THE FAMILY TREE OF THE
PACIFIC COAST INDIANS.
SPIRIT OF THE UNTAMED.
The work of the minister and his assistant teachers in the boys’ school, and the English women giving their lives to work among the girls, is another fine medium for developing patriotism in the Indians here and to the north. Indian children appear at these schools from “anywhere up Arctic way” and on their arrival are frequently suffering from troublesome diseases, of which they must be cured before anything can be done for them from the teaching point of view. The kindness and skill of the teacher in such cases does much to win the love and respect of whole tribes whom she has never seen and probably never will. On the other hand, the Indians have never seen her, but in their minds these teachers belong to the flag—the big scarlet flag that they love, and that, is enough.
The teacher in charge of the Indian Girls’ School at Alert is the oldest daughter of an English colonel of the Imperial army, a man who, in his prime, superintended the construction of one or two forts which in their day were rated as “Keys of Empire”. She considers her life well spent here and although she and her father are separated by vast distances, they are united in the national service; and I take it the old colonel is as proud of his daughter and her work as of his forts. Here at school the future chiefs and braves and squaws of tribes-to-be learn to speak the mother tongue—English, the language of the world—with passable fluency, though, often coming from far-distant sections of the Northland, they cannot understand or speak each other’s dialect—a fact rather surprising to the casual visitor, who is apt to fall into the error of thinking all Indians speak the same language.
Sunday at Alert Bay offers rare opportunities to the visitor. Dropping in to church in the morning, it is indeed a novel service one happens on, all the old familiar prayers and hymns in the strange tongue that seems to express only k, w and a sounds! After church an incoming steamer with passengers from the North offers a very satisfactory excuse for a stroll along “Totem Avenue”, where Indians of all ages sit sunning themselves, or are arriving and departing in family groups in the kayak to visit some distant settlement far up the Nimkish. The young folk in their civilized and rather good, if somewhat bright-coloured “Sunday bests”, are all down on the Cannery pier, seeing the crowd come off the boat. The older women, not caring for such “modern proceedings”, paddle off alone in kayaks to gather driftwood from the opposite shores of the bay; the shore-edge of the tree-cemetery being an excellent “catch” for the “chips” that are the gift of the sea.
But it is the Indian of the week-day, the Indian going about his business, that spells the most interest after all. A stroll along the boardwalk then reveals sights that have to do with subjects of world-wide interest—like food supplies and women at work. For it is the Indian woman (kloochman) who does the work, as board-walk scenes so frequently demonstrate. A group of squaws—bending low, heads together—on the grass at the front door of a cottage are trussing up a dozen juicy salmon between home-made frames of clean pine-sticks. A little nearby shack, from every crevice of which an acrid smell proceeds, proclaims the “smoke-house”. A proper fire is revealed every time the crude door swings on its creaking hinge to admit another fish to the council of its peers. A little farther along, an old squaw sits crouched on a shawl on a float under the wet pier-head, cleaning, opening and splitting salmon from a loaded kayak. Every now and then talking to herself, she works away with a will, while you, looking on from above, wish you understood enough of her guttural talk to tell whether she herself was the Izaak Walton of this good catch or whether it was her lord and master, who has walked off and left her all the dirty work of preparing the fish while he squats on the bench in the little summer house that forms part of the sea wall, and smokes.
Farther along the beach little smoke-houses sweat and smoke—veritable volcanoes of the trade! For it is part of the life that every cottage and community-house should smoke its own winter supply of salmon. In the community-houses the fish is hung to smell and smoke anew over the perpetual flame that burns on the open hearth in the middle of the floor.