Chapter 5 of Dawn of Everything is maybe my favorite. Like all of them, it seems to start off with a simple premise, and goes all over the map before winding up: Coastal Native American cultures defined themselves in opposition to each other in ways that are surprisingly sophisticated.
I mean – that’s probably not the whole story. But it’s a story that puts these cultures in a very different light.
Briefly: there’s a fairly sharp boundary between historical Pacific Northwest Native American culture,s and ‘Californian’ Native American cultures. It seems to be fairly close to the Klamath River.
North of the Klamath (up into present day Canada and Alaska) the indigenous cultures intensively developed food and food processing resources including Clam Gardens, owned Camas & Berry plots, and permanent Fishing Villages – dedicated sites used to process the periodic catch.
To the south: the Indigenous people relied heavily on foraging acorns rather than similar fishing industry or cultivating Maize (as cultures to the east and south did).
The ramifications of this are pretty huge:
In the PNW:
- a large labor force was needed to quickly process the fish (before it spoiled) – utilizing slaves (not just for food processing – for reducing ‘care’ burden as well)
- A professional, hereditary Warrior class (nobles) who sought glory by capturing slaves
Below the Klamath:
- Individuals were expected to process their own food. Relying on slave labor was frowned upon.
- Nobility was ‘earned’ by wealth. Wealth was not inherited, but was earned through puritanical hard work and thriftiness.
The Davids go on at great length about the role of vainglory in the PNW – according to them (and other scholars) the Potlatch wasn’t a friendly sharing of wealth, but a demonstration of superiority by bequeathing wealth on others. They sound as if they were very dramatic: ‘grease feasts’ is a theme, where in fish grease (from candle fish) was used to demonstrate wealth. They describe a ‘petformative’ culture around potlatch, with a heavy emphasis on costumes that obscure identity (masks) and surprises (masks inside of masks, trap doors, etc).
The Californians show up as ‘puritanical’ again and again. At the end of the chapter, the Davids go on to explain that they are not endorsing one culture over another, but to me (a PNW resident since birth) this feels like they are dunking pretty hard on the home team.
Which is kind of amazing because growing up what I learned was mostly celebratory of the indigenous culture. We heard very little about hereditary status, slaves, and the performative aspects of the PNW culture.
Really interesting read
For
Walter Goldschmidt (1951) published a famous paper in American Anthropologist titled “Ethics and the Structure of Society,” where he explicitly compared Yurok values to Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic.” He noted their focus on individual effort, private property, and the moral condemnation of laziness.
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