Wapato and camas

[terry glavin]

well, kishkan, now you've done it. unintentionally, without doubt, but
you've set me off. camas and wapato are among my peculiar obesssions. what
follows (not to be self serving, honest) is from my forthcoming book, "the
last great sea: a voyage through the human and natural history of the north
pacific ocean."

 . . . .One question that has vexed historians and anthropologists is how it
came to pass, exactly, that as early as the 1850s just about every native
community within sight of Mount Baker - that towering, dormant volcano in
Washington State, just south of the Canada-U.S. border - was growing
potatoes.
 The first potatoes planted on the Northwest coast were almost certainly the
potatoes Russian traders planted in soil fertilized with seaweed at Sitka in
the late 1700s. By 1814, the Pacific Fur Company had planted enough potatoes
on the Columbia River, near Astoria, to harvest fifty bushels' worth. In the
Strait of Georgia area, potatoes were being planted at the Hudson Bay
Company post at Fort Langley by the 1830s. By 1857, potato growing was known
among the Semiahmoo, the Duwamish, Samish, Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Skagit,
Katzie, Port Townsend, Dungeness, Port Discovery, Sooke, Songhees, Cowichan,
and Nanaimo peoples, among others. The Duwamish people had 12 hectares (30
acres) under cultivation near the mouth of Lake Washington in 1855, and a
chief at Saanich, on southern Vancouver Island, owned potato fields
cultivated and maintained by slaves.
  Various types of potatoes were harvested on the coast. There was the
"no-eyes" potato cultivated by the now-extinct Snokomish people of the
Boundary Bay area. There were big, round red potatoes grown by Straits
Salish people on San Juan Island. There were kidney-shaped potatoes
cultivated by Lummi people.
 Some people roasted them and ate them with dried fish. Others liked them
boiled. Others still preferred them steamed. Some preferred to sell them -
in 1852, the Katzie, at what is now Pitt Meadows in suburban Vancouver, sold
a substantial quantity of potatoes and cranberries to two traders, Cooper
and Blankhorn, for resale into the produce markets of San Francisco.17

 The alleged leap from a hunter-gatherer way of life to intensive
agriculture is conventionally held to be an epochal event in human social
evolution, carrying with it all sorts of upheaval and disruption. But potato
cultivation caused no such transformation of North Pacific coastal
societies. One reason this is so might be that, although potatoes quickly
became popular, crop cultivation was simply no big deal. Potatoes were  just
another crop.
 Around the time of the potato's arrival in the Strait of Georgia, the term
for potato was "wapato," which applied to both Solanum tuberosum - the
potato - and to the indigenous Sagittaria latifolia, commonly known as
arrowhead, which grows in marshy areas and sloughs. Its leaves are like
those of the calla lily, and its tuber looks and tastes a lot like the
common white potato. Apart from the term "wapato," there were several
ancient names for Sagittaria latifolia. Halkomelem-speaking peoples called
it ska'us, and so did the northern Straits Salish. Puget Samish called it
ska'wic. But generally, throughout the coast, whatever term was used for the
potato was also the name people used for the Sagittaria tuber, and
cultivation of Sagittaria occurred on a massive scale. In the autumn months
of 1827, Hudson Bay Company officials who had recently arrived on the Fraser
River, observed "as many as 5,000 Indians, gathered along the Lower Fraser
for salmon, assembled at the Pitt River to dig 'skous,' a tuber that grew in
pools and swamps, and which was considered a delicacy."18
 The Pitt River country is the home territory of the Katzie people, who were
famous throughout the Strait of Georgia area for their Sagittaria crops.
Some "wapato ponds" were owned by the Katzie collectively, while other ponds
were owned and carefully managed by individual families. Ponds and sloughs
were cleared in large tracts - some several hundred feet long - and when the
Sagittaria was ripe, families would spend the month-long harvest season,
usually in October or November, picking Sagittaria from canoes or by
"dancing" - wading through the shallows and treading on the plants until the
roots floated to the surface. It was a labour-intensive process, often
requiring the involvement of several hundred harvesters in each pond.19
 Another plant cultivated throughout the Strait of Georgia area was camas, a
herbaceous perrenial. Camassia quamash and Camassia leichtlini both produce
big potato-like bulbs, and it was most likely the practice of camas farming
that allowed the peoples of the Strait to adopt the potato so
enthusiastically. Unlike the potato, camas was harvested in the spring when
it is in flower, and unlike Sagittaria, it was used the way Europeans and
Asians used cereal grain; it was dried, ground into flour and mixed with
berries and other foods to make cakes or kneaded into loaves for storing. On
Jarman Prairie, east of the hills above Bellingham Bay, Nuwhaha women were
cultivating camas and other indigenous bulbs in small plots surrounded by
high pole fences secured with cedar rope long before they incorporated
potatoes into their fields. The women of Nooksack did the same thing. The
women of Semiahmoo, at what is now White Rock, near the Canada-U.S. border,
and the Songhees, whose territories enclosed the Victoria area, maintained
"camas prairies" behind their villages.
 Camas production, like the production of Sagittaria, was women's work,
which may explain why European observers failed to appreciate the
significance of plant domestication and cultivation in the economic life of
coastal peoples. To be unobservant of the contribution women make to the
economy of societies is a habit that may explain why the prevailing North
American perspective was - and remains - that aboriginal peoples of this
coast were hunter-gatherers only, albeit subsistence peoples in an
especially favourable environment. But camas cultivation wasn't merely
foraging. Among the Lummi, "the women usually gather the bulbs with digging
sticks, a task which involves strenuous work for many days. The diggers lay
out little plots in the shallow soil where camas grow, cut the earth in
small sections, lift the soil with the sticks and collect the bulbs in their
baskets. They crush the soil directly afterwards and plant the seeds broken
from the stems. Small sections are lifted consecutively until the whole plot
is finished."20
 Camas thrived on the alluvial marshes at river mouths, on the small inland
"prairies" around the strait, on Whidbey Island in the San Juans, and in the
Garry oak savannah of southern Vancouver Island. But it was the grassy,
south-facing slopes of the smaller islands in the southern Strait of Georgia
that appear to have made the best growing sites. The Samish maintained a
well-known camas field on a small island off the south shore of Lopez Island
in the San Juans. The Semiahmoo travelled as far as Waldron Island, south of
Saturna Island, to their camas grounds. The Tsartlip from Saanich farmed
camas on a small islet just south of Sidney Island and on D'Arcy Island. One
particularly productive growing site was on Mandarte Island, shared by the
Saanich of Tsartlip and Patricia Bay. Several families camped on Mandarte
for the camas harvest - the women digging the bulbs and tending the fields
while the men went out fishing. On these smaller islands, fires were set to
burn the fields after planting.21
 The anthropologist Wayne Suttles, whose work with the Coast Salish peoples
stands as one of the greatest contributions to Northwest Coast anthropology,
made note of the association between camas farming and the incipient
aquaculture prevalent in the Strait of Georgia area: "Among the Straits
people, whose territory extended into the San Juan and Gulf Islands,
families owned not only camas beds but clam beds as well. In both cases they
took some care of their property. In camas beds they kept the ground
loosened up so as to make digging easier, and one informant spoke of burning
off the bed after digging. In clam beds they sometimes took out the bigger
rocks; one old Samish woman supervised the digging in her horse-clam bed,
not allowing anyone to leave broken shells in the sand. Such beds and
patches were the property of upper-class families. Ownership was through
inheritance, but I suspect that an investment of labour helped maintain it."
 Far to the north, meanwhile, the Haida people, who became  famous for their
extensive 19th-century potato fields, also cultivated tobacco plantations,
long before the arrival of Europeans. The "Haida tobacco," as it was known,
was Nicotiana quadrivalvis, a variety of tobacco indigenous to the
southwestern United States.

 Throughout the North Pacific, tobacco smoking was a habit coastal societies
picked up quickly from Russian, English, and American fur traders, and
tobacco addiction had become rampant by the early 1800s. On the North
American coast, sea otter pelts sometimes went for small amounts of tobacco,
and by the mid-1800s, the maritime Chukchi people of the Gulf of Anadyr, on
the Russian side of the Bering Sea, routinely paid ten red fox pelts for a
56-kilogram (120-pound) bundle of tobacco leaves.22. . . . . .

 . . .and i go on and on and on and on. . . .







-----Original Message-----
From: Theresa Kishkan <tkishkan at UNISERVE.COM>
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Date: 18 September 2000 09:37
Subject: Wapato and camas


>Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), a member of the water-plantain family, is
>mentioned in lots of places as a main food source among the Northwest
>peoples. In the book you mention, Mike, Food Plants of Coastal First
>Peoples, by Nancy Turner,  wapato is also cited as a major article of
>commerce among the Chinook of the lower Columbia. Henry Zenk (whom I
believe
>is on this list!) describes its use in his contribution, on the Kalapuyans,
>to the Handbook on North American Indians. Lots of reference in the
Handbook
>to camas as a major food source and lots of descriptions of preparation,
>from roasting to steaming to stone-boiling.....
>Theresa Kishkan
>RR1 Site 20 C11
>Madeira Park, B.C.
>V0N 2H0
>(604)883-2377
>Red Laredo Boots (1996); Sisters of Grass (2000)
>
>"This is the old west where a secret cove with an old house
>  is called history, a raven cackling on a limb, mythology."
>                                            --Charles Lillard