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Myth of the Wolves and the Corpse
Myth of the Youth Who Changed his Face
Myth of the Qeqals, of the Black-bear Children
List of Works Cited in Volume III
Illustrations
Map of Mainland Halkomelem Territory Cartography by the Audio-Visual Centre of Simon Fraser University.
Simon Charlie and his Welcome Figure Thunderbird Park, Victoria, 1967. Courtesy of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
The Great Fraser Midden Site P. T. Timms photograph, 1908. Courtesy of Grant Keddie and the Archaeology Division of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
Plates I-IV in “Later Prehistoric Man” From the original printing of the article.
Captain John from Cultus Lake Courtesy of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
Carved House-posts Photographed at Musqueam by Harlan I. Smith, 1898. Courtesy of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
Masked Dance University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology photograph.
Types of Skulls from Shell-mounds at Marpole Reproduced from Harlan I. Smith, Shell Heaps of the Lower Fraser River, p. 189.
Stalo Woman, 1895 Vancouver Archives photograph.
Fishermen with Sturgeon Photograph courtesy of Gordon Schroeder and the Chilliwack Valley Historical Society. "Bros. Louis from Matsqui Reserve."
Introduction
One way to get at the meaning of the tribal name “Halkomelem” is to take Vancouver as a case in point. Halkomelem people would not live up Indian Arm or in Burrard Inlet; they would not really want to settle at Jericho Beach. Coming round Point Grey they would begin to feel at home, and would build along the Southlands and Langara. Halkomelem are a river people or, more precisely in the case of the Musqueam, an estuary people. A map published by the Musqueam band to support aboriginal land claims shows no village sites on Indian Arm. The band chief said in a newspaper interview that the settlements on the North Shore were held jointly “with the Burrard Indians.”1 This Burrard tribe has made practically no appearance in recorded history. Franz Boas knew this area only as Squamish, and his earliest map shows the boundary with the Musqueam as a skewer through the middle of the Vancouver peninsula.2 Hill-Tout, however, picked up a report that “English Bay, Burrard Inlet, and False Creek were not originally true Squamish”; and Simon Pierre told Wilson Duff that the “Squamish did not move into Burrard Inlet until the time of white settlement.”3 Both of J. S. Matthews’ Squamish informants were ignorant of the name “Sasamat,” which is supposedly what the early Spanish explorers heard the natives here call the territory.4 These hints, plus a few others,5 seem to be our only present evidence for the Musqueam’s northern neighbours before the Squamish. But it makes sense that there would be a fiord people in Indian Arm. There is a fundamental difference between Deep Cove and the Southlands, and one chooses by temperamental preference. If you are Halkomelem, you choose the Stalo, the Fraser River.
That the Cowichan and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island are also Halkomelem is a curiosity. On the map it looks as though they came down the Fraser full tilt, fanned out across the Strait of Georgia, and settled where they hit the Island. But this Island-Mainland pattern is not unique; the Straits Salish group to the south have it, as do the Comox to the north, and the Kwakiutl further north still. Your neighbour up or down the coast speaks an incomprehensible language, but there is no language barrier when you take the canoe lanes across the water. Musqueam cannot speak to Squamish, but shares the Halkomelem tongue with Cowichan and Nanaimo. And nobody is sure on which side of the water the language was established first.6
Whatever the origin, these Island-Mainland ties have been maintained in various ways. In their wars with the Kwakiutl, the Cowichan “sent word to the tribes on the Fraser River, and summoned them to come to the island. . . . They obeyed.”7 The Cowichan and Nanaimo kept several summer villages on the South Arm of the Fraser, and some of these operated the year round. The attraction was the unmatched salmon run, and from July on, hundreds of Vancouver Island people would catch and dry salmon on the Fraser, as far up river as the canyon above Yale, where the crowded fish could be taken in quantity by dipnets, and the continuous wind reduced drying time from three weeks to one.8 Ties of marriage bound many villages, and required much visiting among in-laws. If potlatching was originally economic, as Wayne Suttles persuasively suggests, “a means of converting a temporary surplus of perishable food into nonperishable wealth,”9 the aspect which comes down to the present time is the social; which Suttles also amply demonstrates, and which Cultus Lake on the 3rd of June of this year also amply demonstrated, up to twenty long canoes competing in some of the races, and the drumming of the international slahal games going on in the background.
Of the Mainland Halkomelem, Hill-Tout chose to study the Kwantlen and tribes further up the river rather than the Musqueam. Perhaps no congenial informant could be found close to the burgeoning city in the 1890’s.10 What he did do in regard to the Musqueam, however, was to examine their prehistory in “the Great Fraser Midden,” a site at the foot of Granville Street near the present Fraser Arms Hotel in Marpole. How far back, archaeologically, does the Musqueam settlement go, and, if there were previous occupants, who were they?
The road to connect Vancouver with Sea Island (the present International Airport) had already opened up part of the midden in 1889, two years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. He got into it right away; in 1930, he spoke of being directed to the midden “some thirty-eight years ago, when a road was being cut through it.”11 He surveyed the area with Mr. F. Monkton, “a mining engineer well-known in Vancouver early days and one of the founders of the Art, Historical and Scientific Association.”12 By 1895 Hill-Tout was able to write an extensive report to the Royal Society of Canada under the title “Later Prehistoric Man in British Columbia” (included below), which, in the words of Harlan I. Smith, constituted “the first resume of British Columbia archaeology.”13
The problem is that Hill-Tout found two types of skulls, one similar