NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 2 of 8
Guide, Week 2. Shaped from Birth
Start with this week’s
Reading before diving into this Guide.
Three ways to use this guide. If you are in a live class, read before seminar and bring the questions with you. If you are working around a missed class, write your responses to the thinking questions and you have done the week. If you are fully self-guided, take the questions at your own pace.
Key terms
- Cranial modification (shaping)
- the intentional, painless shaping of an infant’s forehead on the cradleboard. It was a permanent mark of free birth around the Salish Sea for roughly two millennia. The terms “deformation” and “head flattening” are retired outside historical quotes.
- Ascribed vs achieved status
- standing you are born to versus standing you earn. A shaped head can only be ascribed, but a labret can be achieved.
- Labret
- a lip ornament of stone or bone, worn through a piercing. It has roughly 5,000 years of history on this coast, worn by both sexes in the Salish Sea.
- Xwe'chi'eXen (Cherry Point)
- ancestral Lummi village site included in the archaeology this week rests on. The ancestors in the data are local.
- Skin stitching / hand poke
- the two regional tattoo techniques, thread drawn under the skin versus dot-by-dot.
- Dentalium
- the white tusk shell harvested off western Vancouver Island by Nuu-chah-nulth specialists and traded as ornament and currency the length of the coast.
- Composite image problem
- Paul Kane’s famous “ethnographic” painting is a studio composite of different people from different nations. Outsider images outlive facts.
Thinking questions
- A shaped head could only record what a person was born to, while a labret could be chosen. If you had to read a society from nothing but which of those two marks it favored, what would each choice tell you? What marks does our society favor, and are they earned or assigned?
- The archaeologists disagree with each other in print. Was it an achieved-to-ascribed shift, or escalating displays of commitment? What does it do to your trust in scholarship to watch it argue with itself honestly, compared to sources that never show their seams?
- The evidence for this week comes substantially from ancestral burials, including at Cherry Point. Who should decide what questions archaeology gets to ask of ancestors, and what would meaningful community partnership look like from where you sit?
- Canada banned cultural tattooing in the same era it banned the potlatch. Why would a government legislate against marks on skin? What did it understand, correctly, about what those marks do?
- Dentalium in a Salish burial is imported wealth from Nuu-chah-nulth waters. Sketch the relationships one shell implies. Harvester, trader, wearer, mourner. How much of “local” art anywhere is actually the record of long-distance relationships?
If you carry Coast Salish heritage
Sources for deeper reading
La Salle’s open-access labret study, Rorabaugh’s 2024 American Antiquity article, and the Salish Blankets book [AMAZON LINK] for where worn wealth goes next.