NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 3 of 8

Guide, Week 3. No Superior Chief

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

Trench embankment: the earthwork fortification of the Salish Sea, dated roughly 1,600 to 500 years ago, with a second stockade wave after contact.
Lekwiltok (Lig̱wiłda'x̱w): the southernmost Kwakwaka’wakw peoples whose musket-armed raids pressed the Salish world in the early 1800s. Their descendants and the Salish nations are relatives today.
Battle of Maple Bay: the canoe ambush (between the 1830s and early 1850s) in which a pan-Salish alliance destroyed a Lekwiltok fleet. It is documented through at least twenty-one oral-history accounts.
Anarchic organization (Angelbeck): the archaeological argument that Coast Salish society combined ranked households with active, successful resistance to centralized authority.
Sling: the underestimated Salish weapon. Stones from slings concentrate at defensive sites and split canoe hulls in the accounts.
Slat armor absence: Northern fighters engineered armor, while Salish fighters chose speed and dodging. Two rational answers to the same problem.
Shovel-nose canoe / ocean-going canoe: two of six documented Puget Sound canoe types, naval architecture matched to specific waters.
Stommish: the Lummi water festival founded in 1946 to welcome home WWII veterans, with war canoe racing as living continuity.

Thinking questions

Quimper meant “they recognize no superior chief” as a defect. Angelbeck reads it as a political achievement. What would it take to run a society that can win a war without a king, and what does it cost? Where do you see that model working, or failing, today?
The Maple Bay alliance included communities that had recently fought each other, assembled through marriage and kinship. Compare that mobilization to how your own communities assemble for a crisis. What is the Salish Sea’s equivalent today, and does it still run through kin?
The wars ended in intermarriage, and the reading names no villains. How should descendants teach a war their ancestors fought against people who are now family? What does this suggest about how any reconciliation actually finishes?
Armor versus agility. The North and South solved the same battlefield differently. Find another pair of neighboring traditions (any domain, from art to food to engineering) that solved one problem two ways. What does the comparison reveal that studying either alone would not?
The war canoe became the racing canoe, and Stommish began as a welcome for returning veterans. What happens to a war technology when the war ends but the skill is too good to lose? List three other examples from any culture.

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR block. Note: Stommish dates and any family racing history belong to the community's own telling.]

Sources for deeper reading

Angelbeck and McLay’s Maple Bay article, Angelbeck’s open-access dissertation, Waterman and Coffin’s 1920 canoe study (free at archive.org), and Be of Good Mind [AMAZON LINK].