NW Native Art • The Southern Shelf • Reading 4 of 8

The House That Moves: The Plank House and the Posts That Hold It

A building with removable walls, posts carved with ancestors, the largest house on the coast burned by government order, and the longhouse form rising again in cedar and glulam.

Ask the Northern track what a house is and you will hear about the gabled clan house, a heraldic statement with a crest pole out front. The Coast Salish answer is different, and the difference teaches.

Shed roof, moving walls

The signature Coast Salish dwelling is the shed-roof plank house. A single roof plane slopes from a taller front wall to a lower back wall, framed in massive western redcedar posts and beams, clad in wide split-cedar planks (Suttles, 1990; Stewart, 1984). The engineering insight that should stop you cold is that the frame and the skin were separate systems. The heavy post-and-beam frame stood permanently at the winter village. The wall and roof planks were tied on, not nailed, and families untied them, stacked them across two canoes, and ferried the walls of their house to the summer fishing and harvesting sites, where a second frame stood waiting (Stewart, 1984; Suttles, 1990). Roof planks were weighted with stones and could be shifted to let smoke out. The house breathed with the seasons. A Salish house was less a fixed object than a set of relationships between two frames, a stack of planks, and a family calendar.

Inside lived not one family but many, an extended household of related families, each with its own hearth and sleeping platforms along the walls, organized by rank and kinship, sharing the central floor (Suttles, 1990; Sobel, Gahr & Ames, 2006). When a household grew, you removed an end wall and added bays. The house was an expandable social container. Remember last week’s conclusion, that Coast Salish power lived in networks of households rather than in kings. This is that fact, standing up in cedar.

Old Man House

At the Suquamish winter village of dxʷsəq̓ʷəb [ORTHO] on Agate Passage stood the largest documented expression of the idea. Old Man House, the great house associated with Chief Seattle, whose people wintered there. How large is argued, and probably always will be. Published figures run from roughly 200 feet long to settler-era claims of 900 or more, with the archaeologist Warren Snyder’s mapping near 530 feet (Lewis, 2016; Mackie, 2010). Even the smallest figure describes one continuous dwelling housing several hundred people, compartment after compartment of families under a single long roof.

In 1870, four years after Chief Seattle’s death, the U.S. Indian Agent William DeShaw had Old Man House burned to the ground, aiming to move its 600 to 800 inhabitants into single-family houses. DeShaw had married Chief Seattle’s granddaughter and had paid for the old man’s funeral, which makes the act stranger and sadder, not gentler. The government’s reasoning was written down plainly enough. The Bureau of Indian Affairs held that buildings like Old Man House encouraged communal living and took away the incentive to work (Lewis, 2016). This was not an accident of frontier violence. It was policy, the architectural arm of assimilation, and the Suquamish answered it in their own time. For decades families continued to camp in the ruins, and the majority never accepted the single-family scheme (Lewis, 2016). The Tribe holds the site today as a park, and in 2009 opened a new community longhouse nearby whose name answers the arson across 139 years, the House of Awakened Culture (Society of Architectural Historians, n.d.). The same era criminalized the potlatch in Canada and, in time, the winter ceremonies. When Week 7 asks why some knowledge withdrew from view, keep the smell of that smoke in mind.

Posts, not poles

Now correct the most common mistake a visitor makes on this coast. The Coast Salish did not historically carve freestanding, multi-figure crest totem poles. Those belong to the North. The Salish monumental forms were the carved interior house post, the grave figure, and the welcome figure. The house post bore a single ancestor, spirit helper, or owner’s figure and actually held the roof up. The welcome figure was the great human form standing at the beach with arms open to arriving canoes (Burke Museum, n.d.; Brotherton, 2008). Story poles displayed inside houses carried narratives belonging to the community rather than crests belonging to a lineage (Farr, 2015).

The distinction is not pedantry. It encodes the difference between the two societies. A Northern crest pole faces outward and asserts a lineage’s prerogatives to everyone on the water. A Salish house post faces inward, holding up the roof over the household it belongs to, seen mainly by the people whose ancestor it shows. Same coast, same cedar, opposite theories of what an image is for. And recall Suttles’s argument from Week 1, that the South’s most powerful images were often deliberately kept from outside eyes (Suttles, 1987). A tradition like that will never decorate its exterior walls for strangers, and it should never be graded as if it had tried and failed.

When Seattle raised a stolen Tlingit pole in Pioneer Square in 1899 and called it local color, it was mislabeling the entire region’s architecture of meaning (Farr, 2015). The city has been slowly relearning ever since. Week 8 will show Coast Salish artists teaching it, welcome figure by welcome figure.

The living longhouse

The plank house never fully left. It narrowed, survived where it could, and in living memory it has been rebuilt in both senses of the word.

As living ceremonial architecture, the longhouse, often called the smokehouse, remains an active center of winter community life across the Salish world. That is all this course will say about what happens inside, and Week 7 explains why the sentence stops there.

As public architecture, a wave of community and institutional buildings now carries the form forward. The Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center opened in West Seattle in 2009 on a historic village site of the people whose name the city wears (Duwamish Tribe, n.d.). The House of Awakened Culture serves Suquamish gatherings at the water. At The Evergreen State College, s'gʷi gʷi ʔ altxʷ [ORTHO], the House of Welcome, opened in 1995 as the first longhouse built on a public college campus in the United States (Evergreen State College, n.d.). In Whistler, the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre, opened in 2008 and designed with the Indigenous-led firm Formline Architecture, joins a Squamish longhouse to a Lil'wat earth lodge in glue-laminated timber and cedar (Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre, n.d.). Post and beam, updated. The grammar held.

Here is the through-line. Coast Salish architecture is household philosophy made structural. The house moved with the seasons, grew with the family, held its ancestors up as posts, and kept its meaning turned inward. Government fire could destroy the largest house on the coast, but the form itself proved to be like the household that built it, distributed, portable, and very hard to kill.

Looking ahead: Next week, the loom, the mountain, and the dog. How Coast Salish weavers spun a textile economy so distinctive it required its own breed of animal, and how their granddaughters got it back.

For key terms and reflection questions, see this week’s Weekly Guide.

---

References