Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America by Leland Donald

Author:Leland Donald
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press

Slaves were also killed at important ceremonies that had a much narrower geographic distribution. The most important of these were Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonies associated with the killing of whales. The Nuu-chah-nulth (along with their neighbors and near linguistic relatives the Makah) were the only Northwest Coast peoples to actively hunt whales (all took advantage of a beached dead whale). Whaling was a titleholder prerogative and the ritual associated with it was very elaborate (Drucker 1951; 1965, 132-144). There are eighteenth-century accounts of slaves being killed during whaling rituals among both the Mowachaht (Sales 1956, 114; Wagner 1933, 160-161) and the Clayoquot.

The first whale that was killed in a season it was their custom to make a sacrifice of one of their slaves the corps they laid besid a large pece of the whales head adorned with eagles feathers after it has lay'd their a sertain time they put it in a box as usual. (Howay 1941, 77-78; original date 1789)

In December 1864 Sproat (1868, 155-156) also witnessed the killing of a slave during the celebration of a "wolf dance" at Tsishaat. The most important Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial, the so-called wolf dance, was probably the occasion of slave killings fairly regularly.

Olson (1967, 113) reports a Tongas oral tradition that recounts that a father killed two slaves in honor of his son's becoming a shaman. It is not unlikely that this happened sometimes on similar occasions among many groups in the northern part of the region.

Among at least some Nuu-chah-nulth groups, slaves were not accorded any dignities at burial but were simply thrown into the sea or the bushes. Our source on the Clayoquot whale ceremony suggests that slaves who were killed at whaling ceremonies were given the dignity of a free person's burial. Ritually killed slaves may also have been given a more dignified burial than was normal for slaves in some other groups (e.g., the Sitka Tlingit; Krause 1956, 163164).

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