Coast Salish Ethnography: The Saanich, by Diamond Jenness Introduction At one time or another practically every sheltered bay and nook along the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, and on the small islands adjacent to it, carried a settlement of greater or less size; but at the coming of Europeans late in the 18th century the Salish inhabitants of this area appear to have been divided into four main groups. Around Victoria was the Songish group whose main body wintered at Cadborough Bay and summered at a place called Xthapsam, just above the gorge at Victoria, while a lesser body occupied the territory around Sooke Basin. The second group inhabited the Saanich Peninsula, extending down its east side as far as Cordova Bay. From about Mill Bay to Qualicum lived the Cowichan-Nanaimo group, and from Qualicum northward the fourth group, the Comox, who abutted on the Kwakiutl Indians about Campbell River and absorbed many of their customs. This division into four groups is somewhat arbitrary, based more on geographical considerations than on differences in dialect or culture. There were such differences, it is true, but they were alight, in some cases hardly greater than the differences between individual settlements within the same group. Society was organized on a family, not on a tribal basis, and since each family intermarried both within and without its group, the customs and the dialects spoken even in individual villages were not always uniform, but reflected the marriage ties with other communities. Thus there could be two families in the same village which, though more or less closely related, practised slightly different rites for ushering their sons into manhood. Neighbouring groups maintained friendly relations, only occasionally broken by personal feuds that did not involve whole villages. The principal enemies of the Vancouver Island Salish (and also of the Salish on the mainland) were the Kwakiutl Indians from the northern part of the island. The Comox group which, being nearest to the Kwakiutl Indians, absorbed many of their customs, seems to have joined them occasionally in their raids on the Saanich, Songish and Fraser River groups. At all events, the latter today bracket their Comox kinsmen with the Kwakiutl, and the West Saanich natives attribute the destruction of their old village in Brentwood Bay about 1850 to either Comox or Kwakiutl Indians (they are uncertain which), who attacked the settlement at a time when nearly all its inhabitants were fishing on the opposite shore of Saanich Inlet near Malahat and burned its three long, shed-roofed houses, as well as several smaller ones. One old Saanich woman stated that her grandfather, a Cowichan native, used to intercept the Comox war parties after they had raided the more southern Salish, ransom any persons of rank whom they had captured, and restore them to their people, collecting the ransom price with interest. Some natives of the Cowichan-Nanaimo group declared, on the other hand, that they were always friendly with the Comox, in whose territory they rested during their periodic raids against the Kwakiutl. Since a few Saanich Indians accompanied them occasionally on these raids, it seems probable that the Comox did not actively make war on their southern kinsmen, but attached a few volunteers to Kwakiutl raiding parties. It was through fear of both the Comox and the Kwakiutl that the Songish retreated in summer above the gorge at Victoria, and the Saanich Indians sent their women and children to secluded spots during May and June, the usual season for raids, while the men maintained a nightly watch on the housetops. During the 19th century, indeed, the Saanich abandoned one of their villages near Sidney, on the east side of the peninsula, and moved to Patricia Bay, on the west side, where they were less exposed to attack.1 The last fight between the Kwakiutl and the Salish took place in Maple Bay, near Cowichan, about 1860, when the Cowichan natives, assisted by the Saanich and Songish, annihilated a Kwakiutl war party and, travelling north in their enemies' canoes, destroyed the village from which it had set out. The present-day Salish seem to remember no conflicts with the Nootka Indians of the west coast until the middle of the 19th century, when the penetration of the Nootka to Cowichan Lake occasioned some skirmishes. However, about 1860, with the consent of the Cowichan natives, the Nootka erected two houses beside the falls on the Cowichan River, and from that date the two peoples mingled in harmony. Lummi and Samish Indians from what is now the State of Washington occasionally raided the Saanich Peninsula and perhaps northward, but so long ago that the details of their raids have practically faded from memory. To determine either the population or the number of houses in an average Coast Salish village of pre-European times is no longer possible. The old kitchen-middens that accumulated in and around them vary in length from a few yards to many hundreds. One at Sidney, on the Saanich peninsula, stretches for more than a mile, and varies in depth from six to nine feet. There may have been a score of houses on this site, but not necessarily contemporaneous. Moreover, the houses themselves varied greatly in size, so that even if one knew their number at any given time, it would give us little clue to the total population. In all cases they formed one, two or three lines facing the water of the bay and the canoes drawn up on the sandy or gravelly beach. Behind them stretched the forest to which the inhabitants could flew for refuge in case of attack, and within a few hundred yards was a stream of fresh water. The sheltered position of the settlements within bays offered many advantages that offset their exposure to sudden attack. In any case raiders always came in canoes, giving the winter villagers ample time to organize resistance or flight, unless, as sometimes happened, the attack occurred at night. Not always did they flee to the forests behind the houses. Occasionally they took refuge on rocky headlands impregnable on three sides, and protected on the fourth by a ditch and an artificial rampart of earth. Traces of such ramparts, originally surmounted by wooden palisades, are still visible in certain places, even on Beacon Hill within the city limits of Victoria. Most of them date from prehistoric times, but one at Khenipson, near Duncan, was constructed as late as the middle of the 19th century. … By the end of the 19th century, the huge shed-like dwellings in which the Vancouver Island Salish were living at the time of their discovery had been abandoned or destroyed, and the Indians had built houses of more modern form, not always on the same sites as the old ones. It had been necessary, indeed, in the interests of white settlement, to move one or two of their villages; thus one, inhabited by the Songish, which hindered the development of Victoria, was moved a few miles west of the city. Early in the 20th century the Canadian government appointed a Royal Commission to delimit the lands to which the Indians should be given legal rights, taking into consideration the villages they were occupying at the time, the places in which they buried their dead, and the streams on which they had plied their nets and built their fishing weirs. Thus were created the present-day reserves on which the Indians live, reserves that correspond in the main with the sites of some of their settlements in earlier years. In 1929 the entire Coast Salish population of Vancouver Island, to the number of 1892, was distributed among 26 reserves, arranged from north to south as follows, with their populations in brackets: Comox (35), Qualicum (2), Nanoose Bay (25), Nanaimo (222), two reserves near Ladysmith (Kulleets 79, Siccameen 44), Halalt reserve near Chemainus (23), Cowichan Lake (8), seven reserves around Duncan (Khenipson 45, Quamichan 245, Clemclemaluts 135, Koksilah 16, Comeaken 60, Somenos 170, Kilpaulus 10), Malakut in Mill Bay (24), four reserves on Saanich Peninsula (Pauquachen 53, Tsekum 25, Tsartlip 102, Tsawout 106), Songhees reserve between Victoria and Esquimalt (90), Esquimalt (18), Becher Bay (37) Sooke (28); and off the east coast of Vancouver Island, Lyacksun reserve on Valdes Is. (50) and Penelakut reserve on Kuper Island (240). (1) The Sidney village was known as Sai'klam "Clay", and Patricia Bay was called Klangan "salty place"; but when the Sidney inhabitants moved over to Patricia Bay they transferred the name "Clay" to their new home. Back to text Continue to "Economic Cycle"