The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (13 page)

Other anthropologists, however, see the feast of merit as a symptom of rank rather than its cause. They point out that when European travelers first reached the Pacific Northwest, the ceremonies in question were relatively modest and did not serve as a major route to prominence. To be sure, guests were given food and gifts, but this was done mainly to repay them for acting as witnesses to an important event, such as the transfer of a chiefly title from father to son.

What gave these feasts such a competitive flavor in later years? We believe that it was the suppression of raiding. It turns out that in the days before European contact, Pacific Northwest chiefs led raiding parties against their enemies, traveling overland or in 60-foot war canoes. Such raids were often over resources, but they sometimes served as punishment for a neighboring group’s failure to reciprocate a gift, loan, or act of generosity. In some cases the victors brought back captives and kept them as slaves.

Warfare, however, is one of the first behaviors suppressed by colonial governments. When Euro-American authorities suppressed warfare, the feast of merit became an alternative outlet for the competitive elite. Such feasts evolved into displays at which the host lavished food and gifts on his rivals, flaunting his wealth by destroying valuable possessions and sacrificing slaves.

Among the best known of these displays was the potlatch of the Kwakiutl people of Vancouver Island. According to anthropologist Wayne Suttles, the potlatch was a modest ceremony prior to 1849. After that date, two processes converted it to an instrument of competition. The first was the colonial suppression of warfare. The second was the Euro-American fur trade, which substantially increased the wealth of Kwakiutl leaders.

There is no doubt that late nineteenth-century potlatches were spectacular. They cannot, however, be viewed as the original cause of hereditary inequality in Kwakiutl society. We know of no society, including that of hunter-gatherers, that did not hold feasts. If feasting alone could create hereditary inequality, there would have been no egalitarian societies left for anthropologists to study.

The Historic Nootka

The Japan current warms the west coast of Vancouver Island. One hundred inches of annual rainfall produce dense evergreen forests. Seals, sea lions, porpoises, and whales swim offshore. Salmon swim up the rivers to spawn. The halibut are immense, and an oil-rich fish called the olachen is abundant. On land are elk, deer, and bear, and the inlets teem with ducks and geese. This is the environment in which European explorers encountered the Kwakiutl and Nootka.

The Nootka were the more southern of these two Wakashan-speaking peoples. There were roughly ten groups of Nootka, each occupying its own inlet along the coast. Since “Nootka” is the name of a region and not an ethnic term, in 1978 these Native Americans chose the name Nuu-chah-nulth to cover all local groups.

The nineteenth-century Nootka moved their settlements twice a year. Sheltered locations on the upper part of each inlet accommodated winter villages of big plank houses, 40–100 feet long and 30–40 feet wide. Summer villages were usually on the coast. At the height of each year’s salmon run, the Nootka gathered at stations where they could intercept thousands of fish on their single-minded race upstream.

In most years the Nootka caught more salmon than could be eaten immediately. Large quantities were preserved by drying and smoking, and gallons of olachen oil were stored in containers. The forest was a source of wood for planks, shingles, canoes, carved boxes, chests, bark cloth, and blankets. The surplus food, shell valuables, sea-otter pelts, and craft items could be traded for resources from the snow-capped mountains and Fraser River plateau to the east.

The basic unit of Nootka society was a local group led by a hereditary chief called a
ha’wil.
He and his family wore distinctive clothing, elaborate hats, robes trimmed with sea-otter fur, and ornaments of abalone, dentalium (tooth shell), and native copper. The chief himself did no menial labor.

Chiefs practiced polygamy and sought to marry women from other chiefly families, thereby ensuring the high rank of their offspring. Sometimes highly ranked girls were betrothed when they were only eight to ten years old. Usually a chief’s oldest son was the highest in rank, his second son next in order, and so on, with nephews in line after sons. Within the extended family, in other words, rank declined as genealogical distance from the chief increased. Senior lineages outranked junior lineages. In later chapters we will see that many agricultural societies on the islands of the South Pacific had a similar system of descending rank.

The children of the chief’s more distant relatives had fewer privileges, but they were addressed with terms of honor. They could raise the rank of their offspring by marrying someone of an even higher rank. It was often from among his more distant relatives that the chief selected his war leaders and spokesmen, giving them a way to increase their renown through hard work.

Serving as craftsmen, fishermen, and hunters for the chiefly families were large numbers of Nootka of humble birth. These people were recompensed in various ways for their services, and they endeavored to make sure their expertise was passed from parent to child.

On the bottom rung of the social ladder were the slaves alluded to earlier. Most were women or children captured in raids on enemy villages, and they could be bought, sold, mistreated, or even killed. On the other hand, slaves might also be freed as an act of generosity during feasts of merit, or ransomed by their relatives if the price was right.

During the 1930s, Philip Drucker visited the Nootka and attempted, by interviewing elderly individuals and consulting documents, to reconstruct Nootka life of the era 1870–1900. Drucker’s accounts are useful to us because he was at once a social anthropologist, an ethnohistorian, and an archaeologist. He therefore asked many of the questions we would like to ask.

The Nootka of the period 1870–1900 showed a level of inequality that seems surprising compared to foraging societies like the Basarwa and Aranda, or even the Chumash. In Drucker’s reconstruction, however, we can see that many principles of Nootka inequality could have been created out of the preexisting principles of egalitarian foraging society. All that would have been required were appropriate changes in social logic.

Many egalitarian foraging societies reckoned descent through both father and mother; so did the historic Nootka. Some individuals in egalitarian foraging societies chose to become spiritual healers or shamans; there were similar individuals in Nootka society. These behaviors, in other words, provided continuity between the historic Nootka and their egalitarian ancestors.

In earlier chapters we saw that among egalitarian foragers, the right to use a resource territory or water hole was usually conceded to the local group that had been using it the longest. “We were here first” seems to have been a first principle. Expanding on this principle, a chiefly Nootka family used prior occupancy to establish its right to a specific inlet and was considered to “own” the associated plank houses, riverine fishing spots, and ocean waters offshore. Chiefs also laid claim to considerable intellectual property, called
tupa’ti,
which included rituals, dances, songs, personal names, and carvings on house posts or totem poles. A chiefly family’s rights and privileges were said to have been acquired by its remote ancestors during the course of a supernatural experience.

Let us now consider how such inequality might have been created. We have seen that generosity and reciprocity were important to egalitarian foragers. Such people expected that all gifts would eventually be reciprocated. They fed visitors who were in need but expected that one day their generosity would be returned. They might loan one of their relatives part of his bride payment but expected that loan to be repaid one day. With the passage of time, chronic failure to reciprocate was met first with grumbling and later with anger. Unpaid debts could lead to raiding and confiscation.

Some scholars suspect that in the rich economy of the Pacific Northwest, loans and gifts escalated to a level where defaulting was punishable by raiding, captive-taking, and slavery. An extension of Raymond Kelly’s principle of social substitutability meant that the actual debtors did not need to be taken captive; it was enough to enslave women and children from the debtors’ village, lineage, or clan.

While reciprocal exchanges of gifts continued to be important among societies like the Nootka, the emergence of inequality led to a new form of wealth transfer. Since the chief was seen as owning all salmon fishing localities, those who fished there were obligated to pay him tribute in foodstuffs. This tribute did not have to be reciprocated by the chief, but it was acknowledged in the following way: the chief used his accumulated surplus to provide periodic feasts for his followers.

These feasts did more than establish the chief’s generosity; they also kept his followers loyal. Tribute is a clear symptom of inequality, but the asymmetrical relationship it reflects can be masked by displays of largesse. So important were these displays that followers might abandon stingy chiefs and take up residence with their more generous rivals.

We have seen that even among foragers like the Aranda, leadership could become hereditary as long as everyone else agreed. Nootka chiefs, with their greater inherited privileges, did not have to seek such a consensus. They did, however, pass on their titles in ways that showed a desire for the support of their followers.

When the time came for a Nootka chief to transfer his title and privileges to his children, he began sponsoring a series of feasts. At each of these events, some privilege would be transferred to an heir. In a final ceremony the chief bequeathed his office to his eldest son and gave lesser gifts to his other children. Many of these gifts were heirlooms with a long history of previous owners; this history was chanted to the assembled guests.

The reason these transfers of titles and gifts were done in the context of a feast was because they needed to be performed in the presence of witnesses. The guests at the feast served this role, and the food and gifts they received were considered payment for services rendered.

Such title transfer may have been the original role of the potlatch, long before it escalated under the influence of the Euro-American fur trade and the suppression of raiding. There was indeed competition involved, but according to Drucker it was not among rival chiefs. Each chief’s privileges were a legacy from his distant ancestors, and the main pressure he felt was to outperform those ancestors.

To be sure, ancestors were important even to egalitarian foragers. At some point, however, the Nootka had revised their creation myth to include the acquisition of titles and privileges by chiefly ancestors. This revision created the need to meet or exceed their ancestors’ displays of wealth.

The Nootka chief also co-opted certain rituals, one of which involved whale hunting.
Figure 6
shows a building used in 1904 for hunting magic by the Nootka of Jewitt’s Lake, British Columbia. This building contained life-size wooden statues of successful harpooners, wooden carvings of whales, and large beds of deceased ancestors’ skulls. Along three of the walls of the house, additional skulls were arranged as if standing guard. The chief of the Yuquot local group visited this shrine and conducted rites of hunting magic to coax the whales closer to shore. During the ritual, his wife lay on one of the beds of ancient whalers’ skulls.

FIGURE 6.
   The ancestors played a crucial role in the traditional hunting magic of the Nootka. In this drawing, based on a 100-year-old photograph from Vancouver Island, we see a ritual building dedicated to successful whale hunters of the past. Included in the building were life-size wooden statues of great harpooners and large beds of deceased ancestors’ skulls. As long ago as 9,000 years, Near Eastern village societies were making comparable statues and curating the skulls of clan ancestors.

We have seen that even egalitarian foragers built modest ritual structures, such as a sweat house or bachelors’ hut. Some also preserved the skulls of deceased relatives. The Nootka simply saved more skulls and built larger buildings to curate them. Later in the book we will encounter early agricultural societies that also preserved the skulls of their ancestors in special buildings. Such behavior was widespread in the ancient world, whether one lived on wild or domestic foods.

Let us now turn to the topic of intellectual property. Even among egalitarian foragers, names were considered magic. Among the Nootka, certain names and titles became the prerogative of chiefly families. The chief inherited the right to assign these names and titles to others; to display the images of certain supernatural beings; to own certain crests that were analogous to those of medieval heraldry; to erect freestanding figures and totem poles; and to adorn his house with carved beams and paintings. The chief patronized the craftsmen who created these works of art for him, providing a route to prominence for skilled people from families of lesser rank.