4 - Wednesday, March 27, 1991 - North Shore News Rights of salvage and the delicate balance of power NOW THAT it has been decided by the B.C. Supreme Court that Indians in this province have no rights except those granted to them by colonial regimes, it is probably a good time for a quick refresher course in the history of the place since Spanish captain Juan Jose Perez y Hernandez showed up in 1774 at the mouth of Hesquiat Harbor. ft wasn’t until four years later that Captain James Cook dropped anchor in Nootka Sound within view of the Nuu-chah-nulth village of Yuquot. A brisk trade promptly began which Chief Maquinna saw ini- tially as a gift from heaven and which promised to make his peo- ple rich beyond their wildest dreams. Trading with the Muh- mul-ni (literally: ‘‘houses on the water’’) offered Maquinna dizzy- ing opportunities. He moved quickly to con- solidate his good fortune by for- bidding neighboring villagers to deal directly with Cook unless Maquinna’s own men were present to act as brokers. H effect, the Nuu-chal-nulth fooked upon the accident of Cook washing up on their beach as giv- ing them the same right of salvage as they would have enjoyed if they had spotted a beached whale or a good run of spawning salmon. Trade was lucrative indeed. Be- tween 1785 and 1825, some 450 Europear ships arrived to barter, with another dozen being sent by the British and Spaniards to settle their geopniitical differences. So long as the Europeans were locked in a hinterland skirmish, local chiefs were treated as they expected to be: royally. But once the European contest was essentially settled, the courtesies extended by the British gave way to brute force. So long as the 200-ton Euro- pean ships had to anchor in Nootka Sound, fearful of ventur- ing any further into unchartered passages to reach other villages, trading centred around Yoquot, with Nuu-chah-nulth enjoying the fruits of a two-way monopoly shared by their chiefs and the white traders. Americans soon began to mus- cle in, however, displacing the British. Coastal surveys and increased competition Jed to the introduc- tion of smaller vessels that could penetrate further, which meant that chiefs like Maquinna could no longer control the trade net- works. The demand for sea otter pelts was the key to trade, so much so that in the first 40 years of con- tact between Indians and the Muh-mul-ni, more than a quarter of a million pelts were shipped to China. Such overhunting led in- evitably to major political and social disruptions among the In- dians. in order to protect his trading routes from rival groups, Ma- quinna and his brother-in-law, Chief Wickanninish, were forced to maintain standing armies of 300 and 400 men, ready to be deployed at any time. Energies that had gone into subsistence were now going into protecting trade, The trade soon included weapons, early Europeans being the original merchants of deaii. A, delicate balance of power had been achieved between rival In- dian groups along the coast over the millenia, with no one group being able to destroy the other. With the introduction of muskets, coupled with the pressure brought on by trade rivalries and later by the near- extinction of the main resource, nainely the sea otter, warfare among the Indians became so deadly that whole clans were ob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL wiped out. Ancient inter-tribal tensions boiled to the surface as high-tech military solutions became avail- able. Against this background of a regional powderkeg, the British brought their own superior fire- power to bear to further their aims. Indians like the Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth learned to their dismay the disadvantage of being a coastal society: their beachfront villages all lay exposed to the cannons on the British warships. In 1792, when Chief Wickan- ninish failed in an effort to cap- ture a British ship, the Columbia, its captain, Hebert Gray, sent men ashore to burn the entire Clayquot village of Opitsat. Lamented one of the Colum- bia’s officers, ‘‘grieved to think that Capt. Gray should let his passions go so far,’’ the village or 200 longhouses, ornately carved, a **work of ages, was in short time totally destroy’d.”’ The disruption of the environ- ment due to inducements to trade, and the exacerbation of ancient tribal conflicts thanks to the in- troduction of deadly weaponry, were but the beginnings of the holocaust — and that is precisely the word — that was about to befall the Indians of the coast and the Cordillera. In the 1860s, a series of epidemics began. By the end of the century, half the Nuu-chah- nulth had died, two-thirds of the Southern Kwakiutl, and three- quarters of the Nuxalk. These are conservative figures, by the way. New information accumulated by archeologists suggests there may have been as many as 20,000 Indians fiving on the west coast of Vancouver [sland alone when the plagues began, in which case the death rate rises to 90 per cent. At their lowest ebb, the mighty Nuu-chah-nulth, who, under Ma- quinna, had opened the door to trade with the men they called Muh-mul-ni, were reduced to some 2,000 survivors huddled in longhouses, and the only new ‘*towns”’ along the coast, apart from the ones the white men were building, were the Indian grave- yards which had sprung up ev- erywhere. By this time, Britain had al- ready ‘‘unburdened”’ the land of aboriginal title, through a legal mechanism that showed far more finesse that [raq’s recent short- lived acquisition of ‘title’ to Kuwait, but which was no dif- ferent in intent or effect. To be continued. ES Wolo ' 7 Correction Notice It?s you who counts the most | Appearing Mar. 27, 1891 SHARE IN SUCCESS j Page 10 — DISKETTES — copy should have included Memorex 342°’ two-sided disks, Reg. price $16.00, Sale price $11.99 each. GST in- cluded. 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