CANADA'S INDIAN PROBLEMS^ — JENNESS 373 



sac whose inhabitants, though ignorant of agriculture, evolved an 

 amazingly rich culture on the foundation of their local resources. 

 These resources were themselves unusually rich. The sea and rivers 

 yielded fish in astonishing abundance, wild fruits were plentiful, and 

 the forests supplied magnificent timber that was easily worked with 

 stone or bone tools. 



At numerous places along the coast line, then, there stood in pre- 

 European days villages of plank houses such as existed nowhere else 

 in America. Some of these houses were of extraordinary size, and 

 adorned with those enormous carved pillars that we now commonly 

 call totem poles. The villagers themselves roughly separated into 

 three grades, nobles, common people, and slaves, the latter either 

 prisoners taken in raids on neighboring communities or the descendants 

 of such prisoners. With abundance of food, particularly of salmon, 

 life was rather easy, and the months of autumn and winter were de- 

 voted largely to entertainments, both secular and religious. The 

 nobles, who acquired their status by inheritance, vied with each other in 

 giving elaborate feasts or potlatches, and the ceremonies and rituals 

 that accompanied these feasts stimulated the arts of weaving, painting, 

 and wood carving, as well as music and the drama. In art and drama, 

 indeed, the Pacific coast natives far surpassed all others in Canada; 

 their unique wood carvings have attained a world-wide reputation. 



A number of European vessels visited this British Columbia coast 

 in the closing years of the eighteenth century, but colonization began 

 only in the first quarter of the nineteenth, and then it was confined to 

 a small district around Victoria. By the middle of the century, how- 

 ever, the tide of immigration was flowing in great strength, and already 

 disrupting the economic and social life of the natives throughout the 

 entire province. European disregard of all distinctions of rank, the 

 abolition of slavery, and the introduction of new standards of wealth 

 which the ex-slave could acquire more easily perhaps than his ex- 

 master, destroyed every vestige of local authority in the villages, while 

 at the same time the establishment of fishing canneries seriously inter- 

 fered with their principal food supply. The mechanical age had just 

 opened. Steamers were plying up and down the coast; lumber com- 

 panies with snorting donkey engines and high-rigging tackle were 

 invading the forests. With almost no preparation or warning Indians 

 who had not yet fully emerged from the stone age found themselves 

 caught in the maelstrom of modern industry and commerce. 



The first result was a frenzied acceleration of native life. By hiring 

 out their labor to Europeans, Indians who could never have hoped for 

 social advancement in their communities were able to amass enough 

 food, blankets, and other goods to hold great feasts or potlatches, to 

 assume the rank and titles of nobility, and to extend their fame among 

 all the neighboring villages. At the same time the introduction of 



