PEOPLE OF VANCOUVER ISLAND. 75 



entrance to Bute Inlet. This is also described by Vancouver, who refers to it as the 

 "village of the friendly Indians" (Op. cit., Vol. I. p. 326). 



The principal place of the Wï-wC-ekum and A-wa-oo is now on Hoskyn Inlet, and is 

 named Ta-ta-pow-is. The Â-wfi-oo formerly inhabited a village at the mouth of Campbell 

 Eiver, Vancouver Island, and nearly opposite to the Uculta village. They have since 

 become merged in the Wî-wr-fkum tribe. The latter are named Wî-wî-kum in the 

 " Comparative Vocabularies." 



III. — Mode of Life, Arts and Customs of the Kwakiool. 



The dwellings, utensils, canoes, mode of life, and food of the coast tribes of British 

 Columbia, have been so frequently described before, and there is so much in common 

 between them, particularly between the northern tribes taken as a group, of which the 

 Kwakiool people forms a member, that it is scarcely necessary to enter into detail respect- 

 ing these matters. Close investigation will doubtless reveal many interesting points of 

 difference, but the main facts as described for the Haida will apply almost equally well 

 to the Kwakiool. (See Report of Progress, Geol. Surv. Can., 1878-*79.) Notwithstanding 

 diversity of language and dialect, these coast people form a single group in respect to arts, 

 and to a less extent in regard to customs and traditions. The useful arts and modes of 

 con.struction have evidently been readily adopted by various tribes from whatever source 

 they may have originated. In dexterity and constructive skill, as well as in artistic 

 representation, the Haida people, however, excell all the others. 



The villages consist usually of a single row of houses ranged along the edge of the 

 beach and facing the sea. The houses are generally large, and are used as dwelling 

 places by two or more families, each occupying a corner, which is closed in by tem- 

 porary partitions of split cedar planks, six or eight feet in height, or by a screen of cloth on 

 one or two sides. Each family has, as a rule, its own fire, with cedar planks laid down near 

 it to sit and sleep on. When, however, they are gathered in the houses of smaller and ruder 

 construction, at summer fishing places, etc., a single fire may serve for a whole household. 

 The household effects and property of the inmates are piled up round the walls, or stowed 

 away in little cupboard-like partitioned spaces at the sides or back of the house. Above the 

 fire belonging to each family is generally a frame of poles or slips of cedar, upon which 

 clothes may be hung to dry, and dried fish or dried clams are stored in the smoke. Eating 

 is a perpetually recurring occupation, and smoke appears to ooze out by every chink and 

 cranny of the roofs of the large houses, the whole upper part of which is generally filled 

 with it. The houses of the Kwakiool are not so large or so well constructed as those of 

 the Haida, though if Vancouver's representations of them are to be accepted as accurate, 

 they are more commodious and better built now than in his time. The introduction of 

 metal tools may have produced a change of that kind. Wood-carving is practiced, but not 

 so extensively as among the Haida, and carved totem-posts are not nearly so numerous nor 

 so large or artistic in design as among that people. Such examples of posts of this kind 

 as occur are also invariably separate from the houses, and no instance of a carved post 

 forming the door of a house was seen in any of the villages. These carved posts 

 are divided by the Indians into two classes, those outside the houses being named tln-us, 



