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From SemiahmooWiki

Welcome to the Semiahmoo Wiki!

This Wiki is a joint project of Surrey School District, White Rock Museum and Archives, Semiahmoo First Nation, and supported by November Learning.

Portions of the museum's resource "Semiahmoo Seasons" will be put on this site to generate interest and discussion around:

    The resource.
    Semiahmoo First Nation history and language.
    Other First Nation topics.

This wiki includes work from the local community, especially Surrey school students.

SEMIAHMOO SEASONS

WHITE ROCK MUSEUM & ARCHIVES

S E M I A H M O O S E A S O N S

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Semiahmoo Seasons is a joint presentation of the Semiahmoo people and The White Rock Museum and Archives Society

This exhibition of Semiahmoo life carries us back, if only for a short while, to a period some two hundred years ago, concentrating on the seasonal round of hunting and gathering along the shores of Boundary Bay.

S P R I N G

THE EARLY DAYS

When eagles soar, hailing the new year; when hawks wheel and dive surprising wakening ground squirrels; when geese return to their ancestral breeding grounds.

When gathering begins once more: alder sap, a tonic for the old ones; rain-washed young shoots of edible greens, of horsetail, thimbleberry, salmonberry, peeled and eaten, fresh and succulent after the long winter.

When camas and wild onion blooms, painting the small prairies and spits with fields of dusty blue and purple.

When steelhead run down rivers and creeks and bears awake, competing with the fishermen.

Dawn. Men launch their canoes onto mist-shrouded waters of the bay.

Women gather fresh willow bast, twisting it into strong twine and cord, dyeing it dark against the deep of the sea.

THE MIDDLE DAYS

When in daylight, hunting canoes put out for sturgeon, or track them at night, watching for telltale light, trails of phosphorescence; the harpoon strikes; swiftly the hunter puts his hand into the water easing the burn of the fast-running line.

When women butcher the catch, curing fresh fillets for winter on drying racks, protecting the fish with smudge from fires to keep away the flies; boiling fresh soup from the dark blue roe.

When gulls wheel and scream overhead.

When women, with ironwood digging sticks, harvest sweet camas from the spits, steaming the precious root overnight in rock-filled fire pits, with sweet herbs and coloured bark, the dried root stored in cattail bags.

When fresh young seaweed is gathered, dried for winter.

When men tie new netting for reef-nets from willow bast twine, and twist cedar-withe rope to hold the nets and set the anchor rocks.

THE LATE DAYS

When blacktailed bucks are plump and fat.

When woolly dogs drive them to water for hunters armed with bow and arrow.

When men set snares for deer on steep woodland trails, or drive them into nets.

When it is the proper time to prepare the venison for winter.

When women dig clams, collecting them in open-weave, twined cattail baskets, gathering kelp for the steaming pits.

When the wool of the dog is sheared with stone blades.

When smelt begin to gather at the waters off the spits.

When anchor rocks are gathered, each tied with cedar-withe, a holding loop made and anchors are set at the lowest tide.

S U M M E R

THE EARLY DAYS

Now ironwood is blooming

And summer homes of poles and cedar bark shelter gatherers.

The dogfish shark is caught, his rough, harsh skin dried to sand the wood of paddles and bowls; his oil cured to soften buckskin.

Now buckskin is dressed; soaked until the hair falls easily; cured with soft, white, rotten wood, softened with oil.

And women gather cattails in the bogs and flats between the shore and hills and children play with round cattail spears, chasing rabbits and ground squirrels.

Now women gather mussels as low tide bares the flats; and cast the shellfish on fires to roast.

And men fish for smelt with herring rakes and the small, silver fish sizzle on sticks round the fire.

Women gather berries in close-woven baskets as bears compete for the succulent fruit.

And the people wait to hear the chant that the salmon are running, the fisherman watching for omens, looking at the bluff for the wet streak across its face.

And the stones, in the playground behind the fishing camp, are painted.

Now the chant is heard! The reefnets made ready! The men man the canoes as the ritualist calls the names of the locations from the big island, through the strait, to the bay and reef.

Now the captain sees the salmon and sings the welcome; “Thank you, elder brother! Come elder brother!”

Now is the time for the first salmon rite as children, with ochre-painted faces, white down in their hair, bear a single salmon to where the women wait; march round the painted rocks to the drying racks, placing brother salmon on a bed of ferns.

Now hogfennel seeds are thrown into the fire and as it burns to embers the sockeye are cooked; and first the children eat.

THE MIDDLE DAYS

The days shorten, the fishing continues.

Women gather nettles and make twine; the cattails are dried.

Crabs are hunted in eelgrass beds, steamed and eaten fresh.

Shellfish, steams and cured for winter, clams strung on cedar twine.

Cod are lured with bobbing, rising shuttlecocks lowered between the double points of fishing spears, released to race to the surface.

THE LATE DAYS

The reef-netting season closes and children sing the ending song… ‘inside the canoe, the outside canoe.’

Women dry blackberries in the sun, forming small cakes on maple leaves resting on cedar racks; small fires keep yellowjackets away.

Crabapples are gathered, stored in cattail bags for winter.

And the final smelt are caught with the rakes.

A U T U M N

THE EARLY DAYS

When leaves are turning gold and red and days shorten.

When dried fish are traded for goat hair.

When springs and silver salmon run upstream never to return; and wary hunters ambush fishing bears, hiding downwind, striking the water with a willow whip, killing with a stone-headed arrow.

And families return to cedar planked houses, the family workshop, gathering hemlock boughs to sweep compacted mussel shell floors.

When seals bask in the fading sun; hunters, in canoes at night, mewl like the young, harpooning the seals as they slip silently into the water.

THE MIDDLE DAYS

When steelhead trout and dog-salmon run upstream.

Fishermen ready gill-nets of nettle-fibre twine, weighted with small rock, cattail-wrapped sinkers, stretched across the run. Long cedar floats, half-submerged, bob and sway, a telltale to trapped fish below.

Women ready the houses for winter, weaving cattail housemats, mats of double thickness for bedding.

Nettle-fibre spun with goat hair and dog wool is woven into thick blankets and warm capes.

Bark from the wonder tree, the cedar, is shredded to make cloth.

Fish from the streams are cured.

The warmth of the house is filled with the smell of cedar planks, smoked and dried fish and game, and the sweet smell of camas.

Children spy on squirrels busy hoarding nuts, and later raid the hiding places gathering the nuts for use in winter.

THE LATE DAYS

Days grow short and does of the blacktailed deer are fat. Hunters kill what is needed.

Cedar is split with stone mauls and wooden wedges.

Rocks are split with fire and water and blades and tools are fashioned.

Bows are split from yew and steamed in kelp; deer sinew stretched and braided for the string; quivers made from mink and fishers, complete with tails; arrows fashioned from cedar, smoothed with dogfish skin, flights of eagle feathers, the detachable foreshaft armed with shell, bone or stone.

The leaves are gone, the nights grow long.

W I N T E R

THE EARLY DAYS

Dawn. A hunter leaves the warmth of the house. Under his buckskin shirt a woven, nettle-fibre under-shirt; on his head a pointed hood of hide extending halfway down his back with the hair inside; buckskin leggings tied to his belt; feet shod in elk-hide moccasins; hands protected in soft, buckskin mittens.

In the house, fuel stored beneath the bed platforms is fed to the fire.

A bushy-tailed rat, raiding the stored food above the platform, lies dead, caught in a small, deadfall trap.

Fishermen return with herring caught with rakes in the long eel-grass; others have speared flounder.

THE MIDDLE DAYS

Before dawn, duck-nets are raised between poles. A flock of geese skims the water and in the early morning light veers over the spit, hitting the willow-bark twine and nettle-fibre net. Men at the poles release the lines; the net drops; the birds are trapped within.

As the geese are prepared, women pluck the soft down into baskets; wing feathers are kept for flights for arrows.

The down is missed with nettle-fibre twine and woven into shirts and robes.

Children gather as dried soapberry is mixed with camas and beaten to a froth; it is cooled in the snow, sweet creamy.

Crabapples, carefully lifted from cattail bags are sucked whole and sweet from the stem.

Men make canoe bailers from cedar bark sewn with cherry bark; women weave kneeling mats from dried cattail for the canoes, and shoulder capes against cold and rain.

A huge cedar log is shaped and hewn, hollowed. Fires are built on either side, the hollow filled with water and heated rocks; bentwood is fitted between the sides of the hollow and as the heat and water softens the fibres the canoe takes shape.

THE LAST DAYS

Winter supplies dwindle; the people, restless, wait for new life and spring.

THE SPIRIT OF LONG WINTER NIGHTS

Evening smoke from the Big House mixes with early starlight heralding and the sound of new Si yow en songs.

Families gather to feast, to drum, to sing, passing on traditional names, rejoicing in the spirit, the power of the winter Si yow en dance.

Early evening; respected grandmother, the storyteller, gathers the young ones not yet old enough to experience the power and mystery of Si yow en; keeps them safe. In awe and wonder they listen to the magic stories, to the lore, the knowledge so much a part of their oral teachings; laugh at her unique and special humour gently imparting lessons, the common sense idiom of days and years gone by.

In the circle a young boy’s eyes light up as he hears the cry of his older brother signalling the release of his song soon to be joined by the magic of drum beats and singing voices of others in the smokehouse- ‘Grandmother, when will I be old Enough to sing for him-will it be next winter?’ ‘Don’t be too eager to grow up, my son, You have plenty of time.’ The boy’s question is soon forgotten as a new story unfolds.

Soon, eyelids become heavy, small heads begin to nod. Sleep comes as the magic of the storyteller’s voice and the reassuring sounds of Si yow en songs and drums mingle with the wondrous dreams of young minds setting forth on journeys through the seasons of their lives.