[The meat for this posting comes from Journal of Political Ecology Vol.5 1998 No 1, article by J. Stephen Lansing, Philip S. Lansing and Juliet S. Erazo. Mark Jones] Building dams almost always takes place on land occupied by First Nations or people considered marginal and worthy of dispossession and 'resettlement'. Of course, if you steal people's land and livelihoods from them, as happened in the case of First Nations everywhere, most recently in the case of the Ogoni in West Nigeria, whose land was turned into a reeking swamp of oil pollution and gas flaring by Shell Oil (whose royalties financed the government which then executed Ogoni playwright Ken Saro Wiwa), and you decant them into some reservation and give them a few shovels to get by, then you can expect them to turn nasty. If, as in the case of for example Russia, capitalism's grandest and newest reservation, you systematically promote the activites of notorious thieves and robbers, making a new politico-financial elite of the most criminalised, anti-social groupings, which is what the West did, then you can get virulent anti-Americanism as one possible response, but you can also spread the idea that in Western eyes, theft, cynicism, uncontrolled greed, plunder and a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to one's fellow citizens, are all commendable, jolly good things which are normative western values. You cannot be surprised if your quislings and placemen then turn into natives before your very eyes and start to behave in the same way, even biting the hand that feeds them, and do it without displaying any of the conventional hypocrisy which masks such behaviour and conceals the true selfishness behind the superficial good-neighbourliness of westerners. Shocked by the appalling lack of gratitude and general bad manners of your victims, the next logical thing to do is to call in the anthropologists, a special breed of men and women invented in Victorian England for the sake of salving bad consciences and explaining away in pseudo-scientific terms the anti-social behaviour of colonial peoples traumatised by our own plundering, genocidal behaviour. If you really want to see the kind of behaviour Dolan describes in its most florid expression, you have to read not anthropology but the works of Primo Levi, the Auschwitz victim who survived until 1987 before committing suicide as the consequence of his unassuagable guilt and endless waking nightmare. In works such as 'The Truce' (1963) and 'The Drowned and the Saved' (1986) he shows how physical torture and annihilation inevitably produce spiritual degradation and the complicity of the victim in the process. This in particular is what destroys the sense of worth and self-esteem of survivors; it is what drove Levi to kill himself and what drives people on reservations to drink, demoralisation and early death. SS anthropologists had a field day observing the odd behaviour of the Jews in the camps and rationalising it for a grateful posterity. It's their Jewishness, you see. The Jews are well known for being cunning, conniving, deceitful, anti-social, thieving, beggar-my-neighbour etc. I can give you an example closer to home of what happens when you steal people's birthright. The Skokomish Indians lived in the Olympic mountains in western Washington state. Unfortunately for them a utility company decided to build dams and hydropower plants on the Skokomish River: after all, who really needed the kind of value-subtracting actvities like year-round salmon-fishing and celebrating nature which the Skokomish were into? Just like at the kind of futile existence these people had before they got the benefits of modernity: the Skokomish regarded the valley of the North Fork as the home of their ancestors, an idea which recently received archaeological support with the discovery of prehistoric village sites that were inundated by the flooding of Lake Cushman caused by the construction of the first power dam. The age of these sites was estimated at between 5000 to 8000 years old based on the style of artifacts found and their similarity to other presumed "Olcott" sites in the Pacific. In the nineteenth century the valley was also a major village site. The valley was the center for many important resources for the Skokomish, including flocks of waterfowl, large herds of elk that wintered in the valley, and many kinds of useful plants including ironwood, yew, bear grass, berries and cedar. A detailed picture of the importance of these resources for the Skokomish is provided by the work of William Elmendorf. Elmendorf was an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork among the Skokomish for nearly twenty years, and published a comprehensive ethnographic monograph on The Structure of Twana Culture in 1960. Many of Elmendorf's informants spoke to him about their activities in the valley before the dams were built: hunting for deer, elk, bear, wolf and marmots in the mountains, spearing ducks and geese from canoes in the river delta, and fishing for salmon and steelhead at the falls and in the river. The lake, waterfalls and mountain slopes were also important as sites for guardian spirit questing. The tidal estuary at the mouth of the river on Hood Canal was also a major natural resource for the Skokomish. The abundant shellfish present at the estuary were particularly valuable because they were stationary and available year round. Along with shellfish collection, other important activities included spearing and trolling for salmon and bottom fish, hunting for wildfowl with spears and nets, and harvesting of sweetgrass, cattail and other plant materials for baskets and containers. The estuary was also an important sacred site for the Twana Secret Society. The third major riverine resource for the Skokomish was of course the river itself, as a habitat for anandromous fish. The Skokomish developed an extensive knowledge of the habits and what we would now term the ecology of all five species of salmon and steelhead, which arrive at the river in a more-or-less orderly sequence of "salmon runs" extending virtually the year-round. At the height of the salmon runs, vast quantities offish were available. Maximizing the potential of this resource required a combination o ftechnological and social innovations. If the salmon were to do more than provide for the subsistence needs of individual households, several problems needed to be solved: how to catch many fish in a short time, how to store the surplus that could not be consumed immediately, and how to convert that perishable surplus into wealth. The same problems exist for commercial fishermen today, who solve them by using large boats equipped with machine-operated gill nets, and selling the fish in the marketplace. The Skokomish developed a wide variety of fishing techniques, including trolling, spearing, gaffing, trapping, set-lining and gill-netting. Some techniques were suited for fishing by individuals or small groups. The most effective method for taking salmon, however, was the construction of weirs spanning the river, which were set up by entire village communities during the salmon runs and carefully managed so that a surplus offish could be caught without fatally interrupting the spawning cycle. These weirs made it possible to catch far more fish than the community could consume. Most of the fish were preserved by smoking or drying. Fish oil and seal fat were stored in seal or porpoise bladders, while dried fish was stored in baskets made from cedar bark and roots and grasses from the river valley and estuary. Thus the ability of the Indians to obtain a regular surplus of salmon depended on two types of technology: communal weirs and various systems used to catch the fish, and smoke-houses and containers used to preserve them. Effective use of this technology required the participation of large social units, which Elmendorf calls villages or "winter-house groups": Fishing weirs in the Skokomish river were the communal property of the members ofa winter-house group who seasonally erected them. However, although all male members of a village were responsible for the construction and maintenance of a weir, sections of the weir platform and the suspended dip nets used there were individually owned...A large portion of any catch was distributed gratis to fellow villagers in any case. Without these communal weirs and an effective technology for storage and preservation, fishing would have remained a subsistence technology carried on by households, and only a fraction of the actual Twana population could have been supported by this resource. The high population densities, stratified social structure and complex ceremonial life which characterize traditional Twana culture are the products of an economic adaptation based on the collective management of riverine resources by the "villages" or "winter house groups". What were these groups? The Twana language has no term for the nuclear family or household unit. Instead, the major social unit recognized by the Twana was the group of kinsmen and slaves who occupied the large winter joint-family houses. These groups or "villages" were called scel.a in the Twana language. According to Elmendorf, scel.a "referred to an entire bilaterally reckoned line or lineage, a series of ancestors and descendants". Twana social organization was thus technically a form of kinship organization which anthropologists call a deme: a clan-like group of persons who reside together and are related to one another by marriage or by common descent through either of their parents. Twana demes functioned as corporate groups, whose joint estate included weir sites on the river and weirs themselves, as well as the large wooden building that served as their joint residence. Demes were socially stratified into three classes: upper class, commoners, and "slaves". Characteristically, even though "slaves" were descended from different kin groups, all residents of a winter village were regarded as members of the deme. The largest Twana demes in existence at the time of the treaty negotiations were located at the weir-sites along the Skokomish river. The wealth items acquired through the trading network circulated in intra-and inter-community exchanges which were the principal focus of social and ceremonial life among he Skokomish, as well as other Coastal Salish tribes. Elmendorf emphasizes that a surplus of fish was sought not as a source of food, but because of its role in a complex system of ritualized exchanges that were the foundation of the social and spiritual life of the community. Winter feasting and heightened social activity were not merely matters of utilizing leisure made possible by the existence of preserved-food stores. In the Twana view these winter activities, particularly spirit dancing and its accompanying food distribution, were the necessities of life for which abundant food stores had to be putaside. Informants repeatedly expressed this view. "The real reason", said Frank Allen, "why people worked so hard in the summer and put aside all that food-more than they needed-was to feed their c'sa'lt (guardian spirits), when they came to them in winter." In Twana society, individuals gained prestige and social status not by hoarding up their surpluses, but rather by generously giving goods away, in a manner that signified the incorporation of other people. According to the Twana concept of the relationship of humanity to the natural world, the continuation of human life required humans to kill sentient beings whom they considered to be, beneath their animal skins or guises, persons like themselves. For the Salmon People, the Elk People and the other animal species were regarded as sharing a common origin with humanity. As the anthropologist Marshal lSahlins observes:Indeed the lives of people and game or fish are interdependent; for if the animals willingly give themselves to the Indians, it is because the Indians know how to assure the rebirth of their prey through the ritual aspects they accord the remains-a cycle that passes through a human phase when the animal is consumed as food. Such beliefs ensured that the social function of the winter villages extended beyond theannual creation of the communal salmon weirs. Each community also took responsibility for enforcing rules against the pollution of the river, since this could interfere with the annual journeys of the Salmon People. It is reported that even when communities were feuding, the weirs were regularly opened to allow the fish to continue their journey upstream. In the autumn, at the height of the salmon run, villages held intercommunity potlatch feasts (siwad). Local surpluses of food were traded through an extensive exchange network to acquire items of wealth that could serve as gifts, whose bestowal was the main business of such feasts. The value of these wealth items was ranked, using double-fathom strands of dentalium shells as the units of value. In the siwad feasts, members of the upper class presented wealth items to important people from other communities, transforming the wealth generated by their mastery of the salmon fishery into personal status. Foodstuffs such as salmon were never treated as wealth for the purpose of these ceremonial gifts, although a lavish outlay of food was expected at the termination of a feast. For the sponsors of the siwad feasts, the ability to bestow rich gifts was proof of the potency of the powers they had acquired from their animal guardian-spirits. These powers were sought by individuals in vision quests in the mountains. Guardian spirits (also called "wealth-power spirits") gave power-songs to their chosen human representatives, and these songs were sung by the sponsors at the culmination of the siwad feasts. One became a member of the upper class by using the "wealth-powers" acquired from one's guardian spirits to accumulate wealth, and ultimately by transforming this wealth into prestige by giving it away in competitive feasting. While such feasts served to validate the upper-class status of the feast giver, they also helped to maintain social bonds between villages throughout Twana territory. The ties created by the feast cycles were further strengthened by marriages between upper-class individuals belonging to different demes. According to Elmendorf's informants, members of neighboring tribes were also frequently included in the cycles of feasts and marriage alliances. The social bonds thus created had important practical consequences. During the spring and summer, members of Twana demes were able to move freely over the entire Twana territory. Warfare existed in the Twana world,but only in the form of raids on their villages by distant tribes. Twana demes did not make war on one another, or on the neighboring tribes who participated in the feast cycles. Elmendorf noted that the Twana practiced only defensive warfare, and "in all accounts the raiding enemy was defeated by defensive action". The feast cycles provided manifold practical benefits. But they also had symbolic or religious significance. Major rituals served to define Twana concepts of society in the context of the collective rites necessary to ensure the continuity of the world. For example, upper-class leaders of demes annually organized the "First Salmon" rituals, in which the bones of the first salmon caught were ceremoniously sent down river to ensure the return of the souls of the Salmon People to their villages across the western ocean. Similarly, the entire community bore the responsibility to enforce rules against polluting the river which might harm the Salmon People in their journey upstream. Twana demes were at once social, economic and ritual units, whose prosperity depended on their fruitful connection to the life-giving powers of the natural world. These powers were conceived as animal guardian-spirits, who were actually human beings in their own countries. In Twana myths, the animals tell the people to treat them well and to remember that they are "just like people" .Elemendorf's informants spoke of "the time when we were animals", before the world capsized, noting that "if the people aren't good, the animals know that there will be another [transformation or "capsize" of the world]". Sociologically, the major use of the surpluses of salmon sought byt he demes was to acquire the wealth items which fueled the cycles of gift-giving and competitive exchange by which social alliances were extended across the entire Twana territory. After the dams were built, the Skokomish river silted up and soon became a rancid polluted trickle. What happened to the Skokomish? Yes, you guessed it: they ended up a bunch of drunks fighting and stealing on a reservation. Then they pretty much died out. Now their 8,000 year old culture is just history and souvenir shops. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
