Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

11 / Tending the Garden, Making the Soil: Northwest Coast Estuarine Gardens as Engineered Environments

Chapter 11 Tending the Garden, Making the Soil Northwest Coast Estuarine Gardens as Engineered Environments douglas deur Late in life, Franz Boas labored to compile the geographical data he had accumulated during his lifetime’s study of the Kwakw~k~’wakw, or “Kwakiutl” peoples of coastal British Columbia. In the resulting volume, amidst the descriptionsof villagesitesandplacesof religioussignificance,amongthemaps of berry-harvesting sites and hunting territories, Boas provided maps and descriptions of elaborate gardens that the Kwakw~k~’wakw people had once constructed near their villages. His maps showed complexly subdivided plots on the British Columbia tidal flats, containing two native, estuarine plants with edible starchy roots: springbank clover (Trifolium wormskjoldii) and Pacific silverweed (Potentilla anserina ssp. pacifica). The one garden that Boas mapped in particular detail, as an example of a traditional Kwakw~k~’wakw garden, sat at the mouth of the Nimpkish River on northeastern Vancouver Island. Figure 11.1 provides a schematic reconstruction of the Nimpkish garden as it existed in the nineteenth century, compiled on the basis of both Boas’s map and the author’s field observations of the site. As many indigenous people reported to Boas and his academic peers, Potentilla and Trifolium gardens, such as those on the tidal flats of the Nimpkish, commonly occupied estuarine salt marshes where the mouths of rivers and streams met salt water. These two plants were ordinarily grown together in closely planted plots, producing a dense concentration of thin, long, starchy roots and rhizomes.1 Often, these plants were grown alongside other estuarine plants with edible roots and bulb segments, including northern riceroot lily (Fritillaria camschatcensis) and Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis ).2 Specialized digging tools were constructed for root cultivation, and specialized “digging houses” or other domestic structures were built to shelterharvestersalongsidesomegardensites .AttheNimpkishRiversiteandmany others, large gardens were divided into numerous family-owned subplots, which were sometimes encircled by low rock walls. 296 Boas (1934; n.d.: 166) described the traditional construction of the Kwakw~k ~’wakw gardens as follows: The women clear the ground of pebbles, which are thrown up in large piles or in walls which surround a bed. . . . The garden-beds are separated by stone walls, but often also by blocks [or “planks”] which are put up on edge right into the ground, being held between the pairs of short posts [or “pegs”]. [Boas n.d.: 166] However, Boas was not alone in his documentation of these gardens. Accounts of similar gardens appeared in ethnographic accounts of several diªerent indigenous populations within this geographically and linguistically diverse region, including: Randall Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy (1990: 306) on the Nuu-chah-nulth: People cultivated estuarine plants “by clearing the ground and placing rocks around” their root plots, where rootlets were “placed back in the ground so they would grow the following year.” Darryl Forde (1934: 80) on the Kwakw~k~’wakw: “Patches of the wild clover root were enclosed in stone fences by Kwakiutl women, each of whom had her individual plot.” George Gibbs (1877: 223) on the Coast Salish: “Inclosures for garden patches were sometimes made by banking up around them with refuse thrown out from clearing the ground, which, after a long while, came to resemble a low wall.” Nancy Turner (1975; personal communication 1998) and Edwards (1979) on the Nuxalk: During the colonial period, women “enclosed their clover plots with fences” and “transplanted rootlets into these plots.” Charles Newcombe (n.d.: 35/4) on the Haida: At estuarine sites, “stones [were] cleared oª” of clover gardens and traditionally “people even separated [their plots] with fences,” probably of stone. And, while references to gardens in the earliest explorers’ accounts of this coast seem, at best, oblique, these early accounts nonetheless provide hints of the presence and significance of such root plots at the moment of first contact .ArchibaldMenzies(1923:116),thebotanistforCaptainGeorgeVancouver’s expeditions, for example, noted a number of Nuu-chah-nulth women working estuarine root plots on the west coast of Vancouver Island in September of 1792: In the evening our curiosity was excited in observing a number of Females busily occupied in digging up a part of the Meadow close to us with Sticks, with as much care and assiduity as if it had been a Potato field, in search of a small creeping root about the size of a pack thread. This I found to be the Northwest Coast Estuarine Gardens 297 Roots of a new species of Trifolium [T. wormskjoldii, Figures 11.2 and 11.3...