Feb 3, 2008, Camas with Madrona Murphy · 19 May 2008, 07:41 by Julie Loyd
Madrona Murphy is a Lopez-based botanist with KWIAHT. Her talk on camas was given to a large group of islanders last winter. Along with Russel Barsh’s talk on wooly dogs (see below), Madrona’s talk was designed to support the thesis that the local Indians were shepherds (dogs) and farmers (camas) as well as fishermen (the usual view of them).
The way we talk about the people who lived here for generations, the Coast Salish, is oriented to salmon. That’s not the whole picture.
Our area is the Salish Sea. We are in the Gulf of Georgia, the Puget Sound is lower. Most of the Indian art that we see here is not from the Salish Sea, but from the Northwest Coast, the Tlingit and Haidas, who were primarily fishermen. We can find cultural parallels in Europe for both societies.
The Haidas were based on territorial personalities with their castles and clan. They operated like medieval European princes who went to war to amass wealth, and who were seen by the majority of people when they collected slaves or taxes. When the Coast Salish talk about Haidas or northern tribes, they think of a boatload of raiders coming to take slaves. They all have a story of some family member stolen by the northerners as recently as the 1800’s, not unlike what the Europeans perpetrated on west Africa. Blockhouses in this area were built by Europeans to repel the Tlingit. The early whites and their Coast Salish neighbors ran to the blockhouses when they heard of a raid coming. When a chief died, they built big masoleums.
The Coast Salish were more like Northern European traditional cultures. Their knowledge and physical wealth was distributed over hundreds of miles. Their legacy wasn’t inherited by any one person, but by the spread-out family. Coast Salish dead were put in trees to get rid of the flesh, then buried under rock cairns.
The Coast Salish were agricultural people. Their economy was largely centered on food from the soil. Farming and towns versus the castles and raiding of the northern tribes. Anthropologists have a hard time calling locals “agricultural.” Agora means field, cultellus means knife, hoe, plow in Latin. Anthropologists have erroneously called local activity horticulture, derived from hortus, meaning garden in Latin.
Worldwide, one kind of farming system is based on the grains: maize, wheat, rye, rice. The other world farming system is based on the storage systems of plants: potatoes, manioc, yams, camas. This kind of farming involves what we now call permaculture. You could say the Coast Salish practiced perennial polyculture.
In preindustrial Europe, food and clothes came from fish, farms, and flocks (sheep). In the Coast Salish world, they came from fish, farms, and flocks (wooly dogs).
Fishing: The Coast Salish set reefnets, which catch sockeye. You can dry a lot of fish in summer. They also ate shellfish, available fresh in winter; native oysters, butterclams, and steamers (see Ryan Drum for an account of butterclam gardens at the zero-tide line). The location of village sites was oriented to fresh water, shellfish, and farming sites.
Farming camas and other plants: Camas can grow quite large. The petals of Camassia quamash wilt in all directions, those of Camassia leichtlinii curled up into a ball. Our island has both species.
Does evidence of farming translate into persistent morphological diversity, in the same way that Europeans selected for different beans or peas? The most visible difference between camas populations in San Juan County is the color; they can be white (even those that aren’t death camas) through dark blue.
In May 2007, Madrona and Russel collected camas from 26 sites on 18 islands. They found quamash here and on San Juan Island in the two national parks, and leichtlinii everywhere. You would expect random diversity to show more similarities between closer together plants, and diversity caused by people to show differences according to clan.
They’re looking for sites from the rim. March’s Point at the refineries, the Coast Salish name for March Point at the refineries means “camas.” They grew potatoes there, and later they put on the refinery and cattle farm and couldn’t find Camas any more. At Jones Island, the deer had eaten it all. Gorgeous death camas, though.
Chuck: When I was first on Waldron, Skipjack was solid camas.
Madrona: We didn’t get permission to go there. Small rocky islands are ideal for camas. For one, deer don’t go there, for another, perhaps due to storms, the soil is several feet of gorgeous soil, like at Blind Island near Shaw. The other very large patch was off of Satellite Island. This island has uniformly larger Camas than any of the bigger islands, probably due to the absence of deer. Speiden doesn’t appear to have any.
We use a flower color chart to pinpoint the possible colors, measure, weigh, and tag the plants. If you collect by hand, you can tell the soil. Most of the sites didn’t have significant charcoal, so they weren’t relic gardens. The best sites would have been turned into orchards or farms. So, what we are seeing probably were around the edges of better sites. Also, the Coast Salish switched to potatoes early on. Rich soil might have become potato farms instead of Camas. The potatoes were brought out here by the first Spanish who got here, and were traded by Indians.
Russel: In the 1820’s, the earliest records from Hudson’s Bay Company describe Indians selling potatoes to the Europeans. They were being grown by Indians who had very little contact with the whites.
Steve: I use charcoal in farming.
Russel: We look for homogeneous soil, where the entire A layer of the soil is rich in charcoal, like that in slash and burn cultures in the South Pacific. That’s called anthropogenic, human-altered.
Madrona: We don’t see chunks, but ash and particulate charcoal, from lighter burns. We don’t have stories of people bringing in charcoal, but there are stories of people bringing in seaweed, fish waste, and rotting wood. They used digging sticks.
Caleb Kennerly, 1860, with the British Boundary Commission, described Lopez: “A point where the rocks suddenly hung their perpendicular wall over a valley, apparently of large extent, covered mostly with small bushes and ferns with a few large firs.” It would have been bracken fern, the roots were definitely an attractive food source. The Dept of Agriculture considers camas as a wetland plant, as does AgCan, while here it can grow in our driest areas.
Coast Salish plant use on Lopez: A slide with sites marked.
Madrona showed maps with longhouse sites marked.Some have been excavatd but it’s difficult to get ahold of the data. Landowners have been collecting artifacts since the 1880’s, so there’s an enormous private collection of stone bowls, figurative art, etc.
Reefnet sites are close but not at the same place as the houses. People could have walked or canoed quickly to their reefnet sites. Not as current thought has it: they weren’t “gone for the summer,” they could have walked.
Current camas meadows are marked, they are also within walking distance of the houses.
We can’t talk about tribal boundaries because there was so much family interrelationship. The map has arrows going to everywhere. Tribal names are artifacts of Federal naming in the 1880’s, but really everyone’s related to everyone. Some relationships go between Saanish, Semiahmoo, and Lummi. Another between Lummi, Samish, and Lopex. Another from San Juan, Sookes, Songhees. For Stuart and our island, most of the family connections go to Vancouver, on the other side of the international border.
We don’t know much about this island. There was probably a longhouse at the TNC swamp. Very little is left of it due to erosion. In 1951, there was enough evidence to suggest that there was a house inside the area that’s now the wetland lagoon area. When Andrea Wiser and Barsh did a study of artifact scatters, they were concentrated around the present day wetland around Cowlitz, suggesting that looking under the pond would be interesting.
Fishery Point was named Wch-chun, meaning “fishing pole.” Longline, rock fishing, and halibut was famous here. Records up to the 1950’s talk about how great the deepwater fishing was around here.
As far as we can tell, the people most intensively using this island were closely related to the people who had reefnets at Pt Doughty and at West Point. Those people also were not settled there, their house was at Eastsound, a big community.
The one site where we found unmistakeable old Coast Salish garden soils, was out by Bob W’s. It is very similar to the bluff edge garden sites seen at Iceberg point, probably much eroded into the sea. There is also lots of Camas on Disney. We know they tended to put their gardens close to water and transport. Top of Disney wouldn’t make a lot of sense. But, people also transplanted regularly. You have to collect bulbs somewhere. The stories say people would go to Disney, where the camas was tough, and bring them elsewhere to start gardens.
Russel: We don’t have evidence that they were farming oak. Why was Disney burned so frequently? Carson S. produced excellent evidence.
We know Coast Salish set fires in woodland areas to increase hunting areas. We have lots of historical records of big deer drives on Disney. I guess that Disney was being burned frequently to maintain it as good deer and elk browse.
Madrona: On Vancouver, they argue that the oaks are there because the people kept the area clear for Camas. People did harvest acorns. I heard the other day that camas only grows in oak litter, which is a distortion; it grows on Lopez where we have no oaks. In the San Juans, there’s no evidence that Indians collected acorns, so why do we have them? There’s some evidence that oaks colonized after logging. All of the oaks from Cheyenne Smith’s study established as seedlings in the 1880’s after extensive clearing in the Gulf Islands.
Another camas point here is the B’s point on Mail Bay.
Gretchen: How does it spread if it wasn’t farmed?
Madrone: The seeds are relatively heavy, I don’t know what eats them. It’s possible that they transplanted them to areas that they didn’t farm, just to make the landscape more human friendly. It would be nice to see which species grow where on Waldron. One, leichtlinii, is more likely to have been gardened because it produces more biomass, but there are some garden sites that only have quamash.
Gretchen: Could people have planted near shellfish areas, just for convenience?
Camas Species: Leichtlinii only occurs from BC to N california. Quamash extends out into Idaho & Montana, northern Utah. Two species kusikii, howlii, common as ornamental, are endemic to Oregon. An eastern species, skiloidies, occurs in the Mississippi Valley corridor, where the people were maize farmers. They ate camas, and farmed corn and beans. Eastern camas doesn’t cross, territory doesn’t overlap. Angusta grows in two southern states, probably rarest. Camas is not related to anything else. Closest relative is chloragalla, and then after that, agave, restricted to North America. Lilies and fritillarias are more widely distributed, and maybe people extended their technology to camas. The center of diversity for Camasia genus is in Oregon.
Russel: Lena Daniels grew up at the fish camp at Pt. Doughty. When Wayne Suttles and I were walking around Pt. Doughty with her, she told us where things were in 1908-1910. At one point, she said, they’d be up to their knees in salmon heads and tails, they’d be so sick of salmon, that they’d get in their boat and go over to Mail Bay, drop a line in the water and have rockfish for lunch. That area, they considered to be the same place.
Names: Madrona: They viewed land as it surrounds water. The bays and high points have names, the islands don’t. They looked for what you see from the water. Viewing things from the land, you get valley names instead.
Russel: The Saanich families on Vancouver have remembered more names for this island than any Samish groups. They’re at Saanich and Nanaimo now. Not Lummi, as the Lummis have always claimed.
L’kungenung is the language spoken by Gulf and San Juan Island peoples. On Orcas, the Big House was still there until 1913, when it had morphed into a row of frame houses, across from Indian Island. The Slough formed a canoe channel through Orcas. They’d spend winter in Eastsound, fishing for shellfish. In early summer, they’d go up the slough and out to Pt Doughty, the major reefnet site, last owned by Boston Tom. A Deer Harbor house was described by early settlers, but there aren’t records. The Westsound house left an enormous shell midden, but no records. There was another one in south Eastsound.
The name for Mt. Constitution might be the name for the San Juans, Swelech. The name of the natural slough is s’chall (JL’s approximations).
Camas behavior: Madrona: What did the gardens look like? Not only does camas grow big. It reproduces by splitting. Wild camas doesn’t, but garden plants do it like mad. What triggers it? Do the voles on Iceberg Pt. make that happen? It grows shallow in a garden, but arm-deep in wild locations. It wedges under rocks. It’s only practical to garden it. In the wild, it reproduces by seed, a one-year-old plant in my garden is the size of a grain of rice. If I plant Jan 1, it comes up in March. Planted in fall, it comes up in Jan. It won’t bloom for four years or so.
From stories, Camas from camas balds and islands were transplanted to bluffs and meadows with or without camas already there. In spring, they hoed and weeded. They targeted grass, and, of course, death camas. Suttles asked a lady about grass in camas gardens, and she got offended. Of course they took care of their gardens! Some harvesting occurred in spring. Summer dormancy (during fishing). Fall harvesting, not just when it was in flower, but probably mostly in fall, when yampah also was harvested. You don’t harvest yearly, but every three years. Harvesting in spring makes your hands blue, which was described. After harvest, you burn, when the yampah is done blooming.
People historically refer to harvesting camas, yampah, chocolate and tiger lily, Brodiaeas, Alliums (onions), bracken fern, berries.
Camas: A camas meal would be reconstituted dry camas with dried fish and dry smoked clams. The camas would be the sweet part of that soup. Roasted in a pit barbecue you’d get camas fudge, like date sugar; sweet with an odd flavor, soft, creamy, starchy fudgy thing. Almost pure fructose. Camas stores energy as inulin, indigestible to us, so you have to cook it for a long time to break it down into fructose. Same as Jerusalem artichoke.
Yampah: Yampah, Perideridia gairdneri, looks like Queen Anne’s lace, flower doesn’t have a cup, no leaves unless in the shade when it’s blooming. Roots are double with swellings on the end while it’s blooming. They taste like resiny sweet carrots. They’re the most easy to imagine people just eating. The biggest ones were the size of a pinkie. Leaves are very thin, little points as thin as pine needles, long and soft and green.
Chocolate lily: bulbs have a hat-shaped central bulb. Instead of having scales like tiger lilies, chocolate lily bulbs have what look like grains of rice, with the potential to make new plants. As soon as they are disturbed, all the scales send up shoots. Chocolate lily was considered to be the less attractive choice as opposed to tiger lily. Neither are palatable to our current tastes, though the Coast Salish liked them very much.
Brodiaeas: are a lily relative, look like a lawn with green leaves, die back, then they bloom in July or August especially after a fire. Townsend’s voles spread brodaeia. The way you can tell a vole garden from a Coast Salish garden is the presence of rocks. It’s native. The meadow vole, complained of by NW gardeners, is not native, not in San Juans. Raptors like eating voles. Voles make runways through the meadows, and raptors hang over them waiting. You’ll see flashes.
Onions: are dormant during summer. Hooker’s onion. Nodding onion is green year-round with a deep root.
Bracken fern: likes fire.
Trailing blackberry, black caps: like disturbance.
They removed death camas, grasses, trees, shrubs, snowberry, rose, conifers.
Death camas: looks like a hyacinth. Has scales on its leaves. If you rub them, they’re like sandpaper. They’re greeny creamy white. Heads more compact and full. Bulbs look identical to the edible camas. You find places where death and edible camas are physically adjacent but separate, possibly because they were tossed out by weeders. It does cause livestock poisoning.
Laurie: It takes effect very quickly. I shat and vomited everything, then I hallucinated, then lay on the couch for days. My insides felt like they’d been in a wrestling match. If I hadn’t vomited, I’d have died. I couldn’t hold my head up, had to be led down the trail.
Madrona: I recommend against harvesting camas unless you’ve personally been involved in weeding the plot and are sure. People marked their fields with ditches, rocks, sticks.
Photo of microburns, When surface temp got over 800 C, 2 cm down it was about 60 C, at 5 cm down was 30 C. So, it might sterilize the surface, but have little effect on bulbs. Bracken came up 3 weeks later.
Camas was replaced by potatoes. The word for camas has to do with digging. The word for potatoes is “dig it up a lot.” Potatoes have a much faster cycle.
Nutritionally, camas produces inulin, fructose. Potatoes are starchy, producing glucose. Potatoes probably were a bit upsetting to the system, part of the reason diabetes might be more prevalent among tribes which ate camas, Snoqualmies are looking into that. Quote from Vancouver: The potato is almost universally cultivated. Potatoes and dried salmon are the staples, camas was considered delicacy. 1857, W.C. Grant.
Russel: The US and Canadian Gov’t tried to convert natives to farmers, which was difficult in the Midwest. Out here, the potatoes were here before the Government was.
Estuarine gardens: Gardens on tidal edges would include Potentilla (silverweed, cinquefoil, has stolons and rhizomes) Springbank clover, our only native clover, which used to be abundant. The last collection was 1915 on Stuart. Still exists on one of the USFW islands. They’re starchy, unusual here. Potentilla tastes terrible. Do we know how to cook it anymore? Or did they select them to be tasty and we don’t have anything representing the cultivated plant. It was described as tasting like sweet potato, but moderns say no. Douglas Dura’s the primary researcher on this, thinks estuarine gardens were cultivated in this area.
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