Anthropology

Among Líĺwat people of the Interior Plateau of British Columbia, an oral tradition relays how early ancestors used to ascend Qẃelqẃelústen, or Mount Meager. The account maintains that those climbers could see the ocean, which is not the case today, because the mountain is surrounded by many other high peaks, and the Strait of Georgia is several mountain ridges to the west. However, the mountain is an active and volatile volcano, which last erupted circa 2360 cal BP. It is also the site of the largest landslide in Canadian history, which occurred in 2010. Given that it had been a high, glacier-capped mountain throughout the Holocene, much like other volcanoes along the coastal range, we surmise that a climber may have reasonably been afforded a view of the ocean from its prior heights. We conducted viewshed analyses of the potential mountain height prior to its eruption and determined that one could indeed view the ocean if the mountain were at least 950 m higher than it is today. This aligns with the oral tradition, indicating that it may be over 2,400 years old, and plausibly in the range of 4,000 to 9,000 years old when the mountain may have been at such a height.

This article examines the social and political implications of the geographically widespread and cross-cultural oral narratives related to the releases of salmon into the rivers of the Pacific Northwest through the destruction of weir-dams. Key themes in these narratives provide insights into indigenous concepts of reciprocity and authority. These narratives explicitly foreground the inevitable tensions between communities that relied on salmon and also sought to prioritize their own interests, seeking exclusive use of weirs, occasionally to the detriment of other groups. This study illustrates how these narratives convey episodes of contradictory interests, exploitation, social struggle, reconciliation, and a moral charter for communities over a broad area. The analysis also highlights how the messages of these narratives are just as pertinent today as they were in the past.

Throughout human history, people have lived in societies without formalized government. We argue that the theory of anarchism presents a productive framework for analyzing decentralized societies. Anarchism encompasses a broad array of interrelated principles for organizing societies without the centralization of authority. Moreover, its theory of history emphasizes an ongoing and active resistance to concentrations of power. We present an anarchist analysis of the development of social power, authority, and status within the Coast Salish region of the Northwest Coast. <p>Coast Salish peoples exhibited complex displays of chiefly authority and class stratification but without centralized political organization. Ethnographically, their sociopolitical formation is unique in allowing a majority of "high- class" people and a minority of commoners and slaves, or what Wayne Suttles described as an "inverted-pear" society. We present the development of this sociopolitical structure through an analysis of cranial deformation from burial data and assess it in relation to periods of warfare. We determine that many aspects of Coast Salish culture include practices that resist concentrations of power. Our central point is that anarchism is useful for understanding decentralized (or anarchic) networks-those that allow for complex intergroup relations while staving off the establishment of centralized political authority.<p>