It Wasn't The Colonizers That Destroyed West Coast Native Culture It Was Indigenous Greed

 January 11, 2025

My friends,

When the first north-west coast native traded his whatever for the trader's new steel knife, traditional native life was doomed.

and it's game over

Right from the get-go, let me make one point clear. Anyone that disagrees with this post is more than welcome to post a comment. But if your comment is not polite, it won't see the light of day.

In the village I was taught that traditionally for a man or woman to move up the hierarchy, two things were needed. 

1. the proper bloodline
2. the needed skills
   

The bloodline was naturally and properly traced through the mother. Proving that you had the needed skills was a far more complicated procedure. 

The candidate was required to 'buy' the new status. Depending upon the desired status, the cost could require a decade or more of concentrated effort of the man or woman's clan to amass the desired wealth. This concentrated clan effort proved that the candidate had the needed skills and wisdom to properly lead her people. 

The final test was the willingness to throw a feast and give all the acquired wealth away. A greedy leader is a bad leader. Or so went the wisdom.

This tradition was developed over thousands of years. It could have gone on for many more thousands. But then along came the unresistable new technology brought by the Hudson Bay Company traders.  

Skinning knives, steel axes, animal traps, better fishing gear. In a moment, thousands of years of stability went out the window. Wealth that once required the entire clan to cooperate for a decade or more could be acquired in fewer years by a much smaller group of people. The traditional wisdom was unable to stop the greed. The old ways were doomed.

And now for a modern day example. Some of the old people that shared with me had a unique understanding of what did the most harm to their way of life. It wasn't disease, Christianity, the residential schools or anything else that I thought of.

For them, it was when the village got electricity. Electricity meant that if you bought the right appliances, you could become independent. Overnight, the clan became much less important. No clan, no village, no culture.

Did the colonizers, the Christian Church and the government do a number on the native culture? Certainly. But so did Native greed.

Brian