"They invented them or what?"

Actually, pretty much, yes, councillor. Indigenous people invented things.

So here’s another too-typical hullabaloo. A local white politician says something snarky and a nice white lady alerts an Indigenous friend who traduces the daft politician’s offhand Facebook comment and its doofus emoji, and the next thing you know the mayor’s drawn into it and it’s about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and away we go.

Oh look, a pretty flower. Let’s say stupid things about it and then have a big fight about colonialism.

The Vancouver Island hubbub arises from the way Parksville city councillor Adam Fras reacted to a fairly benign CHEK News story about the local Indigenous use of camas, a herbaceous perennial known for its lovely purplish flowers. The story ran under the fashionably provocative exhortation of a headline: Call it kwetlal not camas: How to decolonize your garden.

It’s an interesting story, even it does go on a bit with five-dollar terms like “ecological colonialism” and “environmental colonialism” and summons the undead spectre of the “banning of Indigenous cultural practices” and what have you.

Anyway, Councillor Fras allowed his smartass side to get the better of him on Facebook with a since-deleted comment about Indigenous people and Vancouver Island’s pretty perennials ("They invented them or what?"). His comment is incidentally reported to have elicited a response from some unnamed person whose view was that it’s “scary he is on council.”

So, as a public service, here’s the answer to the smartass councillor’s question: Yes, pretty much, Indigenous people did “invent” Camassia quamash and its cousin Camassia leichtlini.

They’re not just flowers. They’re ghosts of a big trade economy.

In the wild, camas is a pretty thing, but if properly cultivated - and Indigenous people used to cultivate camas like gangbusters - camas becomes, you could say, “invented.” It’s what happens when humans domesticate something.

Under carefully-managed cultivation, over time camas becomes something altogether different, with a potato-like bulbs as big as tennis balls. Cultivate and tend and harvest camas properly and you’ve invented a seriously valuable food source and a major trade commodity.

In 1792, as Captain George Vancouver sailed in sight of camas prairies along the shores of Puget Sound, he recorded in his diary: "I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture." That’s because it wasn’t an uncultivated country. It’s just that almost all the farmers had been obliterated in the first wave of smallpox that swept through the area only a few years before, in the 1780s.

Real Story subscribers unfamiliar with my work may be amused to know that I spent years inquiring into these sorts of things. It’s because they tell preposterously overlooked stories about magnificent chapters in human history. One result of my inquires was this book, The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean and another was this book, The Lost and Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions.

I happen to think the story of Camassia is important, that it’s not just another opportunity to bang on about colonialism and so on, if only because it overturns some nearly ineradicable stereotypes about “pre-contact” Indigenous economies and the relationships with the newcomers that followed.

The story also exposes the otherwise innocent ways that simple mistakes can occur even in big-forehead disciplines like anthropology that can end up rendering all of us pretty ignorant about who we are and how we got here. Those errors are often made with the best social-justicey intentions.

Besides, after I came back from a nice long ride on my new Triumph Bonneville T100 last night I had my feet up and I thought I’d dash this off.

Can we leave off with the hunter-gatherer stuff please

The thing about the story of Camassia is that it’s just one little planet in a galaxy of overlooked and forgotten horticultural and economic practices that blow a big hole in the notion of Northwest Coast peoples as having been mere “hunter-gatherers.”

It’s not just that the old economies had pretty well collapsed owing to the first scourges of smallpox and ended up forgotten about. The main reason wrong ideas took root is that the early outside observers and avocational ethnographers and respected anthropologists poking around the coast were fellas.

Lads tend to talk to lads, and you have to admit the coast’s fishing economies were absolutely amazing and the men had a lot to say for themselves. But the Northwest Coast’s “clam garden” mariculture and horticultural economies weren’t closely noticed at all, because it was mostly “women’s work.”

So there was that, and there’s also the long shadow of the great Franz Boas, the founding father of Northwest Coast anthropology. Boas was a good man. He was passionately committed to showing that "hunter-gatherers" could be every bit as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as agriculturalists.

An inintended consequence: those vast camas prairies behind the villages weren’t hunter-gatherer affairs so they were inconvenient to the thesis Boas and his heirs set out to prove. Well-intentioned as they were, the Boasians were content to show that the coast’s complex “hunter-gatherer” fishing culture was a really big deal, and they left all that stuff the women were up to, especially in the days before the smallpox obliterations, as barely above the level of blackberry-picking.

Consequently, existentially important aspects of “pre-contact” life didn’t figure into the way we all ended up comprehending how “Indians” lived in the old days. Get that into your head and you will have resolved an enduring mystery:

If the transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to an agricultural economy is supposed to be such a momentous cultural upheaval that it rumbles and roars over dozens of generations before the process is complete, then riddle me this.

Just about every Indigenous community around the Salish Sea (the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and a reach of the Strait of Juan de Fuca), by the early 1850s, was already putting hundreds of hectares of land into the production of potatoes. So, how was it that the common potato, Solanum tuberosum, was so quickly and easily incorporated into the diet and the economic life of all those peoples?

The answer to the mystery: the potato was just another crop.

In the Strait of Georgia area, potatoes were being planted at the Hudson Bay Company post at Fort Langley by the 1830s. By 1857, potato-growing was known among the Point Roberts people, the Semiahmoo, and the Duwamish, Samish, Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Skagit, Katzie, Port Townsend, Dungeness, Port Discovery, Sooke, Songhees, Cowichan and Nanaimo peoples. A small Duwamish community near the mouth of Lake Washington had 30 acres in potato cultivation by 1855, and a chief on the Saanich peninsula near Victoria had slaves working in his fields around the same time.

You say potato, I say wapato

In 1852, the Katzie at what is now Pitt Meadows sold a substantial quantity of potatoes and cranberries to two traders, Cooper and Blankhorn, for resale all the way down into the produce markets of San Francisco. The thing is, this was no big deal for the Katzie, which brings us to a third vegetable crop, knowns as wapato, Sagittaria latifolia, known to most people nowadays as arrowhead.

Wapato wasn’t farmed and processed like camas bulbs, which were sometimes roasted, but often used in the way Europeans or Asians use cereal grain - dried, ground into flour, and mixed with berries and other foods to make cakes, or kneaded into loaves. Wapato, not coincidentally, is also the word Indigenous people used in the early days for Solanum tuberosum, the potato. Sensibly, too, because Sagittaria latifolia - which is to say arrowhead, looks and tastes a lot like the common white potato.

The people who spoke Halkomelem and closely-related languages (the Cowichan, Musqueam, Katzie, Sto:los and so on) called the “old” wapato ska'us, as did the northern Straits Salish (the Songhees, Esquimalt, Tsawout, Tsartlip, Tseycum and so on). The Puget Samish called it ska'wic. Wherever you went, whatever term ended up used for the potato was also the name people had been using for the Sagittaria tuber.

Now, you tell me what’s “hunter-gatherer” about this.

In the autumn months of 1827, Hudson Bay Company traders who had only just arrived on the Fraser River observed: "As many as 5,000 Indians, gathered along the Lower Fraser for salmon, assembled at the Pitt River to dig 'skous,' a tuber that grew in pools and swamps, and which was considered a delicacy."

The Pitt River country is the home territory of the Katzie people. I confess, I love those guys, did a lot of research for them years ago (I have a summer motorcycle jacket with “Katzie First Nation” on the back and my name on the arm that was a gift from band council), so forgive me for boasting on their behalf.

The Katzie were famous for their wapato (or 'skous' or ska'us) production. Grown in sloughs and backchannels and swamps. wapato was in some cases cultivated in huge ponds that were owned by the Katzie collectively. Other ponds were owned and managed by individual families (similar arrangements prevailed in the Katzie cranberry industry).

Ponds and sloughs were cleared in large tracts - some several hundred feet in length - and when the wapato was ripe, families would spend the month-long harvest season, usually in October or November, picking wapato from canoes or by "dancing," wading through the shallows and treading on the plants until the roots floated to the surface.

I don’t know about my subscribers - do forgive me for banging on about all this - but I find these stories of our human heritage far more interesting than yet an opportunity for yet other eruption over some dumb thing a white guy said in response to yet another lesson about “colonialism.”

And I thought it would be a welcome break from the global rise of the police-state bloc and the slovenly accommodations our governments have been affording the world’s worst tyrannies, democracy be damned.

The End.