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The purpose of this book is to describe and analyze the practice and institution of slavery among the aboriginal inhabitants of the Northwest Coast of North America. The book describes Northwest Coast societies and culture, and investigates how those who controlled access to resources utilized the labor of slaves in the process of food production. It provides the cultural and social background to the practice of slavery and reviews the evidence for the antiquity of slavery in the culture area, also discussing the distinction between the status of slaves on the Northwest Coast and the status of captives in most of the rest of aboriginal North America.

This chapter reviews studies of slavery in the Northwest Coast of North America, commenting on the previous studies and the traditional scholarly view of Northwest Coast slavery. It discusses the relevant works of H.J. Nieboer, William Christie MacLeod, Julia Averkieva, Bernard J. Siegel, and Eugene R. Ruyle. The analysis reveals that although these scholars used different approaches and had different interests, they all agree that slaves were economically important.

This chapter focuses on the cultural relevance of slavery in the Northwest Coast of North America, and evaluates the contributions that slaves made to the economies of their communities. It investigates how slavery flourished in societies based on kinship, given that the ideology of kinship appears to be contradicted by the institution of slavery, and also analyzes how titleholders maintained their dominance of both slaves and commoners.

This chapter provides an overview of the cultures of the North Pacific Coast of North America and discusses its relevance to the practice of slavery, listing the most distinctive characteristics of the Northwest Coast culture and describing the physical space occupied by aboriginal populations. It also discusses the material culture, community organization, social and economic life, intergroup relations, and religious and ceremonial life in the Northwest Coast.

This chapter examines rank and class within the culture areas in the Northwest Coast of North America in the context of an approach of social stratification that considers the presence of both slave and free strata, and discusses ethnographic data supporting a class interpretation. The analysis reveals that the intensity of class divisions appears to have varied during the development of slavery.

This chapter describes the sources of information and the methods used to arrive at the statements and conclusions in this book about slavery in the Northwest Coast of North America. It explains the concept of the approach developed to establish generalizations about Northwest Coast cultures, specifically the tribal unit sample, and discusses cultural variations in space and the problem of change over time. The chapter highlights the problem of missing information and the bias in some sources used for the book.

This chapter traces the history of Northwest Coast slavery in antiquity, focusing on the decades immediately preceding 1770, and describes evidence from the three major types of sources of information: archaeology, eighteenth-century European accounts, and language. The findings suggest that slavery was practiced by the aboriginal inhabitants of the region before contact with Europeans in the last third of the eighteenth century, probably for centuries.

This chapter considers the changes in slavery in the Northwest Coast between 1780 and 1880, providing a brief account of contact history on the Northwest Coast and describing later events that directly affected slavery. It highlights the decline in several areas of slavery, including slave labor and the ritual killing of slaves; twentieth-century attitudes toward former slaves; and marriages between slaves and free persons.

This chapter describes the slave–master relations in the Northwest Coast. It defines a slave as a person over whom all the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised and examines whether war captives were considered slaves. The chapter discusses character and behavior of slaves, describing the slave owners as well as their attitudes toward their slaves, and also highlights the paths out of slavery.

This chapter explores slave labor and its ramifications for the various societies in the Northwest Coast. It describes the tasks performed by slaves, and explains the traditional assessments of the value and significance of slave labor. The chapter suggests that some of the most important production activities of the slaves include food procurement, tool manufacturing, and production of objects and paraphernalia for use in ceremonial activities.

This chapter focuses on captivity and slavery in aboriginal cultures in the Southeast and Northwest Coast of North America, discussing some possible servile statuses found in aboriginal eastern North American societies in order to provide a continent-wide context for Northwest Coast slavery. It explains that the common starting point of slavery for both the Northwest Coast and eastern North America was captives taken in intergroup fighting, who either became slaves or tortured and killed, before, or shortly after, they arrived in their captors' home communities.

This chapter investigates the number of slaves and the scale of slavery in the Northwest Coast, explaining the sources of numerical population data and describing the slave population as found in the census data. It also discusses other estimates of slave numbers which are often vague or contradictory. The chapter concludes that the number of slaves in many Northwest Coast communities was large enough to have considerable potential impact on those communities and the economic, social, and political circumstances of their owners.

This chapter examines the role of slaves in the ceremonial life in the Northwest Coast, discussing the use of slaves in rituals and addressing their most widespread use in the burial feasts of titleholders. It describes the tie between cannibalism and slavery, and discusses the possible symbolic association of slaves, copper, and salmon, as well as the use of slaves in ceremonies and other religious activities.

This chapter examines the production or acquisition of slaves in the Northwest Coast. It explains that almost all slaves had been nonslaves, either commoners or titleholders, who were seized by force, usually in the context of intergroup fighting. Many slaves also came to their owners by means of transactions with other owners, and some are included as part of wergild payments. Slaves could also be inherited as part of the estate of their deceased owner.

The reasons why evolutionary ecology and, more specifically, optimal foraging theory, do not work in many archaeological situations are varied. Most importantly however, is our lack of understanding of basic human decision-making processes in societies intermediate between bands and states. From evolutionary ecology, we can predict some foraging behavior and thus explain some of the settlement behavior of foraging societies (Mithen 1991; Smith 1991). In states and empires, we can use modern microeconomic theory to predict settlement, trade, and political organization. However, we have very little understanding of how to predict behavior in societies that fall between these two extremes. One of the basic assumptions of modern economic, geographical, and cultural ecological studies is that humans are energy maximizers. Ecologists view this ability to be economically efficient as a product of our evolutionary history of being adaptive (Jochim 1981; Krebs and Davies 1991; Smith and Winterhalder 1992; Stephens and Krebs 1986; Winterhalder and Smith 1981). Support for this assumption is clearly seen in studies of small, mobile foraging societies where individuals and kin-based groups tend to maximize their economic return with subsistence and settlement behaviors that most would agree are adaptive in that particular context (Jochim 1981; Mithen 1991; Smith 1991). For sedentary communities with more complex political organizations (tribes and simple chiefdoms), however, this is not the case, and this discrepancy is seen archaeologically in settlement and subsistence strategies that do not conform to predictions derived from optimal foraging theory. Thus, an underlying assumption in ecological studies is that models of subsistence economizing behavior and studies of subsistence efficiency will work well for hunters and gatherers (Keene 1981; Winterhalder and Smith 1981) or small-scale horticulturalists (Keegan 1986), but will decrease in their explanatory power with increasing social and political complexity. Although this has not been specifically tested, the fact that optimal foraging theory is less effective in explaining behavior in agricultural and sedentary hunter-and-gatherer societies (Maschner 1992) and is not usually applied to chiefdoms and states at all supports this contention.

This chapter focuses on James Cook's map of a huge swath of the Northwest Coast in 1778. Beginning in 1768, Cook led three expeditions that explored and mapped much of the Pacific Ocean, including Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. The third voyage began in Plymouth, England, on July 12, 1776, and headed to North America. In this voyage, Cook had charted over 4,000 miles of the North American northwest coastline, determined the extent of Alaska up to Icy Cape, and closed the gap from the Russian survey by Aleksei Chirikov and Vitus Bering to the Spanish survey at Cape Blanco, Oregon.