Time Weavers

An ornately carved stick once part of a prehistoric loom is among the highlights of an archaeology project at the Swinomish Indian Reservation. The artifact may date to a time when Pacific Northwest Indians were the only people on the continent who wove from wool.

A CONNER - Mike Cuperus and Daryl Vander Pol were wading along the Skagit River Delta, pulling sticks from the mud and seeing how far they could throw them, things boys have always done in the lazy days of summer.

But one stick, about 4 feet long, was strikingly different, ornately carved with an animal head at one end. They took it home and began trying to find out what it was.

The piece of wood, once a vertical support for a prehistoric Indian loom, is one of the highlights of a continuing archaeology program at the Swinomish Indian Reservation here. It's a joint project of the tribe, which is rediscovering its past, and Seattle Community College, Washington State University and The Evergreen State College.

Ancestors of members of today's Swinomish Indian Tribal Community lived along the fast-changing delta of the Skagit River. They caught salmon, gathered shellfish, hunted seals, dug roots and picked berries. The culture collapsed after the arrival of white traders about two centuries ago.

``We want to teach our young people the ways of the past which have gone away,'' said Robert Joe Sr., tribal chairman. ``The history and culture of our ancestors is something we can be proud of.''

Students from the three schools recently completed a second year of excavation at the site of prehistoric longhouses, directly across the Swinomish Channel from the popular tourist town of La Conner.

``This site has been occupied continuously by Indians for 2,000 to 3,000 years, right up to now,'' said Astrida Onat of Seattle Community College, a director of the excavation. ``It's an unusual opportunity to establish a cultural continuity which is often broken'' when sites are investigated away from a reservation.

``With Indians still living here, we have an oral history that leads us step-by-step into the past.''

The excavation, which will be continued next year, has reached deposits about 200 years old where stone adz blades, bone awls and harpoon points made of bone and antler were beginning to be replaced by metal implements.

Joe, the tribal chairman, has a special interest in the project. The house where he lived as a boy stood at the site until about 20 years ago. Upper levels of the excavation produced marbles Joe undoubtedly played with as a boy.

``The students tell me I must have lost my marbles,'' he joked.

An aim of the tribe and the scientists is establishment of a Swinomish heritage center where artifacts can tell the tribe's history. The loom support that Mike and Daryl pulled from the mud will be a featured display.

The piece is believed to date to a time when Pacific Northwest Indians were the only people in North America who wove blankets from wool. It was a skill that died with the introduction by European traders of machine-made blankets, long before the memories of the oldest living Indians.

Tribes along Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca maintained a special breed of wool dogs, often confined on islands to keep them apart from other camp dogs. Indians using razor-sharp mussel-shell knives sheared the dogs several times a year.

No one now remembers what the dogs looked like, but early explorers said they were small, usually white but sometimes a brownish black, resembling Pomeranians, a tiny breed with long, silky hair and a tail curling over the back.

The loom support had slots for two horizontal bars, a type of loom in use in the Pacific Northwest when European explorers first arrived. Indian women often supplemented dog hair with goose down, plant material and mountain-goat wool, gathered from bushes in the spring when the animals were shedding.

It took four years for Mike, now 15, and Daryl, 16, to learn what they had found. They had called a newspaper in Mount Vernon, their home, and had inquired at a historical museum in La Conner. No one knew what it was.

Finally, they took it to school, and Daryl's history teacher called Onat, an instructor at Seattle Community College who had begun an archaeological dig on the Swinomish Reservation last year. She brought it to the attention of the tribe.

``An advantage of working here is that older members of the tribe can help us identify things we find,'' Onat said.

Mike and Daryl, not members of the tribe, recently visited Joe, the tribal chairman, who marveled at the preservation of the loom support, a result of its being submerged in wet mud for centuries.

Onat speculated that the loom support was from an Indian fishing village along the lower Skagit that was abandoned in the late 1800s after upstream logging made the site uninhabitable because of repeated floods.

A student survey of ancient sites on the Swinomish Reservation, directed by Dale Croes, research archeologist at WSU, turned up a clamming basket, made of split cedar twigs, that had been preserved in wet deposits. The weaving style placed it in the age range of 500 to 1,200 years old, Croes said.

``It's an open-weave basket that the women would use to clean clams,'' Croes explained. ``They'd fill it with shucked clams and then wade out and raise the basket in and out of the water to rinse out the sand.''

The prehistoric winter village, known as Twiwoc, extended along the channel roughly opposite the modern town of La Conner. The ancient village is believed to have contained four or five longhouses. There were still two large longhouses in 1855, when the tribe signed the Point Elliott Treaty. They were the typical Puget Sound Indian construction with walls and roofs of cedar planks.

Onat believes the longhouses disappeared in the 1870s, to be replaced by modern-style houses.

Traces of prehistoric fish traps, devices that funneled salmon into an enclosure where they could be lifted out by nets, have turned up along the channel.

``There was family ownership of resources, fisheries, shellfish beaches and places where plant food could be found,'' Onat said. ``They were managed carefully. The traps could have caught every salmon in the channel, but the Indians always allowed escapement for future runs and to provide fish for people upstream.

``Shellfish harvests were cycled to avoid overharvesting beaches.''

Onat said tribal elders tell her there was a canoe house on the channel bank across from La Conner. The channel in those days, sometimes one of the wandering mouths of the Skagit, was shallow enough to walk across at low tide. Dredging in the 1950s deepened it to a permanent route for boating traffic avoiding the turbulent Deception Pass, and covered the old canoe-launching beach with dredging spoils. Eventually Onat hopes to search for artifacts beneath the spoils.

Plans for the tribe's heritage center call for renovation of a century-old web shed, where fishing nets were hung, and the repair and exhibit of a precariously leaning salmon smokehouse built by the late Andrew Joe, father of the tribal chairman.

The project ``gives us an opportunity to learn of our past,'' Joe said. ``They can teach us things we've forgotten.''

LOOMS USED BY NATIVE PEOPLES

The first explorers found Indians along Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca weaving wool blankets, a skill that was lost when machine-made blankets became available. Looms were made of two vertical wooden supports, slotted to hold horizontal bars. Women twirled long-shafted spindles by hand to twist dog or goat wool into yarn for blanket-weaving. An ornately carved loom piece, believed to be a vertical support, was found near the site of a prehistoric Swinomish village.