What Is The Distinctive Culture Of Northwest Coast People

The term Northwest Coast is used in anthropology studies to communicate of the groups of Indigenous people living along the coast of British Columbia. The People of the North West Coast People came to BC over 10 000 years ago. This Aboriginal group consisted of several other nations, individually they all had a distinctive culture and political characteristics. On the other hand, they were similar in their traditions and practices of their use of salmon and other ocean animals such as clams, crabs, oysters, mussels, seaweed, seals and sometimes even whales as their way of surviving in this habitat (Canada’s First people, 2007).
The Aboriginal People of the Northwest Coast of Canada had a strong cultural stability for at least ten thousand
Their familiarity of the salmon habitat and small boat navigation in the unfamiliar tidal channels of the Pacific coast was amazingly successful. The Aboriginal women were very skilled in fish cleaning and preservation. This great skill was an advantage, as it allowed them the need for very little training when the canneries and salt processing companies became an option of employment at a later date. Trosper states that the technology was available to harvest and store fish in great amounts but there was not a need for the West Coast People to take more than they needed. Trosper reveals that the population of the Northwest Coast people was great enough to cause potential stress on the fishing resources but in the early pre- contact they chose to not make that choice, as to not create stress on the environment (Trosper, R.
The maximum was recorded as 49.5 million caught in 1911 and an average modern low of 5.2 million in 1960. The yield during the central canning period between1874–1948 was between twenty one to forty five million pounds per year. It appears that the population estimated for harvesting was a greater substantial amount than what should have been harvested. An estimated aboriginal population of sixty thousand North West Coast people were living in the area during the pre-contact period. It was also shown that the recorded annual catch of salmon at that time, could have been as high as twelve million sockeye. Subsequently the actual sockeye catch plus spawning escapement was only between 3.3 and 11.2 million salmon for the period of between 1894– 1986, the projected pre-contact harvest was the approximate amount as the post-contact catch which create stock declines in the salmon species (Trosper, R. 2002). As a result of the tremendous amount of salmon harvested for survival, trade, and ceremony before contact with Europeans, Trosper states that the aboriginal salmon cycle, with its extremely dynamic skill, was so huge that it may possibly have significantly strained and overloaded the resource. This is an example of how the Aboriginal People of the West Coast exploited the geography of their region to support their needs (Trosper, R.