Arrival Masters of the Pacific Coast: The Tribes of the American Northwest

The north-west coast of North America.

A dramatic landscape on the edge of the Pacific.

1,400 miles of rugged coastline, dominated by impenetrable forests,

isolated archipelagos and inhospitable terrain,

battered by relentless wind and pounding ocean waves.

The north-west coast is a place of stunning scenery

and remote locations, but for me what really defines the region

is its people.

They mastered this tough environment to develop a culture that has

lasted over 10,000 years,

which recent discoveries suggest is the longest continuous culture

anywhere in the Americas.

They created unique,

complex communities that redefined how human society develops.

They produced art infused with meaning that ranks alongside any

of the world's great civilisations.

And following the arrival of Europeans in the 18th-century,

they were very nearly wiped out.

Their lands were occupied, their population decimated.

An entire culture faced extinction and yet the people left standing

didn't simply survive - they adapted, they endured,

and they stand out as one of the most successful

and resilient cultures anywhere on Earth.

This extraordinary durability has often been ignored

when their history has been told by outsiders...

..their traditions looked on as curiosities,

their art misunderstood.

But look closely and you find a way of life that has sustained

across millennia, and I believe has a lot to teach us today.

It's the sustainable,

respectful relationships that really are the strength of who we are.

We're getting stronger as a people all the time.

We've always been here and we belong here, and we will take care

of this place for future generations.

Strength, robustness and innovation allowed the peoples

of the north-west coast to colonise these lands,

and it's these qualities of cultural resilience that allowed them to

thrive here for thousands of years.

How they did it is one of the most inspiring stories in human history.

TRIBAL CHANTING

This is a traditional dance of the Makah,

a Native American tribe from what is now Washington State.

Re-enacting customs from the past like this is important, since their

ancestors had no written language and much of their material culture

was made of wood and textiles.

Little survives decay -

with almost four metres of rainfall every year,

the north-west coast is one of the wettest places on earth.

Defined by a densely-forested region,

it begins in the north on what is now the Panhandle of Alaska,

continues down through the rugged coastline of modern

British Columbia, Canada to present-day Washington State.

And on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, lies one of

the most important archaeological sites in North America.

It was here that secrets of an ancient society were revealed.

This is Ozette, the location of a village

once occupied by the Makah tribe.

Around 300 years ago it was entombed in a landslide,

and so today it is a veritable time capsule.

The oral history of the Makah mentions a great slide that engulfed

this once thriving community around the year 1560.

It remained hidden,

encased in mud until it was hit by wild winter weather 400 years later.

In February 1970, a storm came in and eroded this bank,

revealing a series of perfectly preserved longhouses.

Over the next 11 years, archaeological excavations revealed

over 40,000 objects spanning 2,000 years of human occupation.

The objects represent 97% of all artefacts ever found in this region

that date to before European contact.

It had long been assumed that the arrival of Europeans changed

every aspect of life on the coast,

but these objects prove a continuity of culture and tradition.

Some of the very finest artefacts are kept in the storeroom of the

Makah Museum, where Janine Ledford is in charge of the collection.

We have always been such a capable and hard-working people.

We just have no other option than succeeding.

The collection includes tools made of whalebone, wooden harpoon points,

equipment for hunting seals and fishing for salmon and halibut.

It confirms what our ancestors have told us, what our elders

have told us - that we didn't only survive here

but that we've really thrived here for centuries.

You can see wealth so clearly, so you get to see social stratification

that you normally wouldn't see.

That for me really brings out the people behind the objects.

Right. You see things like this canoe paddle, for example,

which was maybe someone's favourite paddle.

You can see the wear marks from where it hit the side of the canoe.

Lots of miles were already put on that paddle before the mudslide.

And in terms of clothing, this is a hat?

That would be hat, a rain hat,

so it's got an inner layer and an outer layer.

Hats were pretty important -

it rained so much here, right where we live, so lots of hats were made

and they were made waterproof and several different styles,

and some of them denoted a higher rank.

The mud sealed out oxygen,

creating the perfect conditions that preserved all this organic material

for hundreds of years.

It's a very unique collection -

it looks like they're a couple of decades old

rather than centuries old.

The objects show that the Makah had been living here

for at least two millennia before the mudslide buried the village

in the 16th century.

In what might appear to be a remote and inhospitable landscape,

they had developed a thriving, sophisticated,

and hierarchical society.

Elsewhere on the coast,

the archaeological record isn't as rich...

..but evidence does show that there were hundreds of tribes living here,

each with distinct identities and different languages,

yet similar cultural traditions.

The Panhandle of Alaska is homeland of the Tlingit.

In British Colombia, Canada,

are the Tsimshian, the Nisga'a and the Gitxsan.

South-west is the territory of the Haida Nation.

Further south are the Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth.

In the US state of Washington are the Makah and the Coast Salish,

who straddle the border.

These are just a handful of the independent communities that make up

the peoples of the north-west coast, who,

when the Europeans arrived in the 1770s,

numbered in their hundreds of thousands.

By that time, people had been living here for millennia.

In fact, research shows that they are some of

the longest surviving inhabitants of the American continent.

To find the evidence, you have to travel across

the near-freezing waters to an island lying between

Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland.

And you have to start looking not where the shoreline is today,

but where it would have been thousands of years ago.

So this is sort of the edge, the old shoreline.

Archaeologist Daryl Fedje has established that the effects

of glaciation and changing sea levels

have pushed one ancient settlement inland and uphill.

So this is where you head the excavation, then?

That's right. We started with a little shovel test here

and found quite a bit of material,

then came further in and decided to put a larger unit.

So this one-metre-square here is where we decided to focus and work.

And so the cultural layers then,

whereabouts are the cultural layers in the stratigraphy?

Basically the darker soils from about level with where

Joanne's pointing there, up towards about 20 or 30cm from the top,

there's a series of... They're not very well defined, but thin smears

of charcoal, lots of stone tools, flakes and flake tools,

a few hearth features and things like that,

and they date between about 6,000 and 6,500 years ago.

Beautifully worked stone spear points give hints of the hunting

that went on here thousands of years ago.

Can you grab the door there?

But Daryl and his team have unearthed an even rarer

piece of evidence that dates back much further still.

Wow.

This is the ancient preserved footprint of a child.

But you can see the outline... A small child's footprint,

and with the toes here, heel print here. And we saw a series of these,

like four or five child-sized footprints

as well as these other ones again with...

Sometimes they are crossed over and sometimes they show better or worse,

but this is one of the ones that showed fairly well.

And in some of them you can see individual toes really clearly.

The footprint was impressed into a light-grey clay and later covered

over with sand and charcoal, ensuring its survival.

And when tiny pieces of charcoal from the footprint were

radiocarbon dated, an astonishing discovery was made.

It was dated to be 13,200 years old,

making it the oldest footprint ever discovered in North America.

To see a place where people were actually physically, you know,

doing something, there was motion and different things going on,

it's really exciting.

And also children, like, we hardly ever see children

-in the archaeological record.

-But they're there all the time, right?

Exactly, they're there but we very rarely find them or see them

in the record, and therefore, thinking about that,

the children and parents living in this coastal environment,

learning how to live off this landscape.

Yeah, for sure. Size seven shoes.

We measured.

I think there's something so evocative about that footprint

because it is something we can all relate to -

a glimpse of a life lived thousands of years ago,

a child of the north-west coast.

But where did this child and the other first settlers come from?

The first people of the American continent are believed

to have arrived here about 15,800 years ago.

Sea levels at that time were much lower

because the ice caps were much bigger.

Modern-day Siberia and Alaska were connected,

allowing migration from west to east.

Exactly how the first people made the journey across is still debated.

Some people believe they walked overland, hunting large mammals,

whilst others think they travelled along the coast,

relying on maritime resources.

I personally believe they came along the coast.

These intrepid maritime colonisers hugged this coastline and became

the first humans in the Americas.

Since this coastline would have been periodically covered in ice sheets,

they would have continued south,

colonising other parts of the Americas rather than settle here.

But a little over 10,000 years ago,

the ice sheets receded for the last time and humans could permanently

settle this coast.

They represent perhaps the longest continuing culture

anywhere in the Americas.

A claim supported by the archaeological record.

The complexity of the many different languages that developed

over thousands of years.

And, more recently, another discovery has been made

that helped to rewrite the history of this region.

20 years ago in a cave not too far from here,

a skeleton was found that dated to 10,000 years ago.

A recent scientific study has identified a genetic link with the

modern-day native North Americans still living on this coast.

To have a bloodline that survived for thousands of years

in the same location is extraordinary.

The reason they eventually settled here is the same reason

they have endured so long.

This might look like a rocky and exposed landscape,

but in fact it is one of the most ecologically rich places on earth.

People here were not living a perilous hand-to-mouth existence.

The resources they found in the forests,

the rivers and the ocean were incredibly abundant...

..and it had an effect that has forced us

to re-evaluate human development entirely.

For many years in western scholarship, it was thought

that bands of hunter-gatherers would roam the landscape,

looking for food on an ad hoc basis until they learned how to cultivate

crops and domesticate livestock,

and that this would lead to the larger populations.

And from agriculture came complexity,

through artistic expression, social organisation and hierarchy.

But the peoples here in the north-west coast achieved all of

that cultural complexity without ever farming a day in their lives.

A complex society that develops without agriculture

is extremely unusual.

How they did it reveals that they had a deep understanding

of their environment, and developed great skills to exploit it.

And this is fundamental to understanding not just

how the culture was established, but why it was so robust.

I've come to see just one example of ancient ingenuity on Quadra Island.

Joining me for a dip is archaeologist Nicole Smith.

Beneath the freezing waters,

these rocks reveal a hidden story, not of agriculture,

but of aquaculture,

because they are actually the scattered remains of an ancient wall

believed to be more than 1,000 years old.

The wall formed something called a clam garden,

an inventive construction used to harvest clams and other shellfish.

It worked by enclosing and protecting them as the tide came in,

and when it went out again there were easy pickings

for the resourceful foragers.

As the famous north-west coast saying goes, "When the tide is out,

"the table is set."

That's amazing. So it stretches all the way down the coast, really?

Yeah, it does. This is actually a really beautiful one to see

and it's so interesting seeing it underwater.

Think of all the marine life - there's crabs down there,

-there's starfish, there's the clams, there's a few seals.

-Yeah.

LAUGHTER

And so it really gives you the sense that this maritime world

-is full of amazing things to eat.

-Yes, absolutely.

This highly sophisticated marine management allowed people

to accumulate the reliable food supply

required to develop social complexity.

The resources of the coastal environment were rich enough

for communities to thrive.

Just how rich can be seen by travelling to the homeland

of the Haida Nation and to the remote islands of Haida Gwaii.

They are located nearly 100 miles off Canada's west coast -

an archipelago 150 miles long.

The rivers here are alive with salmon during their migrations,

as they are all along the coast.

The people understood these patterns in the natural world

and salmon formed the most important part of many coastal peoples' diet.

This river has four big fish runs every year -

the pink, coho and chum salmon, the steelhead trouts -

there's tens of thousands of fish coming up here every year.

When you start to think about how much food that is and how easily

accessible it is, it really changes your perspective

of how you get your food within society.

Fish numbers in some rivers can be an astonishing 25 million annually.

These coho salmon can be up to 17lbs in size.

For thousands of years, the Haida used nets, harpoons,

fish-hooks and traps to catch huge quantities of salmon

on stretches of this river.

So in just half an hour, that's about 25lbs of salmon -

that's enough fish to feed a family for a long time.

The accessibility of large quantities of fish meant that

there was less need to spend time moving from place to place,

hunting in the forests.

But the rivers weren't bountiful all year round -

peak salmon season on Haida Gwaii is between May and September,

which meant the Haida and other communities had to devise

a method of preservation.

And it was this that had a profound effect on their development.

-Roberta?

-Hi.

Hey, how are you doing?

Roberta Olsen has smoked salmon all her life.

They had smokehouses everywhere when we were kids.

I mean, smokehouses are just part of our life.

If you're going to smoke it, you've got to cut it down the back.

-Right.

-Cut the head off first, of course.

Wow, look at the colour of that meat, it's amazing.

In the smokehouse, the fish is hung just below the ceiling,

ensuring it isn't cooked by the fire's heat but is dried out

by its smoke, which eradicates moist areas where bacteria could grow.

So once you've smoked the fish, how long can you keep them for?

Well, nowadays, you can vacuum-seal it so it will last at least a year.

Yeah. And traditionally, before people had fridges

and vacuum-sealers?

They smoked it.

They sliced it till it was quite thin and then smoked it till

it was dry and they would store it in bins and use it all winter long.

Preserving fish in this way provided food for Roberta's

resilient ancestors in the months when the rivers didn't.

Crucially, it also meant they could develop from hunter-gatherers

to settled communities.

What may seem like such a simple process as smoking fish

can be transformative in terms of society, because when a community

doesn't have to worry about food production

cos they have it available all year round,

they can concentrate on other aspects of their culture.

By developing from hunter-gatherers to settled communities in this way,

they broke conventional Western understanding

of how societies evolve,

where agriculture was assumed to be a necessary tipping point

for population growth and cultural advancement,

as it had been in Europe and elsewhere.

All along this coast,

sophisticated societies emerged and developed without agriculture,

and because their food supply was secure,

they had time for artistic expression

such as petroglyphs or rock carvings.

Rock art is notoriously hard to date, but these carvings are part of

a tradition stretching back thousands of years.

They depict animals which feature prominently in north-west coast art,

most famously in the iconic totem pole,

the largest wooden sculptures in the world.

Since the environment played such a key role in coastal life,

images of wildlife are to be expected.

But totem poles such as these at Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology

represent much more than the natural world.

Ingrained in every single one are meanings and complex stories

about people, events and spiritual beliefs that only those

with inherent knowledge and cultural understanding can interpret.

One of them is Nika Collison of the Haida Nation.

My name is Jisgang, I belong to the Ts'aahl clan of the Haida Nation,

and my English name is Nika Collison.

The figures you will see on poles could be telling of origin stories

of a family that raised the pole.

It could be telling of crests, animals, supernatural beings,

to represent their lineage, who they are.

There's a link then between the poles and the imagery and stories

and also the landscape?

Yes, it's an expression of our relationship to the lands,

the waters and the supernatural,

but it's a completely different way of looking at the world.

A profound connection to the environment

not only rooted the early societies to their lands,

it forged an unbreakable and everlasting sense of identity.

I think that the relationship to your environment is relevant

to everyone in the world but, in Haida culture,

we are Haida because of the lands and waters where we live.

This is a belief that runs deep and is reflected in origin myths.

Haida legend says that the first humans were found by a raven

in a clamshell, who coaxed them out to join his world,

an event portrayed in this sculpture by Nika's grandfather,

the renowned Haida artist, Bill Reid.

The apparent paradox of exploiting the natural world for resources

while infusing it with spiritual importance,

in fact makes perfect sense.

The coastal peoples felt that they were part of the ecology,

not separate from it.

The sets of relationships that link the environment inspired

the way they organised their communities.

By structuring their society in harmony with the animal world,

people weren't just recognising the importance of animals

in the environment, they were expressing their connection

to them spiritually.

Animals had a fundamental role in every tribe or nation

because of what they stood for.

There's a bear.

The bear is an important animal on the north-west coast.

It represents family and strength,

and the spirituality of the forest realm.

Such symbolism is important in identifying social divisions

within a tribe.

Most tribes are made up of a number of clans. Each clan is named after

an animal and reflects its traits or characteristics.

Individuals are assigned to a particular clan

during their lifetime.

Here on Haida Gwaii, the main clans of the Haida

are the Raven and Eagle.

Each clan has several chiefs

and one of the Eagle clan chiefs is Haida carver, Jim Hart.

You are either Eagle or Raven, and we're Eagles.

We are one clan that stands here on the islands,

we're one of many clans, and I am the chief of our clan.

Clans are basic social units,

groups of people bound together by common loyalties,

and the chiefs of each clan are usually inherited positions.

There's the hereditary chiefs, which you inherit from your uncle.

You always work with your mother's side of the family -

not the father's side but the mother's side.

One of the reasons for that, one of the main reasons for that,

is because you always knew where you came from.

Chiefs could be male or female, and having several chiefs with authority

had a fascinating effect on how the society worked.

Anthropologist Ken Ames has been studying north-west coast peoples

for nearly 50 years.

There were chiefs, but most chiefs...

There were also counsels or advisers, there were elders,

and government flowed through those individuals.

So chiefs might make decisions about...explicit decisions,

like it's time to move the village, it's time to do this or do that,

but again there would also have to be...

There would be checks on them in terms of the counsel,

and then there would also be people that you would draw on for their

expertise on certain topics.

Do you think that slightly decentralised form of power

was a part of their success in terms of longevity, because power was not

centralised in one individual permanently for a tribe?

That's an aspect of north-west coast that would be shared

with western North America,

which is, power and authority gets diffused.

There's a lot of resistance to accumulating a great deal

in any one individual, and always the power of voting with your feet.

People who didn't like what a chief was asking could refuse to do it,

they could simply leave.

Social hierarchy here was a completely different

system of power.

Chiefs were motivated to act in everyone's best interests,

to maintain allegiances that were the basis of their authority.

A picture begins to emerge of hundreds of sophisticated societies

with many common aspects...

..from shared art and spiritual belief, to kinship with nature

and a social structure that governed everything

down to individual families.

At the heart of every family unit was the longhouse.

They used to be widespread, but today, sadly, they are a rarity.

They are defined by the monumental beams that span the house frontage

and slot into the vertical house posts.

Because of the size of the trees,

longhouses could be up to 300 square metres,

making them the largest structures the people of the Coast built.

Large extended families would have occupied just one house,

working together obtaining food and carrying out other daily tasks.

Houses were grouped together to form villages -

in some cases, up to 1,000 people would live in just 30 houses.

And there was no shortage of building material.

Over 23,000 square miles of dense forest cover British Columbia alone.

You only have to see a huge red cedar like this to appreciate

what a special environment the north-west coast is.

It's one of the most resource-rich regions on the planet,

with everything that humans could want.

But felling trees of this size would have been incredibly difficult.

They grow up to 250ft in height, and can be about 30ft around.

To get some idea of their sheer size and the challenges

of taking one down, I've come to see modern cedar harvesting in action

here on Haida Gwaii.

It's a major industry, and heavily regulated,

not least because it's one of the most dangerous in the world.

-John?

-Hello.

-Good to meet you.

John is on the front line.

-Hey, John, how are you doing? Nice to meet you.

-Fine, thanks.

Brilliant. So these trees are coming down, then?

-Yes, sir.

-So who taught you to take down a tree?

-An old-timer.

-Really?

-Yeah.

What were his pearls of wisdom that he told you?

Ah... Walk out at the end of the day.

That's good advice!

When you see trees being felled today like this,

using modern machinery, it's pretty impressive,

but just imagine what it was like to do it

with traditional tools - just stone, axes and adzes,

maybe fires placed around the bottom to help weaken it before it goes.

There is something a little bit sad.

The tree's been growing here for 500 years and now it's coming down.

But I think when you start to think about why it's coming down,

the purpose it's going to be for - it's going to be used to build

a house or a canoe - you can start to understand something

of the cycle about why they're being harvested.

Can you hear it creaking?

-Yeah.

-She's ready to go.

-Yeah?

That is extraordinary.

The sheer power and weight of the tree coming down.

Incredible.

Dropping such huge trees without the use of a chainsaw,

or any metal tool, for that matter,

demonstrates a control of the landscape,

past peoples' ability to harness a challenging

yet resource-rich environment, providing the raw material

that was at the heart of their enduring culture.

Deep into the forest, hidden from view,

is evidence revealing the next phase of a giant tree's life.

This tree has been taken down with metal tools,

probably more than 100 years ago,

and to find out why they did it, we can just look down here.

And this is great - here you can see how a tree has been felled down

and started to be carved into a dugout canoe.

You can see the shape starting to be preformed, with the side sloping

straight down coming up here into the prow.

It is fantastic to find an object like this abandoned in the forest,

because it gives us a window into a process of manufacture -

how the tree is being transformed into one of the monumental objects

for which the peoples of the north-west coast are so famous.

The skill of creating a canoe from a single piece of wood has been passed

down from generation to generation.

And today, on the east of Vancouver Island,

in the homeland of the Coast Salish, one is being made.

My name is Luke Marston, my native name is Ts'u t'su mutl.

Most people are taught at a young age to look after their environment,

and whether you're taking the salmon or whether you're taking the cedar

for carving, you are always to give respect back to that thing

and to only take what you need.

-Hey, how're you doing?

-Hey, how's it going?

-Good, good, good.

-Good to see you.

-Nice to see you.

-That's a beautiful canoe.

-Thank you.

-How long have you been working on it?

Off and on, it's been a couple of months now.

How do you see the link between the living tree and the finished object?

Cos when the tree came down, it's quite an emotional thing

and you feel a responsibility

that you've got to do something good with it.

Yeah, we call it the tree of life.

The Halkomelem name, the Coast Salish name

is x'pai, which means, like cedar, the tree of life.

We were even taught that even though the tree has been cut down,

it's still alive, right?

So even when you are working on it, too,

you can totally feel the energy.

This thing has been growing for over 500 years and you get to hang out

with it and carve with it and create it and give it a new life

as something else now, whether it's going to be a canoe

or whether it's going to be a mask

or something like that, or a sculpture.

Creating a dugout canoe is a tricky process.

I'll just show you a little demonstration here.

First, you have to split a log in half without cracking it,

and then burn and scrape out the middle.

This hand is for the angle more and this one is more for pushing.

But if you want to just start...

Don't try and take a whole bunch off.

I won't. I won't ruin it, I promise.

Don't carve a hole in it, please.

OK.

If you sink, it will be my fault.

Brilliant.

Look at this - a natural.

I don't know about that,

but it's lovely how these shavings just peel off.

The canoes of the north-west coast are the finest examples

anywhere in the world.

They were a central feature of many tribes' lives.

They could carry 20 people or more, and some were known to travel

more than 1,000 miles and ride out the roughest of storms.

The canoe is such an iconic object of the north-west coast.

It doesn't only open up this coastal landscape,

it also brings communities together.

TRIBAL SINGING

Canoes weren't just transportation, they were symbols of identity

and vital to the lives of the communities.

Guujaaw is former president of the Haida Nation, and this is his canoe.

The canoe, basically, is the survival of the people.

If you don't have access to the water and you don't have access

to the trade goods, then you basically get left behind.

Especially for an island people...

Sometimes people perceive the north-west coast as being remote

and isolated, but in reality it was very connected.

Yeah, we never looked at it that way - we looked at Britain

as being isolated and remote.

It certainly is!

Exactly. It's funny how people's perspectives change

depending on where they are.

The geography of thousands of islands and inlets explains

why so many different communities developed.

But the canoe, and the maritime networks it made possible,

meant that the communities weren't a scattered collection

of remote settlements - they were an interconnected group of nations.

Marriages and alliances between them

followed the exchange of goods and ideas.

Items produced and bartered from around 3,000 years ago included

stone and metal work, woven baskets and chilkat blankets.

These were worn by high-ranking tribal members

on ceremonial occasions.

They were one of the most valuable objects traded on the coast

because they were much more than an item of clothing.

Chilkat weaving was practised by many north-west coast tribes in

the north. Among them, the Tlingit, located on the Alaskan Panhandle.

The technique might have died out altogether but for a recent revival.

Teri Rofkar is recapturing the skills of her ancestors.

The word Tlingit, if you break it down -

"Tlin" is tide and "git" is people.

We were known as People of the Tides.

How do you make one of these robes in this traditional technique?

It's two-strand twining and the twining... In the basket

it's watertight, in here it's very detailed.

It's like black, black, black, white, black, white,

or zero, one, one, one, zero. It's just like binary code.

Traditionally, wool from mountain goats is used and it can take

hand-spun wool from five goats just to make one blanket,

a process that could take a year or more.

The meanings in the patterns and the skill and time invested in

the creation of each blanket conferred status on the wearer.

They were highly sought after and the value of the craft

gave weavers important standing in their own community.

We were specialists in the old days.

My skill level that I have -

I could weave a couple of robes for a family group.

Maybe you belong to the killer whale group and you need some robes.

Well, I maybe need a new clan-house and you're carvers.

We were specialists and that meant

that I could weave these and trade them.

The exchange of skills was a vital part of the economy,

a system of reciprocation that required no currency.

Go ahead, grab this black and white one there.

Go ahead and take that across.

Well, now, there you go.

You're doing really well.

Better than sometimes.

-Oh, yeah.

-And then give it a twist.

-Oh, my gosh, and that killer grip

you've got. Go ahead and move your left hand a little bit.

This doesn't have to be watertight, you know.

That's true, that's a good point.

With thriving trade networks within and between the tribes,

stable social structures and plentiful resources

in an environment they'd mastered,

the north-west coast might sound like a Utopia,

but it was often violent and at times brutal.

It's a big night for the Makah tribe - their high school team

is playing one of their local rivals.

Let's go, Red Devils!

Status was incredibly important in north-west coast society,

and protecting status and revenge for the loss of status

or a perceived lack of respect often erupted into conflict.

Here we go.

I think that does it, the Makah won.

Warfare here was different from other parts of the world.

Maria Pascua is an author and expert

at the Makah Cultural And Research Centre.

Within a European context, war is often about territory,

it's about invading large territories

and then holding on to them and then expanding sort of empires.

But I don't really feel like war on the north-west coast is like that.

What were the main motivations for that conflict in the past, do you think?

For example, if a group became too big for the resources in that area,

maybe someone might split off.

But other things that might have motivated war

were women,

and so I know of some instances where we went to war

due to one of our women that was married to another tribe,

married into another tribe,

and wasn't treated properly.

And so we went, picked her up and went to battle over that.

Wars were fought to establish reputations,

maintain the status of elites and to exact revenge.

The Makah developed a particularly fearsome reputation.

One of the things about Makah warfare is we took the head off

of the enemy, and just like other people, groups, you know,

you hear of scalping and things like that - we just took the whole head,

-brought it back and...

-What did you do with the heads?

Displayed it on a pole back at our village just to say,

"This is what we did and don't mess with us."

Makah weaponry included bows and arrows, spears, and this object,

known as a "ch'tuk".

What does that word mean?

-Face splitter.

-Right, so these are face-splitting clubs?

Yes. So most of them you will see there is a hole

and that was for a line or a cord that went around your wrist

so that if you clubbed someone,

you would still have your weapon.

Even if it fell, it would hang and then you could get it back up

and go at it again.

Attacks were often carried out at night, maximising surprise,

terror and confusion.

And while men were often killed,

women and children routinely met a different fate - slavery.

Slave raiding was another motivation for war.

One view of slaves is that they provided a pool of labour

at the disposal of chiefs. Another view of slaves is that they were

a mark of prestige, so if you had a lot of prestige, a lot of slaves,

that was an indicator of your status,

that having slaves was a status marker.

If you're a slave on the north-west coast,

you're a person who has lost...

..their social identity,

and you've also lost your kinship ties, and all that kind of stuff,

so you've just been pulled out of your context, your social context.

An essential part of every tribe's culture and identity

is a strong sense of belonging,

and so to deprive a slave of theirs

was to inflict extreme psychological trauma.

And it wasn't just warfare that produced slaves.

In some parts, particularly the southern coast,

there were forms of debt slavery,

sort of like indentured servitude where you could pay off a debt

by enslaving yourself and then there might be a term of service

and you would be released, or not.

Slavery here is believed to go back at least 2,000 years,

reaching its height in the early 19th century when around 15%

of the population were slaves -

the spoils of war, more than the drivers of the economy,

as slaves were elsewhere in the world.

Slave raiding and warfare were an integral part of life,

and the ferocity with which the various communities were prepared

to defend their individual cultures and practices is telling.

It is an aspect of resilience.

They were uncompromising when it came to maintaining their place

in the coastal ecology, and getting the most out of it.

And there is no greater illustration of the fearlessness

and determination that characterises north-west coast society

than the ability to take down the biggest animals on the planet.

Hey, good to meet you.

How are you doing?

For the Makah tribe in Washington State,

no creature is more important than the whale.

Getting close to the whale,

you get a real sense of the size and strength they have.

To think about trying to hunt one

just from a dugout canoe is incredible.

The Makah once regularly hunted grey whales,

which can reach almost 50 metres in length and weigh up to 38 tonnes.

It seems like a bit of a callous thing to talk about

when they're right next to you, but the whale is an incredible resource.

It's full of blubber, meat, whale oil and bone -

very useful things for the peoples of the north-west coast.

The whale was the ocean's ultimate gift

and the Makah imbued them with spiritual significance.

Whale hunting is therefore steeped in symbolic and ritualistic beliefs,

and whalers spent weeks ensuring they were ready spiritually

as well as physically.

Makah whaler Greg Arnold has had first-hand experience.

You can't go whaling without being spiritually ready, physically ready,

mentally ready.

It's critical.

And when you're preparing for it,

there's nobody stronger than those guys that are getting ready.

You have to be... When you're leaving a beach to go whaling,

you have to be ready to die that day.

Because of... These are not small animals

and it's a sobering moment in your life.

You have children, you have family,

and you know at that day when you leave the beach...

..this could be it.

Hunting whales wasn't something any member of the Makah could do.

The prerogative was inherited, but then it had to be earned -

the young learning from their elders, showing that they deserve

to join the hunt and could use the weaponry required.

You have these large wooden shafts,

which is the sort of thing you hold on to and throw?

Yes, they have barbed points, whalebone or elk antler.

They are attached to a sinew line that detaches,

and they let the line out and throw seal floats out to keep it afloat.

And then they keep at it until they dispatch a whale.

How close to the whale do you have to get?

Within 10 metres or 20 metres or...?

Oh, no, you have to be right there.

Right.

This is a hard thing to throw, so you're...

..you're almost right on top of them.

Once the whale had been killed,

one hunter had the task of diving into the waters

to sew the whale's mouth shut to prevent it sinking

as it was towed back to shore.

Hunting this way required knowledge,

an understanding of their prey and the sea that represented

the experience of generations.

And it became part of who they were.

It's real important to our people to pass on...

..our traditions.

Because my great-grandfather, my grandfather hunted,

my uncle hunted - I got to hunt.

It became our identity.

You know, for Makah,

this is really important to us.

Harpoon barbs recovered from Ozette

prove that the custom dates back more than 1,000 years,

and today the Makah and a handful of Alaskan Inuit communities are the

only people permitted to whale hunt in the United States.

But partly because of modern environmental concerns,

just one traditional Makah whale hunt has been carried out

in the last 80 years.

The whale is at the heart of Makah identity,

and from a Makah perspective, they have been harvesting whales

sustainably for thousands of years so why should they be forced

to change their way of life because of the failings of others?

The culture of the north-west coast could only ever have

been established through a deep understanding of the environment.

And it is the symbiotic relationship with the natural world that explains

the longevity of a society that has endured for over 10,000 years.

From the very beginning,

each community took from their surroundings an identity

and a system of beliefs, as well as the resources they needed to thrive.

They traded skills and goods across vast distances, fought their rivals,

and established a network of nations,

all of it expressed in artwork that is meaningful,

practical and spiritual.

How the relative success of different societies is judged

is up for debate but, for me, the people here

reached the highest levels of cultural achievement.

But how the peoples of the north-west coast established

their culture is just part of the story.

In the second episode,

I explore how the people of the north-west coast managed to maintain

their culture and identity against the odds.

In 1492, Europeans arrived in what they called the New World.

That moment and what followed had a profound impact

on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

Many were completely wiped out by violence and disease,

whilst others saw their culture and beliefs decimated.

And yet, somehow, the peoples of the north-west coast survived.