1906: The tomanawis of Chief Cha-we-tsot
I had heard of Albert B Reagan (1871-1936) before, in my reading on Pacific Northwest cultures, but I hadn’t realized he was a relatively primitive anthropologist.
For instance, in his article “The Lummi Indians” in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, 1906, he says “nearly all” of the tribe’s population are “half-breeds”. Huh.
Albert B Reagan (image credit: Wikipedia)
Reagan got to the position of professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, and was a US Indian Agent to the Quileutes of the Washington coast. So there’s that.
The first page (139) of his article states accurately: “They belong to the Salish linguistic stock, and now all talk the Lummi branch of that language. When that fails they use the Chenook [Chinook] jargon as a means of communication. The young people all speak English.”
Reagan got a significant part of his information on the Lummi tribe from someone we know well in Chinuk Wawa circles, Willie McClusk[e]y. (Who wrote letters in CW!)
From Willie’s knowledge, here’s an excerpt of relevance for us, regarding a Lummi chief who signed the Stevens Treaties in the 1850s — his name is misspelled in the caption to the accompanying image, not a huge surprise since its was spelled many ways (including Chow-its-hoot, Cha-wit-zit, and Chowitsuit; Reagan spells it right in another published version of the Lummi article):
Chief Cha-we-tsot once owned the ‘potlatch‘ house at the Portage.
The drawings on the totem-posts are his ‘tomanawis.’ The sun, carrying a
parcel of valuables in each hand, came to him in a dream and said: ‘Your
storehouses (or trunks) will always be full. You will therefore give two
more feasts than the average chief; custom had established the rule that
the ordinary chief should give three feasts in a lifetime. So Chief Cha-we-
tsot built the ‘potlatch‘ house and carved his ‘tomanawis‘ on its totem-
posts. He then gave five feasts. two more than the average, as the sun
in the vision had commanded him.
Potlatch house is a Northern Dialect regionalism in Chinook Jargon.
So is the use of tomanawis to mean a physical object created by a human; more typically across all dialects, it means a guardian spirit.
Bonus fact:
Reagan describes how the Lummis, when the priest is absent, perform what I see as very probably an Indian Shaker service in the local Catholic church!
