The balance of autonomy and alliance inanarchic societies: the organization ofdefences in the Coast Salish past

Bill Angelbeck

Abstract

Coast Salish peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America were traditionally complex hunter-gatherer-fishers, organized primarily as independent households for most subsistence endeavours. In so doing, theyexhibited a strong degree of local and individual autonomy. Sociopolitically, they were anarchic, withoutformal institutions of government, and their villages were decentralized in structure. Yet they coordinatedtheir defences on scales of organization beyond the local household, requiring the negotiation of consensusamong those independent households. In this article, I apply an anarchist analysis to evaluate Coast Salishdefensive strategies reflected in fortifications and refuges for the period from 1600 BP through the earlypost-contact period. Using ethnographic studies, I consider how Coast Salish peoples were able to balancelocal autonomy against the shared societal needs of coordinated defensive action and examine how thesedynamics were materialized in defensive features in the landscape.

Keywords

Consensus; autonomy; alliance; anarchism; labour organization; warfare; Northwest Coast.

Introduction

In the Northwest Coast region of North America, Coast Salish peoples negotiated a carefulbalance, over time, of coalition and consensus with local autonomy and dissensus. Thearchitectural remains of Coast Salish groups, organized primarily as independent householdgroups in the past, reveal a flexible social organization as people affiliated or disaffiliated withhousehold groups over time. These dynamics were materialized in the structures of shed-roofplankhouses, whereby house sections could be expanded or reduced to adjust for a changinghousehold membership within. Both archaeological remains and ethnographic studies help tointerpret the decentralized organization that helped to maintain the independence of households

© 2016 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2015.1131620

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while also serving to organize some forms of cooperation on a wider scale. When they wereneeded, councils of household chiefs also negotiated agreements and alliances for the construc-tion of defensive features.

In this article, I assess the evidence for the distribution of defensive sites in the archaeologicalrecord. The wider aim is to understand the nature of alliances and coalitions among Coast Salishgroups during times of warfare and defence. From ethnography, we know that groups main-tained defensive networks and built coalitions through time. The archaeological record demon-strates that warfare proliferated throughout the Late Period, circa 1600–500 BP, as well as duringthe immediate decades after European contact. Throughout the Salish Sea, people constructeddefensive refuges that varied widely in their design and scale. I argue here that an approachgrounded in the theory of anarchism helps to explain the organization of these defences byallowing archaeologists to recognize evidence for manifestations of local autonomy as well aspolitical authority based upon coordination of alliances.

In the following sections, I integrate ethnographic and archaeological data to show how CoastSalish peoples’ defensive organization intensified to meet threats on an increasing scale overtime. To interpret the dynamics of this activity among societies that are distinctive for theabsence of formal or centralized governance, I employ anarchist theory (Angelbeck and Grier2012). As a body of theory with a long history of ongoing practice, anarchism explicitlyengages with the tensions that emerge when individual or local group autonomy must bebalanced with the need for cooperation (in alliances and networks of mutual aid) in somecircumstances. Ethnographic evidence indicates that among the Coast Salish protocols protectedlocal group autonomy while still enabling negotiation and coalition-building activities. I arguefurther that these protocols not only structured the particular character of Coast Salish socio-political life in houses, as mentioned above, but also on the larger scales of the villages andregions. These protocols also manifested materially in a variety of forms, including theconstruction of defensive sites throughout the Salish Sea. The varied organizational scales ofthe defences mirror the diverse ways Coast Salish peoples sought to retain their autonomy indefence while also participating in broader coalitions.

The Coast Salish

Coast Salish peoples are complex hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Northwest Coast of south-western British Columbia and northwestern Washington state (Fig. 1). Harnessing the resourcesof bountiful coastal environments, they exploited bays and coves filled with clam beds, riversteeming with salmon, deltas and marshes seasonally rich with flocks of migratory birds andmountain slopes dense in tall, straight-trunked cedar tree stands. Cedar provided rot-resistantposts, beams and planks for houses, trunks for dug-out canoes, bark for clothing, basketry andropes and raw material for numerous artworks carved into plank-poles, interior house-posts andceremonial masks. They also expended immense efforts on defence and warfare.

Two periods of warfare have been identified during the last 1,600 years in the Salishsequence. The first, the Gulf of Georgia Phase (or Late Pacific Period) reveals defensive sitesdating from 1600 to 500 BP. The second phase followed after colonial contact (c. 200 BP)(Table 1). These periods are notable for the presence of defensive sites and the evidence thatwarfare was prevalent to such a degree that the construction of fortifications was warranted andthat household leaders organized labour for such projects. Below, analysis of these defensive

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Figure 1 Map of the Coast Salish area of southwestern British Columbia and northwest Washington State.

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sites is used to reconstruct the scales of socio-political organization and cooperation necessaryfor their construction, as well as the scale of the society that they were designed to protect. Theanalysis demonstrates that, as with domestic structures, flexible socio-political organizationallowed groups to retain autonomy at the household level while facilitating cooperation on awider scale through networks of alliances organized for defence.

Ethnographic sources highlight a cultural predisposition towards autonomy among CoastSalish individuals and households as well as cultural groups. Of course, the use of ethnographicdata to interpret archaeological patterns requires some justification. In the analysis of NorthwestCoast groups, we have an advantage, given that the period of Euroamerican contact occurred inthe mid-1700s, and in the Coast Salish area specifically during the 1790s, with few Europeansettlements in the following decades. Because Euroamerican influence upon seasonal roundsand lifeways occurred three centuries later than it did for cultures on the East Coast, archae-ologists benefit from a much shorter period between the time of precontact traditional lifewaysand the writings of early anthropologists such as Boas, Hill-Tout, Curtis and others.Additionally, archaeologists argue that the cultures of that ethnographic present show continuitywith archaeological patterns extending back about 1,600 years; Matson and Coupland (1995)refer to this as the ‘Developed Northwest Coast Pattern’ that lasted until shortly after contact.

As a consequence, the cultures of the ethnographic present are relevant for a direct historicalapproach. Moreover, given the long history of collaborative archaeologies in the region (seeMartindale and Lyons 2014), knowledge shared by indigenous elders and community membersis also a rich resource. Accumulated knowledge from local informants helps both to explicatethe archaeological record and to generate hypotheses for evaluating the archaeological record

Table 1 Cultural chronology of the Coast Salish area, highlighting periods with archaeological evidence forwarfare.

Millennia BP Northwest Coast Salish Sea Description

200 POSTCONTACT Postcontact AD 1790 with Spanish; 1792 withBritish; period of warfare ensues aftercontact; firearms introduced. Villagesoften stockaded from 1790 to 1850.

550 LATE PACIFIC late Sí:yá:m Age Rise of powerful chiefs on themainland.

1,000 early Late Period Period of warfare occurs; bow andarrow introduced (~1600 BP);numerous defensive sites and refugesconstructed.

1,600 MIDDLEPACIFIC

late Late Marpole

2,000 mid Early Marpole Permanent winter plankhouse villageswith markers of hereditary class.

3,500 early Locarno Beach Semisedentary populations with signsof social differentiation in achievedstatus.

5500 EARLY PACIFIC St. Mungo Coastal orientation; larger shellmiddens; signs of social complexity.

10,000 ARCHAIC Old Cordilleran /Olcott

Mobile hunter-gatherer-fisher lifeways.

>12,000 PALEOINDIAN Pre-Clovis / Clovis Earliest colonists to the region, as atManis Mastodon site.

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(e.g. Grier 2007). Importantly for this analysis, the ethnographic record indicates culturalpreferences for local group autonomy, as well as clear protocols for the negotiation of sociallife and use of space, beginning at the level of the household, and for the coordination ofbroader action in coalitions.

Principles of autonomy and alliance among Coast Salish groups

Socio-political organization in the Northwest Coast generally––and particularly among theCoast Salish peoples––appears to have defied centralization. While there were chiefs, therewas no chiefdom in the classic sense of a centralized or hierarchical polity. Suttles (1987 [1958])described Coast Salish socio-political organization as ‘not that of a pyramid’ (centralized andhierarchical). Nor was Coast Salish society egalitarian: inequalities existed, with social classesdistinguishing individuals from elite to slave. Instead, Suttles famously described the CoastSalish sociopolitical organization as resembling an ‘inverted pear’ shape, a top-heavy structurein which elites outnumbered commoners. Given this lack of centralization and egalitarianstructure among the traditional Coast Salish, complexity manifested as a decentralized pattern.As Colin Grier and I have argued, anarchist theory facilitates our understanding of small-scale,often non-egalitarian, societies that organize themselves from the bottom-up. We argued furtherthat anarchist theory is particularly useful for understanding societies without formal or cen-tralized governance (Angelbeck and Grier 2012). In the next section, I highlight the anarchicprinciples visible in the Coast Salish defensive settlements. Specifically, I contend that coopera-tion in the construction of defences mirrored dynamics visible ethnographically in Coast Salishsocio-political life on a variety of scales from household and local group to village and affiliatedpeoples in the surrounding region. Domestic plankhouse construction and management,described by ethnographers, illuminates processes that also underlay the construction of for-tifications. More generally, collective endeavours involved concerns for autonomy that had to beweighed, continually, against the benefits of cooperative actions and the creation of networks ofmutual aid.

Autonomy and mutual aid in anarchism

Anarchism, as a body of theory, considers the dynamics of societies that exist without recourseto formal institutionalized governance. By analysing the forms of social power, anarchist theoryarticulates principles for decision-making and situational leadership. Given its foundation inmaterialism, anarchist theory emphasizes agency and practices undertaken by individuals whocooperate and, in so doing, create networks. In the recent past and contemporary times,anarchists and activists have debated how to implement key principles including the mainte-nance of individual and local autonomy and expression, voluntary association, mutual aid,communal decision-making, direct action, network organization, decentralization (alongsideactive resistance to centralization) and justified forms of authority (and resistance toauthoritarianism).1 Instead of a rigid model of collective action imposed from the top down,anarchists emphasize adapting principles for local contexts, so that they take forms that areappropriate to each region’s particular circumstances.

A further task for archaeologists is to investigate how these principles, developed for recentand contemporary societies, might have structured the dynamics of past societies. For example,

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what are the archaeological correlates of decentralized forms of labour organization? Whatmaterial markers would indicate the self-organization of groups, assertions of autonomy (or lackthereof), voluntary forms of association (in contrast to involuntary) or network forms oforganizations? In anarchism, self-organization refers to the ability of individuals to organizecooperatively, creating groups on various scales to undertake productive tasks or to pursueshared goals. The underlying assumption of anarchism is that a formal central authority is notnecessary, no matter what the scale. Instead, mutual aid and cooperative endeavours are theprimary frameworks for self-organization, as well as for linking local corporate groups togetherto create wider community and regional networks of interaction (e.g. Kropotkin 1906 [1892];Ward 1973; Taylor 1982). Importantly, the practical needs of individuals within local groupsstructure the need for organization. Repeated action and engagement in mutual aid over timecreate multifaceted networks that tend to remain non-hierarchical and decentralized. Efforts maybe led by individuals with situational authority, usually based upon knowledge, skill, ability orexperience; this is what Bakunin (1970 [1871]) referred to as ‘natural authority’, as opposed to‘artificial authorities’, those imposed by an institution or office. For anarchists, local acceptanceof authority is justified by a particular goal or situation, while networks and collective associa-tions often dissipate, in favour of returning autonomy to local groups, as soon as the task iscomplete. Archaeologists would expect to see autonomy on smaller scales frequently coexistingwith coordination and collective action on wider scales of interaction. Below, I highlight specificCoast Salish practices that allowed broad-scale cooperation (among households, allied localgroups, villages and regional cultural groups) alongside autonomous activity among localgroups and households.

Creating consensus while maintaining autonomy

Ethnographers have documented that among Coast Salish peoples decision-making was fre-quently undertaken by councils. A council was not a formal institution, but rather a temporaryassembly generated for the situation at hand. At times, numerous chiefs were engaged inseeking consensus and councils, as key features of community governance, continuing to thisday on diverse scales, from households to regional assemblies (Bierwert 1999, 12–13; Miller2001). At the smallest organizational level, Coast Salish interacted as a household group,usually composed of four to six related nuclear families. Kinship was reckoned bilaterally,affording the individual a choice of families with whom to reside. In this sense, Coast Salishculture emphasizes the flexibility and fluidity of individual identity. June Collins (1979)emphasizes that this practice extends deeply into the ways a Coast Salish individual identifieshimself or herself. Individuals choose to identify themselves with the household that will, intheir estimation, provide them with the best opportunities for their own advancement in prestige.Collins (1979) emphasized a specific ‘Coast Salish strategy’ that enhanced and individual’s freechoice about household membership,2 a flexibility that helped to protect autonomy, ensuringthat an individual who selected either the mother’s side or the father’s household did not closeoff other options.

The bilateral kinship protocol, seen as a ‘strategy’, also ensured that chiefs could not beoverbearing in their roles as household heads. A chief who pushed household members toofar––for instance, to generate economic surplus for a potlatch or for trade––risked driving thosepeople away to live with other relations. A successful chief was generally skilled in achieving

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consensus. In this way ‘[t]he chief gives advice but has no power beyond the backing of publicopinion to enforce it’ (Gunther 1927, 262). Clastres’ (1987, 27–48) observations about Northand South American chieftainship more generally apply to the Coast Salish in recent times. The‘triple qualification’ (1987, 29) that was ‘indispensable’ to chiefly individuals required the chiefto be (1) a peace-maker, (2) a good orator, as well as (3) generous with his or her possessions.As peace-makers, chiefs were a household’s moderators, capable of achieving compromise andconsensus. As described by Smith (1940, 49) for the Puyallup-Nisqually Coast Salish, chiefswere ‘expert in human affairs’, arbiters who ‘had the ability to smooth out differences betweenother people and to manipulate their actions so that such differences were less likely to arise’.

Oratory was a chiefly skill that revealed an individual’s reason and capacity to negotiateagreement through persuasion rather than enforcement. Rhetoric also echoed traditional themesin creative ways. Generosity was similarly important, especially given each individual’s auton-omy. Among the Coast Salish, the greater the benefits for household members from theirproductive activities the stronger was their loyalty to the chief and household overall.

In fact, while led by a chief, a household was actually comprised of several family heads, onefor each of the nuclear families that made up the household. In some cases, the chief, or siy:amor sie’m, was the ‘owner’ of the house, although generally that term applied to all who helped tobuild the house, which could require a substantial number of timbers and cedar planks tomaintain (e.g. Ames et al. 1992). Indeed, the individual cedar planks that were tied to the postsand beams for walls and roofing were owned by individual families, as each was valuable initself. During seasonal movements, when the household temporarily split into smaller groups,nuclear family groups would bring their own planks to their camps for use in lean-tos or otherlighter shelters (Suttles 1991). As noted above, Coast Salish shed-roof plankhouses could easilybe adjusted in size by simply removing the planks of family groups that left. Conversely,sections could also be added to a house to extend and incorporate new families or followers(Suttles 1991), with families bringing planks towards its construction.3 In such a way, ‘the housewas owned by those who supplied materials for it’ (Suttles 1951, 273) and each family assertedits autonomy while maintaining the alliance.

Similar negotiations occurred on scales beyond the household. For decisions affecting thosein an entire village, the leaders of households would gather to discuss the matter. Barnett (1955,243) described these assemblies as informal, resembling a ‘conference’ that reached a decisiononly after extensive discussion. Notably, he observed that leaders were not oligarchs, ruling overtheir communities, but rather were individuals who had been empowered to participate in thediscussions.

These, and other cultural protocols for community decision-making and consensus, existedwithin the household, between a chief and family members and other adherents, or amongchiefs within a cluster of houses, or among all household heads at the village level. Evenwider forms of negotiation occurred on scales beyond the village: one example is a CoastSalish alliance created for the battle with the Kwakwaka’wakw Lekwiltok in the early tomid-1800s.

One oral history concerning that battle, passed down among the Twana of Puget Sound,describes the council assembled to discuss going to war against the Lekwiltok (Elmendorf 1993,145–6). In this case, chiefs generally were not involved (since chiefs were generally associatedwith peacemaking), while warriors from the region’s villages arrived to take part. As individualswith tactical minds as well as strong and ferocious spirit powers, warriors made decisions in

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times of attack or an anticipated need for defence, although their authority was limited to thesetimes of conflict. In the account of W.W. Elmendorf, most warriors opted to participate in a newalliance, promising to assemble fighters from their villages for the upcoming battle. Twenty-oneaccounts of this crucial battle together contain the names of more than forty Coast Salish groups,all of whom joined the alliance. This large and successful coalition devastated the attackingLekwiltok flotilla, ending decades of Lekwiltok raids in one dramatic clash at Maple Bay(Angelbeck and McLay 2011).4

This example, taken from oral history, also indicates the ways that councils, as decentralizedpolitical formations, facilitated widespread agreement among regionally disparate and autono-mous groups. Coast Salish peoples enacted councils, as flexible arrangements for decision-making, on household, local group, village and regional scales. The council decision-makingprocess was successful even for the broadest-scale of coalition-building activities, as attested toin accounts of the battle at Maple Bay.

In summary, historic and ethnographic sources reflect actions taken in response to concernssuch as warfare and conflict in the wider region. Furthermore, as discussed in the next section,these actions – section, negotiation and alliance-building – are materialized in the formalvariation observed in defensive settlements.

The scalar organization of defences

Coast Salish peoples built a diverse array of defensive sites. Just as individuals and familiesengaged in negotiation to create a household within a plankhouse, similar agreement wasnecessary to achieve the necessary alliances for defence on different scales of communityinvolvement and coordination. As I show here, these coalitions were materialized in theconstruction of refuges and fortifications.

Defensive sites are present in the northern Coast Salish region of Cortes Island, the traditionalterritory of Klahoose and Tla A’min peoples. The largest village in the region is Smelt Bay,located on the southwestern portion of Cortes Island, with a predominant occupation associatedwith the warfare of the Late Period, c. 1600–500 BP. The areas of the village with archaeologicalevidence for plankhouse structures extend 260m by 60m inland from the shoreline. Deep shellmiddens extend northward along the beach for over 500m. Ethnographic and archaeologicalevidence indicates that Smelt Bay village was not palisaded; however, smaller defensive featureswere present within the site, and there were varied defensive features surrounding the site.

The smallest and most basic evidence for defensive organization at Smelt Bay is the under-ground refuge, documented ethnographically by Barnett (1944, 1955). Refuges had hiddenopenings but opened into larger enclosures that were used as refuges during attacks. In 2005, aspart of archaeological investigations conducted at Smelt Bay on Cortes Island, our crewdocumented two large underground refuges and a probable third smaller refuge (Fig. 2).Typically, coastal villages in this area contained plankhouses (cedar-planked houses builtupon cleared, but not excavated, surfaces); here, the midden berms revealed plankhouse out-lines. The refuge depressions were located adjacent to existing plankhouses, with entrancesprobably hidden beneath wooden sleeping platforms. In the Smelt Bay region, refuges average200 square metres. Notably, these underground refuges correspond not only to the descriptionscollected by Barnett (1944, 1955), but also to the locations detailed by his informants for this

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part of the island. Our investigations provide initial confirmation through archaeological evi-dence to support the Coast Salish accounts of life in the village.

An underground refuge appears to have been organized and controlled by members of asingle household. In this case, the archaeological remains appear to be consistent with Suttles’(1951) emphasis on the household as a primary organizational unit of production, hereexpressed in terms of the organization of defence.

Not every household had such a refuge, however; these features were common amongwealthier families who could amass the resources and personnel required for their construction.As Barnett (1944, 268) learned from elders he interviewed, underground refuges were ‘decid-edly a luxury’ since they were ‘costly in labour’. Since only a minority of houses investigatedarchaeologically exhibit these adjacent structures, the ethnography and archaeology appearcongruent. Given that the majority of the households lacked a defensive refuge, it is importantto consider how they responded to conflict, since no other defences appear to be present at thesite. In the Smelt Bay region more generally, numerous palisaded forts have been documented(Fig. 3). Most are situated on top of high bluffs or sand spits, girded with deep trenches andsteep embankments. At the tops of the embankments, these sites were protected with tallpalisades. Indeed, several fortifications were built nearby in a perimeter area surroundingSmelt Bay. Despite their proximity to the village, each fort is small relative to the village’sestimated population. The archaeological evidence for houses covers an area exceeding 15,600square metres (Table 2). The trench-embankment sites in the area, however, average only about40 × 30m, or approximately 1273 square metres – less than 10 per cent of the total area of SmeltBay village houses. Therefore, it is unlikely that any particular fortification site was intendedfor, or occupied by, all the villagers at a single time.

Figure 2 Map of the Smelt Bay village site noting two underground refuges (and a possible third),representing defences on a household scale of organization.

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The scale of the fortifications suggests that each feature is probably associated, not with thevillage as a whole, but with allied households or a local group within the wider village (Suttles1987 [1958]). Local groups are related or allied sets of households within a village, so that asingle village may contain several local groups. Given that the size of an underground refuge is15 square metres, then the average area of fortification sites suggests that two to four alliedhouseholds occupied each one, a number that corresponds to the size of a local group.

Table 2 Size of Smelt Bay village, including underground refuges, in relation to regional defensive sites.

Borden No. Site L W Area (m2) Average area by type (m2)

Residential villageEaSf-2 Smelt Bay* 260 60 15,600 15,600Underground refugesEaSf-2 Smelt Bay UH 1* 10 25 250

EaSf-2 Smelt Bay UH 2* 12 13 156

Average 11 19 203.00Trench-embankment sitesEaSf-1 Manson’s Landing* 38 23 874EaSg-1 Marina Island S** 36 25 900EaSg-2 Marina Island N** 25 13 325DlSf-4 Boulder Pt, Hernando Isl.** 64 18 1152DlSf-5 Hernando Island Southeast** 76 41 3116Average 47.8 24 1273.40

Notes* Measurements from Angelbeck (2009); note that these relate to the extent of house features present, as the overall siteis much longer, extending over 800m.** Measurements from Buxton (1969).

Figure 3 Typology of trench-embankment refuge fortifications, representing defences of a few alliedhouseholds.

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Accordingly, if there were a large-scale attack, allied households would disperse to theirrespective defensive sites. This latter interpretation, involving distributed defensive features, isin line with Coast Salish forms of social organization, which allowed each local group to defendits own members. At the same time, given the number of defensive sites in close proximity toSmelt Bay, the pattern of smaller defensive sites fits the pattern of a ‘network’ form of defensiveactivity (Fig. 4). A similar distribution is described in Schaepe’s (2006) characterization of adefensive ‘network’ in the Fraser Canyon in Stó:lō territory about 200km southeast (see Fig. 1)concerning rock-wall fortifications at summer fishing camps. There, the defensive walls con-stituted a network connected by lines of sight among the nodes in the defensive network. Withinthe Smelt Bay area, similar interlinked distributions are visible, tailored in this case to the islandsetting. Almost every defensive site maintains a line of sight to another defensive feature, whileothers are readily accessible. Such a distributed network pattern can multiply the visible field,with numerous vantage points available as lookout points and carriers of messages, as has beendescribed in regional ethnographic studies (e.g. Curtis 1913; Smith 1940; Elmendorf 1993).More generally, the interlinking of defences reveals coordination and organizational power on aregional scale beyond the village but, notably, not in the form of a single, centralized majorfortification.

Furthermore, the diverse scales of defences described here would have been appropriate forthe types of conflicts known to have been faced by Coast Salish peoples. More specifically, oraland written histories make clear that conflicts most often broke out among households (resulting

Figure 4 Relationships among fortifications via lines of sight or ready access, indicating coordination ofaction among individual locales.

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from a murder or a perceived slight at a potlatch). Therefore attacks would often be directed notat an entire village, but towards a particular house. Attacks could also be directed towards alliedhouseholds as the feud intensified, as reflected in the presence of the small forts. In cases wherefurther escalation of feuds occurred, involving regional conflicts between Coast Salish groups(e.g. Cowichan versus the Klallam), a still-larger scale organization was required for defence.The defences described here for the Smelt Bay region could have been used flexibly in responseto diverse scenarios of conflict.

The archaeological remains therefore appear consistent with established ethnographicunderstandings of Coast Salish sociopolitical organization. On the regional scale, a decen-tralized and distributed defence would have protected the autonomy of households, while alsofacilitating voluntary cooperation in allied networks when required by circumstances. On thebroadest scale, oral histories of the battle at Maple Bay (discussed above) indicate that a CoastSalish coalition defeated their Lekwiltok opponents, leaving few survivors, effectively endingthe latter group’s territorial expansion and repeated attacks (Taylor and Duff 1956; Galois1994, 233–5).

An intriguing historical detail that emerges from several of the Maple Bay accounts is the factthat the decision to call that council of war was instigated by the Cowichan. Previously, oneCowichan group that had been raiding and pillaging Coast Salish villages throughout PugetSound returned to find their own village devastated by the Lekwiltok. Seeing their houses burntto the ground, the remaining men slaughtered and women and children taken as slaves, theCowichan responded by mobilizing other groups who had had similar experiences. Some ofthose contacted included groups in Puget Sound who had just been attacked by the Cowichan.Further, several groups, including those who had been long-time enemies, allied in this instanceto create a coalition to defeat the Lekwiltok (Angelbeck and McLay 2011).

Oral histories such as this clearly illustrate the core principle of Coast Salish social organiza-tion: individual groups act autonomously, but they create flexible coalitions and larger networksto respond to particular circumstances of conflict. For the Coast Salish situation, the householdis a crucial level for negotiating alliances, while affinal ties created through kin networks alsofigure prominently in coalition-building. The more general principle is the same, however: in theabsence of greater threats, individuals value autonomy; they respond to wider threats with unity.But, with the fading of those conflicts, they reassert local autonomy.5 As seen in the case of theCoast Salish after their victory over the Lekwiltok, broad alliances were quickly disbanded infavour of local autonomy.

As summarized in Fig. 5, dynamic scales of alliance existed from the household level throughincremental scales to encompass alliances with other households in the village, regional net-works and more distant affinal alliances. I have argued that each level of social organization hasa corresponding material manifestation in a defensive feature. The household scale is materi-alized by underground houses; allied households or villages cooperated to construct moresubstantial fortifications; additional defensive sites were built and managed by regional net-worked alliances (coordinated through use of lookouts that supported communicative networksamong forts). And, as oral histories indicate, occasionally, the broadest-scale alliances coalescedamong Coast Salish peoples overall, as exemplified by the groups engaged in the battle atMaple Bay.

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Autonomy and alliance in the construction of forts

After AD 1790, during the post-contact period, Coast Salish peoples created new forms ofdefensive construction. During the Late Period, residential villages were surrounded by, orplaced near, trench-embankment fortifications. But, after contact, villagers commonly addedpalisades or stockades to surround their residential villages (Angelbeck 2009). Ethnographicaccounts detailing the construction activity reveal further social relations of autonomy andalliance.

In contrast to the modest scale of Late Period forts, which probably involved only a few alliedhouseholds, the stockades that surrounded residential villages demanded that all (or most)households in a village participated in their construction. Although the stockades were part ofregional networks of defence (e.g. Stern 1934, 100–1) and might have been constructed throughthe central coordination of labour crews, ethnographic descriptions indicate that Coast Salishgroups coordinated the construction of stockades in a decentralized manner, with each house-hold responsible for the portion of the stockade adjacent to the house. Suttles’ (1951, 278)account of stockade construction among the Saanich reveals that this plankhouse village did notalways have a palisade. Each household had initially cleared its own space, with nearly allvillagers helping each household to set the house-posts in place. That early village wassubsequently burned down by a West Saanich group (an illustration of conflicts among CoastSalish villages). Faced with destruction, the community opted to reconstruct the village.

Figure 5 Increasing scales of sociopolitical organization correlating materially with increasing scales ofdefensive site construction.

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Then they built the houses again. This time they said, ‘Let’s build a fence, like a fort.’ Soeach household built a fence outside its own house. It had doors with locks and loopholes. Itwas 20 feet high in front but lower in back, about the height of a man’s reach.

(Suttles 1951, 278, emphasis added)

Suttles (1951, 278) observes that the construction of the stockade, while a decision taken bythe village as a whole, still relied on the contribution of individual households in constructingtheir own segments of the stockade. This example highlights the careful balance of autonomyand alliance: independent households joined their labour to that of allied households for thedefence of all. Archaeological interpretation of the stockades might have suggested a strong rolefor a centralized authority to oversee the construction, yet such leaders were probably situationalauthorities, while the labour input and maintenance of the palisade was primarily the result ofcooperation among several households. Just as individual families within households ownedindividual planks that they contributed to the plankhouse, the village palisade was also con-structed by member households who contributed their individually owned resources and theirlabour towards its building.

This helps to explain why some stockades only partially surrounded village houses, enclosingonly those households that could contribute the requisite labour. In many cases, only higher-status households could afford the labour, so that lower-class houses frequently remainedoutside or in front of, the stockade, leaving them exposed to attack.

[T]he principal Skagit village at Snakelum [Snatelum] Point consisted of a great stockadeenclosing a long house divided into three segments, each with its own named group of high-class people; outside the stockade were ‘camps’ of low-class people who served as ‘scouts’and were not allowed inside the stockade.

(Suttles 1987 [1958], 5)

Notably, lower-class families at Snatelum Point still cooperated in the defensive network withthose inside the stockade, acting as ‘scouts’. Despite status distinctions – and even whenexcluded from the protection of the stockade wall – external families still worked with thoseinside the stockade, revealing the ways labour and resource contributions by household groupsaffected alliances and how these linkages were reflected materially in defences.

During the Late Period and the colonial era, Coast Salish defensive sites continue to revealevidence for cultural preferences that emphasized autonomy and decentralized forms of socio-political organization. Interaction and cooperation among allied households and villages createdlarger networks for reliable defence in times of conflict or attack. These social relations wereflexible and adaptable to suit particular historical circumstances, reflecting and varying scales ofthreat and conflict.

Finally, as emphasized by Kew and Miller (1999), Coast Salish peoples continued, throughtime, to practise disassociation from larger groups and coalitions, presumably to maintainhousehold autonomy. They write that:

In addition to the properties of coherence and permanence of affiliation, Coast Salish socialnetworks allow for short-term bouts of disaffiliation by individual members, communities,bands, or other constituent groups without substantively affecting the long-term social

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universe, disrupting cultural continuity, or dissolving the boundaries of the Coast Salishmoral universe.

(Kew and Miller 1999, 51)

This ‘pulling out strategy’, according to a Stó:lō chief (Kew and Miller 1999, 51), is astrategic right that ‘express[es] reservations about decisions taken by the collective’. This can beseen as an important related principle of dissensus.6 Indeed, Kew and Miller (1999, 51) regarddisaffiliation as a fundamental means of ensuring consensus, requiring leaders to frame theirideas in ways that are agreeable and satisfactory to the majority. As they put it,

One might argue that Stó:lō people can choose between alternative political approachesbefore a consensus gradually emerges among the leaders of the constituent bands. Thisproperty rests on the idea of permanence and continuity; the First Nations understand thattheir ancestors affiliated, disaffiliated, and reaffiliated over very long periods and that theirdescendants and heirs will do the same.

(Kew and Miller 1999, 51)

The same processes would most likely have contributed to decisions about how, when andwhere to construct defensive structures in the past. That is to say, the cultural dynamics of theCoast Salish would have involved flexible decisions about alliance and autonomy, affiliation anddisaffiliation through time. Defensive structures, as collective undertakings, materialize chan-ging scales of coalition among existing groupings of people, from household to local group tovillage.

Conclusions

In this article, I have argued that, throughout Coast Salish archaeological history, defensive siteswere constructed by groups that were rarely centralized. Instead, socio-political organizationwas anchored in local groups and constructed from the bottom up. As known from ethnographicsources, Coast Salish forms of consensus-building and coalition encouraged local householdautonomy while allowing for the cooperation of allied households and villages when attacksrequired a response by a larger collectivity. Recent archaeological work has revealed a decen-tralized settlement pattern that includes defensive sites that reflect defensive activities coordi-nated on different scales, including small-scale underground refuges, extending back throughthe Late Period to 1600 BP.

More broadly, I argue that a theoretical framework based in anarchism most readily incorpo-rates the tensions inherent in Coast Salish sociopolitical organization. The dynamics of complex,yet decentralized, societies require new frameworks that move away from static models, such asthe category of chiefdom (e.g. Tollefson 1987). The hierarchical chiefdom model cannotaccount for the heterarchical patterns present among the Coast Salish. Similarly, the term‘transegalitarianism’ has been applied (after Hayden 1995; Blake and Clark 1999) to categorizegroups that are neither egalitarian nor stratified politically. While broad and open-ended, thisterm fails to address the known dynamics of Coast Salish societies of the past. The richethnographic record of the Coast Salish also reveals numerous chiefs, yet an absence of

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chiefdoms, and households with families who can flexibly move to other households, as well asseasonal subsistence rounds that vary widely among local groups and households, each of whichwas economically and politically independent.

Faced with these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, I inductively turned to the theoryof anarchism. Its principles – emphasizing autonomy, mutual aid and decentralized organiza-tion – provide frameworks that help interpret and make sense of the contradictions found inthe ethnographic and archaeological records. Theories in anarchism encompass opposingsocial forces, seeing a balance of autonomy with cooperation. Anarchist theory offersprinciples for understanding voluntary association, as well as for the explaining the termsaccording to which cooperative relationships and authority are accepted. Networks ofalliance among the Coast Salish and elsewhere are heterarchical (Crumley 1995): they canbe considered a kind of ‘horizontal power’ distinct from hierarchy or ‘vertical’ forms thatconsolidate power in many societies. Power created and linked horizontally through alliancesincreases in spatial scale as the range and scope of coalitions expands. Any coalition must bemaintained, renegotiated and justified as conditions change over time. Coalitions, like leader-ship and authority, also have to be justified. The ethnographic dynamics illustrate theseprinciples in action as Coast Salish peoples affiliated, disaffiliated, and reaffiliated over time.Similarly, varied scales of social coordination manifest materially in the archaeologicalpatterns. In this article, the diverse scales of Coast Salish defensive features – from house-hold refuges to small trench-embankment fortifications to palisaded villages – were high-lighted as archaeological evidence for the varying the scales of labour organization directedtowards defence in the past.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the editorial guidance of Dr. Elizabeth DeMarrais, as well as those of theanonymous reviewers, for critiques that helped enhance the manuscript. Also, I want toacknowledge the commentaries and discussion regarding an early form of this article for anaudio podcast seminar by members of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studiesat Cornell University, including Kathleen Garland, Perri Gerard-Little, Samantha Sanft, ErinWright, and especially Dr. Kurt Jordan, who also provided commentary on the draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Bill AngelbeckDouglas College

angelbeckw@douglascollege.ca

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Notes

1 For some background on the history and theory of anarchism, see Marshall (1993), Guerin(1970) or Woodcock (1962). For anthropological applications, peruse Barclay (1982), Graeber(2004) or Morris (2014). For archaeological applications, see Flexner (2014) or Angelbeck andGrier (2012); the latter presents a more detailed framework that is applied here.

2 Notably, this is in marked contrast to many other Northwest Coast groups, which emphasizemore strict forms of familial identity. As Suttles (1987 [1962]) emphasized, ‘Among theTsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit, the social units have become even more stable [rather thanflexible]. Membership is determined by the principle of matrilineal descent, making alter-native affiliation and individual mobility less possible.’

3 Notably, this practice of flexible house structure was unlike that of most other NorthwestCoast groups with fixed house structures and sizes, as common with the Kwakwaka’wakw,Tsimshian or Haida. As noted by Suttles (1987 [1962]), matrilineality in the north also tendedto enforce house membership, making kin affiliation fixed as well.

4 Soon after the battle, Coast Salish bands were able again to access lands that had beenconquered by the Lekwiltok in their southern expansion, and many groups pursued marriageties with their former enemies to ensure long-term peace (Thom 2005, 362–3; Boas 1889,325; Curtis 1913, 34).

5 Notably, a similar dynamic, which emphasizes local group autonomy and contestation, hasbeen well expressed in a Afghani proverb: ‘It is me against my brothers; it is my brothers andme against our cousins; and it is our cousins, my brothers and me against the world’ (Barfield2004, 266).

6 According to Critchley (2012, 110–11), dissensus is central to democratically based politicsin that it involves the ‘conflictual questioning of consensus’. Hereby, it works dialecticallywith all the voices involved to achieve an ultimate consensus acceptable to the group.Similarly, Kew and Miller (1999) advance such dynamics for the Coast Salish, manifestingas affiliation and disaffiliation.

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Bill Angelbeck studies the histories of Salishan peoples of the Northwest Coast and Interiorthrough archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory and oral traditions. In his research, he examinessociopolitical tensions over time between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies and howthese manifest as patterns in the archaeological record. In this article, he focuses on anarchismas a critical theory for evaluating archaeological histories, as a way to curb ethnocentrictendencies that archaeologists often apply when interpreting anarchic societies in the past.

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The balance of autonomy and alliance in anarchicsocieties: the organization of defences in the CoastSalish past

Bill Angelbeck

To cite this article: Bill Angelbeck (2016): The balance of autonomy and alliance in anarchicsocieties: the organization of defences in the Coast Salish past, World Archaeology, DOI:10.1080/00438243.2015.1131620

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