Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The material for this report was collected in 1935 - 36 with the assistance of a pre-doctoral Research Fellowship granted by the Social Science Research Council. The research problem was to de termine the bases of social stratification. I had no intention of diverging from the specific problem to collect data for a general ethnography, but I soon found that the societal factors could not be isolated without forcing the material. For example, with various economic property rights as important as they were to the status of the nobles, or chiefs, the fact that a chief owned a salmon trap of one kind, and a man of lesser rank a trap of another type, makes it necessary for the field worker to learn what the different types of salmon traps were to see if there was anything of significance in the two specific cases he has recorded. Again, one cannot evaluate the significance of the ownership of particular ritual privileges by chiefs without knowing the whole ceremonial. Before long I found that my quest for the basic forces of social organization were leading me into all phases of the culture: economy, technology, ceremonialism, and the rest, so I ended up trying to round out the picture. The aim, however, was always to relate these topics to the problems of the social structure.