Life on earth thrives where land and water meet—along the coasts of the oceans, the banks of the rivers, and the shores of the lakes. This holds true for terrestrial as well as marine life. Nowhere does this abundance of marine and terrestrial life show more vividly and dramatically than along the Pacific coast of southeastern Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington. The trees lap up the moisture of the perpetual fog, and in turn the trees nourish a variety of birds and animals. The larger mammals live in the water, where whales migrate in great herds among thousands of otters, sea lions, and seals.
Sailing into Alert Bay, off the eastern coast of Vancouver Island near its northern tip, one sees more telephone poles than totem poles. They clutter the water’s edge as they run along the one main road that parallels the shore. The village of 1,300 people stretches out in a thin line following the curve of the bay. Seen from the water, the whole island appears to be nothing more than a bay. The island forms a crescent that offers a sheltered and secured port between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia, and with easy access into the Queen Charlotte Strait to the north and the Strait of Georgia to the south. Although the island bears the name of Cormorant Island, most people call it simply Alert Bay, both names deriving from the British ships HMS. Alert and HMS. Cormorant, which charted the area in the eighteenth century.
Viewed from any angle, Alert Bay still appears as a community built around the commercial fishing industry. Fishing boats with miles of nets fill the harbor; ancient canneries line the shore. Even the air carries the distinctive fragrance of large catches of fish freshly hauled in from the cold water.
Alert Bay boasts the world’s largest totem pole, which can be seen rising from the hill behind the community. The Nimpkish Indian band erected the pole in 1973, and it rises 173 feet and contains twenty-two figures carved onto a red cedar log. The summit portrays a radiant sun with large rays stretching out into the crisp, humid Pacific air. At the other end of the community, a handful of older, comparatively shorter poles rise up in the Nimpkish cemetery.
Totem poles as large as these seem perfectly in keeping with the landscape of the northern Pacific Coast, where huge mountains loom over the cold, deep waters. Between the islands, massive clumps of rocks rise up out of the water, and with the surf swirling and surging around them in a thick foam, they look like mythological monsters emerging from the depths.
Even the flora and fauna of the area assume gigantic proportions. The tall cedar, fir, and spruce tower over humans. Between them grow tree-sized ferns that wave their huge fronds, making them look more like giant green machines than like animate beings. A spruce tree has been recorded at three hundred feet, but today the trees rarely reach their full height before loggers chop them down for lumber. Across from Alert Bay, one can see the once-forested mountains of Vancouver Island now absurdly dressed in alternating strips of barren and still forested lands. The lumber corporations have clear-cut large sections, leaving the majestic mountains looking foolish, as though they were wearing the punk haircuts of rebellious teenagers.
In the springtime, the swamp cabbages push up out of the ground in clearings and along the roads. Looking at first like a large shoot of stripped asparagus, the plant produces a deep yellow flower that resembles a giant easter lily, then it unfolds large, broad leaves. The leaves resemble the ornamental hosta that gardeners use to trim their lawns, but the plant served the ancient native peoples as a traditional food and material to make large mats with which to line their earthen ovens for feasts.
The exotic plants brought into this area by European settlers either die quickly as they are overtaken by the hearty native plants, or else they too must reach sizes not matched in their homelands. The quick-growing and hardy dandelions, which invaded from Europe, strain to mature before the swamp cabbage smothers them; thus the dandelions here generate flowers the size of carnations and leaves like twisted hacksaws. The dogwoods grow as large as maple trees, and the tulip blossoms approach the dimensions of cabbages.
With such abundant vegetation in and out of the water, the animals here also assume grander proportions. The bald eagles grow strong and large on a diet of giant salmon. The sea gulls look like flying turkeys, and the ravens tower over the gulls. Large black bears thrive in the forests of the islands, and huge grizzly bears thrive on the mainland coast. Fat skunks waddle through the bushes with little apparent fear of humans.
In the water the plants and animals grow even larger than their counterparts on land. The kelp rises up in the ocean, creating an underwater thicket as dense as the tall grass of the Argentine pampas. In this cool nutrient soup, oysters grow broader than a person’s hand. Unlike the more southerly oysters, which are of a dainty size and can easily be swallowed in a single gelatinous slurp, these firmer, more flavorful creatures need to be cut with a knife even when raw. Alaska king crabs grow bigger than most lobsters and offer legs filled with succulent white meat.
Firm prawns grow nearly as large as bananas and can be just as easily peeled and eaten. Sockeye, coho, and dog salmon commonly reach nearly three feet in length, and the chinook salmon can reach five. They produce a rich, pinkish meat that offers a gourmet meal when eaten fresh, but can easily be preserved by the traditional technique of smoking or by modern canning and vacuum packaging.
Cod and trout grow almost as big as the salmon. But no matter to what size these fish grow, they look like little more than ornamental aquarium fish compared to the sturgeon, which sometimes exceed eighteen feet in length.
The rich and luxuriant plankton attract herds of migrating whales that congregate around rocks along Vancouver Island, across from Alert Bay. There the whales sing their deep, melodious songs and scratch themselves on the large rocks. Local legends say that the killer whales scratch themselves so that they can turn into wolves, their terrestrial counterparts, and then search for food in the thick forests the same way they do in the water.
Despite the large animals in the water and on the land, one need have little fear of them. The greatest danger to humans today comes from the thousands of logs that float through the water and line the shore, making piles of artificially uniform driftwood. A few of the tree trunks have a tangled hydra-head of roots sticking out, indicating that they fell into the water by a natural process of wind and water erosion, but most of them have been neatly cut in timbering operations that strip-mine the forest. The renegade logs somehow escaped while being floated down one of the rivers or while the logs were boomed up into the mile-long rafts that ply these channels.
While such logs pose a great nuisance in the day to fishing and ferry boats, the greatest danger comes during the night. The night hours last so long in the winter that it is hard for everyone to be off the water before dark, but any boat, even a large one, on the water at night rides in great danger of hitting one of these renegade logs. Every Indian family seems to have had a member killed in such an accident, or knows someone who has been—a lone fisherman coming in with his haul, parents and a baby returning from a late-night feast, or teenagers coming back from the high school on Vancouver Island.
Sailing into Alert Bay, one notices that most of the houses look reasonably modern, and the small Victorian church gives the village an almost Atlantic Coast look more characteristic of the Maritime provinces. Old and decaying canneries hover along the dock, and the brick structure that once housed St. Michael’s boarding school for Indian children still stands stiff and erect on the northern end of the community. The modern structures protrude from the land and are easily seen from miles away over the water. It takes longer and closer inspection to discern the traditional structures of wood that blend in with the surroundings, and quickly age in the humidity and rain to weak, neutral colors.
As one enters the bay on a quiet day, it is possible to hear the drumming coming from the direction of old St. Michael’s school. The rhythmic beat of the drums and the chanting voices drift over the waves, disappearing for a few moments but then reemerging in its rhythmic beat. The drumming and voices come from the children who troop regularly into the U’Mista Cultural Centre for their lessons in traditional Kwakiutl music.
The U’Mista Centre now houses some of the ancient masks, cloaks, and blankets of the Kwakiutl people, which were seized by the Canadian government to punish the people who carried on their traditional potlatch on Village Island at Christmas 1921. After holding the native treasure for sixty years, the museums of Canada finally returned the artifacts to the people of Alert Bay, who had built a traditional home for them. Under the direction of Gloria Cranmer Webster, the building now serves as both a museum and an active learning center to encourage the study of the Kwakwala language and arts.
The old people named the new cultural center U’Mista, which means approximately “homecoming” and had been applied in ancient times to people who returned home after a long absence, often in captivity. When the masks were returned after sixty years in government captivity, it was a true u’mista, and for that reason the people displayed the masks without glass boxes around them to separate them from the people. They said that the masks wanted to be free and not boxed in. Because the building now houses so many sacred items, the old people also call it “the box of treasures.”
As one sails into the bay, the tall poles rising up along the edge of the water turn out to be the masts of the boats in the fishing fleet. For most of the twentieth century, Alert Bay has formed the economic center of the Kwakiutl territory. The fishing industry centered at Alert Bay, and the government and church administration for them also centered there, replacing the nineteenth-century focus of Fort Rupert and the Hudson’s Bay Company at the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
For the peoples of the northern Pacific, fishing functioned as more than an economic activity or a subsistence pattern; it formed the cultural core of life on which their whole civilization arose. Their technology, myths, communal activities, rituals, ceremonies, religion, and art focused on marine life. They caught fish in every way known to the Old World, and in many ways unknown to the rest of the world.
The native people used wood and some metal to construct a variety of fish hooks for angling. These varied from small hooks for kelp fish to giant ones larger than a man’s hand for halibut. They used the hooks individually or in complicated sets of baited hooks attached to a frame and anchored with weights or allowed to float on air-filled bladders. These sets of hooks floated in the water like large mobiles hanging in a modern art museum. In addition to curved and angled hooks, they used straight bone gorges that were baited and dropped to the bottom of the water to be sucked up by bottom-feeding fish, which then could not free themselves from the slender gorges that lodged in their throats.
Bait such as small fish or strips of octopus served to attract most large fish, but for some fish the natives used lures made of wood, and even complicated designs of feathers. One of these wooden lures looks like the shuttlecock used to play badminton. When put down deep in the water with a long pole and then released, the lure twists and turns as it makes its way back toward the surface, moving through the water in much the same way that a poorly hit shuttlecock might fly through the air. The shape and motion of the twirling lure attract the curious attention of ling cod, who follow the lure to the surface where the waiting fisherman spear them.
The fishermen made other wooden lures in the form of small fish, or used strips of white willow that could be pulled through the water in such a way that they reproduced the characteristic motions and ripples of a wounded fish and thus attracted larger prey (H. Stewart). At night the fisherman used fire to attract the attention of curious fish, which the men speared when they came to the surface.
Even the spears used in fishing came in great varieties depending on the type of prey, the time of year, and the precise location of the fishing. The simple wooden or bone point could be notched or barbed to make it more lethal, and the craftsmen often added two prongs to the side of a point to hold the fish in place.
The natives crafted detachable points for their spears to make them into harpoons that proved important in hunting larger prey. The Nootka, on the western coast of Vancouver Island, and the Makah, from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, both used such harpoons to hunt whales, as did the Aleuts in the Alaskan islands farther to the northwest. Ropes attached to the points permitted the hunters to keep a whale on the line while minimizing the risk of being hit by the violently swaying harpoon shaft. The men quickly retrieved the shaft after it freed itself from the point, then loaded another point onto it and thrust it again.
The Coast Salish manufactured some of the longest harpoons in the world to use on sturgeon. These harpoons reached fifty feet in length and terminated in a forked end. In the winter the fishermen used the gigantic harpoons to probe the cold water for the sluggish sturgeon resting on the bottom. Once the fish were located, the fisherman speared them by aiming straight down with their lance harpoons. The wounded sturgeon, which could be as large as six hundred pounds, often pulled the canoes on an erratic and terror-filled ride toward the deep ocean, but repeated harpooning and fatigue soon overcame the giant beasts (H. Stewart).
Fishermen sought the bottom-dwelling flounder in much the same way that they searched for the sturgeon, but with a different tool. Instead of a harpoon, they used a spear with several points that made it in effect a pitchfork, which they thrust deep into the water to probe the ocean bottom until they snared the flounder.
For herring they made a rake similar to the pitchfork, but from six to twelve feet long. When the herring ran, they came in such numbers that a fisherman could dip the rake into the water like an oar and impale the fish on it. With this tool they literally raked the herring, and, at times, other fish, into their boats.
Tightly woven baskets with narrow, inverted necks served as crab pots, which the Indians filled with bait and let rest on the bottom. Crabs crawled into the trap to feed, but could not crawl out again. The owner of the basket would pull it up after a day in the water and have a basket filled with crabs.
Men and women both participated in various methods of netting fish. The nets they used might be nothing more than small hand nets to scoop up fish such as smelt along the shoreline, or they could be larger ones attached to poles and used to scoop up salmon. Larger nets required the cooperation of dozens of people to spread them and haul them in. Some nets were made specifically for fishing at the mouths of rivers and others were used farther out at sea.
Native nets provoked one of the first technological changes in the fishing practices of non-Indians. Commercial fishermen coming into the area eagerly adopted the Indian gill nets, which the Indians manufactured with various sizes of mesh based on the size and type of fish they planned to snare. As early as 1873, non-Indians on the Fraser River in British Columbia and the Columbia River along the Washington-Oregon border used such nets in preference to the traditional European ones (Boxberger).
The natives used a more permanent type of net to construct weirs, large underwater fences that guided and trapped the fish. The fishermen opened the weirs at high tide and then closed them at low tide, capturing thousands of fish in small estuaries and pools. The complexity of weirs and traps required the building of log dams and permanent stone foundations for them. The construction of these dams and weirs gave fishing among the coastal Indians a level of technological and engineering sophistication usually associated with agricultural people who must make terraces and irrigation systems for their crops (H. Stewart).
The Indians built various types of structures to take advantage of the precise behaviors of specific fish, such as for collecting the annual herring spawn, which could be dried into a tasty food of high protein content. To harvest the millions of spawn, fishermen built rectangular frames that they suspended in the water and from which they hung kelp or tree branches to dangle below the water’s surface. This submerged vegetable matter attracted the herring, which mistook the dangling leaves for natural vegetation and then deposited vast numbers of their eggs on them. The fishermen later retrieved their kelp or branches for drying in the sun, and hung more kelp on the same frames (H. Stewart).
The fishermen further manipulated the environment by cutting paths through the thick kelp jungles. Lazy salmon readily followed the path of least resistance, which meant that they eagerly swam through the cut paths rather than forging their own way through the thick kelp. Like the hedges and fences used to herd deer in the east or caribou in the north, the kelp paths led the salmon into small, confined areas where they provided easy prey for the waiting fishermen.
In a division of labor similar to that of the hunting peoples in the interior and among foraging peoples throughout the world, the men did most of the fishing, and the women processed the catch. Women also specialized in the gathering of the abundant sea life closer to shore. They collected oysters, crabs, sea urchins, mussels, abalone, and clams, which they could gather while remaining close to their children. The marine life harvested by the women not only provided food, but also supplied more of the raw materials for making tools than did the fish gathered by the men. Of particular importance for the native tool kit before the introduction of metal was the wide knife made from the larger mussel shells, and a variety of cutting edges that could be made from other marine shells.
The women used their tools to process all of the fish and marine mammals brought in by the men. They gutted, scaled, and cleaned the fish, and dried vast quantities of them for the winter. They sun-dried fish when practical, but in the rainy climate of the coastal area, they also used smokehouses to preserve tons of fish and other seafood annually. Each product had its own peculiar characteristics that demanded a particular way of cutting or drying the meat, and each task required its own cutting blades and other utensils.
After drying the fish, the women pounded some of them into fish meal, which was an easily transported food used in soups, stews, or any other dishes to provide protein and thickening in the absence of fresh fish or while on long trips. The women also made a type of “cheese” by aging fish and roe. One method for doing this was to store salmon roe inside the stomach of a deer, which was then hung in the storehouse. Periodic kneading of the stomach as it dried would produce, after a few months, a cheeselike substance inside. Similar foods were made by burying roe in wooden boxes or in pits lined with rocks and maple leaves (H. Stewart).
One of the most important technologies developed by women allowed them to extract oil from the fish. The women boiled and pressed aged fish such as the eulachon, the fish containing the greatest amount of oil, then stored the oil in wooden boxes and in long tubes of hollow kelp gourd, which hung in their storehouses looped like a garden hose in a garage. The oil made up an important part of the yearly diet of the coastal people, and they traded it inland in so-called “grease trails” that stretched for hundreds of miles into British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Traditionally the oil together with the fish meal provided two of the most important trade goods that the coastal Indians used for commerce with the interior tribes.
The people of the north Pacific Coast created one of the most complex maritime cultures in the world. They invented and adapted a technology and modes of production unique to them and their special environment. In addition to their sophisticated technical culture, they attained one of the most complex social organizations of any nonagricultural people in the world.
Large-scale commercial fishing in America began as early as the arrival of the first European sailors on the eastern Atlantic Coast. They tapped the rich resources of the North Atlantic, where the cod ran as thick as the salmon did in the northern Pacific. By the sixteenth century, the Atlantic Coast of North America became a major fishing and whale-hunting area for European ships.
Off the northeast coast of America, when the passages between the Arctic islands thawed during the summer, Dutch and English whalers combed the waters for whales, which they butchered and processed on the shore. They packed their casks with oil from the sperm whale and from the Greenland right whale or Arctic bow-head whale. Occasionally the native people also hunted for whale, which they traded to the sailors for European metal and trinkets, but the native contribution to the whaling and fishing industry remained marginal compared to the role of the English, Scandinavians, and Dutch.
Native Americans of the islands and coast along the North Atlantic had little permanent impact on this fishing and whaling industry because the Europeans sailed in their own boats and brought with them an Atlantic-based technology that had been hammered out slowly over thousands of years. That Atlantic fishing complex developed gradually along the coasts and in the fjords and inlets of Europe, and slowly spread to the outer islands before being used to launch fishing expeditions onto the high seas.
Some evidence indicates that the rich fishing grounds of this area may have attracted English and perhaps Scandinavian fishing fleets before Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in 1492. North European fishing boats were venturing farther west and bringing home rich catches of fish, but like good fishermen anywhere in the world, they did not advertise their fishing grounds. Thus, today it proves difficult for historians to document the exact areas where they sailed.
By 1497 the English King Henry VII had commissioned the first systematic exploration and survey of the coast by sending out the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whom the English called John Cabot. Cabot and subsequent explorers marveled at the vast number of codfish. The supply seemed inexhaustible, and the demand for fish in protein-deficient Europe seemed equally insatiable.
For the first century after the European discovery of North America, it appeared that the most important resource of North America lay not in the land but off the coast, in the cold Atlantic waters of Canada and New England. Fish teemed in these waters that had been exploited by the Indians only for their own subsistence. Old documents and maps named this coastal area the land of cod, a name still reflected in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which lies south of the best fishing areas.
The cool, rich waters off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador make ideal feeding for the cod, which reproduce and grow with abandon. A female can lay more than nine million eggs a year, and she can easily exceed fifty pounds. In addition, fishermen preserved the flesh with salt and sun, making it ideal for shipment over long distances and for sale throughout Europe.
We know there was a steady flow of European fishing vessels in and out of this area after 1500. Dried cod became a staple protein of the growing numbers of urban poor in Europe. Cod also became a common food for the populations of Catholic countries on Fridays and other church fast days when they could not eat meat.
One of the meager contributions of Inuit and Indians to the fishing industry of the North Atlantic came not from their culture but from their brute labor. From the earliest days of the fishing and whaling industries, European ships kidnapped and impressed native men, and sometimes women and children, into service. This practice continued long after the fishing and whaling industries relocated from European bases to the newly emerging Atlantic ports in New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador.
Even into the nineteenth century, Indians and Inuit commonly served on fishing and whaling ships in the Atlantic. They occur in almost all nineteenth-century descriptions of fishing communities such as the harpooner Tashtego in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, first published in 1851. Indians and Inuit found or were forced to assume a place in the fishing industry, but they did not change that industry and its already well established system of operation in the Atlantic.
Although the European fishermen arrived on the Atlantic coast of North America with a workable and transferable technology base, the settlers who began to colonize the land did not share the fishermen’s knowledge. Just as the colonists arrived with little knowledge of hunting, they arrived with only slightly more knowledge of fishing. But while aristocrats claimed a monopoly on hunting in Europe, fishing was primarily an activity practiced by a lower class of specialists. Fishing in European ponds, creeks, and rivers never carried the prestige of hunting on the large, private game preserves.
The European specialization of labor and strict division into occupational guilds did not encourage people to undertake new activities outside of their limited professional areas. Peasants grew crops; they did not hunt, fish, mine minerals, work metal, or sell market produce. They did not even mill the grain they grew, or bake it into bread; both of these jobs belonged to separate crafts. Similarly, shepherds tended their goats and sheep, while herdsmen and dairymen cared for the cattle; they did not grow crops, make shoes, weave wool, or impinge on anyone else’s craft. Fishermen fished.
The northern Pacific was the last coastal area of America to be conquered by the Europeans. After a scramble between the British, Spanish, and Russians, the United States bought Alaska from Russia and divided the rest of the area with Britain along the forty-ninth parallel. The fur trade attracted the initial interest of whites like John Jacob Astor, but as the trappers exhausted the fur, the bountiful marine resources of the area became increasingly important.
The first attempts to exploit Indian fishing along the northern Pacific Coast originated with the Hudson’s Bay Company, which sought to market salted salmon in the 1830s. The North Pacific proved too distant from most markets for even salted salmon to survive the voyage in edible condition. To reach Europe or the East Coast of the United States, the ships had to sail south through the tropical Pacific, around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, through the tropical Atlantic, and finally on to a European port. The trip proved too costly and too uncertain, and in any event the Atlantic fishing grounds seemed ample to supply European needs. The Hudson’s Bay Company did find a ready and eager market for its salted salmon in nearby Hawaii, but this market proved too small to sustain a viable industry of commercial fishing in the Northwest (Boxberger).
With the invention of the canning process and the availability of cheap and plentiful tin from Cerro Potosí and the other mountains of Bolivia, new possibilities arose for commercial fishing in the North Pacific. Hapgood, Hume and Company opened the first commercial salmon cannery at the mouth of the Sacramento River in 1864. It failed because of improper canning procedures and because industrial effluents from adjacent gold mines killed the salmon in the river. Even though the location of the first cannery proved poor and the technological procedures needed improvement, other companies found better locations and technology; they opened canneries on the Columbia River, in Puget sound, and along Vancouver Island. Soon commercial fisheries and canneries stretched from Monterey, California, to Alaska. The major boom for the industry came in the First World War with the great military demand for easily transported protein.
The fishing companies relied heavily on Indian labor and technology such as the gill nets, and on the traditional skills of the Indian women in processing the fish. Despite the heavy dependence on Indian women in the early stages of the fish canneries, the companies found cheaper labor in Asia. The canneries gradually replaced many of the Indian women employees with Chinese and, later, Japanese workers imported into the area.
As the commercial fishermen switched to power boats and ever-larger nets and more-expensive equipment, the canneries relied less on Indian labor. The new boats employed seines, large nets used in open water to surround great numbers of fish of all kinds. Some Chinese men also replaced Indian men working on boats. In fishing communities such as Alert Bay, where the fisheries did not have enough imported labor, the Indians entered financial relations whereby the company supplied the boats and gasoline while the Indians managed them and took most of the financial risks. This system operated by rules similar to that of sharecropping in the old plantations of the South after the freeing of the slaves.
By the middle of the twentieth century, some Indians, such as Billy Assu of Cape Mudge and James Sewid of Alert Bay managed to buy their own modern power boats and became successful entrepreneurs within the new commercial system (Spradley). These men combined the traditional fishing systems based on kinship with their new requirements as commodity producers for an international system of corporations and markets. Native entrepreneurs such as Sewid and Assu formed the Coast Native Fisherman’s Association and later the Native Brotherhood, organizations that helped to preserve and restore native fishing rights.
In Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, and other urban areas, the immigrant non-Indians quickly pushed the Indians out of their traditional fishing enterprises. Despite the objections and resistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Lummi of Puget Sound went to court in 1897 to plead for a halt to the encroachment of their treaty rights by commercial fisheries. The long legal struggle of the Lummi met one legal reversal after another, until finally, in 1974 federal judge George Boldt ruled that treaties of 1854 and 1855 guaranteed the Lummi their historical rights to half the salmon harvest. Since then the courts have upheld the fishing rights of other tribes as well, but the people have had to struggle against tremendous corporate and political pressure to exercise those rights.
In places such as Alert Bay, the Lummi reservation west of Bellingham, Washington, and other coastal communities scattered from Alaska to Oregon, the Indians continue their traditional livelihood of fishing. They now use satellite communications to connect their computers to international markets, but underneath the new technology, the native tradition continues. They do not fish today with the same tools they used a century ago, any more than today’s farmer would walk behind a plow pulled by a mule.
The Indians of the Northwest Coast are some of the very few native people who have managed to maintain a large part of their traditional subsistence pattern. Despite conflicts among themselves as well as with the outside society, they found ways to merge their traditional way of life with the marketing requirements of the modern economy. Long after their cousins on the Great Plains have had to give up the buffalo hunt, after the farming Indians of the East Coast have lost their fields, and after many other Indian nations have become extinct, the native people of the north Pacific Coast continue the work of their ancestors. At the opening of the twenty-first century, they seem to be entering a cultural, artistic, and economic renaissance based on the same maritime resources that sustained the culture and economy of their ancestors over the past several thousand years.