[“First you figure out how foragers ought to act, if they are trying to be as efficient as possible. Then you examine how they do in fact act. If it doesn’t correspond to the optimum foraging strategy, something else must be going on. From this perspective, the behaviour of indigenous Californians was far from optimal.
As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labour to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust. At the same time, fish are found in abundance from the Pacific Coast inland at least as far as the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable than nuts. Despite this, salmon and other aquatic foods generally came second to tree crops in Californian diets, and this seems to have been the case long before the arrival of Europeans.
In terms of ‘optimal foraging theory’, then, the behaviour of Californians simply makes no sense. Salmon can be harvested and processed in great quantities on an annual basis, and they provide oil and fats as well as protein. In terms of cost-benefit calculations, the peoples of the Northwest Coast are eminently more sensible than Californians, and have been for hundreds or even thousands of years. Granted, they also had little choice, since nut-gathering was never a serious option on the Northwest Coast (the main forest species there are conifers). It’s also true that Northwest Coast peoples enjoyed a greater range of fish than Californians, including eulachon (candlefish), intensively exploited for its oil, which was both a staple food and a core ingredient in ‘grease feasts,’ where nobles ladled great quantities of this stuff on to the burning hearth, and occasionally on to one another. But the Californians did have a choice. California, then, is an ecological puzzle. Most of its indigenous inhabitants appear to have prided themselves on their hard work, clear-sighted practicality and prudence in monetary affairs – quite unlike the wild and excessive self-image of Northwest Coast chiefs, who liked to boast that they ‘didn’t care about anything’ – but as it turns out, the Californians were the ones basing their entire regional economy on apparently irrational choices. Why did they choose to intensify the use of oak groves and pinion stands when so many rich fisheries were available?
Ecological determinists sometimes try to solve the puzzle by appealing to food security. Brigands like Le’mekwelolmei might have been seen as villains, at least in some quarters, but brigands, they argue, will always exist. And what is more attractive to thieves and raiders than stockpiles of already processed, easy-to-transport food? But dead fish, for reasons that should be obvious to all of us, cannot be left lying around. They must be either eaten immediately or cleaned, filleted, dried and smoked to prevent infestation. On the Northwest Coast these tasks were completed like clockwork in the spring and summer, because they were critical for the group’s physical survival, and also its social survival in the competitive feasting exploits of the winter season.
In the technical language of behavioural ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish – while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms – is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers. Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor such temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple and fairly leisurely affair, and, crucially, there was no need for processing prior to storage. Instead most of the hard work took place only just before consumption: leaching and grinding to make porridges, cakes and biscuits. (This is the very opposite of smoked fish, which you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.) So there was little point in raiding a store of raw acorns. As a result, there was also no real incentive to develop organized ways of defending these stores against potential raiders.
One can begin to see the logic here. Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it’s not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful. Northwest Coast societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn’t have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food. It’s certainly an elegant theory, quite clever and satisfying in its own way. The problem is it just doesn’t seem to match up to historical reality.
The first and most obvious difficulty is that the capture of dried fish, or foodstuffs of any kind, was never a significant aim of Northwest Coast inter-group raiding. To put it bluntly, there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe. And carrying bulk products overland was even more difficult: pack animals being entirely absent in this part of the Americas, everything had to be carried by human beings, and on a long trip a slave is likely to eat about as much as they can carry. The main aim of raids was always to capture people, never food. But this was also one of the most densely populated regions of North America. Where, then, did this hunger for people come from?
These are precisely the kind of questions that ‘optimal foraging theory’ and other ‘rational-choice’ approaches seem utterly unable to answer. In fact, the ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be.
The simple reality is that there was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work. They might hunt manatees or killer whales, but it was inconceivable for them to be seen building weirs or gutting fish. First-hand accounts show this often became an issue in the spring and summer, when the only limits on fish-harvesting were the number of hands available to process and preserve the catch. Rules of decorum prevented nobles from joining in, while low-ranking commoners (‘perpetual transients’, as one ethnographer called them) would instantly defect to a rival household if pressed too hard or called upon too often. In other words, aristocrats probably did feel that commoners should be working like slaves for them, but commoners had other opinions. Many were happy to devote long hours to art, but considered fish runs quite another matter. Indeed, the relation between title-holding nobles and their dependants seems to have been under constant negotiation. Sometimes it was not entirely clear who was serving whom:
High rank was a birthright but a noble could not rest on his laurels. He had to ‘keep up’ his name through generous feasting, potlatching, and general open-handedness. Otherwise he ran the risk not only of losing face but in extreme cases actually losing his position, or even his life. Swadesh tells of a despotic [Nootka] chief who was murdered for ‘robbing’ his commoners by demanding all of his fishermen’s catch, rather than the usual tributary portion. His successor outdid himself in generosity, saying when he caught a whale, ‘You people cut it up and everyone take one chunk; just leave the little dorsal fin for me.’
The result, from the nobles’ point of view, was a perennial shortage, not of labour as such but of controllable labour at key times of year. This was the problem to which slavery addressed itself. And such were the immediate causes, which made ‘harvesting people’ from neighbouring clans no less essential to the aboriginal economy of the Northwest Coast than constructing weirs, clam gardens or terraced root plots.
So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad.
What, then, of California?
Picking up where we left off, with the ‘tale of the Wogies’, a logical place to start is precisely the boundary zone between these two culture areas. As it turns out, the Yurok and other ‘Protestant foragers’ of northern California were, even by Californian standards, unusual, and it behoves us to understand why.”]
david graeber and david wengrow, the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity, 2021