Nuxalk Erotic

The Nuxalk hold one deep valley and the fjords below it. The Bella Coola River drops out of the Coast Mountains of central British Columbia and empties at the head of North Bentinck Arm, and that corridor, together with older village sites at Kimsquit on the Dean River, at Kwatna, and up South Bentinck Arm, is the homeland. It is closed-in country: no road crossed the mountains into the valley until residents built one themselves in 1953. What separates the Nuxalk most sharply from their neighbors is the language. Nuxalk is Salishan, but it sits stranded far north of the rest of that family, ringed by Wakashan speakers on the coast, Heiltsuk and Wuikinuxv, and by Athabaskan-speaking Dakelh over the mountains inland. It has no close relative anywhere. Linguists know it for what it does with consonants: long clusters, and words that contain no vowel at all. Fluent first-language speakers are now few and old, and the nation runs its own school, Acwsalcta, with immersion teaching pointed directly at that.

Families trace themselves through smayusta, the ancestral histories recording which forebear came down from the sky world, at which mountain, and in what form. These are not stories in the idle sense. They establish names, standing, and rights to specific ground, and they are still argued that way. Winter belonged to two ceremonial societies, the hereditary Sisaok of the chiefly families and the Kusiut, whose concern was the supernatural. Masks made for them are carved in an idiom outsiders recognize on sight, heavy in the brow and worked in a blue-green so particular that people simply call it Nuxalk blue. Grease trails ran east from the valley for centuries, carrying eulachon oil inland to the Dakelh, and Alexander Mackenzie came down one of them in 1793 to finish the first recorded crossing of the continent north of Mexico. Nine Nuxalk men toured Germany in 1885 and 1886, and a young Franz Boas, watching them in Berlin, turned his career toward this coast. Smallpox in the 1860s gutted the villages and drove survivors together at the river mouth. Norwegian homesteaders took up the valley floor in the 1890s. The potlatch ban ran until 1951. In 1995 hereditary chiefs and their supporters blocked logging at Ista, on King Island, and were arrested for it, which is roughly how the nation has met outside claims on its territory since. Most members live in Bella Coola today. The eulachon runs that once paid for everything have collapsed, and masks carried off a century ago are still being asked back.