Saanich Erotic

The Saanich call themselves W̱SÁNEĆ, usually rendered as "the emerging people," and the name carries a story. During a great flood, the people tied their canoes with cedar rope to the top of ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱, the hill settlers renamed Mount Newton. When the water fell, someone saw land rising and called out that W̱SÁNEĆ was emerging. That hill still overlooks the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria, on southern Vancouver Island, where the Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum and Pauquachin First Nations hold their reserves. Malahat, across Saanich Inlet, is often counted with them.

They are Coast Salish. Their language, SENĆOŦEN, is a dialect of Northern Straits Salish, which they share with the Lekwungen around Victoria and the Lummi and Samish in Washington. The way it is written was worked out locally: in the 1970s the Saanich elder Dave Elliott Sr. built an alphabet that could be typed on an ordinary typewriter. It uses mostly capital letters and a comma for the glottal stop. Residential and day schools left few first-language speakers, and the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board now runs immersion classes to raise new ones.

The old economy followed the seasons across a territory of islands. Families traveled by canoe to the Gulf Islands and the San Juans for camas, clams and, above all, summer sockeye. They caught the salmon with the reef net, a Straits Salish technology: a net slung between two canoes over lines rigged to mimic a reef, steering salmon up into the mesh. The best reef net sites belonged to particular families. The year ran in thirteen moons, each named for what the land and water were doing.

Two outside events reshaped that world. In 1852 Saanich leaders signed two of the Douglas Treaties with James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company. The English text describes a land surrender. Saanich accounts say the chiefs understood it as a peace agreement, and that the wording was added later to pages already bearing their marks. Then in 1872 the international boundary was fixed through the islands, leaving many reef net sites on the American side. Still, the treaty's promise that the Saanich could hunt and fish "as formerly" has held up. The Tsawout used it to stop a marina at Saanichton Bay in the late 1980s. In 2006, in R. v. Morris, the Supreme Court of Canada sided with two Tsartlip men charged with hunting at night.

Today the reserves sit right against the suburbs of Greater Victoria. Many Saanich are Christian, a legacy of nineteenth-century missions, while the winter longhouse season and its spirit dancing carry on beside the church. In recent years Saanich fishers have rebuilt a reef net and fished with it again, the first in generations, which says a good deal about where the community is looking.