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 |  | Monday November 23, 2009 3:07 AM |
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[Chapter 4]
PIT HOUSE and EXTENDED TIPI
PLATEAU TRIBES
from Native American Architecture
Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton
New York:1989
Pit Houses |
Mat Houses |
Summer Houses |
Today |
(illustrations)
On a trek through the Nicola Valley of interior British Columbia in the 1890s, an amateur ethnographer from the Shetland Islands named James Teit inspected the caved-in remains of an old-style Plateau Indian "pit house." Teit's Thompson Indian guides described how these circular, dug-out dwellings were framed, roofed with dirt from their own floor excavation, and heated with central fires that kept their inhabitants alive through the long Canadian winters.
Teit settled among the various Salish-speaking tribes of the western Plateau, learning their languages and becoming a staunch advocate for their civil and cultural rights. As he won their trust, the Thompson tribe shared their beliefs with him. They described their concept of the world as a huge, circular lodge divided into four compartments, each associated with one of the four cardinal directions. This pattern is reflected in the spatial arrangement of their old pit houses, which were divided by four roof beams. They believed that after death one's soul left the world and crossed a river to the east where it resided in the land of ghosts. Teit learned that this afterworld also was imagined as a round dwelling made of granite enclosing a landscape of trees and hills. Once a soul arrived there, it enjoyed a good life, joking and dancing with old friends. To the Thompson, as to many Indian people, it seemed natural to envision their cosmology in architectural terms.
The Plateau region of northwestern America is an expanse of tablelands, high valleys, and lava beds locked between the Rocky Mountains to the east and the coastal and Cascade mountain ranges in Canada and the United States, respectively, to the west. In the northerly stretch where Teit traveled, pine forests alternate with grasslands along the great bend of the Fraser River. Here, Salish-speaking tribes such as the Thompson, Shuswap, and Lillooet fished and hunted and foraged for wild plants. To the southeast lay other Salish-speaking tribes such as the Okanagan, Flathead, and Sanpoil and their Sahaptin-speaking neighbors, the Kutenai, Yakima, and Nez Perce. Their diet of ground tubers, fish, and berries was supplemented by hunting buffalo. Along the upper Columbia river system lived tribes who spoke Upper Chinook and lived off wild carrots, sturgeon, and salmon.
Even before the coming of Europeans, the Plateau was a crossroads for cultural influences. Trade goods and ideas for building rectangular houses came by way of rivers that cut west to the Northwest coast. European culture made an impact here before Europeans actually arrived. Through mountain passes that opened eastward to the Great Plains came the trappings of an equestrian and buffalo-hunting life style, most notably the hide-covered tipi. While the architectural ancestry of the region remains unclear, most tribal traditions seem to agree that their oldest house form was the pit house.
In the "Chinook jargon," which western Plateau Indian traders used to haggle in a common tongue, the word for pit house was kekuli house. Each tribe dug out, framed, and sized the dwelling in its own way. Despite this structural variety, however, early anthropologists proposed an intercontinental pedigree for the western pit house based upon the common feature of being constructed over an excavated floor. The diffusion hypothesis offered in the early twentieth century by such scholars of Indian architecture as T.T. Waterman and Ralph Linton was that an earth-insulated, semisubterranean lodge had originated in northeastern Asia and then passed across the Russian Strait, where it was expressed in the Arctic winter house. It was then borrowed by Plateau people, and next moved southeast to emerge as the Great Plains earthlodge. Finally, the idea was transmitted to the Southwest, where it produced the Mogollon and Basketmaker pit house forms. The problem with this grand scheme is that it treats a common-sense solution to extreme cold— semisubterranean flooring—as a specific trait suggesting single invention and group-to-group diffusion.
By the time of classic Plateau culture, which archeologists date from A.D. 1200 to 1300, most tribes were concentrated in the north and west and occupied pit houses in permanent winter encampments along major streams. Prehistoric sites reveal clusters of three or four of their saucer-shaped floors, most averaging 3 feet deep and from 25 to 40 feet in diameter. Shortly thereafter the wood-house forms of the Northwest Coast apparently proved attractive to tribes like the Wishram, who lived along the Plateau's western rim. The nearby Yakima apparently kept their traditional mat coverings, but placed them over pole frames modeled after the gabled Northwest Coast buildings.
By the mid-eighteenth century, some tribes in the southern Plateau had begun to abandon pit houses in favor of mat-covered, multifamily structures, while the more northerly groups followed suit less than a century later. It is unclear whether this housing shift signified changes brought about by European diseases, changes in social organization, or food-gathering strategies, or a combination of such factors.
In summer, many Plateau Indians set up lighter pole-framed shelters, including small conical lodges, lean-tos, and double lean-tos that faced each other. All were roofed with sewn reed or grass mats and usually were pitched at favorite fishing grounds or in open meadows. Once they had acquired horses, however, the southern and eastern Plateau groups carried their buffalo-hide tipis year-round. Then, as cloth became available through trade or government issue after the 1880s, canvas rapidly replaced skins as tipi coverings. Tribes like the Nez Perce and Yakima elongated the tipi frame, draping it with many covers, for festive gatherings at seasonal foraging camps and to accommodate guests during formal gift exchanges and relatives and friends at funeral rites.
PIT HOUSES
The Thompson Indians escorted Teit to their old campsites in the river valleys, where the climate was mildest and mountains to the east blocked the wind. Three or four pit houses made up each hamlet, with fifteen to thirty residents in each dwelling. When a new house was needed, the Thompson would begin to measure the floor excavation around mid-November. First they crossed two bark ropes the length of the proposed pit at right angles, pointing their ends in the semicardinal directions. Stakes marked the center and quarter midpoints; then quarter circles were scored in the ground to complete the circumference. Using sharpened sticks and flat-bladed wooden scrapers, the women broke up the earth and hauled it to the side in baskets until they had a hole 3 to 4 feet deep, with sloping sides.
Freshly cut logs were dragged to the site and stripped of bark. Four served as main house-posts and were planted in holes in the floor at an angle roughly parallel to the excavation walls (in treeless regions driftwood was saved for this purpose). Their tops were notched to support the four main roof beams, whose butt ends were sunk 2 feet into the topsoil at steep angles. Supple willows fastened these beams, which almost converged at the smoke hole, and also secured pairs of struts that braced them.
A webbing of spaced rafters was lashed in concentric circles from pit to smoke hole. This supported a snug layer of poles that was thickly padded with pine needles or grass. In the upper Plateau, where rainfall was heavy, cedar bark with the curved side up was laid at this stage. Finally, earth from the original pit was spread over the roof and stamped down, and a notched-log ladder was lowered through the smoke hole. With twenty to thirty people cooperating on the building, a pit house could be finished in a day. The following spring, grass sprouted on the roof and, but for the ladder, the dwelling seemed a living part of the landscape.
Pit house shape and construction varied throughout the Plateau. The Shuswap in the north sometimes used six central posts and beams instead of four, producing a conelike profile once the dirt was added. The Lillooet, who lived between the Thompson and Shuswap, dug a more rectangular pit that gave the building a wedgelike look. The Sanpoil adopted a flat-roofed structure, placing their ladder entry at one side and the hearth on the other side. Their roofs were simpler to construct but also drained less effectively. The Shuswap occasionally added a secondary side tunnel that faced southeast, while in the squarer pit houses of the southerly tribes this side entrance was the sole access to the building.
Teit also learned that the Thompson had once paid special attention to the pit house ladder. Its top sometimes was carved into a bird or animal head and then painted to represent the man of the household's guardian spirit. Customarily, it was tilted against the eastern edge of the smoke hole. It was proper to descend the log ladder facing northeast, supporting oneself by gripping the grooves in the back of the ladder with the right hand. The northern Shuswap reversed that protocol, keeping the left hand on the ladder and turning their faces to the southeast. A fireplace usually was located on the north side of the ladder, which was protected from burning by a stone slab. In the main space, the areas marked by the four main posts and beams were known as "rooms," and each was named for a semicardinal direction.
MAT HOUSES
The winter mat houses of the southern Plateau were occupied from mid-October to mid-March and had floors dropped a foot or two below ground. They could be extremely long, as the American explorers Lewis and Clark discovered when they visited the Nez Perce along the Columbia River in the winter of 1805-1806: "This village of Tumachemootool is in fact only a single house one hundred and fifty feet long ... It contains twenty-four fires, about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster a hundred fighting men"
The multifamily structures were a series of simple A-frames secured by horizontal poles lashed in parallel courses about 3 feet apart from base to top. When one or both ends were rounded, they were framed with a semicircle of poles that resembled a tipi frame sliced in half. Perhaps the tribes began to favor these buildings over the older pit house because they were already affected by European stereotypes, which compared Indians to animals; when the Flathead, for instance, were asked whether they had ever built pit houses they would only say that an earlier race of Foolish Folk had made them, who they derisively described as living "in holes in the ground like animals." At the start of the nineteenth century, however, mat houses were already a way for Plateau families who shared clan or kin affiliation to live together. The year before Lewis and Clark's journey, the fur trader Alexander Ross described the inside of a typical Plateau mat lodge: "... the fires are made in the center, directly under the ridge pole, and about six or eight feet apart and are in ....[text missing]
The common winter mat house was 25 to 60 feet long, 12 to 15 feet wide, and stood from 10 to 14 feet from floor to ridgepole. The Sanpoil began roofing at ground level, tying on about 4 feet of grass banked with about a half-foot of earth. Then twine-tule roofing mats, about 5 feet wide and from 10 to 15 feet long, were lashed up to the slitlike smoke hole with 3 to 4 inch overlaps. Variations in design were determined by available materials and local climate. The Shuswap sometimes used only grass on the roof; their northern neighbors, the Carrier Indians, squared off one end of the house but partitioned the other into a dog shelter and storage room for food. Most of these winter homes had slightly sunken floors, whose sleeping areas were softened with slough grass mats. In colder regions they were banked with earth and used double doors.
In the nineteenth century, the multifamily winter mat lodge changed from habitation to temple. The Prophet Dance, one of many revitalization movements that provided psychological relief to Indians who were dispirited by disease and warfare, used this building to symbolize the pre-white values it tried to restore. In defiance of government and missionary pressures to abandon these native structures, messianic Indian leaders like Smoholla of the Wanapum tribe held their rituals in converted mat lodges. Smoholla's central Prophet Dance lodge at Priest Rapids on the Columbia River in eastern Washington was about 100 feet long and could hold 120 followers. Today, this religious and cultural movement survives among the Yakima as the Washat religion, and its meeting place is still called a "longhouse."
SUMMER HOUSES and TIPIS
For temporary use during fishing and berrying seasons, Plateau people put up new pole-and-mat structures or simply repaired those from the previous summer. The fishing shelters usually were built on the first terrace above the rapids for easy access to the river banks. Their dimensions often depended on how much volume was needed for hanging fish-drying racks, but they averaged 60 feet in length. However, in 1811 at Cabinet Rapids along the Columbia River, the surveyor David Thompson visited a Wentchi fishery where the two rectangular houses loosely covered with rush mats were large enough to contain 800 people.
As early as pit-house times, most Plateau people also used during the summer one- or two-family conical dwellings covered with mats. To craft their mats, the Lower Kutenai gathered Indian hemp or dogbane after the leaves had dropped in autumn. Then they split, scraped, and seasoned the stalks for a year before braiding them into long ropes that were sewn together. Three or four of these large coverings could roof a single dwelling.
The Upper Kutenai, however, used buffalo-hide tipi covers after the practice of the Plains Indians. Once they acquired canvas, the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Yakima expanded the cloth tipi much as they did the mat tipi. For influential leaders like the well-known Nez Perce Chief Joseph, such homes signified resistance to government pressure to adopt the white man's ways; when he died in 1904, his funeral feast was held in such an elongated tipi.
TODAY
The floorplan of the winter mat lodge of the Nez Perce and Yakima Indians of eastern Washington was preserved by the Washat religion. Most of its meeting houses are aligned on an east-west axis and retain the rounded western end and squared eastern end. Instead of poles and mats, however, they are built of concrete blocks and, with the exception of the earthen-floored buildings at the Yakima's White Swan and Priest Rapids communities, have floors of bricks or planks.
The Priest Rapids structure near Vantage on the Columbia River was reputedly the most conservative. Until 1956, when high winds blew it over, it retained its tule-mat roof and was surrounded by smaller, mat-covered family houses. Despite the storm, enough framing still stood to support a new corrugated metal roof. Longhouses for the Washat faith were erected by the Nespelem, Umatilla, and Nez Perce as recently as. the 1960s.
As for pit houses, by the 1900s most Plateau people were reluctant to discuss how they had been made, fearing the ridicule of outsiders who might still compare them to the dens of hibernating animals. Among a few traditional Chilcotin and Shuswap families, however, such lore was not lost. The Mary Thomas family of Salmon Arm, British Columbia, for example, smoked salmon in the old way, tanned hides, and occasionally built a kekuli house. Mrs. Thomas and her sons had built a full-size pit house for display in 1974 for exhibition at the Kelowna Museum south of Salmon Arm. Five years later we invited them to construct a second exhibition pit house for the 13th Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C.
When we interviewed Mrs. Thomas at the festival in 1979, she explained that the older Shuswap style reserved the separate, side doorway for women. Narrow troughs extending from the western sides of abandoned house depressions along the South Thompson and Little rivers tend to confirm her claim. During the demonstration, Louis Thomas and his brothers notched and lashed the main beam braces and horizontal purloins so that the frame resembled, as they described it, "a spider web made of wood." They stomped on pine bark to flatten it and laid it on the roof frame, topping it with grassy sod. A wedge-shaped section of roof was left open, however, so visitors could stand in the shadow-of the Washington Monument and peer down into the oldest house type in the Western hemisphere.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Plateau houses
The Plateau region was a crossroads for trade and architectural influences. Bounded by the Fraser and Columbia River drainages, it encompasses southern British Columbia, Washington state, and parts of Oregon and Idaho.
North America's oldest house type, the pit house (above) was superseded on the Plateau by the mat lodge. With the availability of canvas, the mat lodge form expanded. The large cloth lodge (below) was photographed on the Umatilla reservation in northern Oregon on July 4, 1900.
Pit house cosmology |
Pit houses figured in the cosmology of the Thompson Indians of interior British Columbia. Drawn by a Thompson Indian, the diagram (above) shows his concept of the afterlife. (A) After death the soul leaves this world, depicted as a four "room" pit house. (B) Toward the-sunset across a river (C) there lies the land of ghosts (D), a huge granite lodge where the soul jokes and dances with old friends.
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Pit house roof framing plans
Last Updated
November 13, 2008
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