Territory
The Tututni tribe is located in the southwestern Oregon coastline. The territory included a few miles south of the mouth of the Winchuck River, and inland it included portions of the drainage of the Umpqua,Coquille and Rogue Rivers. The language spoken was Tututni , a dialect of Athapaskan.
Daily Cycle
The Tututni tribe had a daily cycle that began before dawn. The men and boys slept in sweathouses together, then they would wake up, sweat and then swim in a nearby stream. They would then go to their houses, where their mothers or wives and young children lived, and ate a meal. They continued their day with fishing, hunting and tanning hides by using a mixture of elk brains, tree moss and starfish. They also made nets, canoes, planks and tended to tobacco. The women would gather firewood, make baskets, cooked, prepared foods, collected plants and carried water. At the end of the day they would have their second meal together and then the men and boys would return to the sweathouses to sleep.
Citation
Suttles, W. P., & Sturtevant, W. C. (1990). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 7). Washington: Smithsonian Institution. pg. 580-582
The source I used was our textbook. I believe it’s reliable because we are using this textbook to learn about the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes.
Womanhood
When a Tututni girl hit puberty she would wear a tiny basket that held flicker feathers, pigment, and in obsidian flake to slash her body to encourage the blood to flow. Her body but not her limbs were painted red. She wore flicker wing feathers in her nasal septum during the day, and flicker tail feathers there at meals. When she left the house, a deer skin was placed over her head. On the last day, the Tututni girl would dash from the house and swim 10 times before daybreak. The right was repeated for her second and third menstruation. There after, she was a woman.
Ceremony
The Tututni The Ten Nights Dance in the home of the chief at his request in order to forget the dead. Men and women dance alternately. Women wore all there wealth. Recent mourners were paid from a general collection to permit the dance to be held. Small groups of men with a back line of woman dance while married man called jumpers took turns with one or two woman on the dance floor. The different dances imitated animals such as deer, woodpeckers, buzzards, and at the end, comic figures. The participants during the day, eating one meal at noon. For the deer dance, the jumpers wore a basket hat with antlers and an otter-skin quiver with arrows. Men and women wore red and white face stripes.
Citation
Suttles, W. P., & Sturtevant, W. C. (1990). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 7). Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Tututni Tribe Art
There’s not much recorded about the artwork or artist of the Tututni in the past or present. However, most of the Tututni tribes artwork was mostly about practical use and displaying simplistic beauty. They wove intricately decorated basketry with geometric designs of beargrass, maidenhair fern, and wild hazel bark. Not only was it to display beauty but to demonstrate wealth. The Tututni bartered for raw materials and made massive obsidian wealth-display blades. Art was used in clothing to demonstrate wealth. Rich women of the tribe had shells or other ornamentation applied to their aprons front. For rich men, they wore a buckskin cap covered with feathers.
Citations
“Oregon Secretary of State.” Oregon Secretary of State: Oregon History: Northwest Coast, sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/history/pre-northwest.aspx.
Suttles, W. P., & Sturtevant, W. C. (1990). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 7). Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Environmental Management
So far that I could see, there’s not much documented about the Tututni in regard to environmental management efforts.I would assume that the Tututni tribe used some of the same management efforts as tribes like the Nisqually and the Salish, especially since they lived on the Rogue River. From what I could tell the Tututni knew quite a bit about their environment, using what they knew to influence their living patterns. The Tututni weren’t a permanent tribe but they weren’t nomadic. However like many other tribes, they had regular travel patterns according to the seasons.Beginning in June, roots such as camas and wild carrots were dug out and strawberries,raspberries and salmon berries were collected. In July men got trout and lamprey. Through August the old stayed in the village, while the younger people built brush houses in the mountains and hunted the fattened elk and deer, which the woman processed on the drying racks. In September and October they moved to fish camps to obtain salmon. Only two species-chinook and coho-were available. The chief directed a move to sandbar camps where men fished and women collected hazelnut, acorns, tarweed, and roots. In the fall after the berries were collected, the patches were burned over. Hunting areas were burned over every five years. In the winter they would settle in the winter villages for a period of visiting and rituals. The Tututni ate sugar pine nuts, skunk cabbage flowers, octopus, seaweed, laurel berries and myrtle nuts. Among the the Tututni,Galice and Upper Coquille, old men would burn over and fence an area in which they grew tobacco.
The arrival of settlers greatly changed the people’s ability to hunt. During the 1850s, Tututni game trails and hunting grounds were destroyed by settlers clearing land for farms, while white ferrymen preempted their river-crossing business.
Like all other tribes, the Tututni put their own limitations in regards to their religion and philosophy of the world around them. They only took what was necessary and gave thanks for the sacrifice, and never wasted any part of the plant or animal they harvested.
Citations
Suttles, W. P., & Sturtevant, W. C. (1990). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 7). Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Ruby, Robert H., et al. A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest. University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.
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