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.

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.