The cultures of the coastal indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest have placed great value on a sense of history and documenting events. However, they have emphasized the oral over the written tradition, passing on their histories through telling, singing, and speaking of the events to their families and nations rather than putting those words into letters on paper. Among the Tlingit, Haida, Coast Salish, and the Nuu-chah-nulth, history is a complex theme used by storytellers to reveal the interaction between their people and the spirits and transformers around them.
The oral historical record has slowly come to be accepted by researchers and the government of Canada as a source of information with the same degree of reliability as written history (which often reveals more about the writer than the events being discussed). It is not the events – the arrival of the European ships, the trading of the sea otter pelts, the potlatches with Spanish captains as guests – that show a contrast between written documents and oral histories. It is the meaning of those events.
Oral history was ignored as an important document of history because it was not a written account and because it was from a First Nation’s perspective. Yet, some of the most interesting findings of Pacific Northwest exploration history have emerged from the understanding and incorporation of oral history songs and stories. This helps us to understand not just what the expedition captains wrote in their logs, but what kind of exploration took place on the coast in pre-European times, and what really happened when all those sailors came ashore.
