Walking a marine beach, with the crunch of gravel or the soft give of wet sand underfoot is the inevitable overture to picking up shells. It is the pretty ones that are collected, taken home, admired, and maybe used in some decorative way. The sea shell is a fascinating product of the marine world, made by that incredible designer and builder, nature, and endowed with a beauty and usefulness that is difficult to ignore. There is probably no people in the world, living in a coastal environment, who did not use shells in an ornamental way, or find some functional use for them.
How natural, then, for the coastal Indian of the Northwest to find, in the shells of his environment, an element of decoration for his adornment, and a source of raw material for his tools. Many of the shells he found needed little of no modification to serve their purpose, their natural shape and size suggesting the function most obviously suited to them. Consider the olivella shell, beautifully shaped, smooth and polished, ranging in colour from lavender to dark purple. By merely grinding off the tip, a string could be passed through its length, and it became a bead. Strung together they made a gracious necklace for a girl.
Even better suited to a necklace was the dentalium, a hollow tusk-like shell, found only in deep water mainly off the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a few other areas also. To collect them, the Indians used a special pronged device on the end of a pole, probing into the depths to try and retrieve the slender, delicate shells. As with anything that is rare and difficult to come by, dentalia became much sought after and highly prized. Used for personal adornment, its possession indicated wealth, and having value it became an important and widespread item of trade, much in demand by peoples far beyond the Northwest Coast. Through trade the shells reached north to the Eskimo, south to the Indians of what is now California, and inland to the people of the plains, who used quantities of them to decorate their clothing. As with the ovella, the tip of the tusk-shaped dentalium shell was ground off to allow string to pass through it. . . |
