Chinook History Their main food source was salmon, but Chinook men also caught other fish and sea animals. The Chinook woman gathered clams, mussels, shellfish, berries, and roots. The Chinook men hunted elk, deer, buffalo, and sea animals. Chinook people were not nomadic, they stayed in one place most of the time.
The Chinook Indians were fishing people. Their staple food was salmon. Chinook men also caught many other kinds of fish and sea mammals from their canoes and hunted deer, birds, and small game on land. Chinook women gathered clams and shellfish, seaweed, berries, and roots.
The women of the Chinook tribe preserved their food by smoking a year’s supply of salmon. They also pressed the rich oil from the eulachon (candlefish) and used large amounts of this oil as a dip for their food. Shellfish was another popular food and clams were dug from the beach and then smoked.
The Chinook peoples caught salmon using a variety of methods. By the mouth of the river, they made long seine nets with twine spun from spruce roots and with stones tied to the bottom edges. They were caught swimming past a small town near the mouth on the Washington side of the river, known today as, well, Chinook.
Cedar was a favorite material, but nettle, rushes, willow bark, and other fibers were also used. Almost any activity you can think of utilized some sort of cordage. In addition to salmon and other fish, elk and deer were among the most important food resources used by the Chinook.
Chinook, North American Indians of the Northwest Coast who spoke Chinookan languages and traditionally lived in what are now Washington and Oregon, from the mouth of the Columbia River to The Dalles. The Chinook were famous as traders, with connections stretching as far as the Great Plains.
The elite of some tribes had the practice of head binding, flattening their children’s forehead and top of the skull as a mark of social status. They bound the infant’s head under pressure between boards when the infant was about 3 months old and continued until the child was about one year of age.
The Chinook used shells as a form of currency.
Chinook Jargon, also called Tsinuk Wawa, pidgin, presently extinct, formerly used as a trade language in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. It is thought to have originated among the Northwest Coast Indians, especially the Chinook and the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) peoples.
Definition of Chinook 1: a member of an American Indian people of the north shore of the Columbia River at its mouth. 2: a Chinookan language of the Chinook and other nearby peoples. 3 or less commonly chinook. a: a warm moist southwest wind of the coast from Oregon northward.
Today, most Chinooks live in southwestern Washington and scattered around the Pacific Northwest. Population In 1780, roughly 22,000 Chinookans lived in their territory, a figure that declined to less than 100 in the late nineteenth century. Chinook tribal membership stood at more than 2,000 in 1983.
“Chinook women really have a very important role in our society and while most of the time, men were headmen, that is actually not entirely true. Women could also hold the position of head-person.
They were also famous as traders, using the waterways to make routes and to make contact with many other Indian tribes. Not only did the Chinook trade dried fish, they also traded slaves, canoes, and ornamental shells. The tribe’s basic social unit was their villages. Slavery was very common among the Chinook.
They ate clams, crabs, seals, sea otters, sea lions, fish, herring eggs, and mussels, sea urchins, and seaweed. The men hunted land animals including bear, caribou, deer, elk, and moose.
The climate of the Northwest Coast was mild and rainy. The geogra- phy where the Chinook lived was the shoreline. The Chinook had salmon for food, cedar bark for clothing, and trees for shelter. with deerskin and by weaving cloth from the inner bark of cedar trees.