The year is 1467, the place, the northeast coast of what would eventually be known as Vancouver Island. Deep in the forest, someone drags a carefully crafted stone blade down a cedar’s trunk, peeling away a long strip of bark: the raw material for a basket, clothing, or other craft item.
Years pass, then decades. The harvester dies. The basket decays. Centuries pass; strangers arrive, bringing war and deadly new diseases with them. Everything changes. The tree lives on, two lobes of wood slowly closing around its scar window.
To this day, woodlands across the Americas bear the secret signs of centuries of Indigenous life. Trees as old as a thousand years preserve the marks of careful human harvesting. Anthropologists Nicholas C. Kawa, Bradley Painter, and Cailín E. Murray propose a new term for these trees: “vivifact,” as in living artifact. But a more common term is “culturally modified trees” (CMTs). The particular methods of interacting with CMTs vary from group to group and region to region, but the overarching practice is remarkably widespread. In North America, CMTs have been found everywhere from New Mexico to Alaska; globally, they range from Australia to Scandinavia.
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We can read many different goals into the marks on the trees: the harvest of wood to make planks, cradleboards, bow staves, and more; the stripping of bark for fibers and basket-making; the collection pitch for waterproofing, medicine, and gum. Some species provided not just materials but sustenance: edible cambium (a layer between the bark and the wood), plump and sweet in the spring—considered a famine food by some groups and a delicacy by others. While these artifacts and foodstuffs deteriorate and disappear, the trees survive, allowing today’s researchers to make educated guesses about the lost objects. Thanks to careful, knowledgeable, and restrained harvesting of these resources, the trees continue to thrive, and the stories they tell can be quite revealing.
In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, researchers have inferred which years featured particularly generous potlatches based on how many trees were harvested at that time. In “Dendrochronology, CMTs, and Nuu-chah-nulth history on the west coast of Vancouver Island,” archaeologist Brian Pegg tracks the history of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of Vancouver Island following European colonization by examining the relative densities and ages of culturally modified cedars. The arrival of metal tools, the development of the trade in sea otter pelts, the devastating consequences of introduced diseases, and the emergence of a cash economy are all reflected in the ups and downs of cedar harvesting. As Pegg writes,
CMTs are widely distributed throughout British Columbia. Because they can be dated so accurately, they provide data that cannot be obtained in any other manner. They’re also living records of past forest use and resource management patterns, and can provide a window into an aspect of culture that is often not well represented in ethnographies largely focussed [sic] on ceremonial and social life. This serves to illustrate the archaeological importance of CMTs—they should be considered a central part of the archaeological record of the west coast of British Columbia, and should be more actively studied before their numbers are further diminished by forestry.
Clearly, you can read a lot into trees. In some cases, they were altered for the purpose of recording information. The term “trailblazing” comes from the practice of putting “blazes” on trees—notches in the bark—to keep track of important routes. The Athabaskan-speaking Denaʼina people on the Alaska Peninsula make extensive use of trailblazing to this day, and historical paths can be resurrected using these lingering marks, write anthropologists Douglas Deur, Karen Evanoff, and Jamie Hebert. Though subtle—the researchers note that “to some observers, Dena’ina use can seem diffused, and specific traces…elusive”—the blazes document patterns of movement through time and are “essential waypoints in the cultural landscape” of tribal members. CMTs appear “across the Dena’ina world” as trail blazes and deliberately broken tree limbs, but also as “stumps, topped trees, and living trees scarred by bark removal.”
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In the twentieth century, such CMTs have developed a political as well as historical importance for the Dena’ina, as “a number of developments…including proposals for vast, open-pit mines” threaten their traditional homelands.
“Ironically,” write Deur, Evanoff, and Hebert, the Dena’ina people,
who for generations sought to leave little trace of their presence on the land, are now required to identify physical traces of their presence in time-honored places of travel, resource harvests, and enduring cultural meaning within their homeland.
The Dena’ina are forced to document the physical traces of historical activity in the landscape, a challenge when the activity was intended to leave only a slight mark. Fortunately, write Deur, Evanoff, and Hebert, “a growing literature reflects an appreciation of the importance of CMTSs to Indigenous peoples worldwide for specific cultural, dietary, spiritual, or navigational purposes.”
Centuries, cultures, and individual people do pass, but if we’re lucky and attentive, the trees left behind continue to serve as markers along the many paths that take us from the past to the present.
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