Bruce Granville Millerto a cedar pole positioned on the wall, and asked “What’s wrong with
that pole?” The longhouse owner, an “Indian doctor,” described this
pole as a place where malevolent power was concentrated, and a lo-
cation that winter dancer initiates had to avoid, or else they would
suffer from disturbing dreams. My son had correctly noted that there
was indeed something wrong with the pole. (Despite this experience,
this son is now fifteen and an avowed empiricist.)
Another of my children, then aged ten, experienced a vision while
I was attending a naming ceremony at a winter dance house a two-
or three-hour drive from home. Two years before this occasion, I had
found a number of “Indian” names long forgotten in an archive. These
had been recorded on a genealogical chart sixty years earlier by an
anthropologist and provided English names back four or five genera-
tions and names of a few generations of people who had lived before
there had been white contact with their location. These names dated
back perhaps to the late eighteenth century.
In the Coast Salish world and on the northwest coast generally,
these names have great significance because they are tied to control
of particular resource locations and to ancestors. Names are given
to those who are thought to embody some of the traits of the previ-
ous holders, and some names are those of highly revered ancestors.
Kan ( 1989 ) described a similar naming practice among the Tlingit to
the north of the Coast Salish as central to the creation of a system of
“symbolic immortality.” Among the Coast Salish, as with the Tlin-
git, names are associated with ideas of reincarnation. For these rea-
sons, names are freighted, deeply connected to the epistemology of
the community, and, ostensibly, beyond the reach of outsiders. One of
these names was being “brought out,” that is, given to a young per-
son. I was invited to the ceremony as an honored guest and wrapped
in a blanket with money pinned on to it as is the local practice. I was
asked to eat with elders, which I felt too young to do. Although I was
happy for the families involved and pleased that the naming was tak-
ing place, I wasn’t especially happy to have my contribution noted,
and I felt distinctly uncomfortable. During the naming I was asked to
comment on where the names came from and on how old they were,
and I gave what immediately seemed to me to be inept answers. The