CHAPTER I

LOCATION AND ENVIRONMENT

Location—Bella Coola Villages—Tribal Organization—
Neighbouring Tribes

LocaTION

“PELLA COOLA”’ is the common designation of those

Indians who, until a few years ago, inhabited the valley
of the Bella Coola River in central British Columbia. Boas has
recorded! that the name is a mis-pronunciation of Biulxula,? a
Kwakiutl word of doubtful origin which white pioneers as-
sumed to be the appellation of the peoplein question. There
-is no term in their own language to include the groups treated
in this monograph. Linguistically, the Bella Coola form an
isolated island of Salish-speaking people, separated from others
of the same stock by tribes of Athapascan and Kwaktutl lin-
eage.* Culturally, they belong to the central section of the
North Pacific coast area.‘

The Bella Coola River rises among the mountainous
uplands of central British Columbia. Its two main branches
fall rapidly, about forty-five miles from the sea, into two deep
gorges which unite, some five miles farther on, to form the
valley of the Bella Coola. Down this the river rushes in ser-
pentine curves (see Plate 5). Too shallow and too rapid for
the use of large boats, even if such had been known to the
Bella Coola, it serves to bear their dug-out canoes, each hewn
from some mighty cedar. The valley is never wider than two
or three miles and is hemmed in by lofty snow-capped moun-

1The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians (Memoirs of the American Museum
of Natural History, 1898), vol. II, part 2, p. 25. Repeated reference will be made
to this work, and when Boas is quoted without further description, the reference
will be to this memoir.

2Pronounced Bulxwala by a Kimsquit man endeavouring to quote a Kwakiutl.

3Boas, p. 26.
4Clark Wissler, The American Indian (2nd ed., New York, 1922), p. 227.

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