Traditional Culture
Although they were skilled hunters, salmon fishing was the mainstay of traditional Muckleshoot life. Salmon was gathered and cured, and very often traded with other peoples along the coast and inland. Salmon was treated with reverence, which continues until this day. In the elaborate First Salmon Ceremony, which is still observed, the entire community shares the flesh of a Spring Chinook, then returns its remains to the river where it was caught, so that it can inform the other fish of how well it was received.
With a seemingly endless supply of food, the Muckleshoots could engage in various crafts, including weaving, wood-carving, and basket-making. A complex social structure also emerged, consisting of a nobility, middle class, and slaves, generally captured members of other tribes.
Read more about this topic: Muckleshoot People
Famous quotes containing the words traditional and/or culture:
“The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)