Pacific Northwest Canoes - Uses

Uses

The canoes were used for transport up and down the coast. They were used for trade, as war canoes, and in competitions. Emily Carr, who grew up in the early days of Victoria, British Columbia, describes a regatta in which the Indian races were the highlight. The canoes, of ten paddlers and a steersman acting as coxswain, "flash through their races like running fire." The Kloochman ("wife" in Chinook Jargon) was "an even grander race" than the men's, with the women giving "every scrap of themselves to the canoe", working in complete unity