A Comparative Proposal: Northwest Coast Vs. Northeastern Woodlands

Christina Juenger
Comparative Proposal
Title:
Northwest Coast Vs Northeastern Woodlands: A Comparative Essay on the Chinook and
Menomini Nations
Description:
The two nations being compared are the Menomini and the Chinook. The Menomini
Tribe lived throughout the Great Lakes region, but they now mainly reside in southern
Wisconsin. Their geo-cultural region is the Northeastern Woodlands. The Chinook tribe is from the Northwest Coast geo-cultural region and they lived near the Columbia River in Washington.
There are some points of comparison that are interesting to research. The themes of comparisons in this paper will include social organization, fishing/hunting/agriculture, transportation, housing, and clothing. My information is coming from

Franz Boas collected information from what was thought to be the last member of the Chinook tribes.
However, Verne Ray heard reports of two Chinook people still living in Willapa Bay and decided to collect information from them. This book contains the information he collected from two Chinook women and was published in 1938.
Some themes I am researching are social organization, transportation, architecture, clothing, and fishing/hunting/agriculture. Social organization included the upper class, which included chiefs and their families, prominent shamans, warriors, and other people of high birth.
Each village had one chief, passing from the father to their oldest son. People could move from the middle class to the upper class through accumulation of wealth and the strength of their personality. It was common for members of the upper and middle class to own slaves. These slaves were treated relatively well, as long as their services were useful to their owners.
The Chinook’s transportation mostly consisted of canoes. Travel from one village to another was done by waterways. The Chinook lived by the Columbia River, and used the

This information was collected over the course of eleven years. Skinner’s ethnography was published around the same time as Ray’s ethnography on the Chinook, so the writing style and collecting methods are consistent between sources.
In the social organization of the Menomini, there are seven phratries with subordinate gentres (people who are related through their male ancestor). The office of the tribal chief was hereditary in the principal family of the Great Mythical Bear gens. War leaders and men of notable bravery were required to guard the camp. Women had to retreat from society whenever they were menstruating, because they were considered highly unclean. Separation of marriage was through mutual consent.
The Menomini did most of their traveling on foot, so moccasins were important in their culture. During winter, they would wear snowshoes for easier travel. After contact, the
Menomini started using horses as transportation. For water transportation, they used two types of canoes: log canoe and birch-bark canoe.
There were several types of houses that the Menomini used. During winter, they used semi-globular houses, like wigwams. Their summer lodges were made of bark with