While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Yakonan Family. A linguistic family formerly occupying a territory in
west
Oregon, on and adjacent to the coast from Yaquina river south to Umpqua river The family
was probably never strong in numbers and of late years has decreased rapidly. The
few survivors are on the Siletz
Reservation, in Oregon. The family is of considerable
ethnologic interest, since it apparently represents the southern limit of a type
of culture exhibited particularly by the Chinookan,
Salishan, and other tribes
of the coast of Washington and Vancouver island. The
Athapascan tribes of
south Oregon
and north California seem to have been more deeply affected by contact with
Californian stocks.
The Yakonan conformed physically to the general type of the north west coast and are
notable as marking the southern limit in that region of the practice of
artificial
deformation of the head. Their social organization is not fully understood, but
there was no totemic clan system, though a tendency to local segregation of
groups related by blood was evident in their villages. There was also a
preference for marriage outside the tribe, though this did not have the force of
an exogamous rule, so far as can be learned. The social orders of nobility and
common people, peculiar to the north west coast, obtained, and slavery was an
institution in full force until the tribes came under the control of the United
States. The Yakonan mythology and traditions are distinctly of the type of the
coast tribes of Washington, but they show traces of modification by contact with
the Californian stocks on the south The family was composed of 4 tribes occupying
adjacent districts, which, from north to south, were: Yaquina, Alsea, Siuslaw,
and Kuitsh. These tribes have played an unimportant role in
history and little is known of them. On the formation of the
Siletz
Reservation in 1855 they were removed thither, and since
that time they have declined so rapidly in numbers, principally
through the ravages of tuberculosis, that they are now on the
verge of extinction.
