Coast Salish people historically practised canoeing for travel and transport and, at least by 1865, racing in specialized, narrow and fast canoes. Canoe racing during the period of the U.S. and Canadian potlatch bans enabled Indigenous people to gather publicly and enact elements of their culture. The canoes are regarded as living, named entities, and the racers employ spiritual practices in training and racing. Canoe races continue today.

According to anthropologist William Elmendorf, fathers made model canoes to teach their four- to five-year-old sons how to paddle and manage a canoe. Nuu-chah-nulth-style wolf's heads on the bow, as seen in this example, became widely used on the south coast after contact. The full-sized canoes have their names painted on the hull, as do some of the model canoes. The size of the models varies from about twenty-five inches to nearly six feet in length. This made-for-sale model is just more than forty-five inches long. Many models include paddles and interior crossbars, or thwarts, eleven in this instance. Models are painted, in this case, white over red, just above the waterline. The interior is varnished.

Bruce Granville Miller

Bruce Granville Miller is Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia, Department of Anthropology. He has worked with Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples for fifty years and is the author/editor of eight books. Miller was awarded the Weaver-Tremblay Award for Applied Anthropology by the Canadian Anthropology Society. His most recent book, Witness to the Human Rights Tribunals: How the System Fails Indigenous Peoples, won the K.D. Srivastiva.