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What kind of housing did the Chinook live in?
cedar plank houses
The Chinook built large cedar plank houses. The cedar plankhouse was the typical permanent dwelling of the Chinook and other coastal Northwest people. The size of these sturdy buildings ranged from approximately 14 x 20 feet to 40 x 100 feet.
Where did Chinook live?
Chinook, North American Indians of the Northwest Coast who spoke Chinookan languages and traditionally lived in what are now Washington and Oregon, from the mouth of the Columbia River to The Dalles. The Chinook were famous as traders, with connections stretching as far as the Great Plains.
What were the Chinooks superb at?
Since the Chinook lived near the Columbia River and the ocean, they were especially skilled at things that dealt with water. They were superb canoe builders, navigators, and fishermen. Not only did the Chinook trade dried fish, they also traded slaves, canoes, and ornamental shells.
What materials did the Chinook tribe use for roofs on their homes?
There was considerable variation along the coast in house form within the simple parameters of a rectangular post-and-beam structure with planks for cladding and roofing. The planks were hand split from cedar logs or standing cedar trees, but how the parts were arranged varied.
What were the Chinook homes like?
The Chinooks lived in coastal villages of rectangular cedar-plank houses. Usually these houses were large (up to 70 feet long) and each one housed an entire extended family. Today, old-fashioned buildings like these are still made from cedar wood, but they are only used for ceremonial purposes.
What did the Chinook Indians eat?
salmon
Their main food source was salmon, but Chinook men also caught other fish and sea animals. The Chinook woman gathered clams, mussels, shellfish , berries, and roots. The Chinook men hunted elk, deer, buffalo, and sea animals. Chinook people were not nomadic, they stayed in one place most of the time.
What type of food did the Chinook eat?
How did the Chinook tribe catch salmon?
The Chinook peoples caught salmon using a variety of methods. By the mouth of the river, they made long seine nets with twine spun from spruce roots and with stones tied to the bottom edges. They were caught swimming past a small town near the mouth on the Washington side of the river, known today as, well, Chinook.
What kind of houses did the Chinook Tribe live in?
The Chinook plank house were partitioned lodges. The interior had a central communal space. Sleeping and storage space was created by using wooden dividers and animal skins. The Chinook Plank House featured a Portal or Entryway Totem Pole through which a person entered the house.
What kind of wood was used in Chinookan plankhouses?
The best known are plankhouses, post-and-beam structures built using Western red cedar posts and planks for walls, roofs, and sometimes floors. Chinookan plankhouses were part of a Native architectural tradition that in the nineteenth century stretched from southeast Alaska to northern California.
How big were the Chinookan houses in Oregon?
The houses were variable in size and internal layout. They were anywhere from 30 to 400 or more feet long and commonly from 15 to 30 feet wide, although the Meier house near Scappoose was 55 feet wide and others were probably as wide. The biggest houses were concentrated in the Wapato Valley (also known as the Portland Basin).
How big does a Chinook tribe shelter get?
These ranges from 20 to 60 feet wide, and even 50 to 150 long. This shows that the shelter size preference really is not uniform throughout the entire Chinook tribe because it all just matters to them.