ABSTRACT
The Salish guardian spirit ceremonial was suppressed by government authorities together with other traditional Northwest Coast North American Indian rituals toward the end of the nineteenth century; in British Columbia, through the Canadian "Law against the Potlatch Festival and Tamanawas Dance," in Washington by decree of the U.S. Superintendent of Indian affairs. At the same time, most North American Indian children and adolescents were sent to government-sponsored and church-run boarding schools where native languages and customs were to be driven out of their young minds in order to facilitate the then-official policy of assimilation. Traditional North American Indian ceremonials were considered as heathenish by the churches, as a waste of time by the authorities, and as contrary to the interests of an expanding capitalist economy in need of constantly available and relatively cheap manpower. Suppression of the Salish guardian spirit ceremonial appeared advisable to the authorities who had been frightened by the nativistic and anticolonialist Ghost Dance movements (Du Bois, 1939; Mooney, 1896) that originated in North American Indian cult dances of the Northwest Coast (Spier, 1953). In spite of threatened legal prosecution, some Coast Salish shamans and elders secretly continued the tradition of the guardian spirit ceremonial on a small scale.
