Darkhouse spearfishing

[Gordie]

I won this book, Darkhouse Spearing Across North America, at the metro banquet cause I was a HSO member so I thought I would share some of what I have been reading:

HISTORY

Humans have fished for as long as their activeitys can be traced.

Fishing was first done out of a need to survive, only to much later it became a sport--something to be done to relax and enjoy the out-of-doors. Nevertheless,some fishing is still done on a subsistence or commercail basis to supply much needed food stuffs.

Humans have fished for centuries and continue to fish,using a wide varity of techniques.

Perhaps the most primitive is simply grasping by hand or through the use of trained animals,such as cormorants or even dogs. Some of the first fishing "tools" included spears,harpoons,blow-pipes,clubs, and traps.

Stupefying methods, such as poisions and explosives have been used.

Any number of nets,trawls, and dredges have been developed. The mosty common technque, and that most popular with today's sport angler is,of course, the hook and line.

Spearfishing might be one of the oldest forms of fishing done by man, predating angling,especially angling as a sport.

Ancient artifacts show natives in various poses in the act of casting spears at fish beneath the water. Spearfishing was especiaally common in the tropical seasand along seacoasts where fish congregated to spawn. This earlist method of spearfishing was done out of necessity-- to provide food.

A special kind of recreational winter spearfishing exists in North America today; where the spearer sits in a darkhouse on a frozen lake or river waiting for the prey to be attracted into range by a hanging decoy several feet below the suface of the ice in the clear water below.

The origin of thru-the-ice spearing is uncertain. Spearfishing, in general, was thought to have been independently introduced in manyplaces around the world; no single location can be credited with its introduction. The introduction of thru-the-ice spearing would have a narrower geographic range, and may have been introduced at a point and dispersed or was independently introduced at many points.It could have began in Northern Asia,North America, or northern Europe..

More to come in the following days hope you all enjoy this as much as I do..

[MJ1657]

Nice post Elwood.

I have been reading the copy Mollie won. It's an interesting book.

[Gordie]

ASIAN ORIGIN?

Old Japanese silk paintings a show Ainu spearing thru the under semi conical mat dark tents. Tribes in Siberia also used fish decoys, perhaps linking through-the-ice spearing to North America via the Bering Straits. Although, the spear was used infrequently as a fishing device in China.

SCANDINAVIAN ORIGIN?

It is tempting to speculate that darkhouse spearing came to North America with the Scandinavian ancestors of modern day spears. Norway, Finland, and Sweden have hundreds of clear lakes and fjords with large populations of huge northern pike. Northern are more popular as game fish in Scandinavia than in the United States, and ice fishing is common throughout northern Europe. However no evidence exists to suggest darkhouse spearing was practiced in Scandinavia, nor does it exist there today, although the Danes spear eels through the ice.

NORTH AMERICAN ORIGIN?

The next thought might be that we learned it from the North American Indians who inhabited the colder northern regions. Every school child knows that Indians speared fish during spring, summer and fall. (They still do in some places). There is evidence that Native Americans speared fish though the ice from darkened "houses" after attracting them with an artificial decoy. Native Americans houses were made of blankets, brush, or snow.

Eskimos also speared fish though the ice after they attracted the fish into view with various types of decoys. The Kimballs reported that Eskimos, Athabascans, British Columbia's interior Indians, Northwest Coast Indians and Great Lakes Indians all used decoys, but then it was the great Lake Indians who introduced winter spearing to European settlers.

135

[Gordie]

Contiued

The Kimballs speculate that darkhouse spearing originated in North America, and was then dispersed to Asia, since fish decoys have not been found very far into Asia. Rostlund concludes that dark house spearing is old, since it is so widely dispersed, but hr offers no insights into its origins.

Stark and Berglund note “Through spear fishing dates back to prehistoric times, the fish decoys appeared on the scene in the 1890s in Alaska Eskimos communities, and soon after it appeared in the lower states”. The dispersal idea is perhaps correct, but the decoy appeared much earlier than the 1890s.

In his History of the Ojibway People, Warren writes;

One clear morning in the early part of winter, soon after the islands, which were clustered in this portion of Lake Superior and known as the Apostles, had been locked in ice, a party of young men of the Ojibways started out from their village in the bay of Shag-a-waum-ik-ong, to go, as was customary, and spear fish through the holes in the ice, between the island of La Pointe and the main shore, this being considered as the best ground for this mode of fishing.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE

[bassNspear]

nice stuff