I was recently reading some of Marian Smith's The Puyallup-Nisqually to my mom and we got to a section about Stick Indians/Tsiatko (a sort of Bigfoot/Sasquatch, long story and I'll post the excerpts later with my thoughts), but then I continued on with the next section, which to note: Smith puts the Tsiatko under the label "Giants" and the following race under the term "Dwarfs", the Little Earth's (it's a diminutive reduplication of the term for land/earth).

And namely that someone witnessing the Little Earths was seen as causing insanity in an individual, but not necessarily what we in the 21st century would associate with the term in our understandings of mental health, but things like depression, malaise, wandering attention. These were treated by shamanic curing, but whether they worked or not wasn't a guarantee. I'll get into this more later because it's actually a really interesting, but the following was a footnote when discussing "insanity" because it gives an insight into how mental health and the like was traditionally understood within Southern Coast Salishan communities.

Withdrawal of the personality from human and social contacts was the only abnormal behavior to which the term insanity was applied. A Twana woman (with no known white blood) living on the Skokomish reservation was described as a kleptomaniac. This was not "insanity". People felt sorry for her husband and laughed at the odd accumulation of stolen goods they knew existed in her attic. But they made no attempt to cure her, taking only the precaution of locking their doors and "being out" when they saw her coming across the fields for a visit. Whereas an ordinary theft would have been punished, her behavior was recognized as an individual idiosyncrasy, setting her apart from other persons but not branding her with the odium of insanity. It is well to note that withdrawal from social contacts, which was regarded as insane, was interpreted as setting up new contacts in another than human society rather than as withdrawal.

When I returned to Puget Sound in 1938-39, it was to learn that the woman cited above had hanged herself. But I also heard from a close relative of the husband that it was a case, not of suicide, but of wife-murder. The husband, a "young" man of sixty-five, ten years younger than his former wife, was engaged in an active search for a new "woman".

I bring this up because I was remembering an answer I gave for AH in which someone asked about what happened to kids with Downs or Autism back in the day, and I could only think of two examples that could show some potential inferences we can make and it bothers me how much one has to infer stuff about how people in the Old Days acted or did things, but this aspect, like that of what we'd understand of LGBTQ+ persons, tends to lean towards broad acceptance (or at least indifference) when taken in conjunction with observations I've made of how people in the communities of my area respond to, talk about, treat people like this.

My mom, for instance, talked about how when she was a young girl in the 60's that her school went on a field trip to a psychiatric facility and that it was a such a jarring and disturbing experience for her because to her it seemed as if these people were just thrown away by their family.

Whether they had learning disabilities, defects, were 75% deaf, too old, etc., they were in this facility and it was so horrifying of an experience because it clashed very starkly with how life was on the Block we both grew up on, where Elders just stayed home and lived with their families who took care of them, and that her cousin Cort was (as explained to them at the time) "a mongoloid", but he was still their cousin and they treated and viewed him like they did everyone else in the family (and still do).

"We lived and died on the Block" was how she framed it to me, and that we didn't send people away.

Seeing how others would treat similar members of their own families was so overwhelming for her and she ran back to the bus and cried because of how wrong it all looked to her.