(THE COMPLETELY FICTIONAL) CONTEXT FOR A STORY

The hawi derived all their power and influence from inherited privileges. Those privileges largely took the form of ownership of key sites and resources. Trading and salvage rights were considered paramount, allowing for chance windfalls from wind and surf, travellers and neighbours. Choice housing locations were also hugely significant elements of inherited privilege, strongly indicating status. Less prestigious, though just as as much a signifier of one’s status, were the ownership of, and thus rights to, every other element of material and immaterial Being. Paintings and sculptures and carvings, songs and poems, dances and medicines, ceremonies and ritual prerogatives, naming and marriage rights, the management of secrets and of the supernatural realm, as well as rivers and streams, beaches and tidepools, rock outcroppings, clam beds and halibut banks, whole stretches of ocean and vast swathes of land all had their ownership closely guarded as much by tradition as regular applications of brutal violence. Keenly entwined elements critical to maintaining all this status and privilege were conspicuous consumption and the labour management of the ne’vo.

The ne’vo were the majority of the population and lacking any claim to inherited privilege. For access to all the resources necessary to meet their spiritual, social, and biological needs, the ne’vo traded their labour and services, and that of those under them, to the hawi. Under them were the paa’titu. Despite being the second largest social group, roughly 40% of the population, the paa’titu held sub-human status and were never spoken of while also performing nearly all of the essential labour. The majority of these non-person chattel were war captives who, by custom, were treated or mistreated as anyone with higher status saw fit. However, while socially marginal and considered worthless, the paa'titu were essentially the substance of material wealth. Wealth, though very much separate and subordinate to status and privilege, consisted primarily in the number of slaves a member of the hawi commanded. Aside from daily tasks, paa'titu were used either as trade goods or otherwise as fodder in war. Paa’titu were also occasionally used in rituals. Those rituals typically saw paa’titu bathed, cloaked in plant matter, and executed. This dispatched them to the land of the dead for conducting spiritual labour ensuring the continued privilege of their hawi owner. Their highest achievements there were the coaxing of prized gifts from the sea and into the salvageable territory of their hawi owners (ideally whale corpses, referred to as tu’quoi) or, being killed upon the death of their owner, to perform slave duties for their owner in the afterlife. Less commonly, paa'titu were dispatched by their hawi owner as a display of extravagance and confirmation of an owner's high-status or as a practical measure in lean times to reduce resource consumption.

Underpinning all of this was warfare. Warfare could be seen as informing and motivating the whole worldview, social structure, and economy of this civilization. And there was always a joint purpose for war: the appropriation of highly desirable resource territories as well as the procurement of new slaves. Sometimes these habits, land and resource theft and slave-taking, were described as "the conjoined backbones of existence." As such, all hawi were seen as generals. To set them apart in battle, they wore an armour of mammal skins donned only after ritual bathing and ceremonial purification. Other military leaders wore no armour but carried finely carved clubs made of whalebone and bearing names such as “Orphan-Maker” or “Bringer of Widows.” The bulk of those doing battle, the paa'titu, carried only sharpened sticks as weapons and for defence they had nothing more than their wits. The preferred war tactic was surprise: invading a settlement while the inhabitants slept. And successful operation was seen as one which resulted in the taking of many trophies. Most prized among all trophies were the heads of the men in the community. Understood as potent sources of wealth, the remaining women and children were always taken as slaves. When all was said and done, the homes of the prey community was then razed to the ground. Treachery was also a preferable tactic, as it was almost always less costly and more easliy controlled than a battle in the field or an all-out war. A promise of peace might be proposed and an elaborate feast orchestrated to cement this mutual relationship, one resulting in a premeditated, mid-banquet bloodbath. This sort of activity was highly lucrative, furnishing elevated prestige and privilege, as well as all forms of booty for the hawi initiating them. And, as such, high-status individuals often fabricated grievances, with war being easily justifiable restitution for such claims of injury or insult. And, naturally, endless reprisals for such activities kept civilization going.