Native to Victoria.
13 on the map, the #163 most common of 384 species.
Show Sitka Spruce trees on the map
Said to bring supernatural protection (Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Klallam, Ditidaht); bark mixture in sweat bath, decoction drunk for tuberculosis (Nuxalk); branches placed around sick people’s houses with the idea that the sharp spruce needles would keep anything unclean from entering the house; spruce tips rubbed on canoes, digging sticks, and implements to purify them and used to cleanse a person contaminated (sic) with menstrual blood (Kwakwaka’wakw); beating with branches said to drive away the sickness and ghosts of the dead (Klallam); said to bring vivid dreams and good luck if you sleep under spruce (Nlaka’pamux) (Boas 1930, 1966; Turner 2004a; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983).
Wood used for bows, wedges, blanket pins, arrows and arrow points, tongs, clubs, implement handles,
ladders, drying racks, hollowed out containers, fish traps, deadfalls, shelters. Roots for twined basketry, fishing lines, snares, binding and tying; bark sheets for roofing. Pitch for sealing canoes and
baskets, waterproofing, glue.
Pitch or gum harvested from living trees for material or medicinal purposes. Collected from natural or human-made wounds in trees or from pitch blisters. The pitch was variously chewed for pleasure, used as waterproofing or adhesive for implements and containers, or prepared for medicinal use. -- Roots harvested for basketry; only a few taken from a single tree in any one year; limbs and sapling trunks used for fish weirs; inner bark (food) and pitch (medicine, adhesive) harvested from individual living trees over generations (Haida, Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest
Coast peoples).