DREAMING OF NET-ZERO

Photo by Mike Cooper

‘Payshnam chaw shi’ix anaknuwita tichamna kunam tichamnim chaw inaknuwita shi’ix.’ ‘If you do not take good care of the land, then the land will not take good care of you’    –saying of the Elders, quoted by Jess Nowland

A UN scientist recently forecast that by the year 2050 there may be no more edible fish in the oceans.  Also under threat from climate change are future sources of chocolate, coffee, and wine.  What about my carbon footprint?  Is it Bigfoot or is it a fox?  Are we a big blot on the land sucking up resources and spewing out waste, or have we made the utmost efficiency out of the resources granted us? 

These were concerns to the facility staff of Tamástslikt back in 2003.  Most commercial energy users in the region draw an average of more than 60 percent of total power from the Boardman coal-fired plant.  Compare it with the 8.35% average draw on hydroelectric power.  Today in 2013, the Tamástslikt facility staff have made solid progress toward their goal of counting 73 tons of carbon savings.  From 2003 to 2013, they successfully reduced electrical usage by 55% and natural gas usage by 75%.   Their dream is a net-zero balance between energy demands and energy costs. 

Conservation came first.  Next will come renewables. 

Strategies of energy conservation and optimization are value-based with Mike Cooper, Tamástslikt Facility Engineer, and Jess Nowland, Assistant Facility Manager.  Reducing Tamástslikt’s carbon footprint fulfills their values, that Tamástslikt not be a resource hog.  Their holistic view is of systems.  At the same time, they favor modules.  They decentralized the facility’s original big overkill boilers, and configured a system of smaller units that respond to the differential needs of each section of the facility and handle air variably. 

They started with energy conservation.  They sealed up the drafty soffit vents.  They installed micro data loggers that monitored energy usage night and day.  They sought out state-of-the-art light bulbs and installed motion-activated fixtures.  They addressed airflow and insulation problems.  The beautiful redwood siding was a particular problem that called for the engineering of back-ventilated cladding in order to wick off moisture and eliminate mold, a huge project still underway. 

“People, planet and profit” succinctly describes the triple bottom lines and the goal of sustainability. The phrase, “people, planet, profit”, was coined by John Elkington in 1995 and has become a full cost accounting standard  for measuring organizational (and societal) success. Tamástslikt should produce not only a return on the Tribes’ investment, but achieve a sustainable environmental impact, and effect a livable happiness quotient.  Nowadays being a facility engineer takes a different mindset, like a Phil Jackson zen, attuned to technology but with concern for every little thing and the big picture.  It’s all about energy.

Now that the conservation steps have achieved better efficiency, the guys look forward to building in renewable forms of energy.   ‘Small wind’ power is a prospect.  Ted Rapasky of the Tribes’ Department of Science and Engineering (DOSE) set up an anemometer in the field next to Tamástslikt some time ago that measured average wind speed of five meters per second. 

Capacity-building and technology transfer are also part of the plan.  Tamástslikt has offered a series of certifiable training for other tribal plant personnel in order to spread the benefits of being knowledgeable about energy. 

What is sustainability? –Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.– United Nations Bruntland Commission

WHERE IS THE FUN

Hula Hoop, Salmon Walk, Tamastslikt

There used to be some memorable elderly friends who spent time at the museum just hanging out.  A staffer would go for mail, return and tell one of the gentlemen, “You left your pony idling in the parking lot.”  It didn’t hurt that there was a passle of female interns also on duty.  They would take the old gentlemen into the café for soup.  The elders both male and female developed a fan base because they knew a lot.  They were generous in sharing reminiscences about the past for which the younger staffers seemed hungry.

One elder would talk about getting in trouble as a kid because he always wanted to fight.  Neither he nor his brother seemed violent-natured–quite the opposite, both were humorous and easygoing.  As boys they were constantly turned over to the whipman because of fighting.   Whenever they would encounter strangers, boys their own age, they immediately wanted to stage a brawl just for fun.  There was no television in those days.  An elder woman talked about Chemawa, the government boarding school in Salem.  Students would habitually get up after ‘lights out’ and congregate for fights. 

If all that combative behavior could be called play, perhaps certain forms of mastery and competency were the outcomes.  They say play is a reward in itself.  No one plays for any reward or compensation except the pleasure of intense engagement.  A set of lifelong patterns, knowledge, and skills are honed and developed as a child plays.  The child explores novel situations and environments.  He or she builds a base for responding to later experiences.  In adult life, it may translate to characteristics of flexibility and creativity in problem solving.  Play undoubtedly teaches the rules and signals of social communication, the kinds of teachings not transmitted with words.  In fact, play is all about transmitting meanings.  Play is also a de-stressor and removes what may be a major obstacle to learning.  (Judy Diamond, “Playing and Learning” Association of Science-Technology Centers’ (ASTC) About Learning: A Field Guide for Museums. http://www.astc.org/resource/education/learning_diamond.htm )

So how can this information be used?  They say museums should be a place of play, even a cultural-historical museum such as Tamástslikt.  We once held a day camp for the tribal recreation program.  We taught the kids how to make tule duck decoys.  The next thing you know, the tule ducks had been transformed into Kalashnikovs.   Each and every duck was confiscated by the counselors.  It only goes to show that the adults can try to direct play, but kids will deploy their skills to flexibly adapt.  Adaptability really is the goal of play.

Museum people have sometimes felt disappointed when youth gallop through the exhibits without stopping to pore over the text panels.  Do you remember how intensively you were involved in play?   –when you could not be distracted or diverted from what you were doing?  It’s that engrossed state of mind that is very conducive to learning.  Even if kids don’t read the text panels, if they are stimulated by what they are experiencing, cognitive machinery is turning. 

Of course some children never stop playing, and they are next door at the Wildhorse Resort & Casino. We’re still trying to lure them in this direction.

THE MYSTIQUE OF LANGUAGE

“There were once thirteen native language families in the region that is now Oregon: Alsea, Athabascan, Cayuse, Chinookan, Coosan, Kalapuyan, Klamath, Molala, Sahaptian, Salish, Siuslaw, Takelma, and Uto-Aztecan.  Today only Paiute, Klamath, Wasco, and Sahaptian survive in the spoken form. “–Noel Rude, preface, My Counting Book, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, 2002

Have you taken in the Eastern Oregon Word Round-Up?  If you heard of Wordstock in Portland, this is its east-side sibling, happening right here on the Umatilla Indian Reservation today and tomorrow. 

Dr. Noel Rude brought half an index card with a few bullet points for his session, “Efforts to Create a Umatilla Language Dictionary.”  Oregon is quite unusual for its rich diversity of aboriginal languages whereas from southern Oregon to Mexico City, the language would have been Uto-Aztecan–just the way the world is becoming dominated by English. 

Dr. Rude asked, do you all enjoy grammar? to predictable moans and groans, even among an audience of writers and readers.  When he worked at a sawmill, Dr. Rude would leave work saying he was ready to curl up with a beer and a good Arabic grammar.  Linguists do enjoy grammar. 

Who invents grammar? he asked.  It’s children, the most brilliant systematizers.  Children have the urge to regularize speech.  That’s why a child would be prone to conjugate the word ‘go’ by saying, “Daddy go’d store.”   

The Sahaptin hunter-gatherers developed massive noun declensions and almost infinite verb systems.  Whereas English only has about four verb tenses in common usage because English adopted modifying auxiliaries.   Why should a society without a written language develop such a massive grammar?  This cannot be answered. 

Dr. Rude asked, do you all know what is the native language of this territory where we are sitting today?  The fact that we were sitting in Cayuse Hall was a hint.  The last known speaker of the Cayuse language passed away before WWII.  The Cayuse people knew themselves as ‘liksiyu’ and they later became known as “Weyíiletpuu”, a Nez Perce term.  Cayuse may have been a distant cousin of Sahaptin, but not enough remains of the language to determine its origin.  Dr. Rude wrote a paper suggesting that Cayuse could be related to Klamath.  The anthropologist Melville Jacobs came to Cayuse country and begged the last few remaining speakers to allow him to document the Cayuse language.  They refused for their own good reasons, so the language has not been documented beyond a vocabulary of about 300 words. 

Why can’t a language be revitalized if it has only a vocabulary?  Grammar is unconscious.  We may build up a huge vocabulary but the grammar is an underlying construct that exists in our subconscious.  If you don’t believe your knowledge of grammar is deep within your unconscious, then can you explain all the rules pertaining to the word ‘the.’  

Revitalization can lead to the creolization of a language, pidgin such as Chinook jargon, the trade language developed from several tongues.  Pidgin is the product when adults create grammar, he said.

An uproar arose when he asked the question, what is the most successfully revitalized language? Hebrew.  Immediately audience members began to clamor, “it’s not the same language”…  “They’re not speaking authentic Hebrew…”  “The Hebrew of the Bible is like Chaucer’s English to modern English.”  Just paraphrasing. People have strong feelings about language revitalization.   

Of all the Indian languages, Dr. Rude concluded Navajo may be the only viable Indian language.   At one time, Dr. Rude said, Navajo possessed a base of about 120,000 native speakers.

Dr. Rude’s late mother had a friend, a full-blood Cherokee who was also a fluent speaker.  When his mother died, her friend was there.  He asked her, “How is the language?  How is the revitalization coming along?” She said, “Fine.  It’s a massive attempt, but I can’t understand one word they are saying.”    

As a longtime university lecturer, Dr. Rude was quite spellbinding.  Yet after his session, I wondered, what about the dictionary?

THE AUTHENTIC COWBOY ARTIST

Charles M. Russell

 “Old Ma Nature was kind to her red children and the old time cow puncher [referring to himself] was her adopted son”—CMR

 “The worst woman alive, in my opinion, is as good or better than the best man I know.”—CMR

“It’s the women that makes the men in this world.”—CMR

How could one not be endeared of the homespun character who spoke those quotes?  As warm and humorous as his sentiments, Charles Russell also reflected the godawfulness of his era.  No Indian would be shocked to learn that Charlie Russell was just a man.  He had good and bad sides, and he didn’t suppress either leaning.  Nothing is known about the women who were the subjects of Russell’s lesser-known erotic images.  After Russell married, it became his wife’s lifework to expunge all erotica produced before their marriage. 

Despite Charles Russell’s impressive body of sculpture and painting, he never considered himself a high-toned artist but called himself an illustrator.  Russell catered to an audience that no longer felt ‘genocidal hatred’ for the American Indian.  The tribes survived in such abject state, that citizens felt romantic nostalgia for what was believed to be the vanishing Indian race and culture. 

When Dr. Raphael Cristy portrayed Charles M. Russell at Tamástslikt, he cautioned that Russell was a product of his times, when it was simply normal to strike derogatory attitudes about Indians.  According to Cristy, Russell clearly aimed to create sympathetic portraits of Indian life.  Russell wanted to persuade his audience that Indians were human like themselves.  Believing in his influence, he said, “Betwine the pen and the brush there is little diffornce but I belive the man that makes word pictures is the greater.”

Like food and water, sex was an inexorable appetite of white men in the western territories of the 19^th century.   Russell drew on the frontier experiences of his youth when he portrayed Indian females ranging from the dignified horsewomen of “Women of the Plains” to “Indian Maid at the Stockade” to further extremes. 

 “For all the credit Charlie has been given for his progressive sensitivity to Indians it must also be remembered that Indian pornography was one of his trademarks.  The only erotica of Charlie’s that survives today—Cowboy Bargaining for an Indian Girl, Joy of Life, and Anticipation/Exasperation are anatomically vivid paintings of cowboys procuring and mounting Indian women, “ wrote John Taliaferro in Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist.  The Amon Carter Museum stores Joy of Life in its basement to protect the eyes of school tours.  When Joy of Life was exhibited at the Mint saloon in its heyday, viewers paid 10 cents to view the peepshow beneath the tipi flap. 

As a romantic, Russell mostly depicted Indians as they lived when the buffalo thrived, not after their way of life came crashing down.  According to Taliaferro, the state of the native economy in the great plains became dire.  “Impoverished and starving wives and daughters often were driven to selling their bodies to whites to stay alive,“  wrote Taliaferro.

None of the paintings cited above are in the current Tamástslikt exhibit.  Charles M. Russell:  Master of Western Art is purely family fare.  When booking exhibits, no one takes account of works absent from the exhibition.  Visitors view Russell’s works for the moments they represent.  We are able to look at the products of the artist’s journey rendered with such draftsmanship and authenticity, without taint. 

“Like all things that happen that’s worth while, it’s a long time ago”– Rawhide Rawlins, Charles Russell’s fictional narrator

WE ONCE WERE HORSE PEOPLE

Bryson Liberty at ‘Reservation Round-Ups’

It was an honor for Tamástslikt Cultural Institute and the Confederated Tribes that inveterate horse people stepped forward to share their experiences.  Some remarkable feats were described during ‘Reservation Round-Ups’ by those who experienced it:  Bryson Liberty, Alphonse Halfmoon, Antone and Douglas Minthorn, Bill Burke, Jesse Jones, and Etta Conner.  Thankfully, Dara Worden of the Tribes’ Cultural Resources Protection program recorded the event for posterity.    Here are a few particles of stories as recalled from Saturday, September 29.

Alphonse Halfmoon, Cayuse nonagenarian, talked about how he attained his Indian name because of what his elders did after all the horse doings were over.   The boys were shut in the corral and told to throw each other out.  Halfmoon was the ‘Last One Standing’.  Can you imagine what a feat it was.  Mr. Halfmoon maintained his record through his youth and truly befits his name. 

Bryson Liberty told about how they would ‘run the horses’ to get them to funnel into the corral without diverting, and the horses would circle in a big whirlpool pattern.  He named off the nicknames of the guys he knew, including ‘Poots’ whose horse galloped beneath a tree with Poots lying backward on his saddle to avoid the tree branches, then once beyond the tree he sat back up, still at a full gallop.  Pretty amazing horsemanship won the day. 

Bill Burke related how he, cousin Richard ‘Summer’ Burke, and Leonard  ‘Ma’uuts’ Cree missed the 4 a.m. convening because they stopped for breakfast.  By the time they got there, somebody else had done their job.  Willie Wocatsie summoned the boys to tell him what had happened.  He listened.  Then he drew out his quirt, and asked, ‘Who’s going to be first?’  Summer went first and took five licks of the quirt without crying.  Wocatsie said, ‘five wasn’t enough?  You need five more’.  Summer finally busted out crying.  At that moment, Bill resolved to start crying with the first lick.  This sparked lifelong promptness among the three.

As a young man, Douglas Minthorn witnessed some spectacular horse athletes including a black bucking horse that he claimed for his uncle Joe Thompson.  When he brought the horse to its owner, Joe said, “well, all the boys are gone now, so you can have him.”  Douglas sold the horse to a rodeo stock supplier for $200, then later saw cowboy Jim Shoulders win the Pendleton Round-Up championship on that horse. 

Jesse Jones shared that although he participated in the big McKay Creek doings, he felt he had missed the great horse round-ups of yesteryear.  He too saw some great horses.  He remembered how the former stallions would jump up and strut off to reclaim their harems, not knowing. 

Some panelists addressed how they thought the wild horse problem should be handled.  Mr. Halfmoon said, since these Tribes were known for their horses, they should remove all the cows off the reservation and pasture horses exclusively.  Antone Minthorn thought since the tribes were made horseless virtually overnight, the wild horses should be rehabbed and made into saddle horses for families that want them.  Douglas Minthorn weighed in stating since the government instituted range units, the horses are shutting other animals out of pasture; they should be disposed of, so families can collect their wheat and pasture income.  Bryson Liberty said he wrote a letter to the government, advising them to emulate the Tribes’ traditional practice of ‘tying off’ the stallions to reduce populations.  A few months later, he received a stock form letter as an acknowledgement.

‘Reservations  Round-Ups’ was wonderfully rich in stories.  The people that experienced those days are extraordinary.   They are a breed apart.  Their impromptu speaking skills kept the audience captive.  It makes us modern ones feel rather meager in personhood. 

 

ROUNDUP IS A MEMORY

Inez Spino, Eliza Bill, Carrie Sampson

This photo is from the East Oregonian booklet, Cowboys and Indians, A Pictorial Potpourri of the Pendleton Round-Up, undated.  There is ‘Twaway’ Inez Spino, Eliza Bill, and Carrie Sampson, looking so elegant.  My Round-Up memories don’t go back very far.

My grandmother’s tipi was “at the point” with the door opening on the center of the village.  Aunts and uncles’ camps surrounded us.  Inside her kitchen tipi was an icebox, wood stove, cupboards and a table with seating for 10 or 12.  Tipis were way big in those days.  Sometimes random people would just walk in and marvel how homey it looked.  We made a beeline there in the morning because the fire was already going.  The smell of coffee was one of my earliest memories.

In those days, the Round-Up Association would deliver hay for Indians to line their tipis, but that practice ended before long.  On certain days, they gave out boiling meat, watermelon, loaves of white bread as provisions for the Indian village.  When we’d dress up and go out in the arena, we each collected a genuine silver dollar for the day’s effort.  Those dollars were burning up in our pockets and had to be disposed of fast.   There used to be a swimming pool just outside the Indian village.  We could actually rent swimsuits there. 

Out in the arena in those days, the 1960s, females did not mix with the men dancers.  Women assembled in an outer circle.  During the war dance, girls would take turns dancing war dance-style for a dozen steps or so, unless of course they were frozen with timidity.  It was traumatic to be waist-high and thus eye-level with the bare flanks of the old male dancers who weren’t wearing union suits under their regalia.  Then too, some dancers had drunk some bravery and were extra fierce. 

How we suffered for their drinking as we broke camp Sunday.  Preachers would come on the extra-loud p.a. system and exhort us to reform and change our lives.  Women would get on the mic and give testimony about their fallen lives that were now picked up.  It was torture and torment, especially the singing.  How we wished they spoke Latin like at our church.

 

DAVID DOUGLAS

David Douglas portrayal

David Douglas, the Scottish botanist, traversed the Columbia River Plateau in 1825-1827.  He wrote about an encounter near the Celilo Falls or the “Great Falls” in June 1825, when his party was threatened by Indians.

“Just at this time a chief of the Kyeuuse tribe and three of his young men, who are the terror of all other tribes west of the mountains and great friends of the white people, as they call them, stepped in and settled the matter in a few words without any further trouble.  This very friendly Indian, who is the finest figure of a man that I have seen, standing nearly 6 feet 6 inches high, accompanied us a few miles up the river, where we camped for the night, after being remunerated by Mr. McLeod for his friendship—I being King George’s Chief or the Grass Man, as I am called.  I bored a hole in the only shilling I had, one which has been in my pocket since I left London, and, the septum of his nose being perforated, I suspended it to it with a brass wire.  This was to him the great seal of friendship.  After smoking, he returned to the Indian village and promised that he would not allow us to be molested.”  David Douglas, March 24, 1826, Journal.

This is similar to what the artist Paul Kane would eventually write about his encounter in 1847, “These Indians, the Kye-use, resemble the Walla-Wallas very much.  They are always allies in war, and their language and customs are almost identical, except that the Kye-use Indians are far more vicious and ungovernable.”  Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West.

It’s interesting to catch a glimpse of the ancestors through the eyes of itinerant scientists and artists of the period.  Their occupations should give them some credence for accuracy in observation.  They were firsthand witnesses, however transient they were.  Some contemporary scholars discount the likelihood that Cayuse Indians had much influence on neighboring Tribes. 

Douglas wrote about how Indians perceived him as well.  “My canoe-men and guides were much surprised to see me make an effervescent draught and drink it boiling, as they thought it.  They think there are good and bad spirits, and that I belong to the latter class, in consequence of drinking boiling water, lighting my tobacco pipe with my lens and the sun, and they call me Olla-piska, which in the Chenook tongue signifies fire.  But above all, to place a pair of spectacles on the nose is beyond all their comprehension; they immediately place the hand tight on the mouth, a gesture of dread or astonishment.”

Douglas writes offhandedly about killing a white-headed eagle and eating it for dinner.  He was always blasting animals out of the air, then finding them too damaged to preserve.  He was a big collector of species both flora and fauna.  He built quite a body of work categorizing all sorts of things.  He went through many privations just like the Indians, such as sore sand-blasted eyes, which he treated with drops of opium.  After leaving the Columbia River, he ended up in Hawaii where he died at the age of 35 a few years later.

INTANGIBLES WOVEN IN TWINE

About the significance of Indian basketweaving, the Burke Museum intoned,“While it is an ancient art, basketry is a tradition which continues to thrive today.  In the past, basket making was the domain of women.  Today, both men and women practice basketry, although it remains a predominantly female art.  Contemporary weavers, like their mothers and grandmothers before them, often achieve positions of great respect in their communities. …No longer viewed solely as ethnographic specimens or souvenir art, Native-made basketry has entered the realm of fine art.”

One such weaver of the Northwest Coast was the late Bruce (subiyay) Miller of the Skokomish Indian Reservation.   “Subiyay used the metaphors or concepts of the umbilical cord, the living breath, and tree rings to describe the process …. The ‘umbilical’ metaphor stands for the intimate connections … creat[ed] through the weaving – connection to the cedar, to the creative process, to the other participants, and to the teacher. The ‘living breath’ is the spirit or the essence of each person, which is left behind in their work and their interactions with others. As tree rings tell the natural history of the environment (rainfall, drought, sunlight, chronological age) and of the tree itself, the practice of Native traditions from one generation to the next creates a human history. If humans are in synch with their environment, their histories (or their ‘tree rings’) overlap and are integrated.” (Seattle Art Museum, Tree People film documentary)

The following account, entitled Creation of the Yakima World, was related to Major J.W. MacMurray in 1884 or 1885 by Coteeakun, son of Kamiakin. Coteeaukun was a friend and assistant of Smohalla, the prophet of the dreamers.

“In the beginning of the world, all was water.  Whee-me-me-ow-ah, the Great Chief above, lived in the sky, above the water, all alone. When he decided to make the world, he went down to the shallow places and began to throw up great handfuls of mud. Thus he made the land.

He piled some of the mud up so high that it froze hard and made the mountains. The rain when it came was turned into ice and snow on top of the high mountains….

The Great Chief above made trees grow on the earth, and also roots and berries. He made a man out of a ball of mud and told him what he should do.  He should get fish from the waters, and deer and other game in the forests.  When the man became lonely the Great Chief above made a woman to be a companion to him and told her what she should do.  He taught her how to dress skins, and how to make baskets out of bark and roots which he showed her how to find.  He taught her which berries to gather for food and how to pick them and dry them. He showed her how to cook the salmon and the game which the man brought.

One time when she was asleep, she had a dream. In her dream she wondered what more she could do to please the man. She prayed to the Great Chief above for help. He answered her prayer by blowing his breath on her and giving her something which she could not see or hear, smell or touch. This invisible something was preserved in a basket.  Through it, the first woman taught her daughters and granddaughters the designs sand skills which had been taught her.”

(Excerpted from T.E. Sanders, W.W. Peek, Eds., Literature of the American Indian,  Encino:  Glencoe Publishing, Inc.,1973.)

A TIME FOR CELEBRATING

WILDHORSE POW WOW

I have only one heart and one tongue—Howlish Wampo, June 1877

The pow-wow world of modern Native American singing and dance competition is said to be ‘pan-Indian.’  Pow-wow is like a broad cross-cultural theater.  Specialized powwow dances and songs originated in specific tribes but became generalized in practice among many tribes.  For example, it’s said the jingle dance originated in the eastern woodlands as a women’s medicine dance for healing.  Grass dance came from the plains tribes for the preparation of the ceremonial grounds.  Both have become popular forms of dance on the pow-wow scene.  Plains Indian culture, styles, songs, and regalia seem to have been co-opted as the most accessible social intercourse among many Tribes.  All the way from the coast to the southwest, plains style pow wows are held. 

Among Plateau tribes, the paaxam or war dance was to honor the battle participants and formally witness their stories.  Females didn’t join in war dances unless they were veterans.  On the pow-wow grounds, such taboos are lifted, and it’s encouraged for everybody to join in.  The powwow is a time for celebration when people are released from everyday restrictions.  In the old days, powwow season followed the harvest time.  It was a reward for a season of hard work to be able to go out among the people.

Some things stay the same, such as the ceremonial whip man and whip woman who regulate the dancers.  Dancers generally hold eagle feathers up, whereas dancers from elsewhere may mimic sweeping the floor with their eagle feather fans.  Plateau Indians use the golden eagle feathers.  There used to be rock stands out and about where men would hide and pluck out feathers when eagles landed for a scavenger snack.

Dancers used to get ‘initiated’ on the dance floor.  It was not automatic that someone could just start publically dancing but they would make a formal entry with the sponsorship of their family.   Then when mourning families had sat out for a year, they would hold a rejoining and pay for the right to rejoin the community and get back on the dance floor.

Not only is there pan-Indianism in the powwow world, but there has also been a regional blending of cultures even among inland Plateau tribes.  Singers used to sing in more natural voices, but it became popular on the pow-wow circuit for high voices.  Singers must strain their voices hitting unnatural ranges unless they know how to take care of their voices.  More often than not, they’re probably soothing their throats with cigarettes.  The singing is the main attraction.  The very best singers create that watery liquid quality, an unearthly sound.  It’s polyrhythmic, several voices singing the same song in their own way.

FROM LEGEND TIME

TAMASTSLIKT GOBO, TRAIL FROM THE EAST

Throughout the museum, you may have noticed the series of lit panels with coyote silhouettes and paw prints that display excerpts from stories.  Most panels contain coyote-themed excerpts but there is an exception.  The panel at the Oregon Trail exhibit reads, “white people with hair on their faces will come from the rising sun, you people must be careful.”  It resembles a source in the Wishram Texts, an early 1900s ethnography.  According to Franz Boas, an elderly woman named Sophia Klickitat related such an event in ‘A Prophecy of the Coming of the Whites,’ that she claimed happened at the Cascades long before the coming of the whites.

“Long ago, I believe, the people learned that now whites would soon come.  One old man, I believe, learned of it at night.  Then he dreamt; he saw strange people, they spoke to him, and showed him everything– and he heard something like three or four Indian songs.  In the morning he spoke to all the people.  And then everybody gathered together to hear him,–women, men, children, old men—everybody.  He told the people what he had seen in his sleep at night.  And then they gathered together to hear him; they danced every day and every night.  They were made glad because of his story.

He said:  ‘Soon all sorts of strange things will come.  No longer as before; no longer, as will soon happen, shall we use these things of ours.  They will bring to us everything strange; they will bring to us (something which) you just have to point at anything moving way yonder, and it will fall right down and die.’  As it turned out, it was a gun of which he spoke.  ‘There will be brought to us a bucket for boiling-purposes; no longer will you use your old-fashioned bucket made out of stone.’  As it turned out, they really brought to us what he told the people of.  ‘No longer will you make fire by drilling with sticks as before.’  Still more were they made glad, they danced with energy.  ‘Certain small pieces of wood will be brought to us with which you will make a fire.’  As it turned out, it was matches whereof he spoke.

For days and nights they danced.  They were not at all hungry, truly they did their best.  Everything they saw—ax, hatchet, knife, stove.  ‘Strange people will bring us such things.  White people with mustaches on their faces will come from the east.  Do you people be careful.’  Then indeed they would again jump up and down; they did their best strongly.  And truly things are just so to-day ; now surely the old man dreamt  just that way.  Up to that time there were no cattle at all.  Presently white people brought  them; only farther up there were buffaloes.  Nor were there any horses either, only dogs. Thus long ago did it happen to the people dwelling along the river.”

Since it’s said that horses arrived about 1730, this story must be old, old.  It’s a wonderful story to read in its original rendering.  The flavor is quite different.  As Tessie Williams has said, ‘our people welcomed change.’