When a Way of Life is Dismembered, Re-Member

              Last week I participated in a National Endowment of the Humanities Landmarks workshop on the Grand Coulee Dam (“The Intersection of Modernity and Indigenous Cultures”).

              I was drawn to the workshop after trying for several years to convey to students why coastal and plateau Salish peoples are so affected by the health of regional salmon. Dams in particular are featured in shared texts by Elizabeth Woody and Lawney Reyes (Seven Hands, Seven Hearts and Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice), as Woody describes Dulles Dam drowning the region’s most productive, sacred fishery, Celilo Falls, and Reyes describes effects on his family when the Grand Coulee Dam turned Kettle Falls into Lake Roosevelt. I tried to capture the cataclysmic difference between the bustling fishing sites and the calm, warm waters that replaced them, and year after year I failed to do so.

              Last week, I spent time with thirty other teachers in Spokane, Kettle Falls, and Grand Coulee with academics and speakers from Washington and Arizona universities and the Nez Perce Tribe, the Spokane Tribe, and Bands of the Colville Nation. I was especially affected around the central theme of harnessing nature for power, but also around foods, and the stories that connect us.

              In the last few years, I’ve tried to teach more local and Native American history and culture; people from Yakama Nation talked to my classes the importance of food:

              I planned with Yakama Peacekeepers a weekend retreat that would include a day devoted to foods and stories about them. The plan was this: In the morning, some students would go to the fields to join in harvesting root vegetables and greens, others would help dress a deer that hunters were to have taken for the occasion, and the rest would work together in the kitchen to prepare foods meaningful to their own families and traditions. The intention was to eat together and tell stories about our foods. Then Covid happened and the weekend retreat did not.

              Then last year, we brought a class to the Toppenish longhouse, where prayers of gratitude and blessings of welcome and descriptions of provenance encompassed indigenous foods before we ate them. On the bus drive across the plateau, our guide and teacher Polly pointed to a place seemingly nowhere that led to the same yellowed hills we were seeing everywhere, and she told us, Just past there, in this season (Spring), the ladies go to gather camas roots—private property but also a “usual and accustomed gathering” place to which treaty and the Boldt decision allowed them access.

              There was something here, something important, and we visitors all felt it; but I still didn’t have enough understanding to convey myself what was important about food to local native peoples.

              This last Tuesday, Laurie Arnold of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a professor at Gonzaga, helped me to not only feel the importance of food but also how it is connected to every element of daily living, coexisting within rhythms and seasons of these lands and waters, binding food preparations to community, memory, humility, expansive care.

              Dr. Arnold began by telling us she travels yearly to Kettle Falls, where a salmon ceremony still takes place. When she grew up, this occurred at St. Paul’s, one of the remaining sites from the missionary era, but it now takes place by the water: they sing, they offer prayers, and they bang stones together to recreate what salmon used to hear when they swam over the singing rocks of Kettle Falls on the roaring Columbia River. Salmon are not a resource, another speaker, Allen Pinkham, told us earlier: they are a life source. The fact that people still go to the shores of the becalmed Lake Roosevelt for a salmon ceremony when salmon no longer run is a statement of grief, and a connection to the past, and also a statement of hope and continued care. Whether the salmon can make it there or not, we want to honor the salmon, Arnold said—the first kin to say I am here for you and will sustain you. It is our responsibility to give thanks and protect our cousins the salmon.

              A similar intentionality of movement, harvesting, and preservation occurs along the plateau’s seasonal round, and this affects everything: not only diet, but social and spiritual life as well. During camas-gathering season, the root chief convenes the root ceremony, and then women dig roots and put them in baskets around their bellies, chit-chatting with each other all through. The roots are cleaned, peeled, and readied for preservation. They dig a big pit, ten by ten feet perhaps, and the roots bake there, underground for days, which is a big community event, too: a great time for connection. People work all year, and they socialize all year too.

              This management and cultivation of the land is highly organized and represents deep, ancestral knowledge. Look at these structures built with tule reeds, Dr. Arnold says, showing us slides of shelters and fish traps with shared geometry. The tule reeds are hollow, so when it’s hot and dry, the reeds are open and air gets through and hot air breathes out; when it rains, the damp expands the reeds and keeps out the wet. This is very old technology. These are a people who understood where they lived and how they lived there. The homelands foster people and care for them, Dr. Arnold said, and in turn, Plateau peoples find their identities and spiritual practices from their homelands, which it is their responsibility to protect.

              So what happens when the seasonal round is broken? What happens when someone takes away your food—how do you get it now? A store? Food is not just about food, but about community, about co-existence, about deep practice.

              In the plateau, settlement didn’t really happen until the 1850s, which is called BC time—before missionaries. Once they came, change happened fast, in the span of a generation and a half. Lives were changed entirely. The dam represents an entire transfer of wealth. The Grand Coulee Dam destroyed so much plant life on the plateau. Crossing Lake Roosevelt is far more difficult than crossing the Columbia River as it was before. Just trying to get at the foods there is now trespassing. Colville peoples and the graves of their ancestors were plucked out of their homelands. And the seasonal round was stopped—the loss of access to ancestral foods is a nutritional, cultural, and spiritual disruption. An economic and power boom occurred locally and across the West, but the Plateau peoples bore the cost in ways that can’t be assessed or compensated.

              However, Dr. Arnold also emphasized growing localized success in co-management, and larger co-management—with healthy ecosystems benefiting all—within reach. The Upper Columbia United Tribes and Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission have been in collaboration to get more indigenous voices involved for cultural and ecological consultation to serve people better. And people are moving closer to recovering practices that remain meaningful.

              So when we are talking about the importance of food, it involves connection to community, to past and future, to interrelationships with land and the animal peoples, to stewardship of and gratitude to all of these things. I can go to a store and pick something up for dinner; but so many processes go into the event of every can and vegetable stalk and box of pasta and ding dong, that such connection is wholly abstracted. Yet there are ways I can learn the blessings.

 * * * * *

              The other thread I want to pull from last week is about story. Randy Lewis, Wenatchi band of Colville, went out of his way to tell us he wasn’t a storyteller, and that, at 80 years old and recovering from stroke, his brain is a snow globe. That’s what he said: But everything he said suddenly came together like a laser gathering light.

              He started by telling us that he learned to fish at Celilo Falls when he was five. White people would watch all the dip netting on platforms from the road above the Falls and try to buy the fresh-caught salmon. Lewis’s mother, Mary Marchand, was among those dip-netting, and Tommy Thompson, the salmon chief and headman of Wyam, told the men not to hassle her for it—she’s feeding many kids—and when you see her, you better give her a smile. At five years old, Randy learned from women how to dry the fish in the sun, and he took fish that were to be thrown back and dried them, and sold them as salmon to white onlookers, earning adult wages at $13 a day. This is how Randy Lewis would tell a story, with sparkle and mischief. Then, after giving us this image of lived experience at Celilo Falls, he changed the mood without changing his tone:

              He was told he had to be there at Celilo Falls the day the Dulles Dam would wall up the river; it would be an important event, their Ceremony of Tears (the three days mourning event that occurred 17 years before, in 1940, with the drowning of Kettle Falls). And, he said, when the song over the rocks was silenced, the women keened and the men turned away.

              When I was a child, Lewis told us, there were four dams. Now there are fourteen. Everything’s been dammed. A lot of the land used to be green, and we owe it to the salmon, who fertilize the earth. We would never have been able to dream of a day when the salmon would be extinct. That we have salmon at all now is due to the tribes’ efforts.

              Storytellers, Lewis told us, animate what was and the way things are. Western society indoctrinates people not to believe or see the spirit world that we nevertheless sometimes catch out of the corner of our eye, but native kids continue to see this world throughout their lives. Storytellers made the spirit world easier to see. Aunts and uncles and cousins would kneel down on a quilt and just let it all go. All animals—the first peoples—have a spark from the creator, and they all have medicine and knowledge. The elders would sit there and start humming, and then the words would come out. My aunt said we learn our industriousness from the beaver; and all of a sudden, we realized we were hearing a song, and my aunt looked just like a beaver, singing. My grandmother, who could kill you in more ways than you could die, brought us outside and had me gather the sticky mud. Then she started telling stories about the creator bringing first peoples to life, while she, at the same time, was sculpting little characters from the mud. We existed out of time, hearing stories this way. Storytelling is rich like that.

              But it’s more than this. There’s much in the seasonal round, in the wheel of life, the circle of life—whatever you want to call it—that has been broken in this last century and a half. We were an ancient people and we never had to leave. And now the ways of life are, piece by piece, broken off that wheel. But then we come together, and we share our stories of what life was like and how we lived: we patch our souls back together as we speak and as we listen, and we find our connections again. The stories are important because when a way of life is dismembered, you can re-member it.

              Here’s what you can do, Lewis told us: Learn a place. Learn the place where you live. Go backwards. Who lived there before you? Find their stories. Add your own story to it: How did you come to this place? That is how you work on making the world and spirit inside you whole.

              That line—when a way of life is dismembered, you should re-member it—was a thunderclap for me. All week, learning about ceremonies, gatherings, descriptions of how different peoples lived from and learned from fish, plants, and animals, other people, the thread was in stories that recall, that acknowledge, that offer wisdom about ecological and communal practice. These stories are, currently, dismantling dams on the Klamath River, and soon enough, the Snake River too; but they also connect people to themselves and to the world around us. Much is broken. How much of this we can heal soon is doubtful. But we can work on healing, and we can kindle our spirits.

              Many kids these days are afraid of a looming climate apocalypse, and this feeds a despair I try to address as a teacher and adult in their world. They would do well to listen to the stories of indigenous peoples around the world, who have already endured a catastrophic apocalypse: as they’ve come together to recover practices and revive languages and to tell stories, they’ve adapted, found joy and connection, and they’ve endured.

              Randy Lewis said as a child he was about to kill a spider when his mother told him stop: we learn how to weave from that spider. That’s us, she said: that web she’s made, and all the strands in it. A spider uses that web to survive. We didn’t put the strands there and we don’t have a right to remove them. If a strand is broken, we have to work to replace all those strands so the world is healthy again.