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 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.
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