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Stafford, K. 2000April 9. Keeping Oregon's cultural roots alive. Forum. The Sunday Oregonian, pages C1, C2.
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Partially Excerpted from the Sunday Oregonian: "Some years ago i took my daughter to the Root Feast at the Longhouse in Warm Springs. This spring custom -- when the Indian people give thanks for the nourishing roots and other foods of the earth -- may be 10,000 years old. There was a great generosity when we arrived: danching and drumming and singing, a prayer in Sahaptin, the Warm Springs language, by an elder.
Then the native bounty of oregon was spread before us all: chokecherries, huckleberries, camas root, wappato, bitterroot, salmon, venison, and the rest. We feasted! And then we all filed around the Longhouse and heard a final prayer. Everyone started packing to go.
Grateful, I wanted to pay, somehow to donate, something. I asked around, "Where can I contribute?" No one would look me in the eye. When I asked my friend Verben a Green, she only said, "Kim, did you get enough?" She tried to give me more salmon, wrapped in foil.
Finally, an old woman stood before me. "You want to contribute?" she said. "Yes." She looked into my eyes. "You will find a way." She turned away and disappeared. That was years ago. I guess I am still trying to find a way. For Oregon is beautiful, and fragile, and her people live deep in cultural heritage that could soon be gone. We preserve wilderness in the high country; we make laws to preserve farmland; we brag about the beauty of oregon. but how do we save our cultural identity before we become a faceless port in a global economy? I am not talking just about history with a capital H, though I value this. i am talking about the lore and language of oregon people of all kinds - Indian, pioneer, immigrant, child. Ranchers, loggers, old-ways fisher folk. I am not taliking about some kind of vague aesthetic loss, but the deep wound you feel when essential things are killed. There are cultural imperatives among us like rare birds our children may never hear sing.I am talking about tall wooden barns, cathedrals of hay. Will anyone every build another one? I am talking about the 200 songs memorized by Portland's Hmong Singer boua Xou Moua, a walking library of tradition from his native laos. How many songs will his grandchildren know? I am talking about the detailed knowledge of healing plants known to Eva Castellanoz of Myssa. Where are her students. I am talking about the cowboy poems from a fast-passing rahching life, a pungent woods-worker's sense of the forest, and even the enigmatic proverbs such as one I learned last weekj from Eastern Oregon: "Your cat may hagve had kittens in the oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits! What a strange treasure that is.
Could there be a way for the whole state to begin to learn and enjoy and live by these local ways of knowing Oregon? If the answer is no, then Oregon will lose its children to sprawling cities. Then they will say of us what they say back east, "So, you're from New Jersey- which exit?" Among the e-mails on my screen at work, several long ones relate to myh role as special adviserto a state task force on cultural development. The Legislature has asked us to: Imagine ways to preserve oregon arts and culture, and make them available to everyone; promote efficient cooperation among culture workers statewide; develop some kind of Oregon cultural trust. At a series of meetings around the state, we want to ask, how do we save what we have left. How could something we might call "Oregon Cultural Renaissance" become the human equivalent to this state's intense beauty? ........ The task force has me thinking about one thread in particular of oregon's cujltural life, one example of a cultural imperative in our time: the native Indian languages of this place. Some years ago, at the Fishtrap Writers Gathering in Wallowa county, my wife and I had the good fortune to take a Nez Perce language class taught by Horace Axtel. We sat in a circle on squeaky folding chairs and listed as Horace and his wife, Andrea, began to tell about the origin language of that place, the Wallowa country. "You know," Horace began, "all the birds around here speak Nez Perce. If you listen, you will notice they say their own names in nez Perce. And they like saying Nez Perce words so much, most of them say their names twice. The robin, in the evening if you listen, it says its name: Wispoxpox. That's how you say robin in Nez Perce by listening: Wispoxpox." There was a soft knot of wind in his throat, a sound more like birdsong than any English word I knew. We tried to say the word. horace had a lot of fun watchign us try, oru heads bobbing forward as we imitated his pronunciation: Wispoxpox? Wispoxpox? "You look like a bunch of storks," he said, "trying to drink."
And as Horace laughed with kindness at our childlike attempts, I was struck by his forgiveness. For he had told us earlier how his grandmother, as a child in the Chief Joseph band, had been driven away from Wallowa Valley in 1877, never to return. As an old lady, he said, she cried every year of his childhood, remembering her home. One rainy day each winter she would open a trunk with things from her childhood, and cry.
"How can you not be angry with us?" I said to him. "I hear no bitterness in your voice." "It is good." Horace said, "To be here together." What about the Indian languages of oregon, as just one example of cultural imperative? Strangely, this has been a quiet but abiding quetion for nearly 200 years. Lewis and Clark's collection of Indian vocabularies was lost when they returned to St. Louis. All we have is the list of English words Thomas Jefferson gave them as basis for their interview with each tribe:to strike, to kill, to dance, to jump, to fall, to break, to bend, yes, no.
I saw this list at Fort Clatsop when I was a child, and it haunted me. How did the Nez Perce people say those words? How did the Yakama, the Molalla, the Chinook? The Paiute, Takelma, Kalapooya? some elders still known, and some books hold later vocabularities, but the treasures of the old languages survive in hidden ways, and are fragile.
...................... The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs has given to each family on the reservation a beautiful empty book, a family journal. What if every home in Oregon had such a place to be curious together, to gather language, lore, history and creative arts? Maybe it is a book, a Web site, a class.....
Kim Stafford teaches at Lewis & Clark College, where he directs the Northwest Writing Institute, drawing on his backroad travel in Oregon. He is the author of "Having Everything Right: Essays of Place" and "A Thousand Friends of Rain: New and Selected Poems."
Warm Springs tribal elder Bernice Mitchell, 80, uses her "cu'pun," or digging tool, to unearth roots from the reservation's ancestral meadow. Her great-granddaughter and namesake, Bernice Mitchell, 13 [right], joins in. The elder Mitchell says they're repeating a cycle that has gone on "since the time of beginning." Nourishing roots are the heart of the Warm Springs tribe's spring Root Feast, which attracts about 1,000 guests.« « Updated: Thursday, January 20, 2011.
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