Closed Captions Audio Described

Researcher Doug Durr discusses traditional ecological knowledge of the Clatsop and neighboring Chinookan peoples of the Oregon coast. He covers estuary harvesting, root and berry cultivation, salmon management, mountain gathering, and oral traditions—including stories about tsunamis and dangerous berries—that encoded survival knowledge across generations.

Transcript

0:09 I
0:13 out.
0:15 I
0:18 Yeah
0:20 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 10 of Voices and the record Discovery 2. Tell you guys a little bit about us so if you haven't joined us before. We are a traveling exhibit. We've been traveling in the trail since January of 2003, and we started out at 12 at Thomas Jefferson's home, made our way westward to the Pacific Ocean, and next year we'll be doing the return trip back to Saint Louis. We'll open up March 13th in Saint Helens, Oregon.
0:45 Um, as well, uh, we call this the enemy voices because we're bringing people from all over the country to do programs for us to tell Lewis and Clark's story along with the Native American story as well the over 50 different tribes they met along the way. Today we have with us Doug who's from the University of Washington, and he's gonna be talking about the classic and the halo living on the land. So please welcome Doug.
1:15 Hello.
1:17 And thank you very much for showing up today. Uh, As I said, my name is Doug Durr, and I'm a researcher with the University of Washington. I work with tribes all over the West. Um, trying to document things like traditional environmental knowledge and, uh, Historical knowledge, knowledge tied to particular places on the landscape.
1:42 And I do this through the University of Washington, through other connections, working directly with American Indian tribes around uh the western part of North America, uh, through the University of Washington, through the University of Victoria, where I met professor as well at the University of Victoria uh School of Environmental Studies.
2:00 And
2:03 The classic though from here of uh the people who lived here. Our particular interest, um, because this is home to me here, this is where I'm from. And uh The part of my family where we have a written record, they washed ashore here in the 1840s. And develop connections with the tribes living here. Uh,
2:25 they wash ashore and actually take up homesteads here in Seaside, just a stone's throw from the large village that was out here. And so we have this long connections going back. And so those connections continue today. And uh we know though that these, these people who are here.
2:47 Classic Primarily, but also the Nehalem or Northern Tilla of people who are up here some of the time, you know people from up north. They were here for a very, very long period of time. They learned a lot about how to live in this place, and there's been a lot that we have learned, we being people from the outside, being my family being researchers have learned from these families, uh,
3:11 about how to live here and how to live here well.
3:15 And so over the years, the class of people, the people who lived here at Seaside and scattered in a number of different directions, and today we have people who Very classic. We went north. Some of them went up across the river. And those people ultimately became part of what we now know as the Chinook nation or the Quinault nation further north, and we had people who got scattered in the south as settlers came through
3:40 and started to move into the area and we ended up going south, and some of those people became part of what became the Solets tribe, the Grand Ronde tribe, and the class of people who are a mixture of people from different communities up and down the coast. And so the class of people today are scattered, the people who lived here, the descendants of the people who lived here are scattered, and yet they're still around.
4:05 In fact, I'd like to ask if there's anybody here who's a descendant of classic Chinook or Tillamook people. Anybody?
4:14 Interesting. the first talk I've given in a while where we haven't had a few of those folks here. There are a lot of them around and even though we tend to think about these people having disappeared, this is what you hear in all the textbooks, the truth is, They survived and they adapted. They married into other tribes, but they also married into the white families coming in from the outside, and they became a seamless part of the community. And today, ironically,
4:38 And when I do the numbers, I see that the uh The number of people living today.
4:45 Who are descended from the communities right here in Seaside is larger than the number of people who are here, who were here when Lewis and Clark were here. They have more living descendants today. That doesn't mean that the, the class of people are all uh living exactly as they did 200 years ago, but they haven't disappeared. They've become part of a much more complex sort of social fabric right there. And so I've had the The uh
5:10 privilege of working with a lot of their, their elders. And working a lot with the written materials, things that their grandparents and great-grandparents told the people who were passing through the area. And so it's on the basis of that information that I talked today about the history of this very immediate area. And this Way of life that is in some ways been swept
5:33 away even if the people themselves carry on today. But I think it's very important if you leave here to, to know that at the very least these people haven't disappeared. It isn't an extinct people like you're reading all the textbooks. We really have descendants all over. Some living here at Seaside, some still practicing certain parts of their cultural tradition.
5:54 But that being said, I'm going to talk a lot about people as they lived in the past. I'm not gonna talk so much about how modern day classes. Drive around in SUVs and go to the grocery store and do things there, though that's what they do. But instead talk a little bit about just how These people live here on the land. We know that there were several large villages
6:18 right here in the seaside area right along the tidal flats right along where the estuaries are, and the people of this area fundamentally were people of that estuary, and estuary is a place where we have the fresh water come down and mix into the ocean and you get water that's a little bit salt, a little bit fresh, all mixed together, and you get all kinds of things happening there. That's where the salmon first come in and where you can catch the salmon.
6:43 That's where the clams are. All the different clams that the class of people here survived on are all found there in that estuary. A lot of other fish that you don't hear as much about flounder. They had distinctive ways of catching flounder right out here. You go out in the mechanical estuary. In the mouth there and you can see all that those shallow areas and the flounder used to be thick there and. Some people can still remember seeing their
7:07 grandmothers go out and catch those fish by coming out and jumping on them. You can actually get them because they're nice flat fish and so you can test them on your feet. And you can hold them until you can reach down the timeline. And so there are all kinds of things like that to be found there. The roots that grow in the tide flats, almost everything that grows in the tide flats has some traditional use. And unfortunately, this time of the year,
7:31 there isn't a lot of those things out out there. There aren't those things out there to see on the landscape. I tried to gather plants to show you and most of the plants I wanted to show you have turned around and washed away because it's the wrong time of the year. Um, and what this means too is that even though Lewis and Clark were here. At this time of the year, observing things very carefully,
7:54 they missed a lot because they were only here for a narrow period of time, which is ordinarily a very wet rainy period of time, which I'll have to take my word for that.
8:03 And so All the things they needed really clustered around that estuary. We have this slew edge grows on the slews right along those tidal flats, also called the basket sedge. People use this to make basketry and the roots can be used for that, but also these pieces can be stripped and woven together and turned into nice mats and that kind of thing.
8:26 So part of why I'm standing down here is so if anybody's interested I think can hand these things around so you can get a feel for them. Sluice edge, that's right, or basket sedge. Carros are not for those who are taking notes. It's uh. Uh A plant that grows all over. We have a couple of types of edges that grow plants and the roots of these to this day, there are some tribal elders who still take care of these plants.
8:51 They go into there and they churn up the soil around where these plants grow. They pull out only the roots they need, and then they churn up the soil some more all around the perimeter. What that does is it allows those roots to expand without a lot of friction, without hitting rocks, without getting solid dirt. And what that does is make nice long, long roots, and those roots are the best ones to use for making baskets. And so there's a lot of that kind of knowledge that still persists today.
9:16 The tops can also be baited various things too, but uh that there's the management of the land really is tied to taking care of those roots, making sure that those were. A lot of food plants can be found there in the tide class as well. One that I can't show you here, but which is all over, is a plant that the hale people, at least we know that, uh, I don't know what it was called in class. I heard the hale people called it Yitsuka, and it's a root that
9:40 uh comes up as a flower kind of like a buttercup, and you'll see it out in the tha flask here. If you know how to cook the roots, and this is about the right time to gather, it tastes just like a sweet potato, and it was one of the primary starch foods that was going to offset all that and clams and everything else that people ate here, very important plants. And when you go out at the right time of the year and you look out over those tide flats, it's like,
10:03 it's like you're in your SUV driving to the grocery store. It's everything you need out there. You have all the plants. To eat all the plants to make your baskets, all the plants you need to do medic medicinal work, all those things out there on the tide flats.
10:20 And they're on the tide flaps too.
10:23 People traditionally fished around here and up and down this coast, we have some hint of what the, how that works. There's one elder I had the opportunity to work with, Joe Scowell, who's, who was one of the last people raised in the community that was sometimes called Squawtown, Hobsonville down on Northern Tillamook Bay. And uh some of his ancestors came from the village here in Seaside, but by the time that the 20th century rolled around,
10:48 a lot of them were moving north and south, and these people went south down to Tillamook Bay.
10:54 And that family has stories about how hereditary chiefs in that community would take care of the fish as they would come up through those tide flats. They had Strong beliefs that these fish We're sentient beings like ourselves willing to make the decision to come up and, and to give their life so that we might live here.
11:17 And so they didn't want to disturb that. They didn't want to offend the fish by catching too many fish, by using the fish wastefully. And so the hereditary chiefs would walk up and down along the shoreline. As people were fishing and they would regulate that. They would tell people when they were going to set in the nets they had. They were, they would tell people when they would stop fishing, when they would pull those nets out,
11:42 when they would stop fishing because they knew that they had reached a point where they could take care of their own needs for food, they could take care of their needs for trade, but they weren't going to take much more than that because they knew that if they did that. According to their traditions, the fish would choose not to come back. Not so much because you would overexploit them, which is how our modern day resource managers might try to explain that same thing, but because the fish
12:07 had felt violated by that, that it's overstepped our bounds that out, that gone outside of our relationship that we have with those fish. And we know that probably over a very long period of time that these people had the opportunity to witness. Cause and effect They saw people a couple of villages down and catch too many fish, and fish don't come back much after you keep pulling out too many fish year after year after year.
12:32 And those fish don't come back and you learn that and that becomes part of your oral tradition, part of your stories that you then pass on to your children and your grandchildren to make sure that they're OK, to make sure that not only do you maintain that relationship, but to make sure that your family survives, that they have food to eat in generations ahead. So it's important that that knowledge gets passed along within these traditions and in fact,
12:55 Doing the work I do up and down the coast, it's been amazing for me to encounter a few, uh, I worked with a few elders who were raised very traditionally, raised by families where they didn't speak English. Raised by families that intentionally went out of their way to not to teach the children things about the outside world. And uh I, I've sat there with elders who Who are just from a little ways off the coast speaking in
13:19 broken English about how their great grandparents taught them.
13:25 That there were certain things to do with the fish. One of the things I do in addition to working with tribes is I help with salmon habitat restoration work, and we know that we can take very good care of the streams. We can stop all the fishing. We can make those the water quality just perfect, get everything right. And still sometimes the fish don't come back. And one of the reasons the fish don't come back is because if the stream has lost all of its salmon.
13:53 There are no salmon carcasses in the water to feed the little bugs. And if there are no little bugs, there's nothing to feed the little fish. It's a very interesting thing, salmon leave here. They're little tiny fish like this. They swim out in the ocean. They come back like this. So they're feeding on things out there in the water, shrimp and little fish, and all of that stuff that they accumulate in their bodies comes back up with them,
14:18 and it comes into these streams, and they spawn and they die and their bodies are used to feed. All the little things in the stream. We found that hundreds of different species depend on those carcasses for their survival. And one of the species that depends on those carcasses for their survival are the young salmon themselves because they eat the bugs that eat their own. Every one family.
14:42 And so we have now gotten to the point of salmon habitat restoration where we take carcasses from places like uh seafood operations, take those carcasses and put them in the water. And the fish start to come back because there's something that you're getting the nutrients kickstarted within that system. And so it's fascinating me to work with tribal elders who say to me,
15:05 And again, great grandparents. Born in the mid-19th century, who never heard anything about this modern science, they will tell their grandchildren.
15:16 We've been told that we have to put the carcasses back in the water.
15:21 We do that because the fish need that so they can come back. Their physical body becomes part of the body of the next generation. If we don't do that, the fish won't be able to come back. And if you don't do that, they'll be offended and they will refuse to come back.
15:38 And that's interesting because this is cutting edge science I'm talking about with this fish car and stuff. And here we have a confirmation of voice coming in from the 19th century to tell us how to do it right. And for me, that's exciting because I can take that back to these resource specialist modern day scientists and say, look what the tribe builders are telling us. They're telling us we have to do these certain things in relation to the fish.
16:01 And most people who come from a natural resource background think that we're going to tell them, well you have to chant certain words and spin in circles 3 times. That's not the kind of knowledge that's coming down to me from these people. It's very practical knowledge. It's how do you keep your family living? How do you survive? How do you keep your children alive? How do you keep your grandchildren alive? So that's the kind of knowledge that gets passed down through these oral traditions. It's a form of scientific knowledge,
16:26 but it's being passed down in a society where you don't have writing. So you teach children these things at a very early age and teach them how to navigate those things and, and to survive.
16:38 Also down here around the uh
16:42 Well, I'll double back to that point a little bit. I think that that's an important point in terms of how to navigate and how to survive, but I should move up now from the tidal flat, move up a little bit higher, the edge of the tidal flash, that area between. The ocean and the big forests back here. And we know that people right here in this area, class of people. Telling the people
17:06 you know, people all took care of the land in various ways. One of those ways was to burn. The plants out from along the edge of That contact point between the forest and the high flats. And we know that the areas around the perimeters of the big villages, as you went further out, those areas were full of good berry picking areas, areas where people took care of those berry patches
17:31 and made sure that those things grow well. A lot of the berries that you find around here. will do OK. They will survive if they're down under the forest canopy. But they're not going to thrive. They're not going to uh put on many berries. They're not going to really Do, uh, put out enough berries you can actually feed your own family. And so what we see here is that there's a tradition of burning.
17:56 The edges of the forest, going out and starting those fires and clearing back those edges a little bit. And so we have stories from the elders passed down about all around the edges of what is now seaside as you go around back along the edges of the hills, sort of in that area between the tidal flats and back in the trees, all that area being excellent berry picking at one time. Now it's an excellent place to go. My,
18:21 my house, I guess. A lot of suburban yards there and now bear areas are kind of few and far between. But those areas were very important and there's still places around today where you can go and see evidence of that if you walk across the land here. In Eola Park, there's some, some little areas where you'll still see berries growing. And it seems strange because the forest should be covering it, but it's not.
18:44 The forest is back a little ways. And the forest is moving in slowly taking over those areas now because nobody's taking care of that land. But you can still find those places. Nanni Mountain, you go a little further south and Oswald West State Park south of us here. As you drive through that area, if you're heading south on Highway 101, you look back on the south side. That hill slope still doesn't have any trees on it.
19:08 Trees are moving in fast because nobody's burning it anymore, but that whole hill slope used to be burned, and there are excellent places there still to go pick thimbleberries and things like that because people took care of those places for years and years and years knowing that those plants would come back up.
19:25 Also in those areas where some, some plants like Camus. I wanted to show you one of those, but You know, it's one of these plants that was.
19:35 Said to be among the most important. In the diets of all the people along the north coast, as a plant that's very pretty. It has a blue flower that comes up in the springtime and it's so pretty, in fact, the gardeners buy it now at old catalogs right there with their tulips, and they put those in their yard and as blue flowers come up and they, they're spectacular. They come up for just a little while when you go to see and drop back down. And the bowl
20:00 is edible and if you bake that, you know how to do that, right? It's very sweet, very tasty. And a lot of the elders around the turn of the previous century.
20:11 Reported anthropologists coming through that the campus was the most important, one of their most important plants right up there with that deco root. I was talking about in the tide flats. And also, this plant grew right along the edges, sort of wet margins where people were burning to take care of it. And why I had all this buildup to tell you about this great canvas plant is because I can't find you any to show you anymore because they were taking care of it and nobody's out there anymore taking care of it.
20:35 Nobody's burning those places to keep the forest back.
20:39 And the places where it was growing have also been built over and today Camus is an extremely rare plant on this part of the coast. Yes It is rare enough that people say from the Nature Conservancy, other organizations that take care of rare plants, be kind of excited when they see it around here. It's a plant that's been rapidly disappearing and yet 100 years ago, elders were saying they remember, remember it was a staple plant.
21:03 They knew all about how to dig it, where you could go get it, fields that used to be full of it. Early explorers coming through here described these meadows and blue flowers in the springtime that were spectacular. And without people taking care of those places, without burning back the forest vegetation along the edges. And people coming in, building over the tops of those places, bringing in livestock early on. Pigs love cans. They get in,
21:28 they boot up to those canvas bulbs, they dig up the ground and they eat up the patches. And in fact, in some parts of the, the Northwest. Settlers coming in and reoccupying those camps patches actually started off wars. They are fairly significant battles that took place in eastern Oregon when tribes canvas plots that they've taken care of for generation after generation were being uh. Occupied by people coming in with livestock. For the, for the outsider,
21:53 they would see those things, they say, what a great meadow. It's a nice natural spot. I'll set my, set my animals loose, not realizing what kind of investment of labor and personal energy and all those things that went into that particular piece of land that looks so nice, looks like a nice natural meta.
22:15 Hm
22:17 The Wapato, the Wapato.
22:21 That's a good question. The Wapato.
22:24 Doesn't really grow down here on the coast. It grows, a few of them grow here on the coast, but the big Wapoo grounds were further up the Columbia River. The Wapato is a fascinating plant even though it's not from this area, I'll go ahead and tell you a little bit about it, because it's so close. For
22:42 That's right. And it was available in large quantities through trade from just upriver. The real central core of Waapito gathering along this entire coast is the zone from about Portland to Longview.
22:57 What some people call Wapoo Valley Historically. That's another plant that's becoming. Increasingly rare, although here and there on places like Say's Island outside of Portland, you still see Wapato growing in some of these natural squids. And Wapato, it's actually um Chinese food, you have uh
23:18 Little white things, uh, water chestnut.
23:23 Is a relative of that, uh, Sagittarius. They're both the same.
23:28 No, they, but they're both the same genus. And so if you want an idea of what that's like, it's kind of, uh, people call it the Indian potato around here sometimes, but it's the same, it's the same basic size, little round bulb that that grows in wetland areas, uh, up on the Columbia. In fact, it grows, it likes a very specific kind of wetland area. Which is a really interesting thing. It's one of the things the science books I was talking
23:51 about estuaries here where the salt water all mixes in. Textbooks never talk with you much about intertidal freshwater wetlands, but that's in fact what the Wapato really likes cause the Columbia River. It hits that incoming tide, and what happens is you get saltwater in the mouth of the Columbia River, but the further up you go, no longer get much saltwater, but what you get is the tide is still affecting the river level. So the river all the way up
24:16 into Portland is going up and down and up and down with the tide even though there's no saltwater that gets that far up. And so the Wapato is sort of uniquely suited for that kind of environment where you have the water levels going up and down, up and down. It's actually a plant that can grow right in the water. So you have to bulb it in the mud and then a long stem coming up and the leaves and a pretty little white flower up at the top.
24:41 And those were gathered by the Chinookan people from just a little bit upriver and classics down here had families up there. They had kinship ties to the people all the way up the river and trade ties and everything else. And so they traded things down here that they had for Wapoo from just up the river. They were, they were slightly different people, but they spoke more or less the same language.
25:04 And uh they have these kinds of connections. And so people down here, for example, would have things they would gather, whale oil was an important commodity. And seal meat and seal oil, things you can get down here along the waterfront. They also made very good canoes down here. Sometimes those are traded further up river, and they would trade those for a variety of different things in Wapito, one of those things they could get. Also, for that matter,
25:27 some of the people from down here seem to have had, uh, kind of de facto plant gathering rights upriver because of those family ties. And so they, you actually hear stories clear into the late 19th century. Of people jumping in canoes from all the communities along the coast and going up the Columbia, both to fish salmon and some of the falls, all the way up to uh Bonneview.
25:53 But also gathering motos that came back down through. And so it wasn't a plant that really grow, grew much here, but it was one that was close enough and they had access to. And so it was a very important part of the trading economy here and those who probably pick up on that. Um, it's also a very good plant to store, so. Most of the plants that Lewis and Clark are talking about, they're not actually seeing people out gathering much of this stuff because it's the wintertime and it's not the time to gathers,
26:18 it's not the time to gather most of these plants, but they are seeing those plants coming through and those wpao are being traded all up and down the river all through the wintertime, taking care of people, so.
26:35 OK, right.
26:40 It can be propagated here, yeah, it does well in the settings, so you can put it in if you have a pond in your yard, you can get something going with a nice muddy base. If if the water isn't too stagnant, you need a little bit of flushing.
26:56 And the minute I'll go further back up into the mountains, and come back down for a while, and then we can open up for more, more questions here, good questions.
27:06 But taking things up further into the mountains.
27:10 Some of the big mountains, unfortunately, you can't see it here, but if you were to just walk out anywhere at seaside and look up, you can see these big mountains all around here. They have Sale Mountain.
27:20 And we have Sugarloaf Mountain, and we have Onion Peak, and we have Angora Peak. These are all these, this ridge in mountains, about 3000 ft high at the tops, going more or less from northeast to southwest, terminating, hitting the ocean where the Yan Mountain is. And the tops of those peaks. are high enough That everything's a little bit different up there.
27:43 And we know that while I'm talking about the people of this part of the world, spending a lot of time down on the tide flat, spending a lot of time around these estuaries, certain times of the year. Summer being a good time to do this. People trek further up into the mountains, and up there you have plants that you just don't find out here. In fact, there are some plants that are endemic to the tops of those peaks right up here. You don't find them anywhere else on Earth because they're completely isolated from other
28:07 mountain ranges all around this area, so they become completely isolated. But people would go out there and gather plants for medicines. They would gather. A certain kind of grass, bare grass, that's especially tough and sharp, very good for making real rigorous baskets, real tough ones. Also, people would use that for making signs on baskets because it takes dye well so
28:30 you can dye it a certain color and do all the ornate basket work.
28:35 And up on these ridges along the coast range here, people also went up and um
28:41 Well, gathered onions. Onion peak is called onion peak because of the fact that the whole side of that thing. It's all private timberland on the way up there, so it's hard to look at this, but you stand at the base of some of these basaltic outcrops that go up 500 ft above your head, and it's real rough rock and each little pocket on the side of that rock has a little bit of dirt, and each little bit of dirt has an onion growing out the side of it, and it's a pretty cool spot.
29:07 And people would go up there and gather large quantities of these onions which are can be eaten just like. Our own onions. The top meat like green onions, little bol can be used like a web. And so that was being gathered up there, but also there were hunting areas up there, elf hunting areas, and uh we have stories about people going out and hunting the ridge tops, kind of like you hear about the buffalo further east,
29:30 people would actually flush those elk off the tops of the cliffs.
29:35 Chase the places where they knew they would have to go around some corner or around another rock, and then there's a blind corner there that goes off the edge of the cliff and people knew where those things were, they would chase the elf over the edge.
29:47 Some of those cliffs are actually high enough, it's hard for me to imagine. It's hard for me to imagine picking up the elk at the bottom.
29:56 But that was done.
29:59 And also
30:02 Up to the tops of those mountains, you have a lot of different places that were being visited for ritual purposes as well. A lot of other important places like that, and a lot of stories tied into one of those beachs. And so all of that was part of this continuous process of using the land, year after year, going in these cycles, going to these different places and taking care of different areas as people move around.
30:27 And so each part of these Journeys that people take across the landscape, cumulatively provided them with all the things they needed all the food they need and all the medicines.
30:38 The clothing they needed and so forth.
30:42 And so I may actually Uh, cut things a little bit shorter. I do want to get into to questions, and I also see the next showing up. But uh I should say though, as a closing though that this, all this knowledge I'm talking about, I guess it's, it's interesting. People talk with me about these kinds of tribal traditions and Are they relevant today?
31:07 And I, they often seem to think that this is kind of antiquated stuff. It's something out of the distant past. But like I'm suggesting, there are a lot of things that can be learned from this sort of knowledge. We're looking at uh ways of taking care of the fish. We have stories about
31:23 Simple things that seem fairly basic to us, and yet they tell you. How to, how to take care of your family. I was mentioning the importance of, of not overexploiting the fish because they're not, not just the sort of big cosmological concern about the fish, but because of the practical necessity. You need those fish to come back, you need to maintain that kind of relationship with those fish in order to keep yourself fed.
31:48 But we also have stories about, uh, for example, tsunamis here. There's a story about uh About a tsunami that takes place down near. Indian Beach or uh Col Point. Down south towards Kennedy he pulled apart that area.
32:09 About A tsunami coming in and there's a The place called the baskets there, a lot of, a lot of rocks that look like overturned baskets. If you look out there from the poet Point in Eola State Park.
32:25 And the story is described people are seeing all of the, the water sweeping out.
32:31 And we know now Having seen what's taking place in the tsunamis happen around the world, we know that the water sweeps out first when a tsunami is going to happen. That's the dip before the crest comes, and so the water starts to drop and drop and drop and drop and you hear this story all over the world actually because there are different times in history where people see that happen and they don't know what that means, and they get really excited
32:56 because you can go out to places you've never gone to before. And so there's a story from who knows how far back. I assume it describes a real event, a real tsunami because it's so accurate. But they described that water story fall going down and down and down and down.
33:13 And the people in the communities down in that area, and we know there are several villages down here and Beach.
33:19 They get excited about that and they tell their young women, look at their muscles all over the rocks. It's a great time for gathering because look at all those places you can get to that you never were able to get to before.
33:32 And all the young women go out into the rocks and start gathering, and all of a sudden, they see that wave come up. And it sweeps up And we know this has happened many times before on this coast because we find the sand, and we find the drift logs, sometimes a mile or two.
33:51 And that wave comes in and it takes them all.
33:55 And in the story that Only a few people survive. They go up, up high and survive, and when they come back down, they stand on the beach. And, and they cry for the young people who've been lost. They cry for all those people. And if any of you know Cannon Beach. You know that one of the things that's always in the tourist brochures is as you walk over the sand, it makes this squeaking sound.
34:20 As you walk, and people talked about that as the crying chance of Cannon Beach. And in the story They explained that. They say those are the crying scenes, that's the sound of those people crying for the people that were lost out there in that tsunami.
34:38 And when you tell stories like that to young people, you don't need to drill them on what to do in the event of a tsunami. When you tell young people stories like that, you don't have to worry about them getting excited and running out to check out what's going on down there because they have this powerful lesson. And not only do they have this powerful lesson, but every time they walk up the beach, they're thinking about that lesson. They're hearing that sound and that sand. They're being reminded of that story you told them.
35:04 And that's pretty powerful because it teaches people how to what to do and how to survive, and we know that because these tsunamis do happen every 3 to 500 years in this stretch of coastline, there are times when you actually have to worry about that when suddenly after maybe a whole generation hasn't seen it, that water starts to drop back. And I tell you that now. I tell you the story coming back from who knows how many generations of classicilla people.
35:28 You see that water dropping, keep that in mind, and get, get to high ground. So that knowledge is passed down in that way. The knowledge is passed down in other ways. And one of the things when you go to Boy Scout camp. They teach you around this part of the world. You can always eat the blueberries. Find a blueberry out in the woods, it's almost always edible. White berries. You don't usually want to mess with those.
35:53 And in fact, in the oral traditions of the tribes right here, they talk about the white berries as being the berries of dead people. The people who died eat those white berries as their food, so you don't mess with that.
36:05 And then as you're taught in Boy Scout camp, those red berries, you kind of have to know your berries. Some red berries are good. Some red berries are very good. Some red berries are poisonous, or at least when they get very sick. And here too, the elders came up with a way of dealing with this. They tell stories about Helco around here, the wild woman. Kind of like Zonaro up north,
36:30 uh, if you know that name, like a Bigfoot character, but a woman, sharp teeth. Sticks and moss in her hair. Extremely strong, extremely strong and dangerous and liable to even eat children.
36:48 And their stories say those berries are help those berries. All the berries that are red out in the forest, she thinks are hers. And so you never eat those berries in the forest. If you're out in the forest walking around, you don't just pop one of those in your mouth. The only place where it's safe. To eat a red berry is if you take all your berries
37:11 and go back home with the rest of your family inside your inside your long house. That's the safe place to eat those berries, because otherwise she's out there in the woods, she'll see you eat her berries, and she'll get upset and she'll come after you. But what does that do effectively? That makes sure that every time that little kids are out in the woods gathering red berries.
37:32 They don't just start eating it randomly out in the woods. They bring it all home. Where their parents are, where their grandparents are, to watch what they're eating, to make sure it's OK. So a lot of these stories too, you go through and read stories in in collections of tribal tales, and it's like, well, that's what's this crazy stuff about some wild woman who likes to eat children and thinks red berries are hers. That's, that's crazy, but the more you look at this stuff,
37:56 the more you understand what's actually out there on the ground, the real hazards to children. Out there on the landscape, that's where this stuff is coming from, and a lot of that stuff is pretty sophisticated. It reflects the fact that people spent generation after generation figuring out how this stuff works and then how do you tell children something about that or how do you explain to your community about that in a way that's going to stay with them, that's going to remind them,
38:20 it's gonna keep them safe for generations to come. And looking after those, those children and grandchildren.
38:30 And so I think that there is a lot that we can still learn from this oral tradition. And not just the tribal people, although for them it's an important part of their heritage, but I think that this oral tradition, you know, the class of people, when Lewis and Clark came here, we know that they were very good at sharing. They took good care of their guests. They kept an eye on Lewis and Clark. They made sure they had food coming and going,
38:54 and uh they did the same for a lot of families they did for my family. They did it for All the different explorers coming through early on, you know. And I find today the elders who are still tied into these traditions. We are happy to see The rest of us paying attention to them.
39:15 Because it's, we all live here now. We all still, we live in this place, we share this landscape with the people who lived here for generation after generation after generation. In a way, those mountains we see around us, that water in front of us, those are the things we share with those past generations. As well as concerned about our children, concerned about our grandchildren, those fundamental human things. And the point of view of these elders is
39:41 You now have to live on this land. You now have to take care of this land too. You have to take care of your children and grandchildren, and so we can all gain things from this. We can all be inheritors of this oral tradition, reflecting generation after generation and experimentation, having to live on the land, having to deal with the consequences if you overharvest the fish, if you eat the wrong bearing, if you run out when the tsunami is coming in.
40:05 And now we're all in areas of that. And stories that have been passed on to me verbally, they came to my ears, they come out of my mouth to your ears. They're all part of your knowledge as well. So you all have that tradition as part of your knowledge too. And so the oral tradition continues. And just as I said, the class of people aren't extinct. They have to send this all over. So too, their oral tradition is carry on, but in ways they probably could never have imagined. So
40:31 anyway, I open it up for questions. Yeah my
40:38 Train.
40:43 I heard that they're way off. He was asking, is there a time when you are trained uh to tell stories? And the truth is That storytelling is, is a fundamental.
40:58 Focal point of social life. Within the traditional way. And that especially at this time of the year, as we get into the winter, and again, it's hard for me to help you envision this because we're having winter or we're not having winter weather, we're having Whether it's kind of like our springtime. But ordinarily, we have And we will probably in a couple of days, in fact, if you stick around.
41:23 We'll have wind blowing, wind often howling out of the south as these fronts coming in off the ocean, rain falling horizontally. It's a very good time to go indoors and tell stories.
41:35 And for this reason, actually, one of the sets of stories I didn't even really get into today, but it's very important in terms of this kind of teaching I'm talking about is a whole series of stories among the tribes about South Wind. Who is in fact their trickster character, uh, like Coyote further east or Raymond further north. South wind It's here all the time in the winter blowing,
41:59 making your house rattle, making the smoke back up and billow into your home. And so you can't forget about Southwest. South Wind is everywhere. And South Wind is the one in the stories who creates a lot of land forms out there on the ground and teaches people about how to live and how not to live. And he'll steal somebody's fish.
42:23 For example, and then run down the B2 ways and fall asleep because he's so full he has to sort of sleep it off. And he'll wake up encased in rock.
42:33 And he'll have to break his way out of that rock, calling upon the, the generosity of various people who've just about had it with him. And it's a long negotiation process to get chipped out of that rock. So there those rocks are at the mouth of Tillamook Bay. And every time somebody goes in and out of that bay, they're reminded of that story. You don't take somebody's food like that without permission. You don't take things that people need,
42:58 and if you do, you're gonna spend a lot of time negotiating yourself out of a pit or out of a chunk of rock to come to the surface. So that knowledge is all there on the landscape, but the South winds will be blowing all winter long while these stories are being told. So a lot of this knowledge is being discussed, being passed along around the fires in the winter time. And in fact, in this part of the world. More so than in some other tribes I've worked with.
43:22 Some tribes, stories are told and the children learn those stories by hearing them over and over again. Here, there was so much of a premium placed on passing down the information very accurately that they would actually drill children sometimes in learning these stories line by line. So that they would, they would learn and learn and wrote so that the next storyteller would know those stories just perfectly.
43:46 And for that reason it's really interesting because I can go back to old archival accounts. Somebody interviewing one elder in 1900, another elder in 1930, and you can almost get the exact same wording, boom, boom. And it's that kind of cultural knowledge, we don't do that so much in our society with Stories. We knew that with songs. We can say,
44:09 oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh, but we don't teach children to sing well, you know, it's really great to jump in a sleigh and ride down through the snow with a horse, you know what's best, kind of fun. You, you get that kind of rhythm to it and, and those things stick in your head and so. That's the way that those things are being passed on to the children, but it's really from, from infancy on they're being exposed to these stories,
44:34 and then some stories are being told out on the landscape when the landscape features there, that story is tied to that landscape feature. But an interesting thing, one last thing I should mention about the South wind stories is that there, there was a belief that you shouldn't talk about the South wind. You shouldn't retell the South wind cycle out of season. Because you'd be inviting this portion, and in fact cause it to go back to wintertime because that's the wintertime story. So you start telling south wind stories,
45:00 the wind may go south on you and you'll be uh having to huddle indoors again because that's, that's the time.
45:09 So many questions here.
45:12 How long does the uh the waves stay out in a tsunami before they come in? How do they have enough time to go out there and fiddle around with shells and we don't have a geologist or do we have a geologist in the ground? It's a few minutes. Few minutes, not very long. And it depends on the the size of the wave and the variety of things, but it's, it's a few minutes.
45:41 I heard in an earlier presentation the importance of the cedar tree, and I was wondering if there's, uh, any traditions you can share in terms of a relationship with uh either forest management or even cedar. Well, that's, that's a good point. I brought along some cedar. I brought along several pieces of trees. People thought I was gonna give like a wreath making demonstration or something, but I'll hand this out. These are two pieces of cedar. Uh, gathered
46:06 Actually gathered right in the middle of an area that I know was in the Helem senior gathering area at one time, the cedar trees. There there's so much there I can do a whole separate talks on the cedar trees because cedar trees are the source of the wood for the houses, the canoes, the bark can be peeled off and if you pound it just right, and soften it up, the fibers come loose and it's almost like cotton. You can weave things with it. Uh, you can weave
46:29 baskets and hats and all sorts of things. The greenery has medicinal uses. And so Almost everything Uh, that a person might hope for in terms of material culture, in terms of those items you want to make for your living are found in the symmetry. And there were a lot of different relationships with those cedar trees that are worth mentioning. I'll just touch on a couple here again, just like the fish.
46:53 The traditional worldview is that these, these cedar trees are sentient. They, they give themselves willingly so that we may have those things. And so people didn't kill the cedar tree unless they absolutely had to. And so for example, around here, people would take planks off the sides of the trees without killing the whole tree. Or they take cedar bark off the side of the tree. That's actually possible. You can come up to the cedar trees and up in British Columbia,
47:17 I'll still find places where people still have done this recently enough you can find the scars on the side of the tree. You can come up to the side of the tree, put in some wedges. Hit them up and it has such a long straight grain that starts to split off the tree a little bit. And because these people had a lot, a lot. Black patients, I guess you could say the tree sways back and forth and over time that splits a little bit and then when we come back the next day and.
47:42 Uh those switches up a little bit more and it really keeps doing that until finally pop, they take off that whole plank. Cedar bark is the same way you're gonna make clothing out of it. You only take what you need off of one side of the tree, and over time that cedar bark. Closes up the tree heals that up, and it takes a long time for that can be done.
48:02 And if people were taking these things, there are actually certain things you apologies you make to this here saying that, you know, I'm sorry, I'm doing this to you, but I really need this for my family and we'll do this respectfully and we'll still take care of you and take that stuff home. I should also say that the, the cedar trees with the canoes and other woods where you really need a good strong wood, people would often go way up into the interior. It's another use of the mountains I didn't mention.
48:27 Even though there were cedar trees down here, people often went away inland because the cedar trees growing on a real rocky higher elevation areas, they had to struggle. They grow slower. Because it's colder, rockier, and what that means when it grows slower is that the rings are tighter.
48:44 Less growth each year, less build up of new wood. And so from a, if you're a canoe builder, that's a good thing because that means you have really tight grain wood, very strong wood. And so people would actually go away in the interior and chop these trees down. I worked with one elder up north who still remembers doing this with his grandfather, where they went to clear up a mountain.
49:04 And they knocked over the tree. And then it hangs up on the brush and they chop the brush. And it takes about a day and then the tree slides halfway down the hill. You go down the hill and they set up another base camp. They clear the brush there out of the way, push it, rock it pretty soon and slides the rest of the way down to the waterfront and then they can start working under. It takes 2 or 3 days to get that logs down to the water,
49:29 and then they floated down the river. Down to village really were high. So that one was the premium stuff. And there were stories that children would be taught again about these plants, which I won't even get into, but there are stories about the cedar trees at different times and the spruce trees and all the other trees when they're still speaking. Being asked
49:53 actually by that same wild woman character, you know, uh. She has got her face tattooed. And she wants to ask them what what they think of it. Of course, she's pretty horrific looking anyway and now she's got her face tattooed. And she asks each of the trees and turn, what do you think of my new tattoos?
50:13 And Hemlock tree, which I don't have here, has the bad sense to tell her what he really thinks.
50:21 And she says, in the future, your wood is gonna be totally useless. When winds blowing you fall right over. Nobody will make medicine out of you. You're not good for much of anything. But cedar tree has tacked, Cedar tree knows what to say. He says, I think you look great.
50:38 It's always the right answer, isn't it? I think you look great with that those tattoos. And she says, very good, and you're gonna have strong wood time to come when people, people are here. This is before people arrive. People will make canoes out of you, they'll make medicine out of here. Out of your greenery, they'll make clothing out of your heart and you'll be honored by all these people who will show you this kind of respect.
51:03 And so the same thing happens with spruce. This tree is everywhere around Spruce very pokey. I'll hand these around. Spruce also has a good sense to say fairly positive things. Spruce is not given as many attributes as cedar, but Spruce is a great tree, and a lot of the uses are medicinal. It's very important medicine. Uh, spruce trees, in some cases, people would go up and put
51:27 ceremonial regalia in the branches because it's a powerful tree and you want those things out of the one thing in the world, off the dirt and off the ground, and in some cases people even bury people up in trees, up in the branches and spruce trees with broad lateral branches. And they laid those canoes or boxes by the arms of that tree and take care of them. So that's very pokey, by the way, I warn you that
51:52 a lot of the native names for this plant up and down the coast translate to the plant that really, really hurts when you grab onto it. So as this goes around before, that's why I've stripped the stems for you. This will be our last question. OK. Can you give us a glimpse of what it was like for families living in the long house seasonally? How did it change?
52:16 Yeah, the, the long houses around here, they varied in sizes a lot. There was the winter long house where the larger families gathered together, and those were all made out of these big cedar planks. They were often big open rooms. Some of the really big ones were as big as this, the interior of this tent. And you have extended families in them, often 2 or 3 fires in a row down the middle.
52:41 Some kind of large broad bench structure around the perimeter, which served as sleeping platforms. And often there were places to store things underneath that, over the top of that, and so forth. And then there were rooms often partitioned off with smaller poles and uh woven maps made out of various grasses, even sometimes these guys. And so you have whole extended families there.
53:06 In the wintertime You, it's sort of a combined residential space and storage space because there's so much, it's not the time of year when you're gathering food, it's the time when you're living off the storage provisions. So there were boxes all over, often big what they call bentwood boxes made out of cedar planks would be taken off the tree. Heat it up and then bent so that you take a single plank and you bend it
53:30 until you get a box and then you put the top and bottom on and you get a nice wooden box, and people will be living off out of the food or off the food in those boxes, and those boxes will be decked out on those platforms, and under those platforms and above those platforms around where people were gathered. And so in the winter time, people were living off of those telling the stories around the fires and holding winter ceremonials,
53:55 often when the biggest homes, which happened to be the homes of the more powerful families. Um, we're hosting polash kind of events where they're exchanging goods. Thank you. And uh And also um. Massimistic uh work where they're going through it and uh bringing in China's new healing work and that kind of thing in the winter. And then,
54:21 as we get into the springtime, people begin to mobilize. They go to fishing places and plant gathering areas. And so there are fewer people there at the, at the larger houses, but then you have temporary encampments and smaller houses, um. There are temporary encampments like this that used to be all over the place and you can still see where some of them are as you walk over the landscape. Um, And some of those were, they look like simple,
54:45 simple shed structures often. Like the size of a garden shed sometimes where you have a family you're sleeping for a couple of nights, uh, doing some fishing, doing some plant gathering, maybe a simple shed style roof slope like this rather than like this. And um And they would move around between different locations where they had fishing stations and so forth, and then people moving up into the interior as well.
55:09 Sometimes in the hottest days of summer, people sleeping out with kind of map coverings, again, those woven mats being used over a pole of frameworks we have in the interior, fishing stations and so forth. In the big villages though, at that time, people would still be there. Um, sometimes people would pop the boards off the roof, so you got better aeration. And uh sometimes when people are going to go for a major fishing junket, they might even pull some of the boards off and take them with them
55:34 to go clean up to make the walls of the other structure they're gonna live in. So they'd actually pick up those boards. It takes a lot of work to get one of those see planks off of a tree, so you don't just have, you know, a bunch of them here, a bunch of them there, a bunch of them here. You sometimes have to take some with you to, to go where you want to go. And so in those different. Places you have smaller groups of family and then in the larger house, you'd have a few people still hanging out, usually elderly, children,
55:58 those kinds of things staying close to home. And then as you get into the wintertime, then everybody begins to regroup and sometimes people who haven't seen each other for quite a while, for weeks or months, would regroup and then those extended families are back together in a larger village where they spent the year, the rest of the year. So. Thanks everyone.
56:25 It should be a question for De Mario stick around.

Tent of Many Voices

Doug Durr on Clatsop and Chinookan Land Management

Doug Durr

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Doug Durr on Clatsop and Chinookan Land Management

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