Closed Captions

Mike Ayel, director of Natural Resources for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, traces his nation's deep history in the Pacific Northwest. He discusses the Cowlitz as major traders, their territory from Olympia to Portland, food preservation practices, and relations with Lewis and Clark. Ayel also addresses the tribe's post-contact experience, Fort Vancouver's establishment, and contemporary natural resource management work.

Transcript

0:05 Oh, you're so quiet and timid. We gotta get you together, get you focused. We're gonna have a speaker I get, so everybody. Hands on your knees?
0:16 Is forward
0:19 123. Good morning, boys and girls.
0:22 All right, good morning. Good to see you. Glad you could be here. You are now the 10 to many voices, and this is called Core Discovery 2, and we are traveling national mobile exhibit. We've been traveling all over the country. We've seen so many places since we started out. We started out in the year 2003 in the home of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello in Virginia. We've been traveling all the way across the country and we've finally reached the ocean.
0:48 And next year, we'll be coming all the way back and we'll end up in Saint Louis because that's where Lewis and Clark were 200 years ago, and we'll finish up there in September 23, 2006. Now here in this mobile tent what we do is we have a lot of presenters and speakers. They come from all over the country to tell their story and interpretation of Lewis and Clark.
1:08 We have native presenters such as singers and dancers and poets. We have scholars, people that have studied Lewis and Clark. They take the old, um, journals, and they research them every day and they look at them. So we have a lot of different people that come to this tent and tell the story of Lewis and Clark. So here today we have a special presenter. We have Mike Ayel. He's a director of Natural Resources Council
1:33 for the Kaliz tribe. He's also the vice chair of the tribal council. So let's give a nice warm welcome. Put your hands together for Mike Ayel.
1:43 Good morning.
1:45 Uh. Go to tell you some things you probably know and some stuff you don't know. Uh, first start out by welcoming you to Cowlitz's country. Uh,
1:56 some of you may not be aware, but before, after it was Cowlitz's country. You're in Prince Rupertland.
2:05 I didn't know that one. Yeah, Prince Rupertland, you're part of Great Britain. Right here you're in you're, you're English now. And then later on, This would become part of Oregon.
2:21 Over there. Except this was part of Oregon too. And later on after that. It would become Washington territory, a part of Nebraska. So in just a few moments we've gone from England to Oregon. To Nebraska We're back to Washington.
2:45 He didn't even feel like you moved. So anyway, I'll start out with a little bit of history, uh.
2:53 In 1827, Governor Simpson said Schenea's track runs from off the Puget Sound and strikes the Columbia near Point Bellevue. Schenea was the Cowlitz's chief, and Scheniwa was the high chief. Cowlits were a little unusual in that we had 20,000 people, many different villages.
3:17 With one chief, one high chief. And that was Skanniwa. He was my great great grandfather. Uh, later on, Governor Stevens would call Skannia's track the Collis Trail. And so you're at the southern end of the, the College Trail. We were traders. We, we like to trade our money in a long time ago
3:41 was a special little shell called the Dentalum, and that little shell was also called Piaqua, and that was our money and it was exchanged in what they call a fathom, which was like 3 ft long, and a fathom of the large shells was worth a huge amount of money and We know that those little shells
4:05 had great value. Because
4:09 In South Dakota, which is
4:13 Over, over here. Right in here, over there they had our dinelum shells. And we know that because the spiral flute detailum shell comes from only one place in the world. And it's right up the map right here northern point of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes.
4:36 It's the only place in the world that little shell comes from, and I've talked to people from Connecticut that tell me that they have nail shells there as well. So Vancouver was a trading post. Hundreds if not thousands of years before Lewis and Clark got here. When Lewis and Clark came here,
4:59 they said that this was a marketplace. Equal to any in the world. They saw people with Sailor suits Rifles, pistols, metal pots, all things that they've got from Europeans when Lewis and Clark came down the river. And one of the big things.
5:23 That I have to laugh at my ancestors because we didn't pick up on the significance of a boatload of tourists coming down the river. We've seen people come up the river. But we never realized anything important would be from somebody coming down the river. So when you look at the map, you see. That meant they came from here.
5:46 We've seen people come from the ocean. But we didn't realize that they came from the other ocean too. And that's something that we didn't realize, so. We move on. Uh, we traded and we traded from
6:04 Canada Down to California and then to the mountains of Idaho. That's how far we traveled. Uh, I know that. Lewis and Clark never met my ancestors because Ska and all his sons were were large tall men for the time. They were all over 6 ft tall. Captain Clark was a very tall man. He was 6 ft,
6:28 and he would have noticed if there were tall Indians there. So I know that he didn't meet them because our tribal history said that Scheniwa was away in business. In in Canada When Lewis and Clark came through. So we know that that that those people didn't meet with them. So Now I need to, to talk about
6:52 what did we eat? Well, we ate salmon, we had Deer, elk.
7:01 Waapito Camus, and berries. And We would
7:08 The fish came to us. It was a pretty neat set up really. We grew the the campus and the Wapato and uh we would go to the mountains and pick the berries. Our tribe had a special arrangement with the Yakamas. We would trade salmon on the Cowlitz River. For berries on Mount Adams. Which
7:34 Today it seems kind of funny, but at the time salmon were almost as common as sand on the beach and we could get berries for those salmon. So, uh, and we had berries. If we were able to preserve our food, something that Lewis and Clark couldn't do. You guys know that uh. Were Lewis and Clark really hungry when they got here? Does anybody know that? Yeah,
7:59 they were starving all the time they got here because they didn't have the ability to preserve their food. We preserved our food and we were able to do it better than they would. And as a result, when they come into our villages, We were able to serve them meals and we gave them berries. We gave them berries in November and December. Like right now we were able to go and pull them out of the cupboard
8:23 and there were some nice fresh berries that we could serve up for our guests. So that was what we ate and that was how we preserved our food. We had large houses. Some of the houses were huge. They're like modern apartment houses. The large bigger plank houses were 200 ft long.
8:48 That's almost as big as a football field, and inside those houses there'd be partitions to where there would be each family would live inside the house, just like an apartment house today, and some of those houses were called plank houses and some were called longhouses. It just depended on where you lived, but they were made out of boards and they were easily bigger than this tent. And
9:12 they were warm and comfortable houses. So
9:21 I already posed a question, did we meet with Lewis and Clark? And the answer is maybe, uh, Lewis and Clark called us scaletes, which when you say cowlitz and scalloots, uh, It could well be because it's really important to know that the way we said our words,
9:45 the pronunciation of Indian words was impossible for the Europeans. And the Europeans
9:54 Their words were impossible for us to say. So we had this case to where we couldn't communicate, so we had to guess. And Lois and Clark called us Skloots. They called us Hallu Ael and Klitsi. Now colisi means place of the colitz and place of the cowlitz is
10:20 Right. Here
10:22 On the Cowlitz River and the Lewis River and along the Columbia River. Now for a very long time I had read and I'd studied and I I've even seen that one of the great historians had misunderstood Kalitz. He thought it meant river of the Klits, but once you understand that Kalitzi means the place of the Calitz,
10:46 then it can be applied to more than one river. And Lewis and Clark said of us, we hear they are numerous. They said that a couple of different times and how numerous were we? We were one of the biggest tribes in the Northwest. We were 20,000. And uh we look right here.
11:10 So off the Puget Sound. Is Olympia And down here to Point Bellevue. is the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. So we lived between Olympia and Portland. And Out to the west, we lived out to modern Raymond. Down through the Willapa Hills to the Columbia
11:35 and then back up the Columbia River to the Wind River and up the Cascades up to Mount Rainier and then over to Olympia. It was a huge area. We were a very large tribe and we had a huge amount of area, so that's who we were. That's where we lived. After Lewis and Clark, The fur traders came And our
11:59 history said that our chief went to Fort George and Fort George.
12:07 This down
12:10 Right here by the mouth of the Columbia. We call it Astoria today. And our chief went to the to the fur traders and said, I don't like traveling this far. Can you move your, your trading post closer to home? And the trading post closer to home. is here So the reason that Vancouver is here
12:34 is because our chief went to Fort George and asked the fur traders to relocate closer to home, and that closer to home became Vancouver. So that's, that's our connection with this area.
12:49 Yeah After the fur traders came. Then the settlers moved in. And there were Indian wars, and during the Indian Wars. Our people joined the army.
13:04 My first name is Francis, and it took me a long time to get used to that name and then I found out that my first name is really someone else's last name because my great grandfather served with the Lieutenant Francis in the Indian Wars, and that name came into the family and he named his son. My grandfather and then my father had the name and now me,
13:29 so my first name is actually somebody else's last name. After the Indian Wars. We resisted signing a treaty. After we had fought the wars. The settler or the The United States wanted us to go live on the reservation and turn in our guns and go live with the people that we just defeated. We didn't think that'd be a good idea,
13:55 so we told them no, and then at a later date we decided. We're going to have to struggle for our recognition and prove who we are. And We had a chief. His name was Atto Stockham. And he was appointed chief by Lieutenant Ulysses Grant, and just right over here is Grant House,
14:19 and Ulysses Grant made Antoine Stockham the chief of the colleges, and Antoine started the fight for recognition and 150 years later. We finished that fight for recognition and we were granted status that's special to us. It's called acknowledged. It means we knew you were here,
14:44 but now we understand that you really are the callous people, and that was our history up to now. So what do we do today? Well, I'm director of natural resources department. Today I have 2 dams in relicensing, one on the Cowlitz, one on the Lewis. We're working on salmon tracking on the Toole River, and I've got
15:09 biologists working for me that are checking gear for chronic wasting disease. We're checking goose populations for their health. We're working to restore salmon passages to different areas. And uh we're working to protect cultural resources right here. This bridge that's if you could look out and see it just right,
15:33 you'd see there's a bridge across the Columbia River that's going to be replaced, and when that's replaced, it's going to disrupt the whole bunch of surface and under that surface because people lived here for maybe 10,000 years, there will be the graves of people, so that's things that we do. So if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer it.
15:58 And what If you have a question, what I do is I come to you after you raise your hand, and then you ask the question, and everyone can hear it. So go ahead, raise your hand if you have a question. For Mike? The lats of people
16:12 who was their last chief or who's the current chief? I don't know the name of the last chief of the latsip, but I can tell you that uh. The class of people came up here and traded, and if you, this is an assignment for the teachers now. You read the Moulton, Lewis and Clark Journal set book 6 and book 7. And in book 7,
16:36 it explains the role of the latips and the scallos and Uh, I'll use the more modern map. Though the classics live down here. The latsips were intermediaries between the people on the upper valley and the lower valley. And so when Lewis and Clark said
17:01 the Chinooks have been at war with the Skloots. And the the Chinooks are not allowed above the Wakayakums. The latsips were free to come up here. The Chinooks weren't. The tips. Came up, traded, took the goods back down to the Chinooks, and the Chinooks would give them goods and the latsips would take them back. And so
17:26 that's the role of the latips.
17:30 Any other questions? More questions. OK, let's go back here. What is your question? Are, are scientists still working on the project to find um where Bs and Clark are or where they also went?
17:45 Are scientists still working on the project to find where Lewis and Clark um also went? Uh, I think we know where they went, but I, uh, I know that, uh, one of the people in the Park Service, Doug Wilson, is out at Fort Klats today, and they're working to find out all of the information they can at the site of Fort Klats to find out
18:09 how long they were there and what they ate while they were there and other things like that. Any more questions?
18:17 We got one back here. All right, good.
18:21 Have you been able to preserve your native language and do you personally speak anything other than English? Uh, I don't speak anything other than English, um. I was probably the worst student on the planet, so I always tell people English is my only foreign language, but not me, but other people in our tribe are preserving our Salish language. The Calitz had two languages.
18:46 The Salish we shared with the Shahalas, the two languages are almost identical, and the Sahaptan we shared with the Yakamas. In fact, all of the Yakima were the Sahaptan speakers when they came here, they were called clickitats. And clickitat is really means Sahampton speaker.
19:09 We have a question over here. I will come over here to you and you can tell your question.
19:17 How do you know that they used it? All the stuff that you have here.
19:24 How do they know that they use what? All the stuff that's here.
19:32 I mean like here on the table out there. You mean like uh salmon and cedar, that type of thing?
19:42 I, I can tell you that Lewis and Clark took really good notes and when you read those journals, uh, teachers, it's book 6 and book 7. And then maybe one of the neatest one is the one that nobody knows about, and that's the White House journals. Do any of the teachers know about the White House journals? Raise your hand. OK. Joseph Whitehouse
20:07 was a private with Lewis and Clark. And Joseph, sometimes he had duty and he was gathering firewood and peeling potatoes and doing army things. But other days, Joseph had some free time. And when Joseph wrote, Joseph was one of the only journal keeper to write active entries,
20:32 so Joseph's entries were written as they occurred. Everybody else wrote their entries. They took notes, and then they recreated them years later. So sometimes on the days Joseph was free. He gives us the best picture of everything and that's book 11. And for you guys to study the journals, the easiest and best way
20:56 is to pick the date. So like we would just say November 28th. 1805 and go back and look and find out what happened. Any other questions? Question over. Let's go right over here.
21:16 Did any of the uh eastern Oregon Indian tribes like the Imolos and the Kyus, did they, were they involved in any of the trading down here? Oh absolutely, the word Shoshone in jargon means person from the interior, so we know that people from Idaho came here. We know that
21:38 people from California came here and traded, and we know that
21:43 at least I've been studying it. I believe there's a people called. Waakadish Wakanais. And I believe want to see. And those are people called Nootkins from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and those people were here.
22:02 All right, we have uh time for maybe one more question. Let's go over here.
22:09 How do you, how do you.
22:13 He is
22:15 How do you know where Lewis and Clark are buried?
22:19 Well, uh,
22:22 I think it's written in in a history book. Lewis is very. And I don't know where somewhere down south, Tennessee, uh, this trail. They see, and then Clark lived a long happy life and died a very old man. So they and and he he he wrote down a lot of stories and I think he, I don't know where he's buried, but Saint Louis
22:47 Saint Louis, Missouri, right? I, I think it's time for us to go, but I got one more question if somebody's ready. Let's have one more question from this young man right over here.
22:59 Go ahead. Do you, do you think or know if Lewis and Clark passed through this spot where this kind of voices? Do you think or know if Lewis and Clark passed where this spot is right here?
23:15 I think it's really quite likely that yes they did pass by here. The only thing is on the way down I think they stopped on the airport side. I don't think they stopped on this side of the river, but on the way back they spent a couple of days here because they sent a scouting party up the Willamette River,
23:37 so they've certainly looked at this place if they didn't stand here. All right, let's give a nice big round of applause from Mike AL.

Tent of Many Voices

Mike Ayel on Cowlitz History and Lewis & Clark

Mike Ayel

Cowlitz

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Mike Ayel on Cowlitz History and Lewis & Clark

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