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French Opinion of the American Economy in Early 19th Century

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:47:13 +0000

By the early 18th century, the economic relationship between the United States and France, was close enough that France sold the US 530 million acres of land through the Louisiana Purchase. That was one of the reasons that Lewis and Clark were sent West — to explore all the new land purchased from our European ally (Foreign Service Institute). The close economic ties between the countries gave Frenchmen a close look at the US. Historical documents show us that many French officers felt positively about the US economy, but as the 19th century ushered in a time of unprecedented economic development, France had lingering issues with ideas such as free trade.

There were many positive opinions about early American economic policies. For example, the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette advocated for the implementation of free trade between the hemispheres, as it was already expanding rapidly in the US. He thought it would be mutually beneficial if free trade existed among the Americas, France, and the French islands (Nicolai, p. 123). Free trade between the United States and Tribal Nations of North America was also a focus for Lewis and Clark. Lewis actively advocated for free trade. In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose describes how Lewis wanted to build forts along America’s rivers to cultivate trading posts for Native Americans and US traders. Lewis disliked the strict licenses that allowed certain traders to monopolize trade with a specific tribe (Ambrose, p. 443). Most French officers who visited the US acknowledged the economic and demographic strength of the United States, especially compared to the French-Canadian territory that France possessed at the time. Several French officers compared the blossoming American settler economy to the French Republic’s. They were “particularly impressed by the Americans’ standard of living, substantial economic equality, and commercial activity” (Nicolai, p. 119).

That said, there was a divide between the Frenchmen who approved and disapproved of early American economic decisions. There’s evidence that many in France viewed Americans as lazy, fur traders as destructive, and merchants as greedy (Nicolai, p. 113). They blamed Americans for food shortages without considering the environmental and market factors that hindered production. There was a widespread belief that American farmers “neglected the principles of scientific agriculture and displayed ‘indolence’ compared to French agricultural workers” (Nicolai, p. 119). In addition, many French officers disagreed with Marquis de Lafayette about the idea of free trade. At the time, the French used tariffs in metropolitan France and their colonies to protect French industries from lower-priced competition. They were unable to accept the implementation of a new trading system (Nicolai, p. 122).

The details in these historical reports are striking. There is evidence that French Captain Lavergne de Tressan, who fought in the American Revolution, once said that “The United States seemed to be dominated by the marketplace (Nicolai, p.120). This statement summarized with remarkable accuracy the US capitalist economy, which dominates the American lifestyle today. It seems early American trade policy was a good indicator of future events. On the other hand, the promising predications offered by the French officers came true as well: free trade contributed immensely to the growth of the world economy, and helped make the US the superpower it is today.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West, (p. 443). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Foreign Service Institute. “Louisiana Purchase, 1803.” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1801-1829/louisiana-purchase.
Hodson, Christopher, and Brett Rushforth. “Bridging the Continental Divide: Colonial America’s ‘French Quarter.’” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 25, no. 1, Organization of American Historians, 2011, pp. 19–24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23210256.
Nicolai, Martin L. “Trade, Colonies, and State Power: French Officers’ Economic Views on French and English America, 1755-1783.” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, vol. 19, Michigan State University Press, 1994, pp. 111–27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43007768.

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Mike Lyall on Cowlitz History and Lewis & Clark

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:09 +0000

oh you’re so quiet and timid we got to get you together get you focused we’re going to have a speaker so we I get ready so everybody hands on your knees eyes forward 1 2 3 good morning boys and girls good morning all right good morning good to see you glad you can be here you are now the tense of 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 in monachello in Virginia and we’ve been traveling all the way across the country and we finally reached the ocean and next year we’ll be coming all the way back and we’ll end up in St Louis that’s where Louis and Clark were 200 years ago and we’ll finish up there in September 23 2006 now here in this Mobile T 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 lwis and Clark we have native presenters such as singers and dancers and Poets we have Scholars people that have studied lisis 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 Louis and Clark so here today we have a special presenter we have Mike iel he’s a director of Natural Resources Council for the CIS 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 AEL good morning good morning uh going to tell you some things you probably know and some stuff you don’t know uh first start out by welcoming you to ket’s Country um some of you may not be aware but before after it was CET country you are in Prince rubberland you didn’t know that one yeah Prince rubberland 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 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 he didn’t even feel like you moved so anyway I’ll start out with a little bit of History uh in 1827 Governor Simpson said skena track runs from off the pet sound and Strikes the Colombia near point bellw skena was the college Chief and skena was the high chief cic were a little unusual in that we had 20,000 people many different villages with one Chief one high chief and that was skena he was my great great grandfather uh later on Governor Stevens would call skena track the C Trail and so you’re at the southern end of this the cets trail we were Traders we we like to trade uh our money in a long time ago was a special little shell called the dent talum and that little shell was also called hiqua and that was our money and it was exchanged in in what they called 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 that those little shells had great value because in South Dakota which is over over here right in here clear over there they had our dentum shells and we know that because the spiral flute D taum shell comes from only one place in the world and it’s right up the map right here on the Northern point of Vancouver Island and the queen Charlottes it’s the only place in the world that little shell comes from and I’ve talked to people from uh Connecticut that tell me that they have Den talum 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 they said 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’ got from Europeans when Lewis and Clark came down the river and one of the big things that I have to laugh at my ancestors is we didn’t pick up on the significance of a boat loaded tour us coming down the river we’d 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 me they came from here we’d 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’ll move on uh we traded and we traded from Canada down to California and in to the mountains of Idaho that’s how far we traveled uh I know that leis and Clark never met my ancestors because skena and all his sons were were large tall men for the time they were all over 6 foot tall Captain Clark was a very tall man he was 6ot and he would have noticed if there were tall indans there so I know that he didn’t meet them because our uh tribal history said that skena was away in business in in Canada when Louis 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 what did we eat well we ate salmon we had deer elk wapo Camas and berries and we would the fish came to us it was pretty neat setup really we grew the the the cus and the wapo and uh we would go to the mountains and pick the berries our tribe had a a special arrangement with the akamas we would trade salmon on the cetz river for berries on Mount Adams which today it seems kind of funny but at the time salmon were almost as common of sand on the beach and we could get berries for those salmon so uh and we had berries and we were able to preserve our food something that Louis and Clark couldn’t do you guys know that uh were Louis and Clark really hungry when they got hairs anybody know that yeah 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 than they would and uh 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 and there was some nice fresh you know berries that we could serve up for our guests so that was that was how we 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 uh large bigger uh plank houses were 200 ft long 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 long houses it just depended on where you lived but they were made out of boards and they were easily bigger than this tent and uh they were warm and comfortable houses so I already posed a question did we meet with Lewis and Clark and the answer is Maybe uh Lewis and Clark called us scutes which when you say callets and scutes uh it could well be uh because it’s really important to know that that the way we set our words the pronunciation of of Indian words was impossible for the Europeans and the Europeans 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 scutes they called us huel and ketc now ketc means place of the cets and place of the cets is right here on the CET River and the Lewis River and along the Columbia River now for a very very long time I had read and I’d studied and i’ i’ even seen that one of the the great historians had misunderstood kitc he thought it meant River of the Kitz but once you understand that kitc means a place of the CET then it can be applied to more than one River and uh Lewis and Clark said of us we hear they are numerous they said that a couple 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 see off the Puget Sound is Olympia and down here to point bellw is the Confluence of the wamit in the Columbia so we lived between Olympia and Portland and out to the West we lived out to Modern Raymond down through the wipa hills to the Columbia and then back up the the Columbia River to the Wind River and up the Cascades up to mount reineer 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 that’s who we were that’s where we lived after Lewis and Clark the fur Traders came and our his our history said that our chief went to Fort George and Fort George is down right here by the mouth of the Columbia we call it asoria 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 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 and 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 my name my first name is Francis and I was I took me a long time to get used to that name and then I found out that that my first name is really someone else’s last name because my great-grandfather served with a 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 so I my first name is actually somebody else’s last name after the Indian Wars we 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 so we told them no and then at a later date we decided we’re going to have to to struggle for a recognition and prove who we are and we had a chief his name was atan stockham and he was appointed Chief by Lieutenant ulyses Grant and just right over here is Grant house and uh ulyses Grant made Antoine stockham the chief of the colge and atan started the the fight for recognition and 150 years later we finished that fight for recognition and we we were granted status that’s special to us it’s called acknowledged it means we knew you were here but now we understand that you really are the cat’s 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 two dams in Rel lensing one on the callets one on the Lewis we’re working on salmon tracking on the toodle River and uh I’ve got biologists working for me that are checking gear for chronic wasting disease we’re checking Goose populations for their health we’re working to uh 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 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 a whole bunch of of uh surface and under that surface because people lived here for maybe 10,000 years there will be the the graves of of people so that’s things that we do so if anyone has any questions I’d be happy to answer it 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 clat of people were did did they who was their last Chief or who was the courage I don’t know the name of the last chief of the classup but I can tell you that uh the classup people came up here and traded and if you this is an assignment for the teachers now you read the Molton Lois and Clark Journal set in book six and book seven and in book Seven it explains the role of the classup and the scutes and I’ll use the more modern map though the clups live down here the clups were intermediaries between the people on the the Upper Valley and the Lower Valley and so when Lewis and Clark said the Chinooks have been at war with the scales and the scal the Chinooks are not allowed above the war kayaks the clups were free to come up here the shinook weren’t the clups came up traded took the goods back down to the shinuk and the shinuk would give them goods and the clups would take them back and so that’s the role of the clups any other questions more questions okay let’s go back here what is your question are science are scientists still working on the project to find um where Lu and Clark are or where they also went are scientists still working on the project to find where L 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 classup today and they’re working to find out all of the information they can at the the site of the fort classic to find out how long they were there and and what they ate while they were there and other things like that any more questions we got one back here all right good 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 uh not me but other people in our tribe are preserving our Salish language the Kat had two languages the Salish we shared with the shahis the two languages are almost identical and the sahaptin we shared with the yakas in fact all of the yakam or the sahaptin speakers when they came here they were called click itats and click attat is really means sahap speaker we have a question over here I will come over here to you and you can tell your question how do you know that they used it all the stuff that you have here how do they know that they use what all the stuff that’s here all the Stu it’s here you mean like here on the table out there you mean like uh salmon and and Cedar that type of thing I I can tell you that Lois and Clark took really good notes and when you read those journals uh teachers it’s book six and book seven and then maybe one of the neatest one is the one that nobody knows about and that’s the White House journals does any of the teachers know about the White House journals raise your hand okay Joseph White House 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 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 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 it over here did any of the uh Eastern Oregon Indian tribes like the ellos and the caus did they were they involved in any of the trading down here oh absolutely uh the word Shoni in jargon means person from the interior so we know that people from Idaho came here we know that uh people from California came here and traded and we know that the uh well at least I’ve been studying it I believe there’s a people called wakan Nish Waki and I believe wanas SE and those are people called nutkin from the northern tip of Vancouver Island and those people were here all right we have uh time for maybe one more question let’s go over here how do you how do you know uh where Lis and Clark is bed how do you know where Lu and Clark are buried well um I think it’s written in in a history book uh Lewis is buried and I don’t know where somewhere down South Tennessee Tennessee yeah just 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 St Louis St Louis Missouri right I I think it’s time for us to go but we got one more question if somebody’s ready let’s have one more question from this young man right over here go ahead do you do you think or know if leis and Clark pass through this spot where this T of voes is that do you think or no if leis and Clark passed where this spot is right here I think it’s really quite likely that yes they did pass by here uh the only thing is 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 so but on the way back they spent a couple days here because uh they sent a scouting party up the wamit river so uh they’ve certainly looked at this place if they didn’t stand here all right let’s give a nice big round of applause for Mike iel

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Neil Main on Gateway to Discovery and Northwest Coast Ecology

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:09 +0000

got he they were never good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to the core Discovery 2 and the teny horses I see some familiar faces um for our next presenter this is Neil M and he’s going to talk about the gateway to Discovery and he does work for a land trust that manages the gateway to Discovery so I’m going to hand it over to new M please welcome him well thank you it’s a pleasure to uh be Mak your presentation both representing the Gateway Discovery and then the North Coast L con servy is who I work for and kind of the focus of my part of the program for those of you that have heard Doug Durer you you kind of got the historical context in terms of na na American element I’m going to focus a little more kind of the scientific side of uh the perspective of not only the historical context by which the the core Discovery come to because as you know for those of you that follow the concept of Discovery usually that includes some element of some unknown or new information and if you make your group small enough uh then everything is new information that is if you’re just telling your friend next door uh then you could well be be the source of Discovery for a certain piece of information for the person next door although the information may have been known for decades or centuries so the whole idea of Discovery is is kind of squishy and I know people have sort of wrestled with this on the core of Discovery and in a way it’s been a struggle to say what did they discover you know people had already been living here carrying on ecological interactions with every single element of the landscape for 10,000 years kind of what’s left to discover so that that’s one of it is sort of what wasn’t discovered that people might think was discovered and then what was actually discovered kind of in our cultural context and then the really challenging part and the part we’re all faced with today is what’s left to discover that is do we know enough to um sustain a culture like ours uh for the same period of time that the cultures had been functioning in the landscape we now uh inhabit so you can kind of set the time frame for what I’m talking about is 10,000 years and we’ll kind of pick 200 years as our operation period and that’s sort of appropriate given today and all the time that’s going on a couple of things that uh that I I’ll mention real quick one is Gateway to Discovery it’s a real place it’s uh 850 Square ft it’s on the south in the seaside for the local people you know it as the laabi gallery but it’s now uh the Natural History Center and there we we have initially started out to create a center where people would really dis use that Center as the gateway to Discovery that is discovering the incredible place that we have here uh we had to adjust a little bit because once we got going we realized that it wasn’t really so much in the gateway to e Cola State Park and sadle mountain and hug point and Fort Stevens but that just walking through through the building to the de that overlooks the Estuary ended up being the gateway to a Wildlife Museum I mean so much going on every single day and having been in science for 30 years You’ think I would have known that and I knew there were a lot of Critters around but the Dynamics of it when we have people staff there and volunteers there every day every minute making notes about what just happened out over the deck from the Otters coming in and catching flounders and eating on the logs to the bald eagles catching the fish to the deer quum swimming across the river to millions of anchois coming in to the golds being so stuck with anchois they couldn’t even move to the blue herand and the king fisher fights and well it just goes on and on so in a way it’s kind of portrays this idea that when you look closely at anything you you usually find action something’s going on and that’s what we found so we sort of modifi you see you get an experience with Discovery at the Gateway Center and then that also leads you to all of the other incredible places uh in this neck of the woods for those of you that maybe haven’t uh done some of the homework with the Louis and Clark expedition to understand it the best I think you have to understand Jefferson because Jefferson’s mind was scientific that’s where he was he was probably the top meteorologist in the nation at that time and he would even make his kids keep notes on the temperature when they were somewhere else you know I mean it was just almost fanatical about it and he had already tried to mount this very Expedition uh in 1783 he was already ated trying to make it happen and they even even collected funds and had someone that he thought that he was going to hire to make this same trip and that sort of didn’t work out so working through the Philadelphia Phil philosophy Society he had started to organize this Expedition and he just never could get it together and he had all the geography and the scientific information that he was wanting to collect so sort of think about and even by the time he was in Congress he had tried a little run at it just at as a congressional person and had gotten people to put up a whole th000 to to finance the Expedition but it sort of fell on De ears he wasn’t able to make that happen so it’s not surprising not too long after he became president that really just kind of pulled the old notes out of his pocket and said okay now nobody can tell me we’re not going to do this but scientific a scientific expedition in 1800 probably wasn’t a real hot item and so his challenge was to cloak it in the thing that Americans are pretty good at and that’s getting more material wealth okay economic get the Furs get the products so that transition you can see it in the documents and in a way you can see the documents being restructured to have this sort of grand benefit to the economics and kind of the social dynamics including one of Jefferson’s greatest passions which was this idea that unless everybody had a piece of land they were farming there was really no hope for democracy so need a lot more territory to begin with and what he wanted to know was is that all nice and flat and plowable so to speak and of course as you know they come out here and found all these dirty rotten trees just covering the landscape almost as Pest and so it wasn’t seen as very productive in that very productive what would you do with a tree I mean not that many trees so they were looking for farmland well uh when I say cloaking I I mean that literally I mean including very sophisticated ciphering messages that were written in code to Congress and between Lewis and Jefferson and Jefferson and Congress uh secret coded messages about this Expedition and again that was sort of the political reality of it was Jefferson had already asked the French ambassadors that about what would people think of this if we went into this territory and you know he says that would definitely be considered um by you know by our government and so it be trespassing on our land which at that point was basically Louisiana what became the Louisiana Purchase and of course when we bought the Louisiana that s took care of that problem on that angle but of course we still had the English you know in the west and so there that sort of secret uh continued on until just about the time in which the Expedition left were still sending these coded messages uh so that kind of set the stage but it again I think starts to bring up the idea about Jefferson’s thought process on this and keep in mind he thought they were going to go find Masons I mean you know they sort of had a little bit of a science fiction perspective this that this West even though like I say you know I think the folks in near San Museum to you know a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Louis Clark expedition you know and that the further they got away from a culture the more culture they found you know literally millions of people already there with full cultures that had uh evolved to very very sophisticated levels and in their own way have developed a science that we’re still trying to get to that is we haven’t figured out the kind of Science in which you can uh make interpretations without our seven steps of the scientific method and yet cultures that had been here had resolved most of those science questions about what to eat what to use how to use it how to prepare it how to treat it just about everything you can think of in terms of the the cultural uh adaptations so when it come time for sort of the eventual expedition to to leave there was you know a lot of training that had gone on Le had spent a lot of time with sort of major scientist of of the era uh describing animals describing technique uh spent weeks and weeks getting trained to just run the instruments that were necessary to collect the data about main about survey and geography so um as primitive as it might have been at that point in time compared to today with our you know we just got through mapping the plat of planes the very land that that Clark walked on with a handheld GPS with a aerial photo of the site that wherever you move on the classet planes a new aial photo for that spot Scrolls up cuz it’s reading the satellites and then it tracks a little red dot on that aerial photo of everywh exactly where you are in the context of that aerial photo and then if you see something there then you just scroll up your little data sheet and plug in US saw these plants that plant this plant this animal that and then it’s all recorded for that single site you know and then think about the technology but in reality plus or minus a few miles probably in some cases feet uh with those primitive instruments using sort of scientific methodology uh Le was able to make incredible uh Records so again this is Jefferson kind of making sure that all of the elements of making this Expedition uh quite documentary uh had been done with the planning process so that whatever skills Lewis mainly Clark as well didn’t have they got this through some of the top people in the nation at that point in time so it it it sort of sets the stage for for that uh that part of it uh let me just shift a little bit to sort of what I see as the um historical Sciences of let’s say the West Coast uh and and in some ways I think people don’t consider real science if you’re doing it for basic in a cultural context or for sort of fundamental survival that the s is something that often times is considered abstraction from the context of the culture and you go to some separate environment for the science and then you work up the experiment and the design and do all that and you bring it back to the cultural context so when the when the native Eskimos native alaskans got together with some of the top scientists in the world they started a Cooperative project in which uh the two Sciences merged and what come out of that was that uh they were both inadequate somewhat they both added there were pieces missing from the Native culture uh in their form of Science and then there were pieces missing from out of the western version of it and so out of that come really a whole new powerful kind of science that was embedded in the cultural process it wasn’t separate or separate from and I think that’s well that has a lot of Merit it also advances my own Prejudice which is the way we tend to select what we think is good bad and so in a way we’ve been promoting this idea of Citizen science that is that science is not something that’s relegated to the science room or to the scientist that it’s a cultural process and that it benef could benefit benefit us in every way we just been working with a mid that was uh opened up from a little excavation was going on for somebody’s driveway and uh in that in that mid was uh these shells and um we just s these out just last week really to get some analysis I’ve already been through them with the stereoscope and there is nothing but clam shells in this entire layer and also with that was the uh was the charcoal that was left after the Clam Lake okay so if you can imagine razor clams I mean this sounds so good to me baking razor clams you know on a dune uh and leaving nothing but the shells and that’s about as good as it can get but you know when you think about it even with Lewis Lewis is bringing his his science here doesn’t mention razor clams okay in in the journals so can’t quite make that connection but you might have had some bad time of the year to be digging plams but think about the weather now get plans just in the last few days here so here’s this sort of common ground of the razor clown uh not something that’s found in the 3 to 4,000 year old men in this area very few razor clams but if you get to the 2,000 year radiocarbon material see razor clamps that’s what this this is all 2000 somewhere between 2,300 years old and razor plans are everywhere uh keep in mind we didn’t have any sand here until starting about 5,000 years ago the ocean was right back against the head walls all Cobble ridges there almost no sand whatsoever and then somewhere in that intermediate time between 4 and 2000 we start seeing these dudes start to grow and they’re Grow Again from back against the head wall and then start migrating to the West um so there’s probably if we get enough good dates there there a point where sort of all of a sudden razor clamps are showing up because we have sand we’ve got Beach whereas if you look at the mid material from say the pomos site which is in the 4,000 year old era it’s all Bay material almost zero Marine materials okay cockal Tres gacks Gaper clams all those kind of bay things so there’s a big transition that went on in terms of the geography here and then you see the razor clam showing up and and this is where I just try to make one point about this idea of how incredibly valuable and exciting it is to know about the place you live because it’s it gives you an Insight that would be comparable to the native science in which you knew about the processes of the natural landscape because you were a part of that landscape okay unlike our culture which is aart from for the most part some of you maybe living out in the woods and digging roots and stuff but not a lot of folks doing that now so this is that sort of comparative in which knowing about the processes now I could probably almost guarantee you that the folks that dug these plans 2,000 years ago would have been hard to imagine the life cycle of a razor PL and I think that was probably a decade ago or so there used to be a program called Beach was it beach festival or something everybody brought all their stuff to the convention center and it was just about Beach things what you found on the beach and all about the beach materials I remember I had my students setting up a little program there on razor Clans and they had microscopes to look at the CL lby and all the different parts of the plan they had the life cycle put up well we spent the whole night arguing mostly with commercial CL ders about our life cycle of these razor plants because we had them releasing eggs and sperm cells into the water right on the shoreline and then we had these razor clams going all the way out into the ocean 15 20 mi off shore and they were like no way I found little baby razor clams on the beach and they don’t do that but of course they do but it’s hard to imagine razor plants could successfully reproduce by sending little swimming protozoa type Critters all the way out into the ocean spending 6 to8 weeks out there and then eventually starting to grow just the tiniest little piece of calcium carbonate on that little lar microscopic laring which then makes the lar drop down to the bottom of the ocean and then the currents on the bottom of the ocean slowly start moving all of these spat of baby plams back onto the beach by the millions and of course they dig in and some of you may have seen this event I mean it’s an incredible thing when they come in and you’re walking and you’re the pressure of your feet makes these tiny little r clams come to the surface uh and we aren’t the only one that has noticed that if you happen to be there on those few evenings in the spring when that happens then you’ll see these goals down there doing this dance going like this and then take a three steps dance p and what they’re doing is the same thing that we end up doing and that’s they’re making making these little baby razor clamps come to the surface and then they eat it so they’re tied into it so I I I kind of where I’m going on this is to is to make one point for the presentation and that’s that when you’re digging razor clams which is the way these razor clams were dug with a cedar stick stuck into a uh El time and that’s your digging instrument and you and their in your 30 or 40 fellow tribes people have got the entire class of beach to yourself it’s hard to change have an impact on the ecology because one the efficiency level is not real high yeah if you can imagine stick about 3 ft long in the end of this poking it in the sand proing it around and trying to catch razor clam uh the productivity was low and even if you could have caught a million what would you do with them you know because you got the ones you needed for that point in time so this kind of leads to the S of The Next Step even without knowing how it worked um as we saw the sort of cultural shifts from one in which culture was embedded in the science the life science landscape then we saw the transition to harvest strategies that no longer were embedded in just day-to-day survival but were then being uh exploited uh and relocated uh as a product material as much as you can get and you kind of see that sweep all the way through the culture uh which that big conversion in which the Technologies started to drive not better lifestyle not better subsistence but uh alternative products from the product that you were collecting whether it was razor plants or fish or trees whatever that might be so you just see that huge uh cultural uh transition so my the razor Clan is kind of my example of of how it changes the way of look at the landscape here in plon county and the say all the Oregan coast and that as you see the phenomena that plays out and in a way it seems It’s not surprising that commercial PL diers were saying those kids I don’t know what they’re talking about was because it just kind of hard to imagine and it turns out that just about everything that we look at closely ends up being wow how how does that work how does that all happen uh to to even have any of these systems work and even though the reverence was there for the salmon uh you can imagine how difficult it would have been for cultures uh these really very sophisticated cultures from 3 to 5,000 years ago to imagine that a salmon was going to swim three or 4,000 miles of the Bearing Sea be gone for 3 years and then come back and find that piece of water that it was reared in and not find it by luck but find it by science that is that that piece of water has t been tagged coated by the unique combination of the material in that particular Watershed 36 71 Cedars 4,221 henlock 851 sword Ferns and then stir well and you get this product that is so unique that it’s can only be in one place there is no other landscape would have that particular set of materials and all of that of course all the pine needles falling under the water being processed by an in a whole series of of invertebrate organisms which then pass that through the body which then add in well you can kind of see the picture you have a chemical potion so unique that it’s Unique on the planet so if you have a o factory system like salmon do that can sort out individual molecules at the rate of about one out of a million they can find that molecule then it’s not surprising uh that a salmon wood swim out of the neana river swim out into the ocean go to the Bearing Sea swing by the Asian coast and come back up the California coast and swim into the mouth of the the canum and start making choices and so this is the first one it has to make big one left or right okay I mean you either go neana or you go in the can so that’s the first move so the messages start getting read first of all you had to just find this place okay to begin with and then you had to start reading these messages about which water as that set of material that was here when I was here last four years ago and sniff sniff sniff sniff you know trying to sort that out and making that hard left and then you know was it mil Creek it is my did my parents live in mil Creek H not quite right there it’s four molecules off so it goes on by and uh and what about shangar Creek and what about China crate and oh coo crate that’s Bells are going off match up match up um and so it takes a hard left up the hill by the elementary school and it’s headed back now to that unique place where those S would would uh you know have their origin and got that that unique code I say unique on on the planet so sometime we call this St and people say that is so amazing I me how in the world can these s to do that you know and not trying to detract from the absolute Marvel of what at all I sort remind people you know what’s really amazing at least to me that’s that’s all it can do it could have not done anything else okay so in a way it sort of changes a conversation and that there’s a certain amount of sort of Destiny to this process that is it isn’t really left little left and maybe it’ll work out be nice and you know it’s quite precise and so if you look at some of the things that creatures do and it’s and it’s kind of surprising that you know you think about January and Clark is mentioning waiting in 3 ft of water across and I got a right across the first time and then waited across this Grand River um and in those 4 days at least the part was here um you know going through all this salmon territory kind of no mention of salmon no mention of Tides which would have been in January would have been like the big deal of all like as you know you know go to the cove and the waves are going over throwing rocks into the parking lot you know very high water so it’s no small item that and 3 ft of water across the mou of the river so kind of I know it was bad weather but wasn’t bad weather that day you wouldn’t be waiting across the mountain mechanical I can tell you there wouldn’t be a low tide to go across there and yet they waited across that but kind of no mention of the salmon but when we look at the Salmon today in the minana system native salmon in January December and January you know we we sort of consider that we’re looking at the same fish that were running through those Waters 200 years ago the same fish that were running through those Waters 10,000 years ago these are all the progeny of those uh individual ation and the irony of it is that there’s a there’s a population of about 500 coo that sort out that neana system every year and spawn in all those little screams there’s eight streams in the city of seaside’s boundary and seven of them have spawning coal and some cases as many as 100 fish sort of still there today and yet you go to the ne mon system and you look at it it looks kind of well might be a little smelly looks kind of Muddy looks kind of dirty and uh so in some cases when on our sort of sarcastic days we say well it looks so bad that no one tried to fix it so it’s still working so that’s kind of the conclusion we got out of that one well the other thing that I’ll mention I’ve covered I’ve covered the razor clams I didn’t mention the ghost shrimp just because that had to be a freebie but the material is so limp you know the kiten on a ghost shrimp is just you know it’s going to go away pretty fast and when we went back well in the 70s you know Smithsonian did an excavation at palro site and they used qu in sivs to SI all the material and they got thousands of artifacts hundreds of thousands of funnel material bones and things and but when we went back and found their SI piles and they took the SI piles the stuff went through the screens and they at that under stereoscope that was where a lot of the world was I mean it turns out that almost all of the verra of the small fish went through that quartering screen and all the little pieces of ghost shrimp went through it and so there’s kind of a a pretty big missing part of the story about this because and I guess maybe if they didn’t have a low tide you wouldn’t have noticed all those gin poles but you know if I was going someplace for the first time and looking across the mud flats of the neana and that’s all I saw I think it would come up I me say wow what are all those holes in there you know and then if you had noticed some creatures doing this you like what are they doing and if you stuck around long enough and then you saw what they were doing you know that long long Bill Cruise off here every year and they gr shrimp okay so just about every creature and if you tell the story of the ghost shrimp people shake their head like the salmon story like the clam story like wait a minute now you’re telling me that those ghost shrimp they build this U u-shaped tube and then those Flappers that they have on the bottom of their body they use those to pump water through and invite other guests in into that tube and then pump 400 gallons of water through there and then the bottom of the tube is where all the debris settles and then they pick through it with those very delicate little mandibles that can almost handle things at the size of a Micon little decaying particles of of Marsh Grass and well it kind of keeps going on and then there’s things that live on their claws that then feed off of some of the material that they well it just you know it’s sort of like everything we talk about here just keeps going a little bit off the chart because it’s like wow and then take all the complexity of every one of those creatures and adapting to sand and reading molecular structure and and then stir that all cuz that’s all going on together and a whole bunch of those things have to interact to survive so then you take all that complex and then multiply you know by factors three or four or 10 or 10,000 so when I look at when I look at materials from Native American mens in this area and sort of think about a culture that was embedded in that process themselves with their complexity and their delicate inter action at precise times and many of the as Doug was talking about in the last session many of those were I’ll call them esoteric not that they weren’t incredibly be but they were imposed views on the system they didn’t arise out of the system but at the same time they were imposed over time and therefore their accuracy was comparable to having analyzed the same that situ situation for analytical values so you have to think about it sort of in in that context well the other one would be the life cycles of the of the Nearshore Birds uh sheer Waters and wh scers uh in the in the palmrose site uh 25 Marine birds were found uh in the following makes at 25 species and of that about 10 of them you could find them as drift once in a while but if you’re going to get get them in new numbers you have to get in a boat and go offshore a fair amount to start catching up to Albatross and and City Shear Waters and things like that so that’s another part of this sort of grand story is the kind of science that would be embedded in your culture deep enough that you could repeated over time to go offshore and collect up green birds where they I mean the rating there are big numbers Millions even now sh City sh Waters you see you can see 300,000 you stand at the C looking offshore and binoculars so there’s lots of them but getting to them and getting to them at the right time and then of course understanding how to process and make them a part of their culture so like I say 25 species have identified uh right now in just one uh mid sight the other creature that was found at Great rates uh was the sea which is another challenging creature very mobile they’re large they’re strong you know you going have to know a lot about their ecology to catch one um where are they how do they feed when can you get there kind of all the all the sort of insight into uh otter culture in some of the inventories um the bone material from a given meter of B remains it was as high as 44 to 46 bone structures from CR and I mean there that kind of density so there was also some U sort of collective effects that occurred from getting individual organisms that come out at incredibly High rates keep in mind the SE are you know long gone here but more than likely they were managing large kelp BS off tomad and were a part of that help sea urch and seaotter S which is kind of say another one of those sort of complex features um we’re out of time got a couple of little giveaways this is just a reminder a little bit about today’s discussion and that’s that uh my goal here is kind of help you change the way you look at a tree and when you see the limbs on a tree it’s easy to think the limbs are on the outside of the tree but when you sort of see this picture this is a stump in which everything inside the stump rotted away except the limbs okay and even though it looks like a torture chamber it’s really the inside of a tree and what the limb looks like from the trees perspective okay so grab one of these if you’re interested it’s got a nice little reminder uh for you which is kind of my party comment uh and it’s a challenge for all of us as we sort of head into this next uh decade about thinking about our place and how to live sustainably in it so thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everyone has seen thank you does anybody have any questions for now I um it’s just that I wondered what the word is it mid m i d d n I’m not and how would you define that a lay of Earth I’m not sure I would okay it’s it’s kind of the cultural living site may have been a short ter campsite or may have been a long-term living site in which uh lacking Garbage Service uh it just kind of went out the back door of the long house and all the organic material and it piled up and it decayed and sank down and some turned soil and and so it become the the history of that culturals for the most part food Gathering and and see side there’s maybe the greatest Legacy of any City on the entire Pacific coast of mittens where there was cultural uh inhabitants for thousands of years uh starting about 4,000 years ago and those are maybe 10 ft deep and then every inch of this some piece of History going back thousands of years and so there were lots of sand in this year lots of sand bur not too many the next year so you you can sort of restructure the history of the culture by going through that V AR pardon would that be an archeological term it is yeah it’s uh yeah it’s a common term for the West Coast anyway where yeah okay yeah that’s that’s it it’s the and many of them do have just shells because the the uh natives moved from one location to the other depending on availability of a harvest at that particular time so you find these clam mittens only clam shells nothing else uh sort of from here North what did they what did they do with the grimp you said there was go shrimp there oh what did they do with what did they do why were they in the mid um that they might have eaten them I there’s not much there for for eating part of it so they may well have used app claws for something or some portion of it but they they’re just there so how they were used I I don’t know we haven’t seen anything made out of them like unlike let’s say the uh the little sand snail that you find down on the beach um all about uh you know they collected those probably didn’t eat them but if you take a fingernail file and just rub on the very end of it it takes just a few swipes and you knock the end off and then it’s Hollow all the way through so that become a really nice bead really plus one the first be that you have time for one more question okay i’ like to get back to je Jefferson you said that Jefferson had his son’s report temperature so I’d like to ask a couple of temperature questions to the presentation one is did leis and Clark record any temperatures they want I don’t think they did they had what what sort of therometer would they have used and the third sort of related question is the salmon going up stream do they respond to gradients in temperature in the migration or is it a chemical gradient in the what far as we know it’s gradient but can temperature can be a barrier that is it you know if you those who were in the west 2 years ago when fish started going up Basin and the largest fish die off in history occurred in the pouth river 78,000 sh salmon died from a temperature barrier because so much water is be in that system so temperature for salmon can be Buri I don’t I don’t know about thermometers U but and I haven’t looked at the journals to see if there is any Precision about temperature I don’t I don’t remember seeing anything but there might be something there right we’re going to have to we’re going to have to wrap up our program for the day I’ll be here for a few minutes so thank NE M for coming in and talking with us this afternoon this does complete our schedule of programs here in the tent to many voices today and

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Doug Durr on Clatsop and Chinookan Land Management

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:08 +0000

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to the ten voices in the qu Discovery 2 tell you guys a little bit about us if you haven’t joined us before we are a traveling exhibit we’ve been traveling the trail since January of 2003 when we started out at oneill 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 St Louis we’ll open up March 13th in St Helen’s Oregon um as well U we call this the T voices because we bring in people from all over the country to do programs for us to tell ly Clark Story as long with the Native American story as well the over 50 different tribes they met along the way today we have with us Doug durur who’s from the University of Washington and he’s going to be talking about the classup and the halum living on the land so please welcome Doug hello and thank you very much for showing up today uh as was said my name is dou dur 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 and I do this through the University of Washington through other connections working directly with American Indian tribes around the western part of North America uh through the University of Washington through the University of Victoria where I’m at professor as well of the University uh Victoria uh School of Environmental Studies and the classic theum though from here of uh the people who lived here are 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 wash a Shore here in the 1840s and develop connections with the tribes living here uh they wash a Shore and actually take up homesteads here in Seaside just as ston from the large Village that was out here and so we had these long connections going back and so those con connections continue today and uh we know though that these these people who are here clap flip primarily but also the nalum or Northern tum people who were up here some of the time sh 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 had learned from these families uh about how to live here and how to live here well and so over the years the class of people the people who lived here in Seaside have been scattered in a number of different directions and today we have people who class of food went North some of them went up across the river and those people ultimately became hard of of what we now now know as the chinuk nation or the qual nation further north and we had people who got scattered to the South as settlers came through and started to move into the area we ended up going south and some of those people became part of what became the CET tribe the grand Ron tribe and the class of nalen people who are a mixture of people from different communities up in down the coast and so the class of people today have scattered the people who lived here the descendants of the people who lived here have scattered and yet they’re still around in fact I’d like to ask if there’s anybody here who’s a descendant of class of Chinook people anybody interesting first talk I’ve given in a while but 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 when I do the numbers I see that the uh the number of people living today who are descended from the communities right here in the seaside is is larger than the number of people who is here who were here when Louis 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 theyve become part of a much more complex sort of social fabric like there and so I’ve had the the uh 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 people who were passing through the area and so it’s on the basis of that information that I talk today uh about the history of this very immediate area here and this way of life that has in some ways been swept 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 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 in Seaside some still practicing certain parts of their cultural tradition but that being said I’m going to talk a lot about people as they lived in the past I’m not going to talk so so much about how modern day Classics 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 liveed here on the land we know that there were several large villages right here in the Seaside area right along the title Flats right along where the estuaries are and the people of this area fundamentally were people of that Estuary and in uary 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 that’s where the clams are all the different clams of plats 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 the flounder they had distinctive ways of catching flounder right out here you got out in the mechanic Estuary in the mouth there you can see all that those shallow areas and the flounder used to be thick there and the some people can still remember seeing their grandmothers go out and catch those fish by coming up and jumping on them you can actually get them because they’re nice flat fish and so you can catch them under your feet and you can hold them until you can reach down to the SN one and so there were all kinds of things like that to be found there the roots that grow in the tide flat almost everything that grows in the tide flat had some traditional use and unfortunately this time of the year there isn’t a lot of those things out out there there aren’t those things out there to see on the landscape I try 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 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 I’ll have to take my word for that and so all the things they needed really were clustered around that Estuary we have this the SLO Edge grows on the SLO right on one those title Flats also called the basket sge 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 so part of why I’m standing down here is so if anybody’s interested you can hand these things around so you can get a feel for them slle Edge that’s right or basket sge carrots of nuta for those who are taking notes it’s a uh a plant that grows all over we have a couple of types of SES that grow in side plats and the roots of these to this day there are some tribal Elders who still take care of these plants 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 turn 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 hitting 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 the tops can also be madeit into various things too but uh there’s that management of the land really is tied to taking care of those roots making sure that those work a lot of food plants can be found there in the tide Flats as well one that I can’t show you here but which is all over is a plant that the Halen people at least we know I don’t know what it was called in classa but the Halen people called it Yeta and it’s a root that uh comes up has a flower kind of like a buttercup and you’ll see it out in the tie flass 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 sand and clams and everything else that people laid here very important plant and when you go out at the right time of the year and you look out over those tide Flats it’s like 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 med medicinal work all those things out there on the tide flaps and there on the tide flaps too people traditionally fished around here and up and down this Coast we have some hint of what the how that worked there’s one Elder I’ve had the opportunity to work with Joe scoval who’s who was one of the last people raised in the community that was sometimes called squat town hobsonville down on Northern T Bay and uh some of his ancestors came from the village here in Seaside but by the time that the 20th century rolled around a lot of them were moving north and south and these people went South down to till Bay and that family has stories about how the 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 were sensient beings like ourselves willing to make the decision to come up and and to give their life so that we might live here 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 the long 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 going to they would tell people when they would stop fishing when they would pull those Nets out 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 overe exploit them which is how our modern day resource managers might try to explain that same thing but because the fish had felt violated by that that has overstepped our balance 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 these people had the opportunity to witness cause and effect they saw the people a couple Villages down catch too many fish the fish don’t come back much after you keep pulling out too many fish year after year after year 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 to your grandchildren to make sure that they’re okay 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 doing the work I do up and down the coast has been amazing for me to encounter a few 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 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 up the coast speaking in broken English about how their great grandparents taught them that there were certain things to do with the fish one of the things I do in addition to working with tribes as I help with salmon habitat restoration work and we know that we can take very good care of those 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 now one of the reasons the fish don’t come back is because if the stream has lost all of its salmon there are no sandon carcasses in the water to feed the little bugs and if there are no little bugs there’s nothing to feed the 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 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 their own family and so we have now gotten to the point of sem 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 and again great grandparents born in the mid 19th century who never heard anything about this modern science they will tell their grandchildren we’ve been told that we have to put the carcasses back in the water 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 and that’s interesting because this is Cutting Edge science I’m talking about with this fish carage stuff and here we have 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 water day scientists and say look what the tribal Elders are telling us they’re telling us we have to do these certain things in relation to the fish 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 three 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 but it’s being passed down in a society where you don’t have writing so you teach children these things at the very early age and teach them how to navigate those things and to survive also down here around the uh 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 it should move up now from the title Flats move up a little bit higher the edge of the title flats that area between the ocean and the big forests back here and we know that the people right here in this area class of people T people Cho people all took care of the land in various ways and one of those ways was to burn the plants out from along the edge of that contact point between the forest and the tide 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 and made sure that those things grow well a lot of the berries that you find around here will do okay 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 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 the tidle flats and back in the trees all that area being excellent very picking at one time that was an excellent place to go buy a house I guess a lot of suburban yards there now bar picking areas are kind of few and far between but those areas were very 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 cuz the forest should be covering it but it’s not Forest is back a little ways now 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 nion Mountain you go a little further south in oswal West State Park South of us here as you drive through that area if you’re heading south along the highway 101 you look back on the south side that Hill slope still doesn’t have many treats on it 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 and years knowing that those plants would come back up also in those areas where some some plants like Camas I wanted to show you one of those but you know there’s one of these plants that was said to be among the most important in the diets of all the people along the North Coast it’s 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 have both catalogs right there with their tulips and they put those in their yard and those blue flowers come up and they they’re spectacular they come up for just a little while and they go to seed and drop back down and the bulb is edible and if you can bake that you know how to do that right it’s very sweet very tasty and a lot of the elders around turn of the previous Century reported the Anthropologist coming through that the cus was their most important one of their most important plants right up there with that YCO rout I was telling you about on the tide Flats had also this plant grew right along the edges sort of wet margins where people were burning to take care of it and why I have all this buildup to tell you about this great ch plan just 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 nobody’s burning those places to keep the forest back and the places where it was growing have also been built over and today canas is an extremely rare plant on this part of the coast it’s 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 in and yet 100 years ago Elders were saying they remember remember it was a staple plant 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 describe 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 camet that get in they boot up for those C bulbs they dig up the ground and they heat up big patches and in fact in some parts of the the Northwest settlers coming in and reoccupying those C patches actually started off Wars there are fairly significant battles that took place in eastern Oregon when tribes Chas plots that they taken care of for Generation after generation were being uh occupied by people coming in with livestock for the for the outsider they would see those things they’ say what a great Meadow it’s a nice natural spot I’ll set my set my animals Lo 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 it looks like a nice natural Meadow H the WAP the WAP that’s a good question the WAP doesn’t really grow down here on the coast it grows a few of them grow here on the coast but the big WAP grounds were further up the Columbia River the WAP is a fascinating plant and 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 that’s right and it was available in large quantities to trade from just up River the real Central core of WAP Gathering along this entire Coast is the Zone from about Portland to Long View what some people call wapo Valley historically that’s another plant that’s becoming increasingly rare although here and there on his is like savi’s Island outside of Portland you still see WAP growing in some of these natural little SES and WAP it’s actually um Chinese food you have uh little white things um waterest is it relative of that uh Sagittarius they’re both the same no but they’re both the same genus and so if you want an idea of what that’s like it’s kind of people call it the Indian potato around here sometimes but it’s the same it’s the same basic size little round bull blet 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 real interesting thing it’s one of the things the science books I was talking about estuaries here were the salt water all mixes and textbooks never talk with you much about intertitle freshwater wedings but that’s that’s in fact what the wapo really likes cuz the Columbia River it hits that incoming tide and what happens is you get salt water in the mouth of the Columbia River but the further up you go you no longer get much salt water but what you get is the tide still affecting the river level so the river all the way up into Portland is going up and down and up and down with the tide even though there’s no salt water that gets that far up and so the WAP is sort of uniquely suited for that kind of environment where you have the water levels going up and down and up and down it’s actually a plant that can grow right in the water so you have to Buble it in the mud and then a long stem coming up in the leaves and a pretty little white flower up on the top and those were gathered by the chinookan people from just a little bit up River 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 wapo from just up the river they were they were slightly different people but they spoke more or less the same language and uh they had 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 me very good canoes down here sometimes those are traded further up River and they would trade those for a variety of different things and WAP would be one of those things they could get also for that matter some of the people from down here here seem to have had uh kind of de facto plant Gathering rights up River 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 columia both to fish salmon at some of the falls all the way up to uh Bonville solo area but also Gathering wa as that came back down through and so it wasn’t a plant that really grow grew much here here but it was one that was close enough and they had access to so it was a very important part of the trading economy here and those car pick up on that um it’s also a very good plant to store so most of the plants that Louis and cl are talking about they’re not actually seeing people out Gathering much of this stuff because it’s the winter time it’s not the time to gather berries it’s not the time to gather most of these plants but they are seeing those plants coming through and those WAP are being traded all up and down the river all through the winter time taking care of people so okay right it can be propagated here yeah it does well in we setting so you can put it if you have a pond in your yard you can get some going a nice muddy base if if the water isn’t too stagnant you need a little bit of flushing and then 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 these are good questions but taking things up further into the mountains some of the big mountains unfortunately we can’t see it here but if you were to just walk out anywhere Seaside look up you can see these big mountains all around here we have CLE mountain and we have Sugarloaf Mountain and we have onion Peak and we have Angora Peak these are all these this Ridge of mountains about 3,000 ft high at the tops going more or less from Northeast to Southwest terminating hitting the ocean where the a mountain is and the tops of those Peaks are high enough that everything’s a little bit different up there and we know that while I’m talking about the people of this part of the world spending a lot of time down along 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 Tre further up into the mountains and up there you have plants that you just don’t find down 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 mountain ranges all around this area so they become completely isolated but people would go up there and gather plants for medicines they would gather a certain kind of grass be grass that’s especially tough and sharp very good for making real rigorous baskets real tough ones also people would use that for making designs on bask B because it takes D well so you can dye at a certain color and do all the ornate basket work and up on these ridges along the Coast Range here people also went up and um 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 go look at this but you stand at the base of some of these Baltic outc crops that go up 500 ft above your head and it’s real rough 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 going out the side of it it’s a pretty cool spot and people would go up there to gather large quantities of these onions which are can be eaten just like our own onions the top meat like green onions little bulb can be used like a wet and so that was being gathered up there but also there were hunting areas up there elk hunting areas and uh we even have stories about people going out and hunting the ridgetops kind of like you hear about the Buffalo further east people would actually flush those elk off the tops of the cliffs chase them places where they knew they would have to go around some Corner around another rock and then oh there’s a blind corner there that goes off the edge of the cliff and people knew where those things were and they would chase the elk over the edge some of those Cliffs are actually high enough it’s hard for me to imagine hard for me to imagine picking up the elk at the bottom but that was done and also up 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 a lot of stories tied to each one of those Peaks 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 and so each part of these Journeys that people would take across the landscape cumulatively provided them with all the things they needed all the food they need all the medicine for the clothing they needed and so forth and so I may actually um cut things a little bit short here I do want to get into to questions and I also see the executor showing up but um 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 and I 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 can be learned from this sort of knowledge we’re looking at uh ways of taking care of the fish we have stories about simple things that seem fairly basic to us and yet they tell you how to uh how to take care of your family I was mentioning the importance of of not overe exploiting the fish because of 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 we also have stories about uh for example tsunamis here there’s a story about um about a tsunami takes place down near Indian Beach or uh ecola Point down south towards can Eola Park that area about a tsunami coming in and there’s a the place called the baskets there a lot of lot of rocks that look like overturned baskets if you look out there from Nia point in Nia State Park and the stories describe people seeing all of the the water is sweeping out and we know now having seen what’s taking place with tsunami is happening 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 because you can go out in places you’ve never gone on 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 describe that water starting to fall going down and down and down and down and the people in the communities down in that area we know there are several Villages down near can Beach get excited about that and they tell their young women look their muscles all over the Rocks it’s a great time for Gathering because look at all those places can get to that you never were able to get to before and all the young women go out into the rocks and start Gathering and all of a sudden we 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 we find the drift logs sometimes a mile or two Inland and that wave comes in and it takes them all and in the story then 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 have been lost they cry for all those people and if any of you know Canon 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 as you walk and people talked about that is the crying Sands of Canon Beach and in this story they explain that they say those are the crying Sands that’s the sound of those people crying for the people that were lost out there in that tsunami 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 in that sand they’re being reminded of that story you’ve told them and that’s pretty powerful because it teaches people how what to do and how to survive and we know that because these tsunamis do happen every 3 500 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 this story coming back from who knows how many generations of of class ofum of people 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 has 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 wood is almost always edible white berries you don’t usually want to mess with those and in fact in the oral traditions of the tribes right here they talk about the white berries as being the berries dead people dead people who died eat those white berries that’s their food so you don’t mess with that and then as your Todd 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 makeing very sick and here too the elders came up with a way of dealing with this he tells stories about Helo around here the wild woman kind of like zonaa North uh if you know that name like a Bigfoot character but a woman sharp teeth sticks mos in her hair extremely strong extremely strong and dangerous and liable to even eat children and there stories say those berries are hello 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 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 they don’t just start eating them 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 okay 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 the red berries are hers that’s that’s crazy but the more you look at this stuff the more you understand what 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 that’s going to keep them safe for generations to come and looking after those those children and grandchildren 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 is an important part of their Heritage but I think that this oral tradition you know the class of people when Louis 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 Louis and Clark they made sure they had food coming and going and 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 Tred tied into these Traditions are happy to see the rest of us paying attention to them 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 walk in front of us those are the things we share with those past Generations as well as concern about our children concern about our grandchildren those fundamental human things and the point of view of these Elders is 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 on the land having to deal with the consequences if you over harvest the fish if you eat the wrong Berry if you run out and the tsunami is coming in and now we are all inheritors of that and stories have been passed on to me verbally they came to my ears now 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 old tradition continues and just as I said the classic people aren’t extinct they have descendence all over so too their oral tradition is carry on but in ways they probably could never have imagined so anyway I open it up for questions I heard that did everybody else he was asking is there a time when youth are trained uh to tell stories and the truth is that storytelling is is a fundamental 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 W winter or we’re not having winter weather we’re having weather that’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 we’ll have wind blowing wind often howling out of the South as these fronts come in off the ocean rain falling horizontally it’s a very good time to go indoors and tell stories 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 Raven further north south wind is here all the time in the winter blowing making your house rattle making the smoke back up and bow into your home and so you can’t forget about south wind south wind is everywhere and south wind is the one in the stories who creates a lot of the 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 for example and then run down the beach ways and fall asleep because he so full he has to sort of sleep it off and he’ll wake up incased in rock and he’ll have to break his way out of that rock calling upon the the generosity of various people who 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 t m 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 and if you do you’re going to 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 would 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 some tribes stories are told and then children learn those stories just 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 learn them wrot so that the next story teller would know those stories just perfectly 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 boom boom boom and it’s that kind of cultural knowledge we don’t do that so much in our society with stories we do that with songs we can say 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 one his best kind of fun 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 and then some stories being told out on the landscape when the landscape feature is 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 south wind you shouldn’t retell the south wind cycle out of season because you’d be inviting Misfortune you in fact would cause it to go back to wintertime because that’s a wintertime story so you start telling South Wind Stories the wind may go south on and you’ll be uh having to puddle indoors again because that’s that’s the time so many questions here question how long does the uh did the waves stay out in a tsunami before they come in how did they have enough time to go out there and and Fiddle around shelves you we don’t have a geologist or do we have a geologist in the crowd 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 a few minutes I heard from an earlier presentation the importance of the cedar tree that’s right and I was wondering if there’s any Traditions you can share in terms of relationship with the either Force management 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 going to give like a wreath making demonstration or something but all hand this these are two pieces of Cedar uh gather actually gathered right in the middle of an area that I know was in a halem cedar Gathering area at one time the cedar trees there there’s so much there I could do a whole separate talk to on the cedar trees because cedar trees were 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 weed things with it uh you can weave 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 a cedar tree and there were a lot of different relationships with those cedar trees that are worth mentioning I’ll just T touch on a couple here again just like fish the traditional world view is that these these cedar trees are they they give themselves willingly so that we may have those things and so people didn’t kill 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 a whole tree or they take cedar bark off the side of the tree that’s actually possible you can come up to these cedar trees and up in British Columbia 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 Rin that starts to split off the tree a little bit and because these people had a lot a lot a lot of patience I guess you say the tree sways back and forth and over time that splits a little bit and then maybe come back the next day and boom notos wedges up a little bit more and that tream keeps doing that until finally pop they take off that whole plank cedar bark is the same way you’re going to 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 it takes a long time that that can be done and if people were taking these things there actually certain things you apologies you make to this gear streak saying 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 takeing care of and take that stuff home I should also say that the the cedar trees for the canoes and other Woods where you really needed good strong wood people would often go way up into the interior it’s another use of the mountains I didn’t mention even though there were cedar trees down here people often went way in Inland because the cedar trees growing on the 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 less growth each year less build up 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 way in the interior and chop these trees down I work with one Elder up north who still remembers doing this with his grandfather where they went clear up a mountain 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 have another base camp they clear the brush there out of the way Push It Rock it and pretty soon it slides the rest of the way down to the water front and then they can start working on cano takes two or three days to get that log down to the water and then they floated down the river down to the village where they work on so that wood 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 actually by that same Wild Woman character you know uh she has gotten 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 in turn what do you think of my new tattoos and henlock tree which I don’t have here has the bad sense to tell her what he really thinks and she says in the future your wood is going to be totally useless when winds blow you fall right over nobody will make medicine out of you you’re not good for much of anything but cedar tree has t cedar tree knows what to say he says I think you look great this is always the right answer isn’t it he says I think you look great with that those tattoos and she says very good and you’re going to have strong wood in the 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 your out of your Greenery they’ll make clothing out of your bar and you’ll be honored by all these people who will show you this kind of respect and so same thing happens with Spruce this tree is everywhere around here Spruce very Pokey I’ll hand these around Spruce also has a good sense to say fairly positive think Spruce is not given as many attributes as Cedar but Spruce it’s a great tree and a lot of the uses are medicinal pitch very important medicine uh spruce trees in some cases people go and put ceremonial regelia in the branches because it’s a powerful tree and you want those things out of the mundang world off the dirt off the ground and in some cases people even bury people up in trees up in the branches of these spruce trees with broad lateral branches sticking out and they laid those canoes or boxes right in the arms of that tree to take care of them so that’s very Poky by the way I warn you that a lot of the native names for this plant up and down the coast translate to the plant that really really really hurts when you grab onto it so as this goes around before War that’s why I’ve stripped the stems for you this will be our last question okay can you give us a glimpse of what it was like for families living in the long house seasonally how it would change yeah the the long houses around here they varied in size 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’d have extended families in them often two or three fires in a row down the middle 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 small poles and uh woven Maps made out of various grasses even sometimes these guys and so you have whole extended families there in the winter time you it’s sort of a combined residential space and storage space because there’s so much it it’s not the time of year when you’re Gathering food it’s the time you’re living off the stored Provisions so there were boxes all over often big what they call bent wood boxes made out of sear planks that will be taken off the tree heat it up and then bent so that you take a single Plank and you bend it and you bend it 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 would 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 often when the biggest homes which happen to be the homes of the more powerful families um we’re hosting potash kind of events where they’re exchanging goods thank you and uh and also um sham shamanistic uh work where they’re going through and bringing in shamanist new healing work and that kind of thing in the winter and there as we get into the springtime people begin to mobilize they go to fishing places and plank Gathering areas and so there fewer people there at the at the larger houses but then you have temporary encampments 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 shle simple shed structures often like the size of a garden shed sometimes where you have a family just sleeping for a couple of nights uh doing some fishing doing some plant Gathering maybe a simple shed 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 sometimes in the hottest days of summer people sleeping out with kind of mat coverings again those woven mats being used over pole Frame Works way of 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 areation and uh sometimes if people are going to go for a major fishing junket they might even pull some of the boards off and take them with them to go lean up to make the walls of the other structure they’re going to live in so they’d actually pick up those boards takes a lot of work to get one of those sear blanks 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’d have smaller groups of family and then in the larger house you’d have a few people still hanging out usually elderly children those kinds of things Sing close to home and then as you get into the winter time 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 those extended families are back together in a larger village where they spend the year rest of the year say we’re out of time we should be questions for Mario stick

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Dyani Bingham on Montana Tribal Tourism Development

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:07 +0000

ladies and gentlemen I’d like to welcome you to the tent of many voices this tent is part of a traveling exhibit that has been following the Lewis and Clark Trail since January of 2003 I’ve been on this project since last February and we came up the Missouri River from St Louis to North Dakota uh took a break from the trail over the winter and we’re back in North Dakota the 1st of April to proceed on just like Lewis and Clark did 200 years ago and we are following in about the same time frame as Lewis and Clark this story is a huge story it is not just a story of Lewis and Clark and the men that went with them across the continent it’s also a story of the woman who took her small baby and went on this CrossCountry trip as well it’s a story of the Native Americans who were here long before Lewis and Clark and a story of the people who followed after them as well we are very pleased to have with us this hour Dean Bingham who is with the Montana tribal tourism Alliance and she will be talking to us about this organization she is a caborn and black feet so let’s please make her welcome thank you again my name is deani bigam and I’m the director of the Montana tribal tourism Alliance and today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about my organization which is called mtta for short and kind of a guide to developing tourism in Montana’s American Indian communities and specifically answering the question what is culturally appropriate tourism because I get asked that question a lot because that is the goal of my organization is to develop culturally appropriate tourism on all of the Indian reservations in Montana the Montana tribal tourism Alliance is comprised of membership from the seven reservations in Montana here is a map of Montana with the reservations highlighted and along with that are the tribal emblems for each reservation as the presentation goes forward I’ll kind of discuss a little bit more about the details of the tribal emblems and the significance of some of them I’ll go over all of the names of the reservations first is the black feet reservation and that has the black feet tribe and the main city in that reservation is Brownie and it’s right next to Glacier National Park the Flathead reservation is a confederated tribe of the Salish coutney and Ponder tribes which I believe Believe confederated In 1855 to develop the Flathead reservation Rocky Boy reservation is chipa and cre tribes and now they choose to call themselves chipa cre because the two tribes that were once separate have formed an alliance and now are the chipa cree tribe Fort bellut preservation is home of the groon and ainin tribes two tribes living side by side on one reservation this uh has proved challenging but very interesting for Fort belnap and they are very successful in integrating groon ways and asabin ways the fort peek reservation is also home to the asabin tribe along with the Sue tribe and that again is a reservation that has two tribes that live on the same reservation going down in my part of the country I’m from Billings I live in Billings is the crow reservation which is the largest reservation in Montana and that is home to the Crow tribe or as they call themselves The absal the Northern Cheyenne reservation is bordering the crow reservation and that is home to the Northern Cheyenne or as they also call themselves the sitas people we have a board of directors and all of our board of directors are appointed by their Tribal Council our president is from Fort peek his name is RJ young ionda Henry Thompson is our secretary she works at um the doll knife College in lame deer Montana on the Northern Shan reservation Jason buor is our representative from Rocky boys major Robinson is our representative from the Northern Cheyenne tribe actually that name has changed Mell plain feather is no longer our Crow representative but it is now Latana old elk who took mardell’s position she replaced Mardell just very briefly short time ago Clinton Brown is our representative from Fort bellnap and Mary Jane Charlo is our representative from the Flathead reservation as is George heavy Runners are representative from the black feet oh I have Lana’s name down here so I did I didn’t forget Latana she is our actually our vice president now as well and I and I’m the professional staff the only staff for the Montana tribal tourism Alliance and my name is deani Bingham and I live in Billings and that’s where our offices are headquartered our mission is to promote culturally appropriate economic development through tourism and actually the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial has been a very very important part of this development because it has given us a foundation to build off of terms of developing our programming what kind of speakers are very interested in telling their story and working with visitors from around the world so we’ve really used the bicentennial as a time to identify people on each of the reservations that really are ready to share their story and their history and their culture with visitors from around the world part of mt’s goal goal is to have a United voice in tourism development and we really want to tell our stories our way there are so many tribes in Montana and a lot of time stories get filtered and they’re not necessarily True Word of Mouth just so many different cultures and we wanted to be able to tell our stories in our own way so that’s why one of the reasons why mtta was developed we are also working to protect the Integrity of American Amer Indians through cultural culturally responsible planning and diverse Partnerships this is really important because one thing that the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial has done I believe is that unprecedented cooperation with the tribes of Montana rarely do federal and state and international national agencies reach out to Indians like they have done during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial which is very important what mtta does we have developed what we call tribal Ambassador training and it’s a curriculum that kind of helps people decide what they want to talk about in terms of Their Own Story and the story of their family and tribe we’ve T we’re also working cooperatively through marketing Partnerships we do Gathering of artists and package tours and we also facilitate training for tour package development so the big question is what is culturally appropriate tourism one meaning of culture that’s a question I get asked a lot what does this culturally appropriate tourism mean and so I was really in search of the meaning of culture so I just went to the good old dictionary to help me find the answer to that question and the dictionary said that the meaning of culture is the totality totality of socially transmitted Behavior patterns Arts beliefs institutions and all other products of human work and thought I thought whoa that doesn’t really help me too much because that pretty much encompasses everything so I think what I really got out of that is that culture is changing all the time as we as people change and as our world changes so as Indians we really really have to adapt our culture and make it work for today American Indians live within two cultures and I believe that all Americans live under the broad umbrella of American culture and a lot of times modern American culture is focused on money time technology image predominantly white points of view in terms of the national media where it’s a we still live in a very uh I guess you could say European point of view we’re very nationalistic and American Indian cultures focus on community issues a lot of times spirituality oral history historical Injustice arts and culture and sovereignty issues sometimes these cultures can Clash but what mtta is trying to do is help people reconcile the clashes between these two cultures so we can move forward and develop tourism and develop Economic Development on our reservations a lot of times this is where um I would have to say the resistance has come from some of the tribal members in terms of cooperating with tribal tourism or maybe even the lwis and Clark by Centennial it is seen sometimes as a manipulation of our culture exploitation stereotypical which can be dehumanizing it’s very much entrenched in the myth of the wild west and National folklore and sometimes it is a skewed history this is the worst case scenario and this is something that some of the tribal members have been dealing with for a long time up until we have organizations like mtta have taken it into our own hands to develop our own story um sometimes the worst case scenario can play out in terms of tribal tourism development and of often times tourists can pay non-indians for a false stereotypical American Indian experience which could be uh somebody say from Europe or somebody selling like a teepee or sweat lodge or something like that often times um tourists can be rude and disrespectful and also times I forgot to mention that some of the visitors that they visit perhaps on the reservation can be rude and disrespectful too so these are the worst case scenarios in terms of Tourism development in indan religions can be sold and compromised you can see that sometimes if you look on the internet um people selling sweat lodges or selling suances stuff like that people off oftentimes drive through reservations and do not stop for anything this is a danger in terms of like I said the sweat lodge for sale or the marketing of Native American rituals this is very dangerous and PE some people can use tribes names to Market fake ceremonies and never consult with the tribes mtta we are very aware of this and we do not want to condone this type of behavior in any way so we choose not to uh deal with any sort of ritualistic or spirituality Indian religion in our tourism we kind of leave that to people to kind of seek out on their own the best case scenario is tourism for economic development while still affirming Community Values and cultural Integrity an example of this would be the cheyen TR writers they in Ashland Montana they use their whole entire family to conduct these trail rides and basically they really study the history of the Northern Cheyenne people ethnobotany which is all the flowers and the meanings of all of the different medicinal uses of the plants on the Northern Cheyenne reservation the Wranglers are experienced beautiful scenery and a warm family experience and horses which is very important to tribal tourism the I’m going to just kind of fly by these tourism niches and markets because these are kind of the areas in that we are looking to develop in terms of tribal tourism nature ecotourism emphasizes the natural world Montana is a very beautiful state so we want to really explore the flora fauna and ethnobotany but also leave an undetectable small footprint on the natural world and the natural attractions are I mean living in Fort Bon you guys understand natural attractions because this is a very beautiful little town so I don’t think I need really need to go into the natural attractions ecotourism would be hiking walking tours bird watching horseback riding fishing stargazing Wildlife viewing so what we want to do what we really want to help the tribes do is get to know the natural attractions in their Community because most of these natural wonders need protection and not promotion and we can by identifying these areas we can find and develop areas for activity divert attention and interest from areas that we want to preserve and protect cultural tourism would be included in Fine Arts and museums arts and craft shows that’s a very important part in my mind because there are so many wonderful Indian artists in the state of Montana a lot of times though they are working very hard to to get their work done to do their art and they don’t know how to Market themselves or their work necessarily so mtta really helps people Market their work and we try to find places for them to show their work uh museums interpretive centers restaurants Wellness Resorts gift shops these are all areas that we’re really seeking to develop Heritage tourism focuses on the story of people and places told through interpretation of cult cultural landscapes preservation of or restoration of historic structures this would include battle sites like the Little Big Horn battle um Battlefield pictograph caves traditional games archaeological sites encampments like the one that we’re going to have in Great Falls um at the end of this month for explore the Big Sky music festivals Etc cultural heritage tourism is kind of a high hrid of e tourism cultural tourism and Heritage tourism and cultural heritage tourism is planned and implemented with Community involvement and support is respectful of family stories and doesn’t trivialize or commercialize Indian cultures Recreation and Adventure tourism is very common and activity driven this is another area that we’d be interested in developing because there’s a lot of people who are very into staying in shape and and kind of adventurous types and on the reservations there’s a lot of places that we would like to be able to explore this kind of Adventure tourism as well here are some of the activities I won’t go through them framework for tourism development what I really look for is work against any exploitation of people land and culture balance entertainment with education urge community members to tell their own story in their own way and build tourism programs that benefit the people in the tribe both financially and socially a lot of times I think that the social problems are more important than the financial problems of some people just because we have money in our pockets doesn’t mean that um our community is necessarily any better off so we really want to develop tourism in a way that helps us sleep at night in a good way we feel good about ourselves and what we’re doing and what we’re sharing with people visitors and the community attributes for Success this is a lot harder than it seems sometimes an open Friendly personality supportive friends and family detailed plans for business businesses and marketings punctuality uh these are things that sometimes people don’t associate with Indians necessarily and so we’re trying to work hard finding the people who we would consider as very open and friendly who could put their best foot forward in representing their tribe and who are very punctual and strong networkers because these are elements of success that we really really at mtta need to develop for us to be successful in tribal tourism obstacles of course are money and infrastructure anybody who goes anywhere along the Highline or on the reservations know that infrastructure is sometimes sorely lacking there’s not necessarily really great Fairgrounds or uh even restaurants in some cases so this is an issue that we really need to work on too because we want people to feel comfortable in the reservation communities land use issues racism it still exists as as hard as that may be to accept but it still exist so we are working on that and we want to give ourselves the best tools to deal with those kind of situations if they should occur education seasonal we need more trained personnel and sadly but surely politics tribal politics does uh hinder some of our tribal tourism development at times assets uh we have strong American Indian cultures in Montana I’ve traveled all over the state and a lot of times people lose their way of life especially if you go east of the Mississippi River a lot of the tribes have lost a lot of their language and cultures and traditions and they actually really look towards the Montana tribes the North Dakota South Dakota tribes and often times kind of use our culture as a substitute of their own in a way because theirs has been lost so I’ve traveled all over the country and I’d have to say that Montana our tribes are very strong in our cultures in our history in our way of life we there’s a great interest in American Indian way of life I know that because people like yourselves come to these the tent of many voices they go to all of the different educational programming that they know that a Native American is going to be speaking there’s interest in powow there’s interest in Indian art so I’m really really feel good about the interest that there is in American Indian way of life and I think that it’s a really posit postive change we have beautiful natural resources there’s lots of talent and enthusiasm especially among our younger Indians that we’re really ready to put our best foot forward and show the world what we have I consider Montana tribal tourism an asset and we also have strong Partnerships with travel Montana the Lewis and Clark B Centennial commission explore the Big Sky all of uh National Park Service all of the great organizations and important issues intellectual and cultural property rights this is issue that when you talk with any American Indian who’s sharing their story I think that is something that they’re interested in learning about because in the past sometimes people will share a story to a group of people a very important historical or cultural story and then that story may be printed in a book without recognition of the person who told that story so we’re really interested interested in learning our rights when it comes to the rights sacred sites on and off the reservation I consider the entire state of Montana a sacred site but there are a lot of really special sites on and off the reservation that we are working with a whole bunch of different organizations to help preserve rude disrespectful tourists those are important issues because often times especially if we’re dealing with somebody maybe from back east or something who’s very uh opinionated about what they think it’s up to us to really learn how to put our best foot forward and deal with them in the best way training and educating for tourism jobs that’s not doesn’t really happen too much in Montana also how much to charge tourists that’s another issue because we really need to think about not selling our s short but also not charging too much to The Tourist tourism can bring much-needed dollars and jobs directly to our communities and open the doors to funding that can establish cultural community centers and interpretive sites help preservation for land and language and Foster a new generation of small success successful businesses on the reservations here’s a glimpse of Montana’s reservations the fort peek reservation is home to the Cino and Sue tribes it was EST established in 1871 there’s more than 2 million Acres on that reservation the southern border is the Missouri River and the northern border is 50 Mi south of Canada and there’s lots of open prairies and Farms fart peek attractions include the Asino and Sue Culture Center and museum in popler which features a permanent exhibit of Asino and Sue Heritage arts and crafts the fort pet Community College which has the upper Missouri River Institute and gift shop and annually it sponsors seven powow which is the most of any other reservation there’s excellent dancers rodeos arts and crafts sports the for pek Cino and Su tribal flag was designed by Rosco White Eagle and it symbolizes two chiefs holding the sacred Buffalo robe to signify the bond between the two tribes living together harmony the fort bnat reservation is home of the groon or as they refer to themselves the aan or the people of the white clay and the asabin which is nakota or generous ones the land base of 650,000 Acres which has Plains and grasslands it’s Prime Buffalo country Fort belnap attractions include Buffalo tours and reservation tours the scenic Mission Canyon south of lots of Wildlife and hunting and fishing and the fort belnap flag symbolizes a traditional Shield that protects both tribes the circular shape of the shield represents the circle of life the buffalo skull symbolizes the two tribes different colors but functioning as a whole the white Jagged line on the buffalo skull represents the Milk River the snake but a place of sacred power is Illustrated above the skull and two arrowheads signify strong traditional ties with the past Seven Feathers hang from the shield there is a feather for every two of the 12 council members with a c Center feather for the chairman the chipa Creed tribe of the Rocky Boy reservation is located in North Central Montana near the bepa mountains right close to where you guys are it’s home to the Creed descendants from Canada and from chipa that had moved East from the tur mountains in North Dakota Rocky Boy attractions include Bea SK bow and they’re also developing their own tour packages for specifically for hunting the Rocky Boy flag uh the sun’s Ray symbolizes sacred grass dance Chiefs active in preserving chipa Creek culture and the writing Under the Sun represents good health and Fortune for the tribe there’s also some very other important things um integrated like the teepee which is the home the sweet grass which is a very important part of our daily prayers I guess you could say a lot of people believe that when you burn the sage or and the sweet grass the smoke carries your prayers up to the Creator the black feet tribe has a reservation land base of 1.5 million Acres bordered by Canada and Glacier National Park the black feet name derived from blackened moccasins they wore it’s not quite clear if the moccasins were blackened by like fire sitting very close to the fire kind of warming up your feet or if we actually had paint and painted the bottoms of our moccasins black the black feed attractions include home of the Museum of the Plains Indian beautiful scenery and Wildlife North American Indian Day celebration and the also have a really great website called blackfeet nation.com the blackfeet flag has acoustic with 29 ankle feathers acoustic is very important because it was used by our Warriors and the Warriors would count coup on their enemy and when you counted coup on your enemy it it told your enemy that you respected him enough to not kill him but get in close enough to touch him so he knew that if the time came you really could but it’s a respectful form of warfare I believe the acoustic is and also it symbolizes the strength of a warrior the black feet reservation outlined in the middle of the circle of 32 eagle feathers and the bonei branch of the Blackfoot Confederacy is in Montana you can see that it says the black feet Nation ponei that’s what the black feet in Montana refer to themselves as as pikuni s6a and the blood branches are in Canada the Flathead reservation Confederacy was formed by the Hellgate Treaty of 1855 the Confederacy made up of the Ponder Callis spells Cy and the Salish tribes the Flathead attractions include the people Center which is right in Pablo and it has native Adventures which is a very informative daily kind of program for visitors Flathead Lake traditional encampments and lots of powow the flag of the Salish cutney and Ponder tribes is significant for the power of the Sun that is the sun that’s behind the teepee the blue water from the mountains which is uh I believe it’s a right by what and recognized in their treaties that the water that comes off off of the mountains the mission mountains off of the reservation is the property of the tribes the mountains signify Earth and the Tepe represents home the seven eagle feathers and the bow and arrow represent protection of the Homeland the crow or absal tribe Crow AB absal translates as children of the large beak bird 85% of the tribal members speak Crow as their first language and it’s located in South Central Montana they have a large buffalo herd in vast coal deposits that I think they’re looking at developing probably right as I speak um Crow reservation has more people speaking their language than any other reservation in Montana Crow attractions in include abzal tours which goes daily to the battle of the Little Big Horn the Big Horn Canyon yellowtail Dam the battlefield in Chief PLU State Park which is in honor of the last crowchief plen coup the Absol flag signifies the white Tepe is a symbol of life with four poles as the base the Crow tribe is one of the only tribes in Montana that has four poles as their base of their Tepe rather than three and I was I was with um spent a whole bunch of time with some crows and they were talking about the when you the TB poles signify the man and the woman and the daughter and the son and also when you when you uh put the stakes into the teepe the bottom of the teepee that is significant of badger cloth and you have to kind of dig the pole or the stakes in the Tepe pretty well because it holds down like a badger would hold down a pipe is a sacred gift the Crow tribe also has a sacred tobacco plant and the three mountain ranges on the crow reservation the war bonnets represent the warrior Society of the crow good men from the mother’s Clan and good men from the father’s Clan the last reservation is the northern Chyenne the home of the cistas or human beings they have a smaller reservation 437 acres in southeast Montana and in this emblem is pictures of the two famous last Northern Cheyenne Chiefs which were little little little wolf and doll knife Northern Cheyenne attractions include the John Wooden legs Memorial Library Fourth of July paow in Lamer the Labor Day poow in Ashland crazy head Springs and the Tongue River the northern cheyen flight is a very simple but beautiful flag the symbol in the middle is the morning star or W the name of the great Chief morning star or dull knife and it’s the first star to rise in the morning and you can contact me through this information right here we do have a website and it’s www.bb.com and that website kind of goes over a lot of different things um there’s information about all the tribes there’s also a lot of Lewis and Clark information on our website and visitor protocol information information for people who are interested in going on trail rides all different kinds of stuff so if you have a chance please visit the website and you can learn even more about mtta so I’d like to I’m the one who developed this PowerPoint presentation I’d like to give thanks to tribal planning Services another IND an owned organization that I work with that helps me develop my PowerPoint presentations and the National Park Service challenge kosare Grant thank you to all Montana Indian tribal governments and business people and there’s a tribal tourism toolkit that was sponsored by the Louis and Clark B Centennial that really helped a lot of the tribes kind of figure out what we want to do with tribal tourism and help us develop a framework that would allow us to do that responsibly so thank you very much do any of you have any questions you’d like to ask deani about uh tribal tourism and or about the development of tribal tourism or just visiting in Native lands if you have any questions we’ll be glad to feel them at this time all right let’s give Dean a big hand thank you very much for coming it was our pleasure to have you here today thank you please come back and join

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Steve McCracken on Trade Beads and the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:07 +0000

for well good afternoon everyone and welcome to the tent of mini voices T many voices is part of the core of Discovery 2 traveling Lewis and Clark exhibit this exhibit has been on the road since 2003 started at monello Thomas Jefferson’s home it’s been traveling along the Lis and Clark Trail and we traveling through 2006 through the return journey and what we do is at each venue at each stop along the way is when we set up our tenam mini voices we bring in a wide variety of presenters speakers to give us a little taste of the history and the culture of the L and Clark expedition and what we’re going to hear about this afternoon is something that’s often overlooked on the L and Clark expedition we’re going to talk about the some of the importance of trade beads we’re going to hear from Steve McCracken about the whistling Hawks trade bead collection Steve mcra McCracken has been described as a modernday mountain man his hobbies and interests led to his business whistling Hawks in 1989 whistling Hawks is the trade name given given to him by a black feet Onida Indian while on a Vision Quest Steve is an accomplished silver smith as well as a trade bead expert he’s been working and researching uh working on and researching trade bead since 1989 he draws on many different references and research to formulate dates names and history of old trade beads the word bead is derived from the Old English word Badu meaning prayer and Steve has requested that his collection is not to be photographed so we would certainly appreciate your cooperation and please give a warm tenam many voices welcome to Steve McCracken in his whistling Hawks trade bead collection thank you I’m going to start out today with just a short introductory history to the beads and then uh proceed into the beads of Lewis and Clark when we look here I we’ve put a list together and before Christ in uh wrong one in in 10,000 45 and to 720 glass beads were made in China because the reason I pointing that out as Le and Clark had beads from China and from Venice and then in 300 to 400 uh ad the Roman Empire had a vast Market of uh industry in in the trade be error then in 585 benice founded by the Lum Lombards then the records indicate window glass was ordered from Venice glass beads believed to have been made in Bohemia then the German Peddlers were prohibited from carrying more than 10 layers worth of glass rods for making glass beads uh the glass furnaces in Venice were ordered to be moved to the island of Morano and that was just off the city of benis because they were afraid that if the factories started on fire that they would burn down the whole city then as we proceed there were strict rules enacted about taking information from outside Venice and they they enacted the death penalty was imposed in 1526 the first leak of glass secrets from Venice were went went to factories in Paris the process of the wound lamp work beads was invented in benice in 1528 in 1731 the W bead process consumed 800 lb of oil daily in benice in 1740 the Bohemians export export set up permanent warehouses in All Imports and Inland cities of Europe and then in the 17 uh 64 and 46 they produced more than 2,228 th000 lbs of beads that was before the 1800s all this was done so as we start back in the history of beads the earliest beads would have been the fossilized bone here this bone bead here is fossilized this is Ivory and shell these were some of the earliest beads known to man The Quill work which is well known in our areas by the Native American culture in that here’s shells that were found on the Columbia River uh they were found with several other artifacts this comb and and the bone beat or bone pick there is fossilized we talked about the Roman Empire there for a minute this here the reason I’m showing you this is because you see the blue glass here and the ibeads they the blue glass was really common and they they had it before Christ I don’t know where my speakers are okay uh these are Islamic and these were folded over but these were wound so even before Christ they knew how to make the wound beads this bead here here is from China it’s a molded faceted bead this was done before Christ This is a Waring States type bead it’s the I the I beads were were made for to ward off evil looking at you so the people in all different cultures wore ibeads from before Christ and after Christ and uh so you’re going to see these the ibeads in a lot of different collections here that were made in Venice and all over Europe along along with being made in China and they had the ability to make these molded beads before Christ and I have that bead in my collection these beads here are from a Afghanistan that’s jet that’s coal and that’s fiance those were all made in Europe too there the first beads that were being made were the Bubble Glass so you see the the gentleman here he’s making the bubble he’s making a a large bubble and they would they would stretch that out and then make many bubble beads from that piece of glass here he’s they took the rods home and they’re making glass bubble beads right there at the kitchen table here’s a bet the Bellows underneath the table this lady’s over here she’s measuring the beads they use oil lamps like this plus there’s their old measuring tool here’s your bubble glass beads which are very rare and hard to find because they were so thin that they broke and uh we we just don’t find many of them out in the world today the next beads that were made were the cane beads and your Russian faceted beads the molded ones they were pulled through a mold and then they were hand faceted here’s Bubble Glass that’s faceted with the Russian faceted there’s some that’s not as you see here the the blue is a dominant color here’s samples of Russian faceted beads in different colors they uh they Ed several different things to make the the color of these beads green took copper and the blue took cobalt blue and the red beads uh they took gold to make as they mixed with the silica here’s your deep cobalt blue that’s most sought after this is the oldest strand of faceted beads I have as you can see here they’re not fasted very much this strand also White Russians and red this bead here was a noev cadz bead Columbus actually brought those with him when he came and they were used in the ships as bases so when Columbus and actually I have books that date back to Captain Cook when Captain Cook came they brought beads with him too and they were in barrels that were used as Banes in the ships so as they at ate their food and and supplies they could move the barrels of beads around and balance the ship out so that’s why they came with Columbus and and all the early explorers the next bead that was made real common is the cane bead the seven layer Chevron then they made the sixth layer and then on the far right you see the four layer Chevron the reason they started they started out with the the seven layer was because that was what the venetians learned to make in the 1500s and that was the hardest bead to make because each process they had to pull that cane of glass through a mold then on the six layers were easier to make and the four layers got made the process faster because as the years went on the demand for the beads was more and more here’s some pictures of of them working in the old factories in Venice uh they work very close to the furnaces the fires were large it took a lot of wood so they used the podach from the wood to to help make the beads so they didn’t have to mine potash when they were making beads in Venice because they used wood in the furnaces I was telling you about the Bubble Glass and then they went on to making the cane re the way they made the cane as you can see on the far right the young man joining his Rod to the other man with the bubble then they run in opposite directions and they with with the glass being hot and it would stretch up to sometimes up to 300 feet long then they would take it and the guy would break it into bundles 3 or 4T long and then they would take it back in the process and pull it through the mold cuz to make the Chevron it has the 12 teeth on it right there to make that pattern they had to pull it through the mold each time and as you look at a Chevron when you look up close here The Collection you’ll be able to see that each time when they pulled that bead through the mold before they broke those canes to make the individual beads the top one here is the Russian faceted there’s the noev cadz these are all cane beads and then some of these were tumbled and feted you’ll see here this is a picture out of Germany they’re actually being pedal and water was dripping down here in his bucket onto that stone he’s fast hand fasting beads these are two other styles of the same thing but these were these were set at and pedal with their feet the fastet the beads in the early days here’s a closeup of the Russian facet and and the star pattern I’m talking about here the blue gleen glass is the rarest on the on the center of them and this one here actually has nine layers in it if you look close to it here’s a red layer uh seven layer Chevron uh the red core is is not common mostly it was Green Glass like this one here the other thing you can see here is they made mistakes even though they were Master artists what they did they still ended up with bubbles in the glass these are smaller uh collection there of uh smaller Chevrons and you can see the different patterns and then when they ground the sides down how you can see the edge of the the different colors laying underneath here’s this shows you real good we call this a a Chevron salami because they cut it at an angle so you can see each layer was pulled through the mold there and the last layer was not then it would have been this like this is a cane a piece of cane out of a Venice Warehouse they found them in the corner they had uh bundles of canes in in warehouses over there in Venice and they broke them up into about 6 in long and uh shipped them out and sold them all over the world but the red Chevron is very rare and hard to come by so so is the green there’s a green Chev seven layer Chevron with the blue Center there’s a large seven layer and other other examples there this one here is broken so you can see inside different patterns that it’s not just done on the outside edge of the bead it’s the full length of the bead and a lot of people think that these beads were painted on none of these beads are painted on they’re all solid glass and this one here you can see where there’s a crease in that bead that bead was still hot when they laid a rod across it and put that crease in it in the 1500s and they went to the six layer of Chevron there’s a good example of that and the four layer here this one was probably a five layer Chevron but the women like the red on the outside of the bead so they would grind the beads down so the red would show so we call this a woman Chevron the Yellow Jacket five layer Chevron and the black Chevron there these are really rare to come by now and we get to the the beads of Lewis and Clark and that’s that’s a real uh subject that a lot of people argue about because we have a hard time proving the exact history and science of the beads that they had with them and this list we put together here me and a few of my historical friends here you’ve got white WAM and the 5 lbs of glass beads mostly small uh 20 lbs of red glass beads assorted 5 lbs of yellow or orange beads assorted two cards of beads three lbs of beads 73 Bunches of beads 8 and2 lbs of red beads this whole list mostly talks about different color of beads and when Lewis took off on the trip he knew that the blue bead was the most valued and sought after bead for the Native Americans when he when he left before he left but yet he ordered this list of beads so that’s why uh and these were actually Indian presence people are really misund understand that these were bought to be Indian presents they were to be given to the Native Americans these would have been beads that would could have been with Louis and Clark we talked about orange and yellow your Reds the blues these are cane beads then uh we’ll move on to some of these are wound beads in here that’s the next process the wound bead they work real close to the furnace right there and and grabbed the glass and pulled it out and wound it around a rod these beads right here Lewis requested in the letters of Donald Jackson’s he requested the cheap blue beads from China paying less than 13d in Europe for them so Lewis actually requested these beads from China when you look into the documentation of the letters of Lewis and Clark it shows that he asked for those beads from China and they’re all wound this one here I’m showing you the wound process up close where you can see it the wound pattern in it those beads were all made one at a time they weren’t made like the cane beads the wound beads were made one at a time here we’re showing the Bellows the the furnace right there in front of them the vent up above and guess who sitting around the table working at night do making the beads it’s the women here we have a mixture of wound beads with uh a few cane beads in it so you can tell the P beads are cut off straight and then some of them they would take back and put dots in them these yellow Arts here were wound they were made in the 1600s also these are I beads that we’re referencing to there with uh the Roman Empire beads the the ibeads have lasted since the beginning of time here’s a sample of more ibeads of rare colors that are hard to come by these were all made one at a time also this Str here is the best strand I’ve ever had in 15 years and it has blue and pink dots on the white eyes that’s the rarest strand I’ve had of the ibeads and then you have the red I bead and and these names are the original names that were brought with the beads when they were shipped over here because the Crow Nation down where I live in in Montana they call the I beads Crow Beads no matter if they’re black red or white or they call them Crow beads and that’s that’s not Soul uh the these are actually ibeads and I’ll show you CR beads here as we proceed these are Medicine Man ibeads and here’s your black ibeads this strand here I tell everyone this was a a beginning artist because when when he started making the ibeads he wasn’t sure if they were to be black or white and what color dots were supposed to be on them but when we really look at the master artwork that those people did in Europe they really had a fine art and they knew what they were doing we talked about making the cane beads and how they cut them the old way was to break them off like that on an edge or they made like a paper cutting device and then we talk about the the the round beads and the pony beads they were hot pinched beads they were the the pony beads were the size of about an apple seed and that that that size is what LS and Clark would have had with them them but they’re hot pinched beads so they would have been that Rod would have been hot and they would have pinched them off and you’ll see up close here that what I’m talking about when I the hot pinched beads here’s a fine example of these are two wound beads that should have been done individually and they stuck together and then here’s two other examples of where the beads had dirt in them and popped out these are good beads except they were made that way originally and that one there to be formed here’s a closeup of the cobalt blue bead that I feel is the chief bead even though there’s other opinions out there that I’ll talk about here and the sky blue Padre which is the most common and then they made white ones too also there in China you look here now and we can do it real nice with this machine because these were made in Venice and they actually have bigger holes than the ones from China and they’re more uniform there this strand here is bodmer blue they would not have had that with them because bodmer that blue didn’t come out until he was out here painting In 1832 me we can go back I want see look at those there from China how they’re they’re strung and then look at the Venetian ones that shows you a good example of the difference in the product then we talked about the way that they measured the beads was in fathoms these two strands I actually have laying down here on the table and and a fathom was 6 ft when Louis and Clark started out I’m sure that the the big guy on the on the trip he would give them six feet of beads because they were giv them to him by the fathom but as we all know by the end of the trip his six his fathom of beads probably was getting a little short because the beads that he had the red ones and the yellow ones and all that color they didn’t do him any good out there in on the west coast because they were already getting these blue beads here were coming down from Alaska through Canada and and the natives on the west coast already had the cobalt blue beads and that’s what they they actually sought were after here’s the wound bead the doughnut here’s uh the Doan are the large ones and these are Padres here there’s your wound bead there then we talk about mock garnets and when they were made and who they were made by in the 1800 exactly 1800s the Bohemians started making molded beads and that’s this one here is a fine example to show you how that glass was poured in there and it feathered out in the mold these are ducks blood and these are doans and the yellow wouldn’t have been until after 1800s normally this strand here is Dutch donuts and you can see how they’re wound F they were wound fast the reason I kept this strand is because that’s actually seaweed graded together so that strand actually came from Venice over here and was left on that you can see it down here also this is what happens to beads that are dug up is the soil eats at them and uh as we all know in the archaeological world and that we don’t dig up any areas uh they’ve they’ve dug up beads overseas and that and that’s okay but not here in the United States because we don’t dig up the graves in that actually some of these beads were traded in Africa the same exact beads that were traded here and in Africa they measured their wealth by how many beads they had and instead of burying their beads with their dead they may have buried their beads because it was it was their wealth it was their livelihood and that’s why we we get a lot of beads that were traded in the fur trade over here are being found in Africa and other other countries you know and Alaska also they’re still being traded in Alaska today these are common beads that would have been with Lewis and Clark the cobalt blue right there with that $7 million collection that’s coming out of St Louis we’re calling those the chief beads those would have been like gold to the Native Americans these white beads right here the pony beads would have been like silver and the greatest thing in between the white bead and the blue bead was tobacco those were the three biggest things that they wanted on the from the the white people the Native Americans wanted the the blue beads and the white beads in tobacco Here’s Your Greens that would have been common then there’s your greasy yellows like I say a lot of the yellows weren’t made until after the 1800s so they could have had these these with them and you got white beads in there one of the biggest things about the old beads also is you’ll see strands down here that are on string they that’s they were on cotton string that’s what they were shipped over on and some of them that are restrung on elant grass some of them came out of Africa some of them actually came from Europe on grass then we get into the wound beads with the trail designs and these here were done one at a time these these are French cross and we call these Trail beads this is a bumblebee that’s because it it represents the body of the Bumblebee this is a snake bead that’s found on many of the invoices and people are wondering what the snake bead is and it’s actually that trail bead right there because if you put a bunch of those together it actually looks like a snake skin I’ve had a lot of historians come to me and and ask me what’s the snake bead on those invoid es and they’re looking back on the invoices from the 1800s forwards and that’s what they’re looking looking at that’s the bead they’re looking for and I have a strand down here with some on it after the during the trail beads they made the feather designs here’s your Red Feather which is very common these are not there’s black feather beads and cobalt blue here’s showing you the different bead artists the earlier ones actually made finer lines this one here is a worn out bead and these show thicker lines on them they actually made the swirl bead at the same time they all date to the 1700s these are French Ambassador beads there’s a lot of people like to come up with names for different beads and why did they name it that was it named after a French Ambassador or not we have no written proof that that was true no documentation this one here when you hold the light up to it you can see that it’s green on the inside instead of black like the other one here’s another ibad Trail bead designed mixed together cobalt blue and these are fancy lampor beads these we call Cal Lupe uh like the Hudson Bay white hearts and florals we kind of categorized several different beads in that same area because of the White Center and the yellow Center these are Trail beads and these are Dutch dels and it’s because of the the blue and the white that it’s called a Del but these were all done in Venice we talk about skunk beads this is the true actual skunk bead and they were made cobalt blue and black and you can see the skunk tail right there these are actually called skunk tail beads in the beginning some of them were done fancier than others and some of them were plainer and you’ll see examples of these down here also the L and Clark bead that is a big controversy uh is story and friends of mine we we’ve tossed this around back and forth and Peter Francis who’s gone now uh him and me had several emails back and forth and talked about the loose and Clark bead and just like all the beads that I’ve showed you before here they were made in the 1700s that LS and Clark bead was started being made in the 1740s and and were quit being made in the 1850s and if you look at this one here you can see there’s mostly white on that band that goes around it that would be the earliest one and then as they went along they got better with their designs but that Twisted cane became a candy cane in the Louis and Clark bead and that one there would have been closer to 1850s these are fancier Lewis and Clarks because they’ve got the different color in the in the white and that but we cannot prove there is documentation from Wyoming but I would not use that as documentation for the truth because all the archaeological digs and that we can’t prove that LS and Clark had these beads with them French Ambassador bead there it’s a large bead with a nice design or French yeah this is French Ambassador the other one was arabes I made a mistake there uh these are kind of similar to the Le and art then here’s your fancier ey beads elongated beads then we got the gold Florine beads that’s what these are called and these are similar to the Lewis and Clark but what this is is this is brass inlaid or sometimes copper and that was inlaid in the bead while it was hot and there’s different sizes and shapes of those beads also then we talk about the raised florals these were done actually in the 1700s some with the white Hearts some not uh the earlier beads that I showed you with the trails on them they were raised little rods of raised glass like you see here and they were paddled into the bead these were not and that’s why they’re called raised floral beads fancy raised floral and these tend to be the more expensive ones then we talked about the the molded beads these are the type of molds they would have used they’re just like the gun mold the for molden bullets they could do four at a time or six at a time sometimes one at a time uh they were just as hard to make as as the wound beads and that because they still had to heat the glass to C certain temperature and pour it into the mold and plus have a rod in the for the holes we talk about the mock garnets that they had with them the Bohemians started making these pressed beads in 1800s and right here would have been your mock garnet they’re about the size of the pony beads There’s real garnets there and that’s the mock garnets here that I have enlarged there these were done one at a time and when you look at them down here you’ll actually see that the color of them is like a mock Garnet the red white heart though has several different colors so that shows you the variation in those also we talked about the Press beads these are corn barley corn beads these were pressed Lewis and Clark had them with them and these are Crow beads there’s more press beads these are podr uh you can see the the lines in them the molds these were pressed uh faceted beads these are actually cumba beads for the African trade you can see the seam though in those easier and you can see in that picture here’s your melon beads that are pressed here’s your Manhattan Bead that bead has been said that that uh uh a gentleman bought Manhattan with $27 worth of beads that’s a bead they’re referring to but there’s no truth to that story here’s a pend piece there that is actually made out of slate and that piece was found in North Dakota and that’s the exact shape of the glass beads that the Mandan Indians were making when Lis and Clark wintered with them over over in North Dakota they were taking the blue beads and smashing them up and making them into a pendant just like that so that that dates back before the the glass beads ever got here this is an iroy bag it has the Russian facet beads here with the pony beads here’s some Hudson Bay crosses uh with pressed beads with the the signatures on these and some of these have the Hudson Bay symbol on them they were made in Canada they were in a museum there and they were sold out of museum uh some of these were done by Richard Chuck shank I actually have one on that was made by him here’s your Hudson Bay Metals a big brooch that has uh several hearts cut out of it another brooch from that time period that would have been Indian gifts the the the big item that I told you about between between the the the blue and the white beads is the tobacco and this this is a snuff box made out of buffalo horn and that dates back to the 1800s this pipe case here is out of wood the the man would have carried their pipes in a case like that so they wouldn’t end up broken like this long one here uh this one actually dates back to 1775 in Civil War time as the pipe got plugged up with uh uh our favorite nicotine they would break the end of the pipe off and make it smaller in the pubs they would start out with a long pipe like that and they would come in and and grab the pipe and use it over and over and they’d break it off as it filled up with nicotine here’s my list of references start out with the voyage to Paradise exploring in the wake of Captain Cook beads of Lewis and or before Lewis and Clark 16th century glass beads the letters of Lis and Clark expedition by Don Jackson world of shipwrecks a bead Premiere a history of beads all these combined is what I come up that we use to come up with this presentation this here is actually a buffalo bone knife and that was uh a kids toy now here we go with blue beads the blue pony beads what if Lewis had more of them Indian presence became the clothing for the core of of Discovery to survive and they were not given as gifts like I said some Native Americans rep these beads represented the spirit world and when the classics proved great hegers and trade when why did the captains take that as an insult tobacco and blue beads they do prefer to everything December 20th 1805 Lewis wrote I Bartered my Al skins old irons and two canoes for beads one of the canoes for which they had given us but little had I cut up for fuel April 20th 1806 so on the way back they knew the blue beads were so valuable that they actually traded canoes and got blue beads back from the Indians to trade on their way home and as we end here uh everything we need to survive is out there on the Prairie will we ever understand what’s there and we are products of the fur trade whether people want to admit it or not we are products of the fur trade and always remember that the ground is an open book to those who can read the writing and understand it and that’s all I have for now for my presentation up here but I’ve brought beads along here and I’ll field questions for any of you and you’re welcome to touch these beads and that but like I asked at the beginning you don’t take pictures other than the park personnel because I’m actually being paid by the park service okay so is there any questions if you have any questions please raise your hand I’ll bring the microphone around to you so everybody can hear your question we’ll be up here and you can handle the beads and ask questions up here also if you want any questions all right well let’s give Steve e

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Missouri Speaker on Lewis and Clark Expedition Materials and Methods

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:05 +0000

and the Buffalo sent you in there and it’s really um soft and flexible when they take it out of buffo so they would just take it peel it off in strands and literally make sewing threads they could make um they use it in thicker quantities to lash tools together would they let it dry first or would they they pull it off as when it’s still wet it still wet or you hopefully soak this and get it soft enough again to okay but we haven’t tried that I’ve tried about everything else but I haven’t tried that one yet so it was used for a variety wind was coming from West so they weren’t able to use the sail too often but uh that would be another way to propel it now there’s a rope up there in the front too they would use that rope to pull that would be the have to walk on the shore there wasn’t much of a Shore there actually I left in the now the Missouri River was not very back then so they were able to do it most places like that but this boat was very very heavy and it was loaded with about 15 so imagine trying to pull something like that up they had about 20 22 guys out there and P on that Ro so to many people walk up the M what they were doing that’s what they do they were walking up carrying their possessions behind on the boat pretty pretty tough guys back there like that it’s just like what yeah canas is it’s like this roof that’s um it’s thin and it looks kind of stringy almost it looks like a radish yeah it almost looks like a radish or some people call it know to yeah yeah that the same thing wild carrot is not the same as K but it looks yeah and so they would tradition of her upbringing within the N Pur tribe and some of her experiences growing up so please welcome Mary tble good afternoon sight with a sighting vein once you got that thing lined up exactly the way you want it to go and again you’re going to have it up on the tripod or up on the shakeup staff and then you’re going to sight through the siding vein and in the sighting veins there are holes and then there’s slits below that so once you’ve got it kind of rough figured out with the holes then you slide your eye down and you line it up with the split and then you get that much better direction as you go along so this team had to move a lot slower yep L and Clark didn’t measure their way all the way across the continent with this kind of accuracy and what what we like to say is that the the public land surveyors are following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark as they’ve gone across the continent now we’ve got Lewis and or we’ve got the public land surveyors the general land office surveyors another name for the same thing kind of filling in the rest of the map L Clark just taken that one route across the continent where now we’re going to say we want to measure out the rest of it and the reason for all of this is to fulfill what Thomas Jefferson had in mind and that is to get as he put it the yman farmer out on the left you have a rough idea how far off Clark were with their rough maps and then fin did miles miles the final map which um gets published in I believe it’s 1814 with the the first set of journals um that yeah that map has been compared with a modern map so it comes out to be about 40 Mi off now you know part of that is the accuracy of the the width of the line I mean a line on a map of that scale you know could be you know 40 Mi wide all by itself so but they’re incredibly accurate and it it really comes from two places one is um this is a replica of Captain Captain Clark’s Compass the one he carried with him we we know it because it’s one of the few pieces that actually survived the ls and Clark um Voyage as they came back to St Louis in 1806 all their equipment that they had left became Surplus government property it was auctioned off oh God but the compass Clark’s Compass was his own personal Compass so he kept that compass and it’s now the original was now expected to get back it’s phenomenal isn’t it in fact that one poster we have we have one at pompy’s Pillar the uh the one at the top there oh yes and it shows a a photo of his uh where he his name nice that’s where leis and three others come out over Lim High Pass they were an advanced part looking for the way across a disappointing day though row after row of mountains yeah yeah okay on the well that in this corner we get from the Mand Indians one of the 12 varieties that they perpetuate from the old store of genetic seed stocks and it’s kind they Grind from formul so you can grind it back and forth just like that you got to work in the kitchen more here you I a Volcan CRA kind of a b fish it has to be we covered this didn’t open quite a while you got one in the shirt origal tail this is a relatively large here check out the in the Joby this is about 300 lb jly bear this is over a th000 so quite a bit of difference does the weight correspond directly to like how tall they stand oh yeah how much mass they did like that what is it Boon and Crocket scale right do they measure the height of them set no it’s this this print that’s rting one does kind of the same things that I are you an archaeologist for the PM then h no story okay there is there are jobs for his history majors not very many I have a degree in history so yeah for 6 years I I was a teacher before that so I I used my degree obviously but you know this is him when he was one of that that party of of four men who first entered Idaho uh with me my blanket is kind of buried underneath my stuff over there he would have had a blanket along also but uh so it’s was like just like a little mini Expedition they took off from the main group kind of thing yes yep set out on foot cuz the bullets were going so slow at that time so he was the guy who carried the provisions that me he was the cook and so he would have had a h sack you know he had 2 lbs of flour about the same of of meal I don’t think he had necessarily any of this stuff but it’s just kind of interesting I just wanted to have it on display anyway is it’s like the hard yeah that time they were calling it biscuit but it’s the same thing it’s whole wheight flour butter and water mix it up roll it out and then bake it and that stuff will keep for a long long time it’s about 14 months old that’s a loaf of sugar oh and what do you do you you shave it off you can shave it off or they have little you pinch some off like that yeah and it has a lot of molasses in it so it’s really much better for you than just plain white sugar and that’s how tea used to come that’s black tea oh wow it’s okay oh sure where do you get this now there’s a company several companies online that sell reenactor supplies all stuff so then what you do is just cut off a piece too sure you can scrape some off or you can cut off a piece and it’s it’s proc it’s chopped very finely so it’s almost more of a powder than it is a leaf and at that time they were issuing a 69 caliber must that’s the big one that’s the big musket ball yes they all handmade so they could be interchangeable no these weren’t these were made by by by Factory it’s called the 1795 contract model it actually was just a copy of a musket that was made in France about 30 years that’s what I mean cuz the French one could take like they could take all the they move the moving Parts on any rifle and change out with another one and like so they did that so like for the core so they all had you know rifle B they could just kind of how it yes and they did have one good gunsmith along them and he had to get Innova a few times to repair guns but he was able to and and so they carried a cartridge box rather than just you know a Powder Horn with with a separate pouch of of balls oh so they have like yeah and you know I don’t know what these look like but a friend of mine made up some cartridges for me it’s just each cartridge was paper and it had just enough powder to to Prim the pan to pour the rest down the barrel and then the ball went down the barrel um that was enough for one round okay so you have to get out your Powder Horn and dump it out you just the end of right right but but here’s the quandry okay now I’m ready to reload but what do I do so this this gives me to a rule that the Army had at that time regulation if you wanted to be in the Army you had to have at least two teeth and they had to be opposite each other you see where I’m headed yeah and then you pour some on that and then you pour the dress down there right Tamp it in with the ram rod and then you’re ready to to shoot around if you were if you were really good you should be able to get off four rounds a minute one every 15 seconds uh and they also had a bayonet though in case uh 15 seconds uh wasn’t enough time that’s the biggest chipmunk I’ve ever seen that’s a big chipmunk you want lunch yeah they were having a hard time you got sear running now I did I proba I didn’t I know I didn’t hit you with anything they would send out Hunters along the shoreline and they could range out in front of the core as they were moving up shootting animals and hang them up and they would actually come along and together and they were only moving 5 to 6 M an hour I mean 5 to 6 miles a day and on the way back they couldn’t do it because they were averaging up to 70 m a day on the way back they got into the current the way they so they couldn’t put Hunters out cuz they run off and leaving down stream so to speak mhm so they actually had to stop three or 4 days at a time send Hunters out and bring in the food and and eat a couple of days jerk the meat and then they get back in the canoes and off up but they were they were not doing too well on the way back that’s whenever Captain uh Lewis got shot is actually one of the hunting trips by the beach of those and we still use these today so they would have put their PL here wouldt soaked put it all in she pressed it together and kept it nice and tight until the plants dried out and when they dried out they had a perfect specimen of the plant that they looked at remember you kids Uncle Ryan got you one of those you have that little plant press with piece of wood terrible uh back side right there on the this is the back away from that’s the back side because uh wood never I that backbody told anything my uncle always told yeah pretty old bottom around mixure of mercury you know the stuff in thermometers that goes up and down to tell you the temperature and jalop which is a plant root and it’s held together with breadcrumbs as a binding agor and if you’re given one of Dr Rush’s pills you’d have to hurry to the bathroom because in less than 10 minutes you’d be cleared out to the extent that just liquid’s coming out also to make you go to the bathroom they have salt peter and if they’re out of salt peter they could give you gunpowder because salt Peter’s one of the ingredients in gunpowder what is that what’s that sponge thing well it’s just a sponge for cleaning wounds now do you have sponges at home yeah Is this different yeah how’s it different because it’s all at holes has like holes what are the sponges like that you have at home they’re like they’re rough they have holes in them they like and they’re Square you see what you have are artificial sponges that they make out of plastics this is a real sponge it used to live at the bottom of the sea little microbes and bacteria would swim by and get caught up in all the nooks and crannies and it would eat them this used to be a living animal this doesn’t have any eyes you ever see an animal without eyes you have what um and I hauled this out and it was overcast and I said to the students what can I do with oh you make a fire I one of it’s overcat it’s it’s easier to get a flashlamp oh oh good good good now from North Dakota you get to say Chic now this woman had a child and think things really didn’t change a whole lot in child they put light cord on it yeah changed a lot in the grass there huh in the grass in the grass that’s my coffee cup oh coffee my coffee funny looking coffee cup isn’t it then I can put it on my belt here and I got my coffee cup handy when next time I want made out of a some kind of out of a buffalo horn buffalo horn this what is that blue what’s that blue stuff what do you think that blue stuff is huh what do you think yeah if I took if I wanted to make a nice long straight Str line see I would take this string and I would lay it on there like that listen listen like that hang on the end of itang on right on the end of it hold it hang on hang on real tight hold down here hold it down there you see real tight my truck is is wet you see the line e

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Jay McConville and Daryl Broncho on Nez Perce Fishing Traditions

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:04 +0000

e here inside the tenary voices we bring in a lot of presenters from all over the country and actually sometimes internationally to speak with you on something related to Lewis and Clark or the cultures and communities that they met along their journey and with us at this hour are Jay mcconville and Daryl Broncho they’re here to share with you a little bit of some fishing instruments and all kinds of interesting fishing equipment and styles of the nesp people so let’s give them a nice warm welcome thank you well I don’t know where to start so I never done this before and it’s all new to me other than the fishing I’ve but done out quite a bit um this is the Gaff hook um I’m not sure when we started using them before that we were using Bones from our kills you know made little Bears out of them now we resorted to these we have a dip net here 80 lb test line these are made from uh old bed springs they have a trigger on here when the fish gets in there this trigger will let loose this will wrap around the fish the fish won’t can’t get out these nets we these nets we used down at the Columbia River before the dams were built we have several pictures here out of our tribal members and yakas and Warm Springs and mellas off this was uh Salo Falls right here um if I had have known earlier I was going to be doing this presentation I would have brought a DVD of my uncles he’s got about 50 minutes of footage that’s soilo fall um see these before these are down where the dall’s dams built right now my family used to go down in quite a few years back they used to have a uh like a trolley type thing that went across on a wire that ran across the top of the river to get from side to side yeah they would send the kids across their I from what I heard there was people that were younger that would go across on that that right yeah yeah that’s what I was saying they used to send a uh there was like a trolley that used to go across the top of the water yeah yeah I was there I was there pretty when I a little kid he’s got some more pictures over here yeah see these people here they using in the G I mean the dip Nets they’re a little longer than the 14o oh they have guys standing around in the back grab another some days they’re like 30 lbs or better now they’re they’re hardly another this is the Gaff pole had a r a gaff pole it’s a little weather beat it’s hav had it for three years and my Point’s too big hope I can just get it to stay for a little bit this is anyway it goes right here TI almost 18 oh yeah I wish I would have got to see it yeah yeah there was a that used to they used to um go across to uh what was I going to say oh no not here this is damned up now uh I’ve done dip netting but reason we tie so far up if the tip breaks we’ll still have their fish with the extra line we have on here uh at this point in time it was Native Americans I believe um this they damed it up and pretty much just there’s no way to over there anymore running water this is will fill the fish all gone now but you tell a rock from a fish cuz it’s softer you’ll turn your a hook and then St it pull it out this will be hanging like it like it was and the fish will still be on there I learned how to Gaff before they built Ro Granite down in Al powerway down there by Clarkston or chief Timothy have back in the house they have um old people carrying every time they carry their po over there they dip it in and they pull it out and like one after another they’d go over there and they pull them out they ate everything they ate the head fast one after another though um the dipnet knock out back in the early out well probably in the 50s probably in the 40s before before the dams were bril and we use these today still we use the Gaff hooks today still um there’s times the tribe will tell us not to use these because the damage of fish we’ll have to resort to the dipnet and that’s happened quite a few quite a few years recently because of the runs but we have pretty strong runs here lately um I fish I teach my boys to fish my future son-in-law here um he fishes too but um I would I’m getting to know him a little more we hunt a lot well this is not about hunting but this about fishing uh we stole fish down by Cascade Locks down at the Middle Fork of the salmon we still fish at Rapid River we still fish at uh down to Columbia in zone six I think it is um we still fishing Clear Creek don’t fish we fish all our old Rivers D naha the grand round you know Oregon Idol Watcher we still fish today because it’s within our treaty we signed a treaty with the United States government and Chief Joseph at the time was thinking of the future and that’s where we’re at today still so even though we’re on a small reservation and we don’t cross I don’t anymore cross private property of fish anymore I go pretty much where everybody else goes CU some people don’t want us passing their land or whatever so anyway this this is a gap hook this is what they look like before we start them but they’re you know excuse me I got this in here at the white elephant uh Spokan a lot of these you can get over in Portland OR uh uh my buddy he gets his out of Florida because he has a daughter down there she send them up to him they’re not Rusty these these hooks here belong to my dad so they’re keepsakes they’re pretty old old they’ve been around for quite a while uh eventually my sons will have them one of my sons over there the dipnet The Dip Net if the river is Flowing you want to go down with the down with the net where the fish will get in there like I demonstrated earlier once fish gets in there the weight will trigger that this thing will close like I said this is 80 80 lb TX so you use some people use 50 lb or better leave that down here um that’s I don’t know what else people like to know but that’s what I know about fishing and once we get the fish out we Club them so they don’t jump back in the water that’s but I all I have to say so there are a few questions in the group if you don’t mind taking questions if you have a question go ahead and put your hand up I’ll come around with a microphone we can all hear your question uh do you tie your own Nets or do you buy those already tied um I my dad used to tie those I don’t know how I mean you know I haven’t learned I think if I had someone to show me I have a nephew does it his name’s Tom Williamson he he T he ties these nets um but there’s a lot of Elders you know they hand us on down a lot of young young guys younger than I am I’m in my 50s so I there’s young guys that know how to do this and ladies yeah again y other questions where’s some more oh I thought I saw someone how often do you guys go fishing once a year twice a year and how many do you usually catch in one at one time well I usually catch like for my I have a sister-in-law she not done best house I usually fish for the elders or people that can’t fish I fish for myself or I fish for the for our power committee you know they might need 10 fish we’ll catch 10 fish but you know this year I didn’t catch any fish so last year I caught three and that was enough for me so what type of fish do you prefer to eat and what type of fish do you normally catch or looking for in the season should I mean I I caught three steel head this year had them smoked there only e steel head but I prefer trout it you know I trout fish quite a bit and I have like six or eight poles at my house but haven’t we been out lately so but I was last year I kind like four that’s thr last year do you have a Whopper fish story for us not really well let’s see no I better not see might embarrass myself my son’s probably thinking well what’s new Dad yeah he can tell it are there any other questions all right well I want to thank you guys so much for coming and sharing with us your culture of fishing let’s give them a big nice thank you thank you if you didn’t have an opportunity to check out the pictures they have you’re welcome to come up we have lots of time and if you too shy to ask a question with the microphone I do welcome you to ask them personally thank you all so much for coming that was a lot

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Fredy Baker on Mandan history, culture, and Lewis & Clark

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:59 +0000

and he’s going to be talking about man and Hada culture and history for us today Mr B wow sitting up here I almost tempted to say please turn to page 243 in your hand books and also would someone please pick up a question my name is Fredy Baker and I’m my member of the Mandan and hel tribes wondering what the Mand tribes are doing at on the agenda at meeting in omasa well we we were the the destination tribe when Le and Clark first started out Jefferson had heard about us he heard about us through reading about the probably the Alexander McKenzie vure across Alexander McKenzie was the first white guy to cross the P he cross it up in in Canada and uh actually did what did but he took a different kind of route that interested in C in history because I have two little Branch with our our Canadians living on Vancouver Island if anybody on Vancouver Island very beautiful location uh I just first of by saying that you know in this show celebrating the vice sentennial and so are a big event to close part of the heritage of America being open as it was in those days but for the and the you know L and Clark is really not a big deal so at me and say what what do you mean well because by the words you know L and Clark came to visit us about 1804 1805 obviously and as early as 1700 know we’ve been dealing with the French so we were used to see these white guys come to our village we were Traders uh we had U developed a massive trade system probably as early as 700 you know there’s evidence from archaeological digs and those kind of things that put us uh at that time at the mouth of the somewhere around the mouth of the bad River and for here South Dakota and we lived in in several villages we lived in Earth lodges which at that time were a archaeologic architectural marble which is you know they were extremely well built they were extremely comfortable and extremely useful uh later on when the westbr settlement started out came up to our Ty of the woods you know many folks built Assad houses much like somewhat somewhat like our our Earth watches but the time they were extremely extremely uh Advanced technological he and we also um we also were agricultural people the band band were agricultural people as early as about 700 the say there’s evidence that we were hitting at to the bad River and that we were also fing we raised what I wonder what that’s a sign of get off the stage and shut anyway we raised corn uh we raised squash we raised tobacco we raised beans and we used these for ourselves but also we they became a very important trade item because we were sedentary we liveed in in villages and people knew where we were and raised food people came to us they would bring us different tribes came to us with whatever products they had to to trade we and we had a very elaborate kind of trade system would and we also were’re proba be pretty astute Traders um we would if a tribe came to us to trade you know in order for us to recognize them and trade with them you know someone had to adopt be willing to adopt that and um listening to my little grandfather you know sometimes if they didn’t come with very good merchandise we wer very interested in trading with them and sometimes they might have a hard time finding someone to actually adopt it uh but we did adopt them and the price of adoption of course was to give presents give some of their stuff to the the family that adopted them they also very traitor so so people used to say well you’re you were kind of Walmart of the upper Missouri I said no no no we wer the Walmart we were the original Sam’s Club because in order to trade with us you had to buy into our our system um and then uh as we we moved North oh in our own stories our own myths our own our own origin stories so there still there’s some question about just exactly where we put ourselves we had a Creator by the name of L man who who uh created the Earth along with a K character called first Creator e and uh those two together you know had walked Walked on walked on on the on the water and you know they found this gold found this this little plant with blood coming out of it and he had some connection with that plant and that plant told him you know I you know I’m your mother I’m the one that that produced you and so he was walking around wondering you know how that plant got there and he ran into this little duck call I guess a mud duck I think about and he asked the duck was ding down and coming back up and he asked the duck he said what what are you doing what’s down there and the duck said Earth there’s there’s fruit down there so he said well give me something so a little duck uh down and came back up and so he took four different and brought him four different pieces of earth and so as he was walking along you know he would take those Dr bit of that Earth and as he left left it would become become land this is our know there’s much more to it I mean these are you know long long stories and they were P for for many times so I when I was a little kid I heard you know the complete creation I was very fortunate that I got to spend what the first 6 years of my life living with my grandparents my my grandfather was a full what we call full BL all H and my uh so my mother was was Hera and my father was andad so I have on both sides uh my father’s uh my grandfather was you know traditional in the sense that you know he taught me a lot of the kind of the history the values uh and he always kind of told me about who I was and what I was going to face uh and told me that your life would be difficult as a as a male as a man I had responsibilities and I like these guys was age here and he tell me that you know nothing is easy because you are a man and you have responsibilities and continue this on and U when I was 6 years old in that inevitable day when you have to go off to school you know and like most kids you know went to school for a couple days and he wasn’t too cool he had to sit at a desk and he had to do certain things you couldn’t run around like you always were able to so I decided D this isn’t ready so I decided I wasn’t going to go to school and so I ra the big plus and my remember my grandfather sitting by me and uh talking to me and he said me he said you know he said I’ve been telling you all these years that have certain responsibilities that have and U these responsibilities you know you have to learn how to make a living so it’s very hard on the preservation he was actually was was very successful because we we moved from uh when they put us on reservations you know we moved along the river and continued our same lifestyle we still had large Gardens we raised our own food and we switched from the Buffalo to to raising T my grandfather was a real old of a farmer ground type I guess because he had all kinds of Critters on on his on his place he had East I remember East in particular because when you’re a little guy e like come up and just about discard your body and they like to nip I remember being ni a few times also had chickens I where chicken well because my first real job that I was responsible for was to gather the eggs when I went to get the eggs be uh there always certain hands that decided that they wanted to be mother hands instead of just so they would uh reach out to gra their a little kid Le a big impression on you so anyway so so he he told me that you know I needed to learn he had no idea what education was education couldn’t speak English and fortunately if you learn how to speak speak about almost interchangeably because we had some major Smalls epidemics and you know we were forced to come together our our our our languages are different but our cultures are very similar it’s almost hard to uh to know whether well certain stories are man only or there comination of man or stories um so anyway so that’s kind of how I got my my Foundation I learned I lived in in an environment where under one hand my grandfather Wasa and taught me the ways in the language so I grew up speaking H by folks on the other hand and people at my age my my parents age were very concerned that we learned how to speak English and that we went to school and that we got an education you know and so uh so they taught me to speak English so I I can’t remember a time I couldn’t speak either language I learned how to speak English and it simultaneous so it became a natural kind of thing I went to I went to about the fifth grade um I received an Indian name Indian name I received was uh was yellow yellow yis named after a by by a man uh who was but my my mother or my grandmother that side were we’re very we’re very religious they’re very Catholic my grandfather on the other hand I think you know was Catholic only because you know women have a way of kind of convincing you to do certain things and I think because of that he but I always felt that he really still need the old religion and U he had a ble uh Liv in a fairly large house at that time and I was able to have pretty much run of a house except for this room where the bundle was there was a bundle in there and there was a bule Ro and I was not allowed to go in there but anyway uh so I I was sent off to a Catholic school at the age of five I mean at the age of 10 years old board school by that time the Garrison Dam had was beginning in all of our schools were were being shut down I went to recers four years in a what we call a government School government Day School by theair and U so from there and last summer I was going away you know we had a Catholic priest who was very Adam at the his legacy being a Indian person from our reservation to be ordained a priest and so somehow at the 10 to age of 10 years old I was destined to be that person and so kind of as a uh not quite sure about kind of as a test to that to that charge so to speak I was given the name of a very religious kind of a person he was a very powerful medicine type person not exactly he wouldn’t like ATT but he was a very strong medicine type of person so and his name was yell yellow that’s got name was given his brother I went off to a school about a junior in high school I discovered girls and kind of ended my and I went on to to school re me background give some idea know what like my father was a uh one these guys that know he told you something and you might argue with him under your breath but you made sure that he didn’t hear you and so I I decided I was going to be a pre I was really confused about what I was going to do with myself so I decided I was to go to the Air Force and kind of find out what life was about and of course he he was ad but I going to college and so one day he goes to town and on our reservation you know we have an Indian agency and Indian agency pretty much you know tells us what to do so B long story short went the agent the agent talked about this great School in called fi in Minnesota and so my dad came back I’m telling you hey we were rers I was he my dad bouncing over the hill weighs me down I think oh something terrible has happened byway he uh says I know where you’re going to school and I said oh did you go to Minnesota they already you know they called me school got me Adit everything and then came back and told me where I was going so that was T today you batteries of tests and you have counselors and think well my I you’re going that as I was getting on the bus to leave he grabbed me and said you know you’re smart he said if you go over there and you raise hell and you don’t study and you out he said don’t come back here there’s nothing here for you so that was my that’s not how I grew up like but anyway whether has question who would be the man I told you a little bit about the you know how they they had this massive trade system the H were over in the East also we also have some questions some mythology in our or some stories in our culture that put us some somewhere at the most one time maybe at the MTH of the Mississippi River we might came up the river there some story that and so they like I mean let food but anyway uh you going talk a little bit about you know what life was like what who were we when l heart came to us besides having this massive tra I we have been contact we been we first ran into French around 1700 we were trading with them on a regular basis there were always Frenchmen that come in that came to our village and lived with us they married among our people and uh you know so we were used to to seeing white people come to our village and so when Lo in CLK came to our village we really weren’t B impressed the death were to some extent because in 1781 prior to 1781 they were the rulers of the upper Missouri there were large people there were numerous people and uh and they lived in these several Villages and each of these probably 10 Villages around the area by then they were living around the heart river in North Dakota and uh they were probably each capable of raising at least Warriors which you you think about it so it’s there a lot of people massive infrastructure and we developed all this all this this culture we’re M legal which means that the women were govern compar to know when Lou and clar came to us you women had you know didn’t even have the right to vote in most inst instances they were Step Above shadow in our culture women own everything they own classes certainly they you know with some help of us they they built their cles uh we did the huning we did the uh the garding of the village and the women you know did besides building their lodes they also you know they made clothes and they they also kept a meat PR care of the food and so for but they owned all that St so for example you know if you married a woman in our society at that time the you went into that woman’s Lodge and became part of her Lodge she didn’t come to your Lodge and become part of you you went to her so I suspect that if it were modern a that instead of they taking our name when we married we probably took their G When we married so and uh you know things were and also you know we had some pretty severe responsibilities responsibilities of providing food and those kind of things and if we didn’t do a very good job and if for some reason or other you know their our wife decided that we really want a very good investment there was no such this worrying about child support or who’s going to divide the property or that kind of thing all you did was just take your stuff and put it outside the lodge and and we were and you were hi you hope hope that you that you had a your mother still had room for you or somebody else take you in I’ll give you out there homeless basically um so and then uh you know things like we had our medicines you know people always wonder you know hearing about for instance that she had a very difficult time in labor I never fot why would she be except for Charo uh and charos C bring out the me why she would actually go to the Fort to have this child but she had all kinds of of help and systems back back in the D probably made her her her labor a lot easier all those guys that little try to have a video there but so we had all these Sy in place we knew how to how to doctor things we do the plants that that we had and and how to get tea and those kind of things and some even carry over to my when I was younger one time I was playing with a knife and u i was PR for it I was throwing the knife down like that and beh hold I stuck myself in the foot and I pulled the knife out you know blood just spr over place and I out a loud yell and my dad came running and I guess he thought I was probably probably got fit by r or something but when he saw what I did he went out into the into the trees there and he brought some leaves and he chewed those leaves and he put them on that that gushing blood and he just within literally within seconds of leaving stop never did try to find out what what PL that we choose in order to do that you unfortunately that’s G so so much of that so much of our our ways of medicine those kind of things are are gone because we didn’t uh bother to either find out about them or try to uh r that partly because we had two major small epidemics in 187 1781 and that was probably one of the major major reasons that as result that smallet epidemic the almost wiped out some you prob me if you were in school about when I was went the history books he find out that all the uh that all the mands were were were gone there were no mands I go heing that school and U coming back home and quing my parents about why they were telling me I was about M because I wasn’t there were no M left the teacher said that teacher right so uh we had this so when leis and Clark came up the river you know the mandz looked at them as a way to get some of their influence back to get some of their power back you know some new trading partners they really had no idea about you know what what they were doing they weren’t used to having discovers discover for sa us to having Traders their Village that was change and when they got done you know and all this top about see some of the things that Louis and Par did because we had a very sophisticated system of saying a family you’re born you’re born into a family and immediately at Birth you know you’re a grandfather you’re a father and you’re an uncle we didn’t have cousins in our in our culture and each of those had had K with responsibilities the uncles for instance on my father’s side my dad’s Brothers their role was to help to be to have respect to understand culture and also that was the go of of our B my brothers my mother’s Brothers on the other hand were the disciplinarian they’re the ones that taught you how to pay attention to things how to mind that kind of thing and and they did this with you know a fair h of very good persuasion sorry I what of I uh talking we were talking about that one of one of my relatives tell me about his experience when he was a kid he said he lived in a little Community called Shel and there was a and there was a shelter which and the water ran fairly fast North Dakota in the winter time you know usually gets pretty cold and almost everything freezes over well in this instance there apparently was a little spot there where the ice didn’t freeze and there were fish in that area so he used to run down there and watch play with a p and his mother was very concerned that he would fall in the water and ground and he wouldn’t die he wouldn’t mind keep running down there out run down there so one day her brother showed up and he told she told him that she a really concerned about La she said he’s down there he always goes down there that fish I’m afraid he’s going to freeze or CCH a terrible cold or whatever so he said okay so he went back outside put on his horse SC down there sure enough was La went the fish so he grabbed La by his by his heels and he put his head first into that ice pool water remember cuz what 20 below zero outside he said just about the time he thought he would grounded he pulled him out shook him good as soon as he caught his breath he stuck him back in the water again and then he put him he said he put me on the back of his horse and he G back to the house well you know that when it’s that cold and wind you know everything that’s wet freezes almost instantly and so by the time he got back to the house his clothes from about here on upward frozen but the effect was that he said he never went by that again I the same you my uh my Nemesis was my was my uh one of my mother older brothers his name was Thomas and U that was the role he played was that if I was looking around not doing it what my PO wanted me to do their magic word was we’re going to have tell uple to and take oh no and so and he came to the house first thing he would do is asked my parents if I was behaving myself this guy behaving himself know I’m sitting here the only place I was when whatever I see him coming I would take off of the house I guess when I was younger I would scream and take off of the house try to get get so the place that I always found found any kind of a uh any kind of safety at all is my grandma’s black if I got to my grandma before Tom got to be I was safe no matter what she going to but nobody else would so that was and this was an age old system though parents did not discipline the children they disciplined somebody else’s children in their roles as so we had this very complicated system uh in the earth lodges in the summer in the winter time you know we built Earth lodes on top and the summer one know e to farm up there number two there was you can see distances the enemy coming number three uh comfortable bugs and stuff and wind and blow winds a lot night Bree and all these nice uh bires would be like like an air condition Sy win time we went down below and we we built we built uh new smaller lodges and then onto The Lodges was a little big kind of like an Annex almost and in that anex the uh grandfather or the older folks the grandparents and the young children would spent most their time because it was nice and warm in there just ideal place for education to go on culture so that’s how we were living when those came to us we we had all these all these system we also had a system of PL now remember we when Louis and Clark came to SP time Village we we live you know just and side by side in these large villages we had no Poli system or we had no no written laws or no jails or anything anything like that we did have a place syst that but we did have we those kind of things and so we um we kept order number one we they developed a plans system and the plans were you know basically almost like an extended family they also played some of the same roles like the clent unes were people who provided certain kinds of par for instance being a Society we were born into our mother’s plan and the mother’s plan had certain responsibilities the father’s plan on the other hand also had certain responsibilities and they would um one of the major ones was they were it was up to them when you passed away you sent your spirit to to the spirit world EV our we we still do that where we we called senior be a our language and their job was to be sure that you are sent to the right right direction and we’re all with those ke that one of things we always had I think kept us through difficult times was our ability to laugh at things to laugh at ourselves to tease to tease each other even you know at very somber times I remember one time there was a story about this guy who was his job was to send the spirit off to the to the right place you stand at the foot of the the gra you know the person’s head is pointed to the east they always set the spirits off we believe that they to to the East and so he’s out there and usually know say you give instructions say don’t come back you know don’t be scaring people don’t know always all these kind of things say this kind of long Sal thing and one the things he said to this to Spirit was he said you’re going to a place where there’s going to be good things to eat like oranges and apples guy couldn’t speak get he sing this in English and one the guys P the other guy he said I think he’s send him to Florida go Sav R I was going to try to stop about now I guess um and I kind want talk with you rather than at you so anybody has any questions I try to try to try to answer that right now yes how does the okay the ricas uh were always south of us they you know they came from around the area around the Arkansas River they moved up and eventually I think when Lou and Clark came they were probably somewhere around around the border of north south F South and they always were sometimes we were at war with them U you know we had kind of a difficult relationship until about the 1840s when they came to know because of the the tribes the or thetic tribes coming together they move closer towards us and we asked them to we were living at like a fishal village and at was 1845 they were across the river and we said you come and join us because in numbers we can be more effective against our enemies and the arra felt that at that point that they didn’t need to do that this happened a few times and eventually they got attacked by a bunch of enemies and eventually joined us that’s how they came together again I was saying that know we we teach each other all the time and so our word for the they call themselves sish and we call them which basically means you know if you were in a fight with somebody and that person was beeding you up and you came running to me for help that’s what choice words for us questions yes what about the the I’m sorry I forgot to mention well about the Welsh coming up because some of your words are similar to The Welsh and you’re home to come they weren’t really they were more like Buffalo bus yeah that’s what I mean I well I don’t know I guess most of us don’t think that there’s anything to that you know and you know and um really there’s no evidence there’s there were stories about Mand dancing some some blue maybe the Vikings have gotten mixed up with somewhere along the way but in our Among Us there’s really no evidence of that ever Happ so first Contact was with a friend andly the French came with us and they married with us but there was no think so yes if you were wiped out if you were wiped out by small pox I said we were almost right okay almost thank and we do have and there’s very few unfortunately Amanda culture itself you is really the language is really endangered at this point there to my knowledge there are two uh real fluent Mand speakers left I I also shared the U I worked at the Museum my my career was in Healthcare Management um after I retired in 1999 and then U I got interested in history and amateur historian with emphasis on amateur that way I can say anything to you I want so but so that’s kind of how I uh that’s how I got you know involved and and we’re trying to preserve we have a a u you know working with one of the colleges and we’re we have the person the one person that we have that’s a fullet speaker is being taped to telling stories in in the Mand language and will archive those and then know so we’re trying to at this point to preserve the language but the other on the also on the other hand being you know somewhat pragmatic that we need to preserve so that you know we will have an archives to go to to be able to bring back and and see what we can together there is an apprentice typ person who is studying just got his Masters he’s one of our trial members nephew of M uh just got his Masters in specialy in preserving uh indigenous languages and he’s desperately Mand know doing almost a total abion Liv with this and language so might yes are youu yes yes yes we are it’s difficult because most of you probably stud foreign language you know some type of foreign language Latin did four years of Latin in high school and took a year Spanish oh I also know how to I I used to know how to speak German primar because I used to hang out with the grade school I went to high school I was German Russian community in North Dakota lot of the so I learn how to speak anyway uh so it’s very difficult to teach it in school because with two things one is that know we need to preserve the language and the culture at the other hand we also need to have our kids learn the skills they need in order to become you know successful World they need to learn math they need learn English um you know they need to learn sciences and that kind of thing so it’s kind of kind to put those two together we have the double responsibility learning the skills that will allow us to be to be successful in the world and also Hader I was up in North Dakota last year we went over into Mont there was an Indi University that we went to okay we also have AOL okay and they were saying that there were mostly young women with children who were attended and that there was a day care for the children wouldn’t that be an ideal place to start do that we’re try to do that reason that there you just mentioned that there are most of our reservations don’t have community because we tried sending students out when I went to school there were I think out of out of our tribe there were probably what six of us that went off to colleges I went to a school at B there were four big reservations right around B and there were six Indian people in in at the state and all six of us were Jacks so but now you know they have an IND studies program you know we have this year we graduated a lot of students we know our TR this doation for being pretty well educated we have we have doctors U Physicians we have doctors philosophy we have several M I guess we say that almost any field you mention a field we probably have one of our C members that’s successful at practicing that field doesn’t mean that we’re without problems you know the the system of destroying the male especially when you know when transition happened we put on reservations uh and then we had a thing called Garrison Dam which completely destroyed our culture and we’re trying to recover from that uh you know lot of the destruction was aimed at the veils and our system our way of life and and quite successful yeah so we’re trying to recover from that we’re trying to Define who we are as and and and what our life will be in the future because we feel that’s our responsibility to that take care of ourselves feed ourselves and set up but also to preserve who we are and and communicate that to the Next Generation yes how did the M get along with the suit not well not well we were their name for us the s word the makot word I say there three different dialects of word for for the h man dance is uh to and to means enemy but I I used to work uh at 48 s Ro which is reservation down where city was from and so forth I first win you know and people were strong I oh you’re a to so I got the right idea okay that must be what we are so asked me where you from I said I’m a to some me you know what means I said oh me enemy but we not we get along really well in fact my uh see my niece back there and you know she’s a m and some German and my my son-in-law is a is a now we’re friends but we no we didn’t get however we did we we had this massive trade system they used to not trade with us and so when they came to trade with us we we had a u i like a truce not only a truce but when they came our village to trade they became part of us so if we got attacked by a sue band while they were there they were obligated to Def to help us defend ourselves working the world today I don’t know question about your Earth lodges a question about your Earth lodges you said the um the summer ones were up on the top of the hills and the winter ones down in The Valleys uh did you rebuild the year or were they had to re well the summer lodes worked those were permanent but us the river ones were I mean the B ones were usually because what you know during the winter you have a massive drain on the the resources especially especially wood because we wood and so we probably Prett well completed the resources we also had we elected chief that came to our Villages a couple guys happen to be was happen to be their particular time to be and so they were immediately chosen as the as as the Chiefs we had temporary kinds of chiefs so we our people our leaders we had this elaborate Society system where you started out as a youngster and if you proved yourself then you ended up being you know a black mouth which was the top Society he became to old to be a black go and he became a a member of the the old go dog Society the old W societies those two societies were the ones that made policies and for black car them out and there were like there was a group called The Fox kit and their job if the village was under attack and we needed to escape there were like the kamakazi on that would sacrifice their life for the uh you know for the good ability of all their songs and centered around the philosophy of death you know good to die for the cause kind of thing we’re kind of one more question yeah I play I this week 6:30 uh earlier did you describe kind of in depth your spiritual belief so when was Catholicism introduced to your tribe and were there any attempts to suppress your your spirit oh absolutely absolutely I probably around 18 1860s ’70s know we had a reservation which divide the fa into two two parts and and the the uh Congregational Church was given the responsibility to christianize the Savages of one side and the Catholics were given the responsibility to christianize these saes you know on the other side unfortunately you know again it was kind of like those in park when they came to our F they recognized nothing positive about what we were doing we had this elaborate system we survived for for centuries develop the spiritual people gave there to us but then we were desolated by Smalls we were starving to death and I think it was more of just a Breaking of our will we didn’t have much that and so we we became we became Catholics who became congregational now there’s all kinds of other churches there too but the you know our Traditions are are coming back and we’re trying to find you know redefine I think anyway I think my time is it’s been a pleasure and we make a commercial announcement in the uh fall August of 2006 there will be a signatur at Fort birle you know we’re kind of as I was saying L and Clark were really no big deal I’m doing an oral history project right now and I’m interviewing several of my contemporaries and direct I reservation believe it or not um and one of the questions I asked them you know so what do you recall your anybody in your house your an your your grandparents anybody talking about leis and Clark and there’s virtually nothing about L and Clark say what about she whatever you know where she married Etc ET there’s very little to do about about s the only thing that you know we take pride in is that I mean we’re not was a fine win uh and but the thing that we that we we can say with with confidence is that there were any number of our women that would have had the stamina and so forth you to be able to walk out to the pafic carrying a child and come back but anyway August of 2006 we’ll have our s event hope that a lot of you will come and visit us we the home of or we’re the place where ghost and Par spent their winter we’ll try to make you as comfortable as we may l in par when we came there hopefully hopefully you won’t be as much trouble because us the little the little I been able to gather about you know one I know one of our our Chiefs was saying you know that they came to us having no skills I they never lived in the in in the cold North Dakota winter before 42 was toally totally unheard of I was in at the monello opening up the park I think one day it was there like seven above and everybody was freeing for that I mean that’s you know that’s where they came from and so they had no skills and we had you know they were one of the old Chiefs old was saying we had to watch them like a HW so we wouldn’t do anything stupid with that think for coming in and sharing that with us we always like to having it here on our stage I’ll tell you a little bit about the

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Mike Lyall on Cowlitz history, trade, and survival

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:58 +0000

well good afternoon everyone welcome to the ten mini voices core Discovery 2 I encourage you folks to come on in and join us for just about to get started with the program so you’re right on time and core Discovery 2 is a national traveling exhibit it’s a multi- agency Federal exhibit the national parks service being the lead agency his exhibit’s been traveling since January of 2003 will continue to travel through September of this year 2006 during the four years of the by Centennial of that Lewis and Clark expedition and what we do here in the tenam many voices is we bring in a wide variety of presenters to share with us different perspectives and different asss ects of that lisis and Clark expedition but also to talk about the history and culture of all those American Indian nations that Louis and Clark are traveling into their homelands and we have with us today Mike I who is KET he’s going to talk about ket’s history and culture before and after LS and Clark so let’s give Mike a warm welcome here to the Ten of many voices hi there my name is Mike I uh want to start out with uh we’re going to use this map and see where my pointer is that area right there is rert landland Canadians think of it as something else but its historic name is rert l and we are right here in the Columbia Department of rert llander on it would become Oregon and Oregon actually started a whole lot farther uh East than it does today and it ran from Russian America clear down to Spanish America Oregon used to be a whole lot bigger place than it is today so once upon a time we were subjects of his Royal Majesty King George when we were here we were in British territory when it was rert and uh that’s really important because uh there was a young Lieutenant browon came up here came up the river and went up as far about as modern Camp B modern bonaval and browon in 1790s the Brits had had a map in 1794 significance of that is is 10 years before Lewis and Clark got here the English had mapped the Columbia River up to Bonville and uh the importance of that map is that in later days in the 1820s Governor Simpson the governor of all of robertlandy said that skena the college Chief whose track runs from off the pet sound and Strikes the Columbia near to point bellw Simpson knew exactly what he was talking about he had a map he had a map that was first drawn in 1794 and was later revised up to 1814 I believe and so uh for those of you that don’t know point bellw is the Confluence of the wamit and Columbia Rivers yep bank so that’s the before Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark when they came through here we’re not sure they ever met us they heard about us and they kept saying we hear they’re numerous we hear they’re numerous and they called us hu atel and we lived across the Columbia here on the Lewis River and we lived on the CX River as well and later on as I said Governor Simpson would say the college Chief lived from Olympia to Portland and so we had a huge area and once upon a time we were very many uh populations are based on estimates they run as high as 30,000 to as low as 10,000 and the importance of that is is that when you come down the Columbia River Valley you know and you leave The Gorge to the Columbia there wasn’t 10,000 other people here so we were at our smallest equal to all the other tribes combined along the Columbia at our largest we were three times as many and uh so that’s a little bit about it now Lewis and Clark when they came through here they called us huel and kisic and kalisy and it’s really important when you study this stuff to understand that the closest we get to exact pronunciations is a near mess the Europeans couldn’t pronounce the Indian phonetics and the Indians couldn’t pronounce the European phonetics so they would try as they might and they only got to a near Miss they never got it dead on and then you got helpful people like Captain Clark now I wrote a paper about 3 4 years ago and my wife is a trained secretary and she went through and I had taken all these direct quotes out of the journals and she went through and corrected all these misspellings and she said Mike this is junk you didn’t spell any of it the same twice think in in the same sentence it’s misspelled over and over I said yeah that’s Clark and so she had to go back and change it cuz I joke Clark couldn’t spell cat twice in the same sentence but that was Clark and so a lot of times people are going to try and split hairs and see who was here and who wasn’t and unfortunately in some cases it’s not really clear uh I can tell you that I’ve done a lot of intensive research and the people that lived across the river were called the cathop poin nation and all I can tell you is it’s not clear who the cathop poan nation was uh they’re called shanans but shinan in the terms of an educator means literally someone that lived in this Columbia River Valley it means someone that spoke the languages of the Columbia River Valley and it means more than anything local Indian and when you try and find what was the language of the people of cathot you can’t find that you can’t find how many people were there it’s gone you can’t find where they went you can find later on that the KET people lived at at in the plank houses at cathop po we know that our Traditions here in the Columbia Valley were that you could not marry inside your your village you had to marry outside your village so you married your neighbors and the closer you were to your neighbors the more of those neighbors you would be married with in other words we we would marry people that were 2 miles away 5 miles away but we still married people further away but just not as often uh one of our uh chief chief skena married the daughter of the shinuk chief taken stocka their son was atwin stockham atwin stockham was a college chief he was appointed he was Chief by birth but he was appointed Chief by Lieutenant ulyses Graham so we married people aund hundreds of miles away but we also married more often people much closer so that was us and Lewis and Clark in pretty much a little bit of where we lived now we had here’s a bit better detail map of Washington you start on the Cascade Crest and you go down Skookum Chuck drainage drainage which uh today is in in modern Centra Washington and then it would go out here to Raymond and then down the wipa hills to Modern Stella and then back up the Columbia River to the uh origin again on the Cascade Crest it’s a pretty big area and it’s only this last few weeks that I’ve actually got to the point where I can uh take it out of the speculation stage I believe the cets were a closed Society I I don’t think that it was kind of unique in the Northwest uh strangers were allowed in on trade routes they weren’t allowed off the trade trade routes cuz what is Hu AEL mean hu atel means strange place the huel lived on kaana huks place of the en that’s what they called the Lewis River so that and then later on in the 1850s some of our titanum people the S hapton speakers would come out of the woods in the 1850s to see their first white man 50 years after Lewis and Clark some of our people had not seen a white man and it it it’s kind of a I I’m not able to prove it yet but I think it is when you consider the speculation it’s reasonable speculation that we were a closed Society we were 30,000 people we were multiples of of all the other tribes combined and we left almost no Trace our uh uh our populations were destroyed by the waves of diseases after Lewis and Clark left the fur Traders came and the diseases just came in waves and the Bay Company people would write down that three and four fell 75% Bingo this this trip the disease came back three and four again 75% of the of what was left and then again and again and again and this went on for about 40 years and 30,000 people became 200 so so literally depending on the numbers you pick 1 maybe 2% of our people survived and I’m part of those people and they’re still here so that was our experience with the F the beginning of the fur trade now we had longtime trade alliances and these were very very important because for our history when Governor Simpson wanted to uh go up to the northern portion of Oregon where we would call it Canada today at the uh Fort Langley on the Frasier River he took an influential man up there to help establish a trading post he took the college Chief skena as ska was still a man of influence that far away from home and uh that’s written written up in the morg mofin Fort Langley journals as I speak I’m I’m not going to give you footnotes but I will try and give you interesting books to to look into and to read about the callets another really good book is uh Dr Vern Ray’s ket’s handbook written in 1966 and Dr Ray is really important to us because it’s his work that helped get us recognized and Dr Ray is uh credited with founding the school of an apology at University of Washington so he he’s a very important guy to us but that that shows how the trade now remember Simpson controlled all of this all of rert and what we got from Canada in trade was the dent talum shell from Northern Vancouver Island up in here now that dentum shell came down the inner corridor down the pet sound up to Columbia and when you go to South Dakota in the Sue Museum in Chamberlin South Dakota there are spiral flute D talum that come from the only one place in the world Queen Charlotte and the and nka up on the Northern end of Vancouver Island and those shells came down that trade Corridor through Fort Vancouver before it was Vancouver and up to Columbia and out to the rest of the world now I know that uh I think I can show that trade was here long before Lewis and Clark when Lewis and Clark came by uh Fort Vancouver they saw people standing on the Riverbanks wearing sailor clothes carrying pistols carrying rifles we had the Russian Rifle it was a better gun than the Americans American Guns broke broke a lot one of the party in the Lewis and Clark party his job was keeping the guns patched well here we had we had better guns uh what did we trade to get that stuff well we had our dentum shells and we had something else we had a couple of really important items we had cus that grows on prairies and it it it’s not widely known now but it’s it’s being well documented that the Indians were doing prescribed Burns long before leis and Clark got here when you see a prie anywhere around here it is probably not a natural land form the paries most of this place are signs of human occupants so and I actually because I work on a lot of environmental issues I point out that trees in the Mountain Meadows are an roaching species because the tribal people went up there and burned the trees they burned it almost every 2 3 years and so that the berry crops would stay good and one of the things that happens is when there’s a burn down on the Prairies the Chas regenerates real quickly and I know that these burnts were frequent because our lore was at the height of the flames you could step over the fire you didn’t have to outrun the fire because they burned so often you could just step over it it wasn’t an issue and there’s a another really good book it’s by a guy by the name of James Swan it’s called the northwest coast and in that book you want to just read the whole thing cover to cover cuz he was a early uh pioner out here in the 1850s and uh he was was among other things a drunker and a bum but he also before he was that he was governor Stevens personal secretary so if you want an Insider view of the Stevens treaty councils what happened behind the scenes travel with with James Swan and Michael T Simmons and the Indian agent Lansford the agent uh uh I missed his name but anyway uh he James Swan will take you on these Journeys and it’s a really neat book and in the back of the book you read read through the part that you normally wouldn’t read and there’s a letter from George Gibbs and George gibbs’s was uh Steven ethnographer and it’s Gibbs work that is is today the most quoted and Gibbs was Brigadier General in the territorial Army appointed General by Governor Stevens and in the back of that there’s a uh a letter from Gibbs to Swan that a a friend of ours uh a researcher by the name of Dr Steven Dal Beckham who’s a professor at Lewis and Clark College who did his doctoral dissertation on Gibbs Steve had never heard of that letter because the letter was a personal letter to Swan so it’s not in the National Archives but you can see it in the back of the book and it it talks about why the War the Indians went to war why who lived where all of that is in that book it’s a really neat source so now I’ve got to get back onto uh what did we eat and what did we trade we we traded cus we traded something even more valuable we traded WAP WAP is a little bulb like fruit uh vegetable and it’s only place it grows is out of the Columbia River Valley just as it comes out of the the the the gorge and downstream to a point where the water gets too salty and it’s too tidle b w kayak WAP doesn’t grow much further than that and people would trade anything for WAP it was really it was a really desired food the other thing we had to trade we traded salmon we traded smelt and what did we get well we would trade with the people that lived on the coast and we would get clams and oysters from the coast so we could trade them WAP we could trade them C we could trade them salmon and we had another unique food source that was again from the Columbia Valley really just from The Gorge down to about wakum for some reason nobody else processed it upstream or Downstream and that was the pounded salmon now leou and Clark bought pounded salmon and what was pounded Salmon well you take smoked and dried salmon and you process it another step further and it and they pound it and put it into bricks and these were fairly large bricks some of them would weigh as much as 90 lb and I’m still chasing down the stuff on this one it’s my belief that it’s spring now so this time of year it’ be when we would make our pounded salmon last year’s leftover smoked salmon would become come this year’s pounded salmon and it was your emergency food supply if something failed if the weather changed if the salmon run was small if the smelt run was small if you had bad luck hunting you could go get that pounded salmon and Lewis and Clark bought that pounded salmon they bought smelt they bought uh salmon they bought elk they bought all of that from us and it’s kind of interesting though today we think that in the old days uh Communications weren’t that good well when Lewis and Clark would hit the falls the tribal people were on the banks there ready to watch the show cuz you saw the the canoes out there there’s a writer by the name of Rex Zeke and Rex Zeke really drilled it he hit the nail on the head to describe the Lewis and Clark canoe called him Fred Flintstone boats out here the Indians canoes were the Formula 1 race cars those canoes the Cano were so finely built Lewis and Clark said the sunlight would shine through them some of these canoes would haul 40 men the other thing they would haul and I had to read read this about three or four times before I got to where I could accept it the Bay Company would order horses from the college cuz we had more more horses than the any people in the area and so when they were building Fort George which today is asoria they went up to wakum and they talked to the college Chief and ordered two horses the college Chief said okay so he puts an order in our version of UPS they put two horses in canoes and brought them down the Columbia River to wo you can only imagine a canoe with a horse going by okay really good canoan really good Boatman and one really tame horse so then they get the horse to wakum they put him back in the canoe and these two horses go across the Columbia River to Fort George where the horses stand patiently harnesses are made for them and within the week of placing the order the horses are working as draft Animals Building Fort George and that’s canoes we had both fast and light canoes we had 40 Man War canoes where there’s a story about the kets getting in a battle with this one Chief and before the morning was out we had 400 men there was a small party originally there was only a 100 guys that were going hunting up the wamt river uh the fur Trader Alexander Henry said the cets were gathered on the banks of the Columbia to go hunting up the wamit for the summer as they usually do and interestingly enough the guy we were fighting he had a tiny Little Village nearby and he’s the only one that had guns we didn’t have guns we had bows cuz we were hunting guns are for war and combat out here was unique when we would have a war they would stand back at maximum range and fire their bows and arrows and after a while someone might be hurt and then they would call a truce and they would discuss it has honor been satisfied if so the guilty parties would make their apologies make gifts the war is over we had one man Wars sometimes you know there might not even be a you know a single fatality in the war well this poor Chief that’s shooting at the cets he’s the only one in the battle with guns but he can’t shoot the kets cuz they out number him I think his tribe that Village was like 70 people he’s picking on 30,000 all at once with 70 so he has to shoot near them and not hurt him anyway at the end of the day they were able to sit down and talk it over and no one was hurt and uh the uh Chief with the guns was able to buy back one of his slaves who was taken in combat and uh the war was over but that was our Wars we had unique different Wars culture was really strong here uh people there was no consideration that you could just go stand in the face of a chief or you know today we have this idea of civil descent you know didn’t exist culture the the binds of culture were so strong the thought wouldn’t have come up to you so now I’ve got to talk about uh I talked about a little bit about what we ate where we lived and I touched a little bit on what happened to us the diseases came through but our survivors our survivors were traveling all over my own uh great-grandfather was a uh a missionary and the head of the Indian Shaker Church his name was Mach man but he was was also called I wahah Lewis yalich yin and iel iel went to a Swala ceremony in Central Oregon and Washington and he took he went back reported that ceremony John slokum took that ceremony and made that ceremony the Indian Shaker Church the Indian Shaker Church then they returned back to Eastern Oregon and a pyute by the name of Woka attended that ceremony in eastern Oregon that P took that ceremony to sue country not in here and that Shaker ceremony morphed and became the Ghost Dance religion and that’s in money’s book The Ghost Dance religion and sitting Bowl so we callets actually had a tiny little touch in sitting Bow’s life from Western Washington up here in the Northwest and my daughter teaches in college and one of the professors she’s teaching with is going to write a book on preon Tech trade here in North America and I told her I said well that’s a really neat book for you to read money thought he was reading or studying religion he was wrong he talked about religion but he was showing us the old trade routes how people could travel from Western Washington up to Columbia to Central Oregon back to Western Washington back through Central Oregon and out to the dtas money didn’t realize it he thought he was talking about religion title of his book’s about religion but in reality he was showing us the trade routes and this was in the 1890s after 98% of our people had disappeared and the the the the decimation wasn’t exclusive to just calls a lot of the tribal people had that kind of numbers taken down and so after all of the cultures gone the few people that are left still respected the the old traditions so very well that that religion could travel just like I said in just a relatively short time and and that’s what we saw and in the 1850s the cets started their fight for recognition and that was by atwin stockam atwin stockham had a uh uh a nephew who was my grandfather Frank iel Frank iel took over the fight for kis recognition in the early 1900s and Frank helped right and pass the Indian citizenship Act of 1924 and uh he continued to work out the rest of his life for CB’s rights and he died in the 1930s and in Washington state indians weren’t given the right to vote until after the the 1940s so the guy that passed the citizenship Act never got to vote as an Indian but uh then in 2002 we did finally get the recognition and I I think uh to the people that that have worked against us in different issues you know you need to know that it took four generations and 150 years for us to finish something but we don’t quit you know i’ I’ve got I’ve got kids I’ve got grandchildren you know projects that I start if I don’t finish them I’m not worried about it somebody else will take it over but uh and so that comes on to my next project next thing I want to talk about is who are we and what are we doing today well we’re working on the environment for one I’m directory of Natural Resources uh we’re working on fish passage on the Lewis River on the CET River we’re uh trying to get a grant to do studies on on the smelt uh the smelt may be a fish that will go from uh once harvested at the point of disinterest to extinct uh we’re we’re starting to find somebody last year for the state Washington State Department of Game did uh DNA testing and they found that the CET River smelt are as genetically unique from the main Channel Columbia smelt as the main Channel Columbia smelt is from The Frasier River smelt so we’re dealing with incredibly tiny fragile populations and I think it’s only just this week that the uh smel are starting to come back to the cge river uh and why is that important well the smelter tiny little fish they can’t dig a nest in the river bottom they have to spawn between the Rocks they call it the substrate so the smelt need a river that’s free of silt and good smelt habitat is tremendous salmon habitat and for those of you that live in flood prone areas it’s good flood control CU if the river bottom is nothing but bare rocks it’s not full of mud and in the case of the collet river the uh North Fork of the tle the result of the Mount St Helen’s eruption is depositing according to the core of engineers figures approximately 6 in of silt per year on the length of the colit river and that would be one thing if it were smoothly applied like a nice uniform Co coat of paint but the reality is it’s not it gathers in sandb bars there’s some places where there’s lots there’s some places where there’s not so much and when you go across the river to the town of Long View Kelo you see dkes build up and there’s talk now of making the diyes higher got to make the diyes higher because the river’s filling up sooner or later you end up with an elevated River you have a river above the town what do you do when you have that big 9 point something or other earthquake that’s going to happen here and cause this liquid fraction that’s where the mud and the water just become liquid and just go to Silly Putty and everything goes away long Kel is going to get really really wet so we’re working to to control sediment we’re working to uh when when we when we control that sediment we get three bangs for the buck we get smelt we’ll get salmon and we get flight control that’s some of what we’re doing we’re working on uh uh habitat protection for salmon for El for Deer uh we’re working to establish health care for our people uh because we used to live in such a huge area our tiny Remnant population we’re only 3,500 today is scattered all over northern Oregon and Western Washington uh so for instance at our uh senior nutrition centers they’re open to the neighbors when you go to Toledo if you’re over 60 you go in on our the the days that we have uh senior nutrition you can eat for free you don’t have to be a tribal member uh some days uh a lot of the people that eat there are just neighbors our our Indian healthc Care Centers because we don’t have enough people are open to any Indian people we’re actually working on one Health Care Center where when we get the uh proper paperwork it will probably be open to all low income people uh those are things that we’re doing and uh so that’s that’s where we were that’s uh where we are and that’s where we’re going so with that if anybody has any questions I’d be happy to answer it yes I got two questions uh some time ago I read a uh Diary of a lady that came over the trail and U she said that when uh somebody got sick the neighbors all went over to visit and uh let them know they were concerned hoping to make them feel better and they didn’t know then that that’s how disease got spread around when they went to visit a sick person then they were inoculated also um would that did the Indians do the same thing would that account for the Indians decimations uh in part probably because the medicine man would would come and pray over the the sick person but also there was an American captain that just about made this part of Canada forever a captain by the name of deiss that said that he had released the contagion he told the people if you don’t behave I’ll Rel release it again and then another uh Trader at uh Fort George Duncan McDougal made the same threat we’ve turned this disease loose on you and if you don’t behave we’ll turn the disease loose again we know that uh the Brits back back east in the Colonial area intentionally distributed contaminated blankets uh here were they was it intentionally done I don’t know I know that it was they took credit for it even if they didn’t do it so uh yeah the other thing was is that these are diseases that we had no uh immune immunity to at all uh one of them was malaria they think that the malaria mosquitoes came over in the water casks of the ships and the ships would uh put in in the South America and the different areas around the world to pick up fresh water and they think that that’s where malaria come from the malaria came up here and it was called intermittent fever and there was a really neat guy by the name of Tom me Dr Tom me of the Bay Company and he figured out a way to take a tree bark and make quinine cuz I had figured it all out I had it all thought out cuz I’m descended from you know uh College Chief skena and I knew that the Sons and Daughters of of chiefs intermarried other Sons and Daughters of chiefs so I thought wow I’ve got a a broader gene pool that’s why I survived and I talked to the uh author Dr Robert Boyd and told him that and he laughed and he said NOP and I said what what is it and he says well Europeans that were exposed to this disease died he said your family had access to qu and later on I found out that the quinine was through this doctor told me and so that was the only thing that they ever they were ever as far as I know that was the only disease they were ever able to control but we had no immunity to these diseases and so stuff that today you would laugh off or take two days off of work kill people when lwis and Clark came through here when they went up the wamt and they could smell the death of an entire Village in the main channel of the Columbia people died right where they fell nobody was buried they just died as though it was one big bold lightning strike people died so fast so quick they couldn’t do anything with them so any other questions unfortunately I can understand what happened to your people due to disease in the past I’m curious as to why your population is not any larger than it is today is it because of illness shed or is it because people are marrying and moving away or do you know why it is not growing at a faster rate uh probably all of those uh in part a lot of our people have moved away and in part uh you’re looking at literally only one or two% of our our original population uh we were marrying out and uh many of the people as they move out uh never come back um Indians often like to talk about wishing it was like it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago uh 200 years ago if St Helens uh silted the CID how would the Indians have handled it and how would that impact his smell col smell well a couple hundred years ago we didn’t have a structure on the Cs called the SRS the sediment retention structure that the core of engineers put in for the price of a couple billion bucks and uh at that time I don’t think they had ever had an eruption so severe but the presence of the SRS has allowed the sediment to bleed out and it will continue to bleed out if we aren’t able to control it for the the lifetime of our grandchildren it will be bleeding out for a hundred or more years now that eruption was so severe that it may have salmon out of the cets and toodle drainages for 4 500 years but the salmon stocks were so much healthier 500 years ago 200 years ago than they are today that Remnant stocks from other drainages could repopulate it but just just as the tribal people are a few per of what used to be the salmon are a few per of what used to be and it’s unlikely that uh if we don’t control the salmon it’s quite likely the salmon will go extinct would the have become uh that specific population may have disappeared but it would have been repopulated by other healthier stocks that were unharmed any other questions all right thank you very much

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