Tent of Many Voices Archive - Lewis & Clark Research Database

Tent of Many Voices: 03300603TMB

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

A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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Tent of Many Voices: 11280502TMB

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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Tent of Many Voices: 03310601TMB

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

good morning I am I would like to introduce you welcome you to the core Discovery 2 we are doing by land what Lewis and Clark were able to do by water which is to follow the Lewis and Clark Trail this is a commemoration of by Centennial and so true to 1806 whenever Louis and park were making a hasty return to St l Louis so are we we’ve got about 6 months and we’ll be back in St Louis this September every town that we go to we get local presenters to come in and speak in the T of many voices where you are right now and so this morning I would like to introduce you to Patricia Allen she’s a member of the culture committee for the grand Federated tribes of grand Ron and this morning she’s going to talk to you about living off of the land so if you all please give Patricia a warm welcome we’ll get started thank you um I’m uh great grandma grandma and aunt and I was raised customarily traditional all my life where I was um when I was very small but the title of my um talk here is living off the land and what I’m going to talk about is um how I was learned this and um I learned from my grandma who was a tribal member from Grand Brown her name is uh calling for war Johnson who is uh who lived to be 94 in comparison with my great grandfather John machino who was a clamus my grandmother was of the umaro uh descent so um I want to talk about these things because of the reasoning you know we have seasons for all the harvests that uh We Gather which now we’re um we’re going to be into the salmon season the root season and all the Camas and uh these Seasons before we even start doing these Seasons we have a ceremony which will be happening April 23rd uh the harvesting of these foods are the medicinal purposes of our body to survive we have a blessing ceremony thanking the Creator for our survivals uh Ena us also to find these Foods uh we than um we we ask for the safe journey because we had tra we travel a long ways for these we go to the um waters for the salmon we go into the Earth uh into the lands the flat lands for the roots the canas which will we’re going to be harvesting here in um a week or two and um I want to talk about the foods uh the seasons that uh we get these foods which starts with the spring and that’s a season uh where uh We Gather our fish and the Camas and the um many other uh Seafoods that we’re going to served during this ceremony that we’re having um we also have some um berries and meats that we serve and when we do the servings um because I’m a uh I was taught to cook in a long housee and prepare these Foods also to preserve them uh it you know it takes a great step to do these things they’re each done with a lot of time time and effort um which is uh you have a mentor who is teaching you at all times guiding you through these different walks um the salmon in the first in the spring we uh we catch the salmon and then we proceed to um cut them start cutting them and then uh filling them for the feasts that we have and then we also ask if we do have have uh abundant more salmon after that then we start to uh wind dry or smoke dry them and we uh dry them with alter with when we smoke them um we also catch the steel head they have I imagine you you fishermen know that there’s Wild Ones out there but there’s the major now is K to put um uh I guess the Wilder to be set free um we we use also um the muscles we use clams we use oysters these are caught uh we have uh certain ones that go down there and do that all these different areas are like guided out with different groups that go to these different areas to do to gather these and each one like I’ve been taught each one at different times you know you can’t some are going on at the the same time so you’re you’re going to be you know kind of deciding which one you want to is the easiest usually but um I’ve done all of them and uh I really enjoy what I’m doing the canas um that is prepared in a oven I mean we do that in the ground we call that an oven because that’s our mother earth we use that for when we prepare them to barbecue them and we use certain leaves uh to prepare them and we put the we never put the uh the heat above it’s below the so that they’ll steam so um that’s how the canvas is prepared for preserving the cell where we also have a cell released which happens we call it Tupa now today um it uh it’s plentiful here in Brad round along the main road you can see a lot of growing well you can eat that either raw or you can cook it you know in stews and uh which we um we were terminated in uh 1954 and a lot of our heredity was lost so now we are coming back with these different ceremonies with our pank house that we are um right now in the process of uh building um next the roots that uh also when we do have other roots that we trade for with from the salmon and these roots are like in the desert areas that we know and we have uh people that go over there and like myself I live in the desert I live in Warm Springs well my grandchildren now are today out digging these roots for the ceremony that U is being prepared and uh you usually you go out early in the morning and when you go out you say a prayer when you first touch the land which will be today and uh they’re um they’re out there doing the ceremony of gathering because um giving thanks for this wonderful day that we are able to be here and that our children they’re also taking my children my great grandchildren out there to be with them so that that they’ll be observant to all the things that are on the land and uh at this time there are um three of The Roots out in the desert that are being uh gathered so they’re going to be aware and they’re they’re little guys I mean you know they’re little babies they’re like the oldest is 3 years old and so um they scravel around out there and it’s really fun you know for them and they have their little diggers we have a little diggers that um they you know take out and try to dig and they have dug I mean you we have a special little service for the children you know because to make them know that it’s real good and well for them to be participant with the feast you know the Gathering and to be thankful in the summer seasons um we start the Gathering of the berries and the herbs in the Seafoods uh the wild tea and the WAP um the WAP today I want to talk about that because you know the because of the farmers and because of the um the fencing and everything on the land that we are um really don’t have that much of the the wo as we used to have it’s become more scarce and um you know a lot of the areas I guess are we haven’t we have just now begun to come through our programs to try to preserve and save these uh endanger species of uh foods that we have we used and we supplemented on and survived on so now we’re in that position also with the fish fish and wildlife you know the deer AR in Seasons enabling us to carry on 100 years from now so we’re we’re uh we’re working programs to where you know we’ll be able to eat this in later life also because it’s a it it’s a real it’s a ceremony for us to um you know not everybody knows where these things are there’s different areas that we just don’t talk about because we have to protect it um we um also the clams muscles we go out and gather the muscles along the rocks and the clams you know in the Sands the oysters and we also ate seaweed well I myself my grandmother when I was very small she uh showed me this but I’ve never eaten it but I know you probably maybe some of you have today but I’ve never done it but I’ve um gathered it the crab and wild mushrooms and uh also we go and we gather the eels and uh we have are two specific areas here in um by Grand round which we go to to collect these eels and we um bring them home we clean and we prepare prepare them to dry you know I can I know how to dry them and uh to preserve which um you know is being taught here how to clean them to clean all the oil out I imagine you’ve seen the eels you fish with them probably sturgeon fisherman use them a lot now but um we uh that’s a ceremonial food for us because it was you know we used the oil and grease for many things you know for bug bites and you know all kind of different remedies you know the the fish itself was used use for the eel um the um we in the fall we go we we go to the mountains and in the mountains because uh this is a season for the hunting and in that time we go to um gather the berries and also dry the dry the meats the different uh deer or elk whichever we might um spot that day but there’s a group of people that go out to the mountain because in all this time that’s carried on the fish are running so as long as the fish run the people will fish as long as the seasons different seasons run the they will they will be there Gathering doing all these different foods until you know to find them for to preserve for their women ner and when and these foods are real important because we have a lot of Ceremonies we use them in um many ceremonies and the the most sacred one is when we put away a person an elder or somebody who has passed away this food is used always we are never without it so through this period we have to preserve and gather up a lot of this I mean it is it’s a group of people it’s not just me it’s a group of people families who gather this it’s not everybody it’s just different groups the medicine people they they are considered the medicine people because this uh food that they are gathering is the supplement that they use in ceremonies that we could continue on existing and being who we were brought here to be and to be proud of who we are because we are existing yet today and um we also go uh when we go to the mountains we have we go for the huckleberries elderberries or the thimbleberries these things all of these things in and preserving are dried to keep a lot of them they mix with your um um when you have the when you are drying your eelf meat or deer meat you um you take this uh dry deer meat and you grind it up and they preserve this for especially for elders because by then the elders you know they um the food is too hard for them to eat well how they preserve this is they grind it up and they grind these berries up and they mix them together which will bring the sweet and the substance the protein from the meat for them so that um you know they they don’t have to work at um what eating something that would normally be okay for a younger person but when you get older your digestive system is um hard to digest a lot of foods so what you’re going to do is you’re going to prepare all M for your ERS because we respect high honor our elders and we take care of them and we try to you know help them all through their life you know after they’ve become because they were our mentors they were our teachers who taught us all these different things I’m talking today mainly from the woman’s point of view because um and I imagine you had the men’s point of what they do because uh the women is the one that is gathering all and working with the foods preparing the foods teaching your children the different ways of foods out there teaching them the the uh things not to bother because of the toxins are in them and uh showing them different um herbs that uh they might use um for different things the different um how to use the fs when you preserve your Foods as layers uh and the Gatherings that they do the basket trees the material you use for basket trees and to gather them in fall and to be able to bring them back you always have a older person these are the ones this is the reason why you’re taking care of them they’re sitting like I am waiting and showing taking them to these different areas where they can gather and do all these things that they’re uh to taught to do and so um my grandmother was a great one because um she taught all of us children we were out there you know Gathering scrambling doing all these things but to us she made it fun for us because uh you know you weren’t to eat the first you had to wait and uh taste everything you know when everybody else did you knew so you had to take candy along well we went for candy you know so it was it was a fun time she’d take lunches for us and and it was rather enjoyable for us to be with our grandma and spend that precious time that um she shared um the winter season we come to that and this is a season where we start preparing for the next we do our sewing in and weaving and and the the men will make Nets and the different things that the men do you know I’m not really um a person to say fully with the men you know the plannings that they do uh in in preparation like for the next year what they expect out of that year and the prayers and the scks that go along with all these different Gathering periods that are done um they prep uh they go out and get the sticks for us when we’re going to dry different um foods that we have and also you know you need the sticks um because uh I don’t we were always taught that we were running around you know Gathering sticks because we never knew uh I guess for your when you camp and to do different um things uh the camp to hold your Camp up or to dry in a tree or to make tripods like when you would try do your Heights you had to have have scraped sticks and prepared sticks for that so it wouldn’t um you know get rid of the bumps and things that it wouldn’t harm you or do Travis like or you know when you were uh preparing to carry all your stuff out of there um the materials um my grandmother and him there’s different areas you go to the mountain for your berries and things you go on the flat for your roots uh the mountains that we went to was uh Mount Hood for our berries and whatever we were doing there but it you know uh as I think back you know from all the years we travel like that we would do this you know it was just something that was implanted in us that we did year after year after year after year we never tired of it we were always thankful and joyous because we were able to go out there and my grandma was a long housee cook and she took you know we thought that you know when we went to the mountains and um got huckleberries we thought we were going for maybe 5 10 gallons we didn’t we went for dozens and dozens of uh you know it wasn’t just small it was always you know she was a good provider for the fitting that she thought it what she gathered was never enough too because at the end of the year we would all by that time like myself I’m a gatherer and I do the cutting of fish people come to me and they ask me medicinal purposes through the year do you have this do you have this and by the time the year is up I’m I’m depleted now you know and I have two freezers I have two freezers what I I uh put like if I can dry my roots or whatever I have I have to put them in there and freeze them and it’s it’s still preserving you know in the freezer that I can’t if we don’t have sun in the summer I’m going to put it in the freezer because you know then like in gallon bags and then like uh during sometime I have 5200 in there because of as the year goes on and the ceremonies that are if I’m unable to be there then I’ll automatically take it there have my kids call them up and take it there because they need to use this because this is a the medicine uh that we use is one of the medicines you know for all the people of healing and um healing healing we think is um healing your body but we’re talking about spiritually because the Creator gave these uh foods to us and this is what we were taught from the very beginning of time and now a lot of the things that we do have are being um extincted you know from us like some of the trees are going and and um this the the WAP is very you know we don’t have that much anymore like we used plentyful for you know the land and uh because you know we had the population but still we have to keep the teachers around that knows these things that we can instill our children who are from here in grandr the histories and to let them carry on uh to what has been happening to where we were you know when we were terminated there was a great um span there where our children were lost and a lot of them now are we have really enthusiastic people you who the children are being taught the language and everything but I’m thankful you know that we are still here able to uh bring our family and our tribe back to the true identities that they need to have to live and uh that right now is about all I can think about but uh if we have any questions out there yes now I’ve never read that in history I mean I’ve got documentation back to uh my grandfather who uh that’s like uh two other Generations from me before the reservations and there I haven’t heard it yeah because this is a vast trading area this is one of the biggest trading areas in in the coast we it was a my grandfather was John Vino and of the clamas they had the biggest trading area it ranged from Portland Oregon even over into washingt up into Washington clear down into California up into Canada yes yes we did yes we did we did do that because we have evident of uh the bones that were being used for uh ceremonial purposes and they had clubs and uh that were made from the whale so we used all the ocean I mentioned the uh the ocean you know the sea very uh animals and creatures that we did use yes definitely for the oils all the fried fruits and meats on this side of the Cascades from mold and mil how did you salt would be unhealthy if you used too much of it for everything well they buried them they buried them and they had cases and they used basket trees is there any more questions yes I’m going to go ahead and bring the microphone in in the movies we see the some of the Indians maybe after a war party or someone an Indian ding they would build a fire and they would they would uh pull those smoke up put in their body yeah cleanse they use that they use the cleansing system and the sweats you know we had people who lived uh that lived under the ground I mean they dead like holes and I’ve read that through documentation from my uh grandfather they called them they lived under the ground people I mean you know that was just the way they Liv but they would come out because you know they would come out in uh you know during the days or whatever but I mean that’s where they slept underground I mean under areas like that it’s just the way they were I don’t know why but I mean you know the Creator what the different tribes we have right now five tribes right here I mean that are are in the the Confederate tribes in R but we are um uh we this there’s 29 different coastal tribes which a lot of them are integr into our tribe I they’re all our family all of them are our family does anyone else have any other questions for Patricia if not then let’s all please give her a warm Round of Applause I want to thank you all for being here listening thank Youk and our next presenter is at 11 o’ it’s Tony

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Tent of Many Voices: 11220503TMB

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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Tent of Many Voices: 08170402T

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

to you our next speaker uh Miss beev Hines of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation she is going to talk to us today about Chicago web so please join me and help me helping welcome be to the stage today I guess we’re all here and ready to go and we hope we don’t have too much traffic on the interstate and too many of them running Jake breaks I don’t want to break your hearts but I’m going to uh cut down some of the myths of saga Saka sakaka Saga and twice Clark called her Janie those of us in Iowa learned sakaa years and years ago the north dakotans say sakaka but not the Mandan Hada tribes some of you had your exposure to Sago waya from Waldo’s novel one of my friends said oh it was such a beautiful story about her that big thick book and I said the only part that was accurate was the start of each chapter where she quoted from the journals s way I didn’t speak English s way I didn’t have an affair with Captain Clark I’m taking all the fun it aren’t I let Legends and myths Die Hard and some of the myths have been that there was a second Saga that lived until she was close to 100 and then died and is buried on the Wind River Reservation but those of us who are Lewis and Clark people think differently this one could almost start like a fairy tale once upon a time there lived some stories in history should always start that way as far as I’m concerned but Saga was quite a young woman the only thing now is that the M Dan and the Shoni still don’t agree on how to pronounce her name you’re more apt from the Mandan Villages and amasa to hear Saga the shones will sometimes say Saga she may not even have been named when she grew up in the Shi tribe regardless of spellings or pronunciation she’s quite a remarkable young woman she has more statues 23 than I’m aware of that have been made her than any woman in American history she’s got all kinds of paintings she’s got mountains she’s got Rivers she’s got just about anything you can think of named in her honor many books about her and most of them aren’t accurate kind of hard to go back and get into the Indian history and and have the history come up with what she want according to the journal she was Lioni one of the snake tribe the salmon eaters her people were a semi nomadic tribe they were called the aaduki centered around today’s Continental Divide through the area of Idaho the lmh High River Val she was probably born in what’s now the tendoy area what we know is documented about where she was taken in Lewis’s journals for July um August of 1805 and Lewis wrote that when she was about 12 years of age approximately 1800 she was taken prisoner near the Three Forks Montana area by the Hada Indians they were a raing part the shonis did not have guns they had great horses but they didn’t have guns and the minaries would come in adasa minari group would come in the men would be off Hunting they would not take women they would not take old men they would not take the young boys they took the young women to be their slave early life as a child had been like well they were semi-nomadic as I said in the summer they went to the mountain rivers to fish for salmon in the fall they crossed the mountains to the Eastern PLS to hunt for buffalo in the spring they went to their C planes for the C rout she learned as soon as she could walk to take her little digging stick so by the time she was three she had a little digging stick and she learned how to dig for rots she learned which berries were edible which of the ground vegetables that they could find were edible she learned how to set up a tear down a t she learned how to pack for whenever they would travel to hunt or anything have to remember the men did the hunting and the killing and then they left the cutting up and all the rest of the work to the women small pox had already been through the area of the shies they were a weakened tribe they got their horses from the southwest from the Spanish and as I said they had marvelous horses just no guns the pl’s Indians really made the raids and took their toll on them when she was taken she was taken back to the m then area Village the area they headed east but they did did not go by the way that Lewis and Clark came West later they took the southerly route they went in along following the Yellowstone until a Yellowstone f up with the Missour so one thing I’m going to tell you is she was not a guide she was not a guide she was not a guide she did not know where she was going she did not point out to them take this route she wasn’t a guide her role key role was As an interpreter for the shonis a woman with a baby meant usually that it was not a war party and she helped them find food but when you see Sago way pointing no she did not know where she was going hate to tell you that imagine being a 12-year-old being taken by a tribe going across several hundred miles and going to live in another tribe where you didn’t know the language if they asked you your name you couldn’t even tell them your name because you didn’t know what they asked so we don’t know if Sako was her name in the shonis or not the shonis frequently did not give their children a name until there had been some major occurrence in their life so she may not have been had a name so today the Shon and the Man Dan still argue does saga mean bird woman or does it mean b boat launcher did she have a name back then but she went with this tribe to become a slave now being nomadic and going there not knowing the language and going into a tribe that planted pumpkins corn tobacco she had to learn to farm this is a totally alien world to this young woman they raised sunflowers beans corn squash and so the digging stick that she had learned to dig for things with became a digging stick like they used to plant things Amy moss and I had a long two hours in the airport one time and she said oh we didn’t take slaves hello yes you did the Indian tribes almost all of them took slaves I haven’t been able to ask any of our our uh deep historians who get into genealogy and lineage and stuff if this was a good way to bring in fresh blood to a tribe so that you didn’t have a lot of inbreeding you would steal from another tribe and bring them in and eventually you took them into their family and then married she was with them about 3 to four years before shano came along sharino had come to the Hada Villages as a Trapper and trater he spoke French he spoke Hada some say he won her in a card game the captains tell us in a in a journal that he purchased her now when you look at purchasing do you think as we do with some other tribes in the country and in the world a bride price he already had one Shoni wife with a small child he was probably close to three times her age thing I like about sharino is he kept marrying very young Indian women even when he was 80 he took another 15year old but he took her as his bride he worked As an interpreter when LS and Clark came he was an interpreter for them we’re told he was short dark loud rough and was always it seemed like in trouble and kind of chickening out on things during the Expedition what they said was a French man by name Shabana who speaks the big Bell the gr language visits us he wanted to hire and informed us his two SARS were snake shy Indians we engage him to go with us and take one of his wives to interpret the snake language no one says it in the journals nor in much of what I have read over the years as to why they picked Sak waya my own feeling is if wife number one had a 2-year-old and you’re going to take a Shon wife to interpret you’re going to take the one that’s got a baby in a cradle board not a 2-year-old that’s going to run around Camp when you look at how they had to interpret and the way that language is very interesting private leish who was half Onan and half French spoke French and did a lot of the interpreting so the captains would speak to him in English he would speak in French to shano shano would speak Hada Justa then when he got out to the show you had to add one more layer so trying to interpret and go back and forth could be an all day thing that winter at the camp at Fort Mandan they moved sharo and Sago waya into the fort itself so Sago waya was away from any of her women friends and the women who would help her with her pregnancy and on February 11th we are told that she was in labor with the baby painful violent and one of the Frenchman by the name of your said he had heard if you took a rattlesnake rattle and crushed it and put it in water and gave it to the woman she would deliver quickly well I’ve had three kids and I think if you threaten me with rattlesnake rattle I might deliver quickly also Clark had the rattlesnake rattle just s gave it to her they say in the journal she delivered 10 minutes later Captain Lewis was enough of a scientist to say he would have to see that many more times before he would believe in the efficacy of it so my nursing background said okay what is in rattlesnake rattle is there something like kosin like we use today to induce labor uh-uh my medical friends say oh B keratin the same stuff that’s in your fingernails it’s what’s in a rattle snake rattle I thought okay placebo effect you tell somebody long enough strong enough that this is going to work maybe it does she delivered on April 11th or February 11th of 1805 and on April 7th of 1805 the kbo went back Downstream 30 men of the Expedition chano Saga and the baby started West 55 days old baby in a cradle board a nursing mother 16 years 17 years old with the original disposable diapers a piece of leather filled with Cattail fluff or Marsh Grass at least it was by greatable the first time that they mention in the journals after leaving on the 7 that she did something for them was she was walking on shore on April 11th she found a pile of wood and she knew that the mice would hide things under the wood so she dug in under there and lo and behold wild are the chokes food for dinner they walked a lot on the shore not always in the boats and she would find The Rook vegetables the things that they could eat she gathered R and all the rest of the way with them now squa was not a derogatory word back then squa when used in context meant the wife of another man back East the Algonquin called the white men’s wives squa and it didn’t have a derogatory connotation it just meant you were the wife of another man on May 14th the white perose starts to tip they’re in the water of the Missour the wind comes up it starts to swamp sh no panics he doesn’t do a thinging the captains were walking on Shore cruzat blind in one eye and not seeing any the other the good River Boatman was at the runner he threatened shano to straighten things up help write the boat sh froze in the meantime Sago waya with the baby on her back is reaching in into the water picking up journals picking up boxes picking up papers and things as they float out everything they needed that was washing overboard she got most of it back cruzat got them to safety he threatened to shoot Charo if he didn’t Shape Up mistake was he didn’t do it LS wrote in the journal that she had the equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board at the time of the accident he praised her June 10th they are now in a camp near the Great Falls they have camped because they are trying to figure out where Falls what’s going with the river they’re trying to get the celestial navigation find out what they’re doing and Saga becomes very ill high fever intestinal pains Medicine of the time one of the things you did was to bleed a patient patient you know they gave you an a medic to make you vomit they gave you a diuretic to make the urine flow they gave you a perg up to clean out the bowels and then they would bleed you and in this case Clark bed her for 4 days she got worse Clark BL her again what the men say in the journals he BL her twice leis was on a side trip Clark wrote every day about her illness and she kept getting worse and she ran a high fever and this is the one place something happened in the trip that might have made a difference had she died on June 14th Clark wrote her case somewhat dangerous he had her swallow some bark Peruvian the powdered Peruvian bark came from the syona tree gave us our quinine but it was also the aspirin of the B so he gave her a dose of that by mouth and and he also put a pus of it on her abdomen she became worse he wrote she got into a depression somewhat dangerous June 15th she refused to take her medicine and so they Clark said to shano I want you to help me I don’t think shano really cared and Clark wrote that finally got her to take some but he wasn’t concerned about her health Clark said if she Di it will be the fall of her husband as I am now convinced leis F away he came back and by the time he came back to Camp her arms and her hands were twitching her pulse was very weak leis wrote found the Indian woman extremely ill and much reduced by her indisposition pulse weak and irregular he gave her two doses of farts and he finally gave her some Lum opium mixed with alcohol or water now that will make change in your pulse and it did help there is a sulver spring not far from there it’s called Sago waya Springs and Le sent the men for some of the sulfur water and he had her continue to drink the sulfur water for a number of days we don’t know if there was an electrolyte imbalance but they tested the water today and they say no there’s nothing in it that really would have cured her but a nursing mother what would have happened if she died good question 4month old baby would the men have chewed food and then spit it back out for the baby to eat you have to look at this and you think that could have been a catastrophe it could have been a catastrophe captains recorded every day of her condition took about 10 days for her to get better now what did they think that she had today the doctors say possibly post cartum pelvic inflam atory disease she probably had had diarrhea because theal diseases were among ands we look at that and we’d say okay do we want to tap it up to a child bed fever the Sago waya that the ls and Clark believe was the true Sago waya died in 1812 at Fort Emanuel 4 months after giving birth to a girl lazette and the fort settler whose name was wrote that the wife of shano who went with ls and Clark died today of putrid fever very much what she had 4 months after giving birth to baby pm to John Baptist they did the journey around the falls it took them three plus weeks to get around the falls and then on the 29th of June there is a flash FL there is this heavy rain Clark sharo sag Lea and the baby are in kind of a valley a gully and this flood comes running through now here’s where sharo panics again he scrambling to get up to get to High Ground trying not too hard to pull her Clark is below trying to shove her up before the water gets more than waste deep on him they managed to get to the top shelf of this area before anything happened to all of them but they lost the Cradle board they lost all of the baby’s clothes sharino lost his gun that rainstorm was so heavy and so bad that they had hail Stones between 1 in and 7 in in diameter were told in the journals that the men were beaten and blooded by those hail stones 24th of July now they’re seeing the Rocky Mountains I love the captains one of those things that you realize that at the time they thought that the country was balanced there’s Appalachians on the East Coast not too high you’re going to get to the West Coast you’re going to find something that matches I would love to have been a little mouse because I’m told the captains would not have use Square words but I want to know what they said when they started seeing the Rockies and then when they got out to the shies and all they saw was row after row after Row the Indians had told them they would see shining mountains snow on them but they didn’t tell them how much and I would love to have heard what they said we are now to the area where Sago waya is beginning to recognize landmarks getting out near the Three Forks area this is the land of my people and on August 14th shano hit Sago a and Clark reprimanded him for it now this is one of the thing that Shon tribes and her great great great grand niece Rosanne ninon says please always talk about the violence because there was frequently physical violence in these families Clark sto The Cho I know August 17th they are in the area of the shonis now and Sago waya sees a woman in the distance she said through sharo and such that she and a friend were captured by enemy Warriors her friend escaped and made her way home and the woman that she met was the friend her fingers in her mouth and she dances she is overjoyed to see this young woman when it came time for the meeting with the chieftain a woman is not normally an Indian woman is not normally in a circle with The Chieftains and when you are meeting with strangers if Saga was brought in to interpret she would come in with her head down she would keep her head down until she was to speak and this is where you go English to French to Vasa to show Shy and back and this is when Hollywood couldn’t have done it any better Chief kwe was her brother now we’re not sure if it was blood brother or Clan brother but it was her brother and it made it much easier to go and get the horses now the custom of the show time was that she had been promised to a young man when she was a child they asked her to stay with the shies this young man though did not want her for now he had two wives and children and she had another husband and she had a child by him so he didn’t want her so there was no reason for her to stay with him one of the things that came up was on the 25th of August kight’s people had been starving the members of the Expedition hadn’t had a lot to eat beforehand and though he had promised horses Kam was going to take his people to go on a buffalo hunt because they were starving and here is where shano is in trouble again because Saga overhears her brother saying that they are going to go on a buffalo hunt which wouldn’t let no horses for LS and Clark she tells shano and shano does not tell Captain Lewis at first not till later in the day the captains did though hold Choate to his promise of horses so on the 29th of August they got their horses and their mules even got a horse for Chicago whale through the bitter Roots starving I’ve often wondered how a nursing mother managed with the food supply that they had to keep enough milk for a young child but she apparently was given enough and managed to do that this is an area where they were Clark recognized her usefulness the wife of shano interpreter we find reconciles all the Indians as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace they recognized that through the mountains out to the coast there were a couple of times during the Expedition I would love to have been with them I would love to have watched all these men carting water to pour down a hole to get a prairie dog the other thing I would love to have seen when you read the journals is when the men do the Rapids of the Snake River and the Indians are watching and I’m wondering if the Indians are thinking those crazy white men do they know what they’re going to do but they got to the coast November 24th they are going going to take a vote for where to over winter York got a vote he voted for Overlook like 11 of the other men so that they could see what was going sakado WEA first woman to vote the Native American voted kotas and in the journals this is one of the places that CL called her Janie Janie voted poas root V vegetabl WAP where there is food has to be the practicality of a woman on the 30th of November Sago way had been hoarding flour to bake something for young pong she had gotten wet and it had started to sour so she baked bread and gave some to Captain Clark he said it was had not had bread for months so it was a treat and I say okay did she start the sourdough bread thing because that was Sour Dough Bread by the time she used the wet sour flour when they had the camp at Fort pla was the first time that cicago waya sharo and the baby had a room of their own all the journey traveling west they had used the large leather tent stayed with Captain leis Captain Clark George Jer the other interpreter shanoa and baby pal they had shared T all out one of the interesting things on this was from November 4th to March 23rd there were only 12 days it did not rain on the Oregon coast and only six of those days did the sunshine kind of a wet miserable winter Captain Clark’s note that they did Christmas gift exchanges on December 25th you know there’s nothing like a Christmas dinner of rotted elk meat they exchanged some handkerchiefs one of the men made a pair of moccasins for clar but Sak waya gave Captain Clark 24 weasel Tales how do you know what weasel Tales are when they turn white Herman she had brought them from the Shon when she was there with her Tri now I’m not saying she didn’t think a great deal of it because I think she did and he probably treated her better than Captain Lewis did but she gave him 24 white weasel taals that made marvelous decorations this woman had the captains take her belt of blue beads away from her to buy otter skin cake the Indians on the were ferocious Traders they’ve been trading with all the sailors for years and the other people coming through and they would hold you up for highway robbery and the captains in their journals did not speak too highly sometimes of them but she had lost her belt of blue beads for trade for that on January 6th they hear about the huge quailes over on the beach and sag waya wants to go see it she has come all way with the men she’s done everything the men have done and she wants to go see the big fish and what I would love to know is how did she make known through sharbono without stamping her feet to the captains that she wanted to go see that big fish she got to go it was a 3-day trip carting the baby in his in the Cradle Now by then he’s about 10 months old had to climb this one area to get over to where this big fish was and by the time they got there it was bones most of the glubber and meat had been taken but she was allowed to go she had gotten she wanted to see the ocean and she wanted to see the big fish they started back in March by the time in April the expedition was forced to pay very high prices for horses sharo took two of her leather dresses away from her to trade for a horse he also gave up one of his shirts but it wasn’t like taking her dresses again didn’t ask just took it in May baby pom became very ill high fever slowen at the back of his head and his neck those of us with gray hair probably remember the words of mastoid and the infections that we used to get before the days of antibiotics they said that he was cutting teeth and he had the LAX that means he’s cutting teeth and he’s got Di so what did they give him laxative he was the only one in the whole trip who got an enema and then the white man had the audacity to write but the child felt better they used a pus of hot onions as hot as he could stand they used a pus of beeswax pie and Pitch as warm as could be applied he did survive it it’s amazing when you look back at this and think of all things that happened to the men and everybody else we don’t have immune systems like that today no way they had them they put up with the bad water the half rotted meat of course then when they got disent they got Dr Rush’s Thunderbolts to clean them out and I think sometimes that may have been a help instead of all that the one time coming home that she was a guide the men had split Clark was going to go to the yellow store leis was going to go up here what is now cut back Montana area and she told Clark through interpreter that there was a pass in the mountains that her people took and if he went that particular way it would shorten his trip he could make it through there easier today we know it as Boseman pass and it is the one time in the journal that he calls her my pilot that is the one time yes she knew where she could tell them to go I don’t know if she pointed there but most of the time no she wasn’t a guy on August 17th 1806 sharino and the family left the Expedition sho got $533 he got the tent he got a horse one what’s K again Sil Sil no pay Clark expected I think to make it up to her later because the ricra village on August 21st he did write a letter back to sharino saying that he did not have it in his power at that time to reward her as she should be Clark asked to take the baby back to St Louis with him and educated not live with him but educate him and Saka said no he was not weaned yet he was 19 months old later Sago waya visit through this area down to Missour was in 1810 and she and Cho went to St Louis Cho tried to be a farmer he was given some land sold it back to to Clark went back up the River in 1811 racken Ridge and his journal had written that in 1811 shano and his Indian wife who had gone with ls at Clark to the coast were there on the boat that was going back up the river and that she liked the flight which made me think she was trying to dress as the white people did but her she was in ill health and they on their way back December 12th of 1812 Fort Manuel letting WR this evening the wife of sharino a snake squa died of a future feater she was a good and the best woman of the fort age about 25 years she left a fine infant girl lazette what sagaa did was fantastic feat accompanying the man doing everything that they did except the hunting but she was looking for Soldier food to coast and back it’s like that old saying you know Fred St was a marvelous dancer The Ginger Rogers did everything he did only backwards and then high heels and long dress well Sago waya did it in her moccasins and with a baby on her back a nursing mother Louis said she was happy to Lucky Clark called her uncomplaining and such a trait wouldn’t have been gotten such a compliment if it weren’t true ly took baby Lizette and another young boy down to St Louis arrived in 1813 applied to the court in August for appointment as a guardian for lazette as well as for a Tucson a boy about 10 years old in the court records his name has been crossed out and William Clark’s name has been sub ited so William Clark did the educating of John Baptist sharino and loette the children were educated in St Louis I love the things that John Baptiste we don’t know what happened to lazette we know that lazette there was a lazette carono at 24 there was a marriage license but we have not been able to follow anything beyond that we know that John Baptist could speak English French and hadassa was sent to school learn Greek and Latin went to Germany what is now Germany with Duke Paul of whartonberg can you see them with this young Indian warrior throwing a tomahawk in the Palaces of Europe for a few years and learned to speak German Italian and some Spanish and then came back to this country and over educated indan who then went to lead groups out into the West Clark’s ledgers were found in 1936 he had in the 1820s started keeping track of who was alive and who was dead of the Expedition between 1825 and 1828 the woman who wrote about the Saga waya the one pero the one who never said she was sagaa died before these were published but in his Ledger he had written 182 s dead and then below it SE way off dead when you look at the ways that the name was spelled in the journals about 23 different ways all total and D when he did the journals put in a j because he couldn’t read their G’s so you have sakaia Saka s and you keep going on and I still like Jamie whatever you end up calling her she was a marvelous young woman a feet I don’t know that any of the girls today would walk across the country in their moccasins with a baby on their back and do the things that they did whatever you do she’s a marvelous young woman she was not a guy but we are very proud and recognized that Lewis and Clark would not have survived or made the journey without the help of the Indians that they discovered along the way that they met up with from the Odo Missoura who gave them watermelons when they met down near what is now Fort Atkinson to the man B van where they exchanged metal and blacksmithing for corn sexual favors of veneral disease too to the show shies that gave them horses to the N Pur who rescued them after the Bitters and W said do not kill them this aged woman he said I have been rescued by white men and brought to my people do them no harm they never would have made it without the na of Americans and wouldn’t have made it without this young woman Saka the Shon young woman interpret interpret thank you I’ll take questions if you have any about five minutes left we can take questions any questions there are a few very good books out there’s a couple on Sago there’s a little pamphlet The sharo Family Portrait and Irving Anderson wrote that it’s ailable at our interpreter Center one of the ones I really like is um Chicago way up by Frank tasma and then Harold P Howard did both versions at the very end of the book he wrote the second one I have up here on the table there’s a book list of good accurate lisis and Clark books starting with inexpensive paperbacks and going on to more expensive ones and then there’s a sheet that says happy birthday captains Lewis and Clark it tells about their birthdays August 1st was Clark’s birthday August 18th was Lewis’s they had their best birthdays of all three years when they were along this stretch of the river so pick one of those up read how they celebrated here and read what happened the other two years on the trail and thank you

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Tent of Many Voices: 07180602

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

e all right thank you first of all I’d like to say uh good morning how are you all doing this morning fine okay great that’s great um as I was introduced uh again my name is Marvin dos I’m with the L cor Battlefield National Monument uh and I’m with the inter division uh the lead park ranger um the battle A Little Big Horn you know is one of the most talked about battles it’s one of the most famous battles this battle was a mystery controversial why well you know because from what today that’s called the Reno Creek to the last than Hill you know there was no survivors there to tell of what happened all 225 soldiers annihilated there but it’s a accounts and then also uh archaeology in the field of archaeology uh archaeologists that were out here you know their their findings of artifacts you know spend cartrid cases and uh we we put those two together and this is what we assume of what happened on that day uh throughout the summer uh we have programs uh three three topics and those are uh repeated you know throughout the day uh one topic is the battle talk which uh talk about events that led to the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 uh the Battle of Little Bighorn itself then aftermath of the Battle of Little Big Horn other program we have is a US calvalry Soldier in 1876 uh talks about the soldiers uh in 1876 uh those that were at the battle at the time of uh of the battle uh we talk about their their way of life you know like Hollywood version you know you see uh big tall handsome soldiers you know like John Wayne and uh uh Charleston hon you know big fancy blue uniforms yellow stripes yellow bandana and black hats you know it life life wasn’t like that with the soldiers back then or the seventh Calvary by the time they reached his area they were pretty well Ted and uh by the way you know back then when uh you wanted to join the calvary as we see again movies you know John Wayne you know back then uh these these two guys would have made it as Calvary soldiers uh because there was a height limit back then when you wanted to join the calvary you couldn’t be no more than U 5’8 the average height of the soldier in 1876 the battle little Bigg horn is uh 56 so if you were over 5’8 you would have made it as a soldier they’ll send you to the Infantry so these uh two two gentlemen would have made it as Calvary the reason why is because that you know on these campaigns uh the military the Army back then you know the calvary Soldier the horse you know there was a weight limit on that horse with the equipment that they had to carry plus the height the weight of the soldier that’s why the soldiers were you know not that tall and uh so that’s what we talk about you know the life the calvary soldier in 1876 the other program is the Indian village uh this program started off with the cultural the ways of the Indians the tribes at the time Orin the area at the time of the battle of borns uh particularly the Plain Indians uh their way of life uh you know at that time the Indian the tribes the Plains Indians you know their their way of life was a buffalo you know the Buffalo was a Mainstay of the tribes at that time the Buffalo that provided them with food shelter you know every every part of that Buffalo was used for something and one of the things that I talked about in this uh Indian Villages you know the tribes that were here at the time of the battle in 1876 a lot of visitors come out and uh the thing that they have on their mind is this Hollywood version of the Battle of Little Big Horn you know cusser on top of the hill saber in one hand and pistol in one hand and thousands and thousands of mounted Warriors circling around him you know it wasn’t it wasn’t like that uh it didn’t counts shine in two moons so we dismounted and we did our fighting on foot once the soldiers or the remaining soldiers reach the top the bullets that were coming from the solders rifles were very deadly it was like humming bees as it wh by it’s pretty powerful weapon that every Cooling and every Ravine that led up to that hill was full of Warriors we crawled creeped up towards the top every once in a while pop up behind a brush fire up to the top top go down so that’s how the battle with big horn you know there’s there’s so much misconception about this battle and uh as as I mentioned uh the tribes another thing that visitors come out and uh they see the tribes at that time various tribes one of the largest Gatherings of the Plains you know in movies in Hollywood you’ll see the eve of the battle where these Indians dressed in their finest War paints weapons dancing around a bonfire you know Hooper and harling firing their rifles boom boom you know wasn’t like that you know this this Gathering is uh 1875 uh ultimum will be sent out to all the tribes they were told that all the tribes that were still roaming the plains they were told that you must return to your agency or reservation if not after January 1st of 1876 we will pursue you so a majority of the tribes uh will return to their agencies or the reservation in the spring six bands under the leadership of Chief syu refus to go back to the agencies on the agencies they will tell the government why should we sign a paper where you tell us you will put us on a land you will provide us with food you will take care of us they said pointing to the ground said This is Our Land and the Animals the deer the analou the elk the Buffalo those our food they provide us with food sheltered and pointing to the skies the heavens the roof over our home said this is our home so with that these bands they they’ll head out to the PLS as they were called rors so in 1876 America was gearing up for the celebration of the Centennial year you know four the gearing up for the Fourth of July Centennial last thing or least problems or problems that they want us to take care of is the Indian matter Indian policy say we got to these tribes back on the agencies so in 1876 this three military campaign will be lunched so those are tribes that were here and it wasn’t a gathering a largeest gathering and as Chief syu said last thing on our mind was Warfare even though we knew that we were being pursued by soldiers but for the time being we wanted to roam and hunt the planes freely like like our ancestors so in 1876 his campaign was launched pursuing the six bands of the Sue also the allies and Northern cheyen and handful of rap hole in sting we veed off into the Little Big Horn we knew this was Crow country the old men and women and children grew tired we veed off into the Little Big Horn and this is where the soldiers caught up to us tribes that were here you know questions about the tribes that were here about a year ago uh this gentleman had asked me a a question after my program said um you said you’re a crow and I said yes sir I’m I’m Crow I’m native of this area and uh also the scouts the other Scouts were ARA and I said yes sir said uh why didn’t the Crow and the ARA join the Sue and the Cheyenne and fight he said aren’t you all Indians and I said yes sir well we’re all Indians said why why why didn’t they join fight you know traditional enemies you know as far back as history from Revolutionary War war of 1812 and when France England were here they had tribes on their sides as allies but those tribes are traditional enemies in tribal Warfare so at that time the crow Su traditional enemies Crow arapo traditional enemies and Crow and cheyen traditional enemies later the crow shason traditional enemies Crow blackre traditional enemies we had a lot of enemies back then this leads to my uh program the topic of the crow at that time uh here in this area you know the plains the crow uh even though we were also a migratory tribe which we migrated or branched off uh the hia from Missouri Crossing Missouri onto Yellowstone as far as I remember uh through our uh ancestral uh you know uh stories uh that were told to us by our ancestors and as far back as I remember the crow Aboriginal territory at that time as far back as the late 1600s was a present day Milk River area from uh Montana North Dakota area cutting back across uh towards present day uh Glacier Park uh King Mountain Area uh there’s a lullabi in the crow uh lullabi where uh also a story of a young child uh grandmother who uh seeing a little saying that my child you know born inama Jes King Mountain uh today you know King Mountain Glazer Park so those are the stories that we you know the Lis those know how we know where the curl Aboriginal territory was and then from there straight down to uh Yellowstone present day Yellowstone Park cutting back into Wyoming uh down below Buffalo Thermopolis area then straight over towards black hills and then back up towards the Milk River so that was the Aboriginal territory through oral history of the crow now those names those areas were mentioned in a lot of the oral history and as I mentioned Lis and also songs sacred songs and that’s how we know and then in 18 As Time came out when the Europeans came a lot of changes and uh his word will start to see Fort ly treaties treaties that was sign government the tribes then we see the territories designating uh each tribe the headman or the chief as they had come together they would State their Aboriginal territory or where their ter territory was one of the earliest Chiefs a Kula Chief sits in the middle land said where my four poles sit is were my home today the present area of the Three Forks area to The Milk River and then down here uh Wyoming and then uh on this side of Wyoming back into ystone is what he as where the crow territory that time and then from there from the 1851 Treaty to 1868 on up um each treaty that was signed every time you know the the government would take away land here there so at one time the crow Aboriginal territory was about 33 million acres to what I had mentioned earlier to today 2.2 million Acres the Cronan reservation and uh you know we’re we’re fortunate you know the crow today that we still take our Aboriginal territory we’re fortunate that you know a lot of people think that just because the crow scouted for the government for lieutenant colonel George arms Custer that is why we are given this land no that was not the case as I mentioned Aboriginal territory again uh couple years ago one of my programs this guy uh who was European you know walked up to me and you know he was he was pretty ticked off you know he said uh you mentioned your you’re Crow and I said yes sir I’m I’m Crow goes well he said you know I believe the Sue and shyen should be the ones living here said they’re the ones that were here they fought for this land they should be put here on this land this should be their land not you not the crow and I want to know why why are you crows here is it because you scouted for Custer and I kind of look back and then people were starting to gather around me and pointing a finger and I me I said okay wait a minute I said let me tell you how we got this land I said in the for ly treaty you know all the tribes of the planes were gathered each headsman Chief was told to come forward so the government going down a line issuing land to the tribes first tell the shonis you live down here in Wyoming the rap hole the you can live in South Dakota area and Cheyenne’s down here black Peet and Seno is up here top Montana going down Nest per is over here in Western Montana and going around and finally it came to the crow said but this land here said this land here is very handsome it’s very beautiful and we’re going to give it to the one of the the most handsomest tribes the Plains and that’s a crow the guy kind of laughed and I went back in uh the late or late 1700s about 1800s one of the first explorers that came to the PLS in their first Contact the tribes were the crow and in their journals they wrote the most handsomest tribes that were Came Upon men were the men of the Crow tribe or the crow Crow people people and I I kind of threw threw that on him so again you know the crow uh here at the time of the battle the crow Aboriginal territory in 1876 the Army would start to use tribes as Scouts also for the tribes at that time when with the for ly treaties you know designate or uh put on the agencies some of them could no longer hunt or some of them couldn’t even weren’t allowed to carry firearms anymore a lot of things had changed the impact of the Europeans with Fort L treaties so in order to to maintain their their warriorship uh in 1868 in one of the treaties uh the treaty Pro uh prohibited to take arms against their enemies uh so that means that they could not carry the forarms meaning that they could no longer go out and raid you know capture horses and uh capture weapons from the enemies which gave them the warriorship you know meaning that they to gain status to be Warrior ship and uh they couldn’t do that so in order for them to to maintain that warriorship that you know status this is when the Army uh uh in uh 18 uh in 1866 the Army uh reorganization act said that Indian Scouts were enlisted men who while they were not solders were nevertheless declared by the Attorney General of the United States to be part and partial of army the service of Indians was provided for by the act of Congress approv approved June 22nd 1866 the language law of the law as it appears in section 1112 of the revised status 1873 being as as follows now this is what the tribes you know in order to maintain that warriorship where they no longer could go out you know their enemies so they join an army to maintain this warriorship and this uh act uh continues the president is authorized to enlist a force of Indians not exceeding 1,000 who shall act as Scouts in territories in Indian Country they shall be discharged when the necessity for their service shall cease or at the discretion of the department Commander it was further provided by the law that Indian Scouts so enlisted or employed by the president were entitled to to receive the same pay and allowance as Calvary soldiers which at that time and for many years thereafter these soldiers or the Indians serve as Scouts were paid $13 a month the same as the enlisted soldiers on this campaign in 1876 you know the C who uh were being pushed back towards West back further in their Aboriginal territory as I mentioned earlier you know the Sue would come in the shyen uh the rapos so at that time the South the East area the East territory of the cro uh Crow territory was literally occupied by the Sue at that time the crows would face crisis you know so this was a time for them to join the Army because they knew that the Army the United States Army was here to remove their traditional enemy puru out of the territories and take them back so that was an opportunity for them to join with the Army also the the Ross they too uh General alred cherry out of Fort Abraham Lincoln in his campaign he had acquired arikara Scouts the same as the ricra like the crow when the Sue came in they literally robbed the araras of their food capturing or you know uh stealing children and you know women so they they too that was an opportunity for them you know to join as Scouts cuz like M Crow they knew the government Army was here to remove their enemy so this campaign that was lach you know we see the crow um Fort Ellis present day uh Boseman Montana at that time the crow uh in the area of uh what we now call the Mission Creek uh this was where the first agency was and uh from there the Detachment of uh Scouts under Lieutenant James Bradley uh will be his the detachments of Indian Scouts total in about uh 50 in numbers as they headed down the Yellowstone later the majority of them will head with or ride down towards the mountains to join up with General crook uh one week before the Battle of Rose but or the battle Little Bighorn the battle Rose but um this 6 hour hour battle that was fought there present day uh outside Shon Wyoming the crows did fought in that battle here the Detachment of or the uh commanding officer uh General Cher uh John given and general Cherry will meet present day rosett Montana and this is where they’ll send Custer down the rosett with 12 companies of the seventh Calvary and in that command we’ll see six Crow Scouts and these Crow Scouts are uh curly white man runs him White Swan Harry mcon um half yellow face uh these will be the scouts attached to the seventh Calvary now as they March down the rose but early morning they arrived behind what we all call the wolf mountains uh about 4: 4: 5 a.m. now these Scouts will serve as uh these were the eyes and the ears of the command and the crow you know they they knew this area uh traveling at night you know they knew what area they knew what what was out there um in the records of uh this campaign the events uh later uh in the record of events said that these Scouts performed a duty in the field of Colonel gibbons’s wing of the Yellowstone Expedition until June 21st when uh Colonel Lieutenant Colonel kuster’s command arriving oppos it camp near mouth of the Rose but six of the scouts were detached to the company to his command they participated in the attack upon the Sue Village in the Valley of the Little Big Horn on June 25th five being with major Reno and one with kusser when one was wounded four had headed out from the field the one remained with major Reno these four four scouts or five Scouts would be with attached to Major Marcus Reno and uh except for one crow Scout Curley uh who at the time of the battle um by the way Curley uh the time of the battle was uh 17 years old uh he was the youngest of the crow Scouts um the other five would remain with Reno’s command C would ask uh C’s command if he stay with his command and permission granted and there um they’ll head up towards what we know call weird point today the highest point that uh you see up there from there into the medicine tail medicine tail and from there is where curlyy said later on the anniversary who was out here said this is where I last saw cusser and curly was considered as uh one of the survivors or the only survivor of the battle A Little Big Horn uh curle was told that uh this is not your fight you must leave who was told by uh the chief Scout Mitch Mitch Boer um I mentioned earlier or I read earlier that uh where it says they participated in the attack upon the Sue Village actually they didn’t participate it you know they were released once the village was was located um two of them will be heading out towards the other side of the bluff uh where there was a large horse herd uh the other four would remain up on top of bluff so these uh Scouts from uh we talk a little bit about the history of the crow to this point to uh to these four four Crow Scouts who uh served in the military with the Army status uh being recognized as soldiers being paid the same pay as a soldier which was uh $13 a month and when they were on this campaign they got an extra 40 cents per day average uh day of the campaign that time was from uh 225 or uh about uh about uh 225 days to 125 days so you know times uh 40 Cent plus of what they get paid so after this campaign later uh they they would be you know collecting you know pension or if they passed on a family the wife was likely receive that that pension um I like to read a little bit about uh the scouts they’re uh when they were born and what they’re served as Scouts uh first of all uh curly who uh ranked his rank was Private uh Indian Scout uh he was born in 1856 at the little roseb but creek near the roseb but area um who was with custers colum on June 25th possibly witnessed a fight of the Custer column and later carried the news to the streamer Far West later Curley uh would be interviewed you know after this battle he was one of the most popular uh when after this battle you know they the uh media would come out they wanted to interview somebody about this battle and of course the last Scout that was with kuster Curley so he had a lot of you know uh he had a lot of tension back then it was he was like a celebrity and uh it was stated that later some of the crow Scouts got a little jealous because of he got so much attention and uh these interviews uh later consisted of uh Lieutenant James row you know with uh Thomas leforge interpreter interviewing Curley on uh the uh curly uh passed away in uh May the 21st 1923 and uh he’s he’s buried at the Lorn Battlefield National Monument the Scout white man runs him who uh ranked private was with also Custer’s command um earlier accompanied Sir George Gore on the western hunting trip in 1856 with the Custer column then on June 25th he was here at the Battle of Little Big Horn um white man runs him was also later interviewed by uh Colonel Tom McCoy in the Grahams uh book uh Custer Smith um white man runs him passed away on June 2nd of 1929 uh is buried at uh lch grass and uh Harry marason uh private born un unknown uh served in the Army Detachment of Indian Scouts um who participated or was in the area the time of the battle and uh died passed away on October 9th 1922 uh buried at St an’s Cemetery in LG grass and goahead ranked private Indian Scout with Custer column uh who was on top of the hill um he is also uh when he passed away on May 31st 1919 uh he’s buried at the kuster battlefield National Cemetery and uh the last not least uh Scout who was also in charge of the scouts by the way uh under Mitch Boer was half yellowface now there’s a little story about half yellowface who uh was not recognized even to today where a lot of people think that he should received or be recognized half yellow face uh his rank was Private uh was in a valley and on the hilltop with major Marcus Reno uh he was in the Infantry with Lieutenant James Bradley uh when Reno reach a Hilltop uh they uh set up the second day uh water carrier um volunteers to go down the river bring up water for the wounded um in this um little little jail where um the soldiers went down under the protection of Sharpshooters on the side um filled up cantens and brought up to the top once they reach the top uh one of the soldiers a young Soldier by the name of Madden uh was shot in the hit Madden Rose down the hill by that time everybody was back up on top uh nobody didn’t want to go down there and save uh man half H face up on top he’ll drop everything without cover uh Sharpshooters or anything he’ll run down the bottom there and he’ll pick up half aace throw him on shoulder and he’ll walk up to the top uh half Hof face saves man later uh the Army DC uh the Army uh decorating these water carriers and the volunteers and the Sharpshooters Congressional Medal of honors all those soldiers were mentioned but nothing was mentioned of half yellow face a lot of people feel today that half face should be recognized for his heroic bravery at time the battle A Little Big Horn you know those mentioned uh well that you know just a little bit about the crow uh the Aboriginal territory of The Crow and how the crows came to be here um today as I mentioned you know 2.2 million acres and all the lands that were taken away you know section here here there you know we’re we’re fortunate that um that we’re still here in our territory um even though lands are taken here and there you know we see the big horn mountains the Big Horn Lake they are in the Cronan reservation uh there’s a little story about the Cronan reservation uh the cro the Big Horn Mountains and the Big Horn River you know Nam after the big horn sheep and uh we’re fortunate that those are still in the crow reservation and uh i’ like to thank um all of you here visitors um I hope uh shed some light on your story about the Battle and also the curl at this time uh we have a few minutes if you have any questions um go ahead and see some answer some questions here well in C we say it means it’s good means it’s good to see you may have a good day I hope thank you very much right and thank you Marvin Daws with the National Park Service from Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument so um we’ll give him a little round of applause for his efforts today thank you for coming out we appreciate it all right all Next program will begin in about 20 minutes we will have Wales bull tale and he will be speaking on the crow way of life so feel free to come again for e e

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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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Tent of Many Voices: 08110405T

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

the people who went with them on this journey it’s the land that they crossed the people they met and the people that they didn’t meet but the people who have come since then and to tell all of those stories we bring people from different backgrounds and different perspectives to come here and talk about their side of the Lewis and Clark Story and today we’re very very fortunate to have with us Paul Brill Paul uh has worked with the Native Americans from most of his life he is a genealogist and a consultant and a great friend to the Omaha people so we’re very glad to have him here today and he’s going to be talking about some of the Omaha uh genealogy so Paul you’re on am I I think so are you here they didn’t pay the electric bill there we go I thought a genealogist was someone who was a a lover of the I Dream of Genie but I never classified myself as that but about 43 years ago I was selected by the Secretary of the Interior to come to Nebraska and also to South Dakota because things were being done both places to be involved in something that involved the Omaha tribe who had just received an award in the in Claims Commission uh a year or so before and they were able to secure the legislation which was dated September 14 1961 little did I know what I was getting into I came here with a wife and three small children actually one was born in South Dakota the fourth one and uh people back in Indiana actually they don’t think North and South Dakota actually are part of the United States because they don’t have much population and if you’ve lived there and gone through Winters you might think the same thing anyway I came here with the purpose of finding out which individuals would qualify under the legislation that was enacted by the Congress of the United States and I might tell you the the uh elements of that legislation came about as a result of lobbying about three individuals who represented the Omaha Tribal Council they are all deceased now they are Alfred Gilton they are manura Morris and Pauline Tindle and these three individuals had come many times to Washington and I have just barely met them because they were around in different sections and they were able to secure the elements that went into that legislation my job my task was to carry out those provisions and to find out if there were really any Omaha Indians here and if there were to make a roll of them and to determine exactly how much Omaha Indian blood they had I didn’t know whether they’d be a court low or an ounce or two low but I was going to find out I came at a time when the council had such persons as Valentine Parker senior whose son Valentine Jr on the council just died a couple of months ago and the tribal chairman was Lou a s sui a most generous gentle man and buddy gilin and manura Morris and Pauline Tindle and Craig Woodhall the are such were such outstanding people and for me to meet them was indeed a pleasure and and an honor uh it started out to do that and it ended for me about 2 years later there were other things that were happening but my essential tasks were finished except I had been vaccinated with an Omaha needle and that may be trite but I have been so well treated by so many people that it enabled me to continue an association to and including today and I suspect that when I live to be 150 well I’ll still be doing that uh I don’t think I owe anybody any money but at the point is I do owe a lot of thanks my profound thanks to members of this tribe you understand the state of Nebraska gets his name from the Omaha word Nas and it means what the Omaha said was the land of the flat water which they gave that name to the Plat River not the Missouri but the plat those were the hunting grounds for buffalo and I remember reading also where the settlers always call this nebras which is that corruption and of course it’s been corrupted at least it’s stable now after a couple of hundred years it’s simply Nebraska but the word is nasaki and the people here the Maha people have been here well I wasn’t here when they first came I came a little later but probably as long as 400 years their movement started as a breakoff of the parent language family called the suan they with other elements of it they traversed from Minnesota down through Illinois or Wisconsin perhaps even in Indiana to the Ohio River I found a name of a member in the what would now be the Parker family who had to have been born in the 1700s but his name was oh or a variation of that name I’ve heard others talk about it but it meant that River now whether they got it from when they lived there and it stayed or where there were other tribes that called it that day because tribes were very Adept at borrowing things from other tribes names and locations in any event they got down to the Ohio and they were part of a group of five called aab branch of the suan language and that includes the omahas the ponas the oage the COA and the K but the call other name is which is where the word Kansas comes from and the Omaha have a Clan which is the K Clan they separated somewhat uh when they hit the Ohio hit to Mississippi now remember they didn’t take an interstate back in those days and travel was probably over a period of years some got across the Ohio when it was frozen and that probably is the name for the Cora whose real name is ugak which means Downstream Omaha means Upstream because they and the ponas separated and the oages also went in the middle and the omahas and ponas and the Iowa tribe which is not linguistically that close went up the Mississippi till they hit the de MO River following it West and north and into Minnesota and over into what is now South Dakota and hit the big Sue River came South to the Missouri river which is not too far from here and at that time which could have been as late or as recent as 1650 a lot of experts and you know what none of them were there but they seem to think they know whether that’s totally accurate or approximate I can’t say whether it was a a parting of the ways because of some internal strife we can’t say but the pona language is virtually identical with Omaha you get into the other L oage is similar the word for gaha chief in Omaha in oage it’s kahika and in other the quap and call it is even further away but they are in the same family much as we have the romance languages of Latin being French and Spanish and Portuguese Romanian and some Engish anyway they came down here and settled in this area although much of their hunting grounds were also in AA and there they stayed they were ultimately attacked by various bands of the Sue particularly the Brule Sue they not only were friendly with the Yankton Sue they intermarried with the Yankton Su there are descendants today and people that have been here this morning of Yankton Indians and their French fur trapping people the dorians uh there also are cases where Omaha stayed with them and in among the Yankton there was a family called like John Omaha um I don’t know what name and they probably ended up with a Yankton name so there was a little diversity at that age when they first you had the Europeans were the Spanish and they was mentioned the Manu Lisa Manuel Lisa has descendants in this tribe one time I met with an elderly lady in early 1962 and she told me about a place that would have been something similar to this but it was closer to Macy where they were there watching and I don’t know whether it was not a hand game it might have been a shell Society game the Omaha know what I’m talking about but and this lady who was about 90 years old in 1962 and she was with her mother and a couple of sisters and a couple not yet born and they were watching this and this crowd of people next to her were making a lot of noise and she said I remember asking my mother what are they talking they’re loud and my mother said oh they’re just bragging about what that they are descended from Manuel Lisa it took me about 38 years to actually make that contact but I now know who the descendants of Manel Lisa are then we came with the French fur Trappers and that was the little fleshes and the font nails and the sa sees course I’ve already mentioned the dorians but that came indirectly through the through the yanked and sup the my fleshes were an interesting group and I haven’t found all I know about them but they came the original one was came from Louisiana and married a whole bunch of women we Ed the say well how did that happen to well he had a fast horse and among those was one woman and the child of that one was the very famous Chief Joseph leesh who had the Good Fortune to have been raised because he was orphaned very early the Brule Sue killed his mother his stepfather and several other aunts and uncles down by Fremont south of here they he was raised by big elk who had become chief after the death of black I mean um Blackbird and when he did he gained great status and uh Joseph leesh had a whole bunch of wives and two of them were Omaha one of them was Oto and one of them believe it or or not was a Mormon woman that he met when the Mormon train came from NAU Illinois now that train is not the Santa Fe that’s the Wagon train and they were at there at bellw he married this woman and had three daughters by about 20 years ago I got a phone call from a lady from Portland Oregon and she said I I said well wait how did you get my number she said well I wrote to the Secretary of the Interior they referred me to the Bureau of in Affairs who referred me to the Aberdine Area Office who referred me to the wineo agency who referred me to the Omaha tribe who said call Paul Brill this lady said my grandmother was the last surviving child of Lewis s she died in about 1927 I said how how many of them are there out there she said well maybe not but we think there’s 10,000 I think I’m losing my voice here there’re about 10,000 now that may be a little excess but I told Elizabeth Sal see is on the council and I said well the word I get is that what they’re going to do is they’re going to get special legislation special legislation and they’re going to enroll 5,000 SAU who sees and they’re going to come over and give ask Oliver if he’ll prove them and they’re going to get special legislation to become Omaha and that’ll be called the Western Omaha tribe the S sea Branch this was the S sui came in the family now s is a French word SS is without Susi means care and so it now has been shortened to where it’s one word so we now have the soses the LEF fleshes the dorians and then perhaps for Nebraska not so much the Omaha tribe the most famous were the fontanels who came in in American fur trade company and Lucian Fontanel had come up from New Orleans and met and married a woman who was a close relative of big elk and had a whole bunch of kids and they all did very well some married out of the tribe one having married a pony woman but most of the descendants came here and those descendants have gone to a lot of other places and are intermarried with various bands of Sue and all over the United States they’ve started their own tribe another one became was known as Logan fontell and he became a war chief and he was given the name shongaska which is White Horse and in fact went to Washington DC and was party to a treaty there he sadly was killed by the Sue within a matter of a year or so thereafter uh south of here uh we have a Logan fontell in this audience that was his great great great great uncle I’m getting close what is it great great grand Uncle okay and he died about 1855 so we’ve only had about 150 years since then but anyway they had women in the F family who married back into the tribe and have become very prominent into the mcau family into other families and because the name has been absorbed a lot of younger people that are here don’t realize they may be a fontel there may be a fontel in your present in past be careful if you want to marry a fontell he might be a cousin anyway this is what happened and I found out and it’s been a glorious experience to be able to find those kinds of things now the names of those were French that was easy where did these other names come from well the Presbyterian Church was the most prominent religious group in this area I’ve been told and there’s some uh legitimacy to that that the government actually the Congress actually said you folks take the Catholics you take this batch of company uh you Presbyterians you have here you evangelicals are over here now there was some overlapping but that’s not far from the truth because a presbyterian missionary came here way back his name was Father William Hamilton and one of the Omaha headmen whose name was c h took that name and became William Hamilton and all of his descendants they are not descended from the missionary they’re descended from the individual who took that name uh the Presbyterians had a school when the omahas were in B and there were two preachers down there two missionaries one was Reverend Clay mcau and if any of you are relatives of mcau that’s where it came came from another one was Reverend black and that name is not too prevalent today but there are some of those and Henderson the interesting thing is Upton Henderson and James Black were full Brothers but they took their Anglo name from different missionaries there are fremonts here Fremont was taken the name was a very a famous Mountain Man Trapper uh early on we had George Washington’s Abraham Lincoln’s General Shermans they had those we had uh people named Bert Bert county is named after the Bert but the Omaha Indians took the name Bert and so many of those individuals took or were given that name but you see they really still use the Indian name that was the thing that was important and even in my time a lot of them they didn’t even know when I was given the name is they even forgot I was called BR that was what and I thought well how come you don’t know because that name was not significant the Indian name and clans were the important thing and it still is sadly it’s not as important today as it has been because I find out when I ask someone what is your Omaha name well I think I’ve got one but I don’t know what it is or I know what it is but I don’t know what it means and that’s an erosion of the culture that is is difficult to to understand uh and it’s hard to realize that it is happening Omaha tribe divided in a system which is now known by Anthropologist as the Omaha Crow system of kinship and marriage it’s the most perfect system among all of anthropological groups that an they’ve studied whether it’s been in Asia in s whether it’s been in China or in Europe it is its Simplicity is so marvelous you had the Earth people and you had the sky people and each of them had groups within there and it was called exogamous which is a big word which means you married out of your clan you married out and this of course with a small group of people of a few hundred or even if they ever got to be a few thousand minimized the chances of marriage now I doubt seriously whether they were aware of DNA and genetics but I confident that they were aware of the situation which would result in marriage that occurred too close that’s why the European monarchy has been a disaster for Generations in any event this clan system has served the Omaha well served it so well um and there were sub Clans one of the sad things is that these names when they’re translated have lost their real uh meaning there is a name in the wany the El Clan called J W which refers they called her packing wood she carries the wood but what they’ve lost is that that lady had the honor to carry wood to the fires of the seven Chiefs the seven who had pipes so it was not just an honor of you know she would just thought hey you go get some wood no it was an honor to be able to bring the wood there uh among the Sue there is a name called afraid of his horses well that’s pretty terrible name but when you hear what is really said is he is so Fierce as a warrior the enemy is afraid even of his horses but it’s a new light on it doesn’t it one of the names I like to use is hint Jinga hint is hair I may be corrupting the the accent but that’s it t is yellow Jinga is little so I like to when I speak before students I said well what does that mean and they said well he had yellow hair no he painted his hair yellow no and hundred other wrong answers and what we find is this when a deer is born it has spots doesn’t it the spots go away and they yellow to the tan and the brown when a Buffalo cat is born it has toughs of yellow hair behind the ears what I’m telling you is the nuances of some of these names eludes the white population who thought they do everything they think everybody is a big bear or short bear or long bear or Buffalo this or that and indeed that exists but more than likely it had to do with some very minor thing that was not noticeable to the outside world and it got corrupted where I’m from in Tero Indiana we had a federal P we have a federal penitentiary and I did work there in the past because one of my childhood friends became the U Warden of that and I started doing this and there was a fellow there from out the soup country whose name was Johnny never misses a shot and of course he got the nickname of Bullseye but these are the kinds of things and I will tell you I’m not sure that I ever met an Indian man that didn’t have a nickname now some of them are easy and some of them are not so easy to talk about but people that I raised with had some nicknames but not everybody did but that’s a common I won’t use the word Affliction because it’s not U some of the most honorable people I’ve ever known have names of why would I want to be called that but you see you don’t even know the background that anyway I don’t want to pass my time but um there this is a subject you could talk about for 60 days and you never even began to tell about it would you have some questions that you might be interested yes ma’am let me come over with M so everyone can hear just in the short time that Lo has been up here he’s talked to several people and it seems like he’s related to everybody now when somebody in Omaha wants to marry another Omaha if how do they know they’re not related or are they so distantly related now is it okay yes and no I’m going to relate a story that happened I won’t tell you the names because that would give it away a lady about 15 years years ago when I was here she saw me she said this is in the tribal building and she said um when I was about 16 or 17 I came home and told my mother I was really sweet on such and such an individual boy he could dance both Indian and white way and he was this and that and my mother didn’t like him for some other reasons she said she pulled her sha over her head and began to cry and yell she was mad you can’t even touch him he’s your relative about a year later I came and told her I said you know I’m really I think I’m going to marry this guy my mother put this Shaw back we’ve never talked about it in that ensuing time and she began to cry silently and she said you know I never married that guy but I always wondering was I related to him or just so distant and I said well this is his name oinga yeah well do you know what his grandfather’s name was no his grandfather used his Indian hinga but he took the name of Charles wood Hall and didn’t like it so he reverted to ohaj Jinga yes he’s about a third cousin you mean he was a relative I said yes oh my mother knew it all along in many cases it is very it has to be very distant as some of you known from the charts you can go back to the same individual in fact more than even twice you may have to go back to six or seven generations I know of only one instance and that doesn’t mean I’ve known it all were a woman whose reputation was suspect let’s say that and married her first cousin had she not come from a family that was extremely powerful I’m not sure what would have happened to her because there was an uprising here and we’re talking about 130 years ago she married her first cousin and she knew it was her first cousin the tribe was an absolute uproar and only because certain Elders were able to make it quiet they perhaps even went away for a while because in some cases people who had committed murder if they weren’t treated harshly begin with were actually uh kind of they were sent out on the Prairie they could not come within certain distance of of The Villages so I don’t know I wasn’t there I came a couple of years later from that but this was a but this Omaha Crow kinship system is so marvelous it absolutely minimizes that sort of thing I made the comment one they said well well what why did those two marry if they knew that they would be causing so much trouble I said well I’m not an anthropologist I’ve studied it I’ve talked to a lot of them who are a lot smarter than I am but let me use a good phrase in Indiana they just had to hots for each other now that’s very unscientific but you know what it tells me that Omaha were a lot like the rest of the world in many of the day-to-day activities a lot like the rest of the world There are rules and they kept these people going and in good shape for centuries but occasionally there was a little as they say in New Mexico at one of pblos where well he fell off the wagon when they were coming through whether that’s the case I don’t know but they were human and these little exceptions to the rules which are magnificent I’ve talked to one of my bosses John Barney Old coyote Crow and we he was my boss out in California and we talked about this and he said you know we never thought of it but we have that same system like similar we have it rigid here and rigid here and this way we have while they’re much larger than the Omaha but the same time uh they realized that it worked for them any other questions yes sir uh my Robinson my name is I hear that what is the name uh that means City langage Clan right um my question was that um I’ve been asking around among our elders and stuff and I’ve been trying to locate the uh final resting places every our last Clan Chief and I’m wondering if you know where they’re located that wouldn’t be uh Robert Morris would it um Yellow Smoke or was there someone since him I’m not sure about that that’s what I’m trying to find out I personally don’t know um I went with a member a cemetery that’s falling into disuse the U Stones were still there and this was a Phillips that’s a name for you not familiar it was a Phillips Cemetery it should be restored it just breaks my heart see it but here was a name of a lady that didn’t fit in and it took me 2 years years to find out she was a Dale and had she married a Phillips and that’s why she was in that but there are all these cemeteries around here and I would you know beg the tribe to really identify them and to restore them trees have fallen over vandalism has done all of this and I I’m sorry I can’t answer your question that’s thank you one more PA I just want to thank you for mentioning three of my ancestors namely chief pel chief Logan F now and Luan F now I’m very proud of my Heritage as a matter of fact I visit the tent exore was a picture of big out there are better known as katanga help me with pronunciation but I fun to uh let you know how much I enjoyed your presentation thank you his full name was is because there were ones that followed and that’s like the white man says senior and Junior and names quite often were passed down from Uncle to nephew and from father to son or skipping a generation and um big elk was an absolutely beloved Chief and he was the one that met Lis and whether he was over on the river saying land here or whatever he was doing his good uh Vibes in that made it easier for this uh group that came up L and Clark to be well received because the Omaha controled this part of the Missouri River and when Blackbird was the chief as well nothing would have gone up if they didn’t want it to nothing would have gone up I don’t care when you get up in the Sue country it wouldn’t have gotten past here but they were well received and I think that that’s indicative of the very nature of these people thank you so very much e e for

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Tent of Many Voices: 07030502TMB

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

well good afternoon everyone and welcome to the tenam many voices I encourage you to come in and have a seat and join us we’re just about to get started with our 1:00 program the tenam Min voices is part of the cor Discovery 2 traveling loose and Clark exhibit it’s a m agency exhibit with a National Park Service being the lead agency if you spend some time here today if you go out to the keelboat for instance you talk to members of the Army Corps of Engineers if you go out to the Dugout canoe you talk to someone from the Bureau of Reclamation so it’s a multi- agency exhibit and it’s a multi- partnership exhibit here in the tenam many voices we have a wide variety of presenters that share with us a wide variety of perspectives both on the lwis and Clark expedition itself but also we like to hear from the PE from the descendants of the people that were living there long before Lewis and Clark arrived we’d like to hear from these indigenous or American Indian nations to share their story their perspectives and that’s what we have today with our 1:00 program we have we have Howard bogus who is an enrolled member of The Crow Nation he’s going to share some of his people’s history and culture Howard is a oral historian has been learning his history and culture of his people since he was six years old so we’re very privileged to have him here let’s give him a warm welcome to the tanam voices so you got me on oh okay all right thank you uh want to thank the National Park Service for allowing me to come here to speak with you and uh talk to you about the history of the people who were here when lisis and Clark came uh one of the things that people don’t see in the in the Diaries and and of the Louis and Clark and and stuff like that that there was people here there was culture there was societies there was religion all of that was here and it was all basically the same as the stuff that Lewis and Clark brought here and uh Jesuit priests and uh other religions that brought religion to the crow people afterwards but uh anyway uh I’m an enr enrolled member of the Crow tribe of Indians and uh at the age of 6 years old I was designated by a cow cro Indian Elder my named George Washington Hogan and uh when you go down on the Crow Nation you will find many Washingtons you will find many Lincoln and uh things such as this because at that time the Indian people named almost all of their children after a president or somebody that was very very important so you find them types of names down there but Mr Hogan when he adopted me uh that does not mean that I left my my family and went to live with the Hogan Family whoops my outfit fell off here my uh speaker fell off in the back of my belt but uh anyway uh when uh Mr Hogan when he adopted me um I became a a member of the Hogan family so I had okay so I had two families uh to bring me up and when Mr Hogan uh adopted me he he he he asked my parents if I could be brought up as an oral historian so I’ve studied oral histories all my life plus the written histories I’ve put together a library of over 8 around 800 books on the cow Indian people and the other Indian tribes of Montana and in thousands of loose leaf pages I I don’t know I I got so much I don’t even know what I have anymore but uh anyway when when when he uh asked me to do this then he and in Crow tradition then he designated two people that would be my tutors when I was very young and one of them was one of the people was Robert suar yellow tale who was actually the first American Indian that became a superintendent of a of a tri of a tribe of Indians in the United States and he was one and Mr yellow tale became came back and he became the superintendent of the Crow tribe of Indians uh and the other person who he designated was Robert Summers how who was who was my my mother’s older brother so I had a clan uncle and and and and an uncle who were my my teachers and these old these gentlemen would take me out and through the hills and stuff you know and you know I can remember now you know when you in the 40s and 50s men we had we were still driving Model A and old junker cars and stuff such as that you know battle tra around the hills and these guys would take me along and say you know this is what happened here on this hill side this is come and look at this these rocks and this the the rocks that this marks a prayer site or a battle site or or it’s a trail marker or something such as this you know and so I’ve actually spent most all of my life hiking the hills and looking toward uh my friend Mike penfold here goes with me all the time anymore because I have I lost all my peripheral vision so I only have central vision also they don’t allow me to drive but old Mike here he takes me all the time and and uh but anyway we go out and we we we uh find the paintings and stuff out here we we visit paintings here that have been carbon dated at 1,000 years old so the you know there was a culture there was you know and that was here a long time uh we we we walked the trails we have a highway system today the Indian people had a highway system one of the main highways is just right out here just west of Great Falls it goes from Alberta Canada to New Mexico and all you do is you follow little piles of rocks all the way um one of the things that’s always uh very interesting to me is that the I I believe that the Indian people got along a lot better before the white men came along before they was being pushed into smaller groups uh because at at in in our beliefs no one owns the land the land is there for everybody and the land is there to to take care of everybody uh in our and we and in our structure of Life uh our structure of life is a family is is a family structure because I pray to my my father the sky I pray to my mother the earth I pray to my grandfather the sun I play I prayed to my grandmother the moon these are the things that brought us into this into this life in this earth they’re the ones that brought us up they tutored us they taught us they fed us they took care of us so our our really our our way of life and our religion was our family and our Earth our Sky our sun our moon you know it’s it’s like uh my father this guy he looks over my mother the the Earth he showers with the rain my mother the Earth brings up the green grasses the trees whatever it takes to feed us or to feed the animals that we’re that we are going to consume without it our grandfather the son without our grandfather the son this could not happen because we need the sunlight to take care of it but you know we need time to rest so our grandmother the Moon she watches over us while we rest at night so that we can get ready for our new life that begins in the morning because in our cro in in our croad tradition our lives are one day at a time a life is one day at a time and it is for all of us yes we always plan for the future but our life is still only one day at a time and so that’s this is how our belief our culture was and this was a belief in a culture that was going on at the time when Lewis and Clark came up through the Missouri River I drew this map right here this map right here this is Mandan right here and uh I drew this map off in Crow Indian oral stories I drew it off of the information that was given by sits in the middle of the land when he signed the 1826 treaty at Mandan with the United States government that was the first treaty that the C Indian people ever signed with United States government so when uh they signed this treaty uh the general he says well sit in the middle of land he says what where where do you live how can I find you if I need to contact you because the 1826 treaty it didn’t say I’m going to give you something I’m going to take anything it was a treaty of friendship because the crow were recognized as a nation by the United States government not as a tribe of Indians not as a reservation we were recognized as a nation one of the very few tribes of there was only a eight to 10 tribes in the entire United States that were recognized by United States government as a nation but anyway when uh when we signed this treaty here and he said where do you live well he says my Crow people live under my Lodge we as Crow when we set up our lodge we use four main polls all of the rest of the tribes use three main poles to set up their lodges but Crow used four so we set up one he says my one pole sets at thei River Big River the Missouri River or the Yellowstone the AA runs into it this is up here on this my second pole it’s down here and it’s what where the it’s the Gap Where the Buffalo come through Spearfish South Dakota that’s where the second pole was set for the coration the third pole was set way down here in the southwest and uh it’s at a place that is called that you can visit today it’s the gurgling Waters pooo Papa Waters and it’s where the waters are boiling from the ground it’s a beautiful place to go to our fourth pole set where the rivers mix the headwaters of the Missouri River where the Jefferson all three of the rivers come together here at the Three Forks and this is our cron Nation sets under our law L because our lodge is round if you noticed the the the reserv the the nation was in a shape of a heart and I couldn’t figure it out I I study father desmid quite a little bit and uh father dmid went back to uh St Louis when he got to St Louis they asked him that where have you been where’ you come from he says I just came from the heart of the cron Nation we have to remember that father dmid drew a good share of the maps of the American West he was a priest a Jesuit priest but yet he you know he had to have a a way to finance himself because uh the Catholic church was not financing the Catholic church was not financing uh father dmet father dmit was a renegade study him oh he’s fun he is fun but uh anyway when when when he got back to St Louis he said he was he had just came from the heart of the crow country when I use the oral stories this country over here this is Plat River Country this water all runs into the Big Horn River this run water all runs into the Yellowstone River this water runs into the from the Missouri into the Missouri here into the Yellowstone and then Yellowstone Park up here yeah Crow Indians at one time Yellowstone Park almost 80% of Yellowstone Park was in The Crow Nation we should have kept that and give them the rest of the reservation but uh no it’s it’s it’s very interesting of the history and the people who went here but one of the things I like I always like to talk about uh the culture uh we had artists and our artists when they made a painting a thousand years ago you can read it today and it tells you a story um that’s one of the things I forgot to bring along with me I was going to bring along some photographs of of of some of the paintings and uh there one of the things what I find in the paintings when I see them all the time is that they generally have they generally have the number 13 marked into it there’s generally 13 little marks you if there’s a whole circle of marks you divide them they’ll divide out into because the 13 moons we have 13 full moons in a year the Indian people use that as our calendar the 13 full moons we even had a calendar believe it or not the 13 moons on the Turtles back the next time you see a turtle count the little squares on his back there is 13 that is our calendar that was our calendar yes so you know they was we was doing the same thing as a white man different way uh the other thing that was very interesting it was you know like I say you know the the religion part of it is how how when we prayed when actually when it going to come all when when it all comes down we all prayed to the same person up here when we die I I was buried on the top of the ground because of the fact that if I was buried down under the ground my spirit can’t rise and go up and I need to do that and and uh you know it was until 1894 that the United States government passed the law and said I had to have 5 ft of dirt on my face yeah one of the things that uh the non-indian people I don’t say I don’t I don’t use the term of white man very much I don’t I I I think it’s a derogatory term but I I generally say the non-indian and one of the ter the things that the non-indian people did uh get from the Indian people you go to any the cemeteries you’re always buried so you face the east Indian people were always tried buried so that they could fa they they would face the Rising Sun when I set up my Lodge I would set up my Lodge my openings when I set in the back of my Lodge I would sit there in the morning and I could sit in my Lodge and I could had watched the Rising Sun from the back Lodge so East was a very very important part of of of our of our way uh 13 you know like I say everybody thinks 13 is a great a bad number ah not for us it’s great no fact is I was in Washington DC a couple of years ago and I was visiting Nick rhof West Virginia and uh when when we were visiting Mr Mr Ray Hall he says uh well you know this might be a bad time for you to have propably to do cuz we was trying he’s actually put together a bill to try to uh put protection on uh cultural sites historic sites Across the Nation Indian and not Indian but he’s getting a lot of flak over it because I mean it it it protects a lot of land so but anyway when uh when we was talking to Mr Ray Hall he says well this is my 13th term he says this might be a the beginning of my 13th term he says this might be a bad time I says no this is the most wonderful time for us I said because 13 is our is our good number and like I say when you go around the the paintings you will find them always have 13 in some way or another uh in in the paintings uh some of the paintings I mean you you read them uh you get them get them and as you see on my belt buckle here I have lodges beaded into my belt buckle and the lodge is my home my home is very very sacred my home is my church because uh in in American Indian people we don’t go build a million dooll building so we got someplace to go on Sunday anytime that I go go out here my feet touch the Earth and I can see the sky I’m in my church I’m in my church and and I go there quite often to do this but uh what a lot of times you I like to talk a little bit about the prayer okay I do a prayer something happened in my life I don’t know maybe a death maybe I’m not getting along with people or somebody who got hurt that’s very close to me or something like this I go out to do a prayer and when I go out to do my prayer I go Before Sunrise to where I’m going to do my prayer I do a prayer twice a year on top of pompy’s pillar and I go up there I have my little place that I can set I can sit there the entire day people don’t even know that I’m there but I go Before Sunrise and I don’t come come back down off until sunsight at night and when I up there I I pray for what was is is going on happening in my life but I don’t sit there and pray the entire day I’m sitting there and I’m thinking what is the bad things has happening in my life what is what is the way that I can can can fix this uh this more it’s in our belief is we we need to know who we are within we need to know who we are as long as we know who we are we will do well but the day that we don’t that we find that we’ve lost ourselves and we became you know uh maybe we start drinking maybe we start using drugs maybe we do you know we we start doing things but you got to remember who you are and take care of take care of that that person as long as you always know exactly who you are you will do well but when uh I like to talk a little bit about Lewis and Clark now Lewis and Clark entered Crow country right here right here they traveled up Crow country right through here Crow people people were on the Sun River which is west of Great Falls the two Medicine River Crow people were living up there at that time there was Crow people living on the Milk River which is way up here but Lewis and Clark they entered cro country right here traveled up here and out the other side of cro country down at three fors then they returned Lewis made this entire trip back Clark P just drip down to Yellowstone uh there was one of the groups went down to through the Missouri River here again and uh prior made the journey with the horses across over here on these yellow lines so they traveled about 1,700 miles and never spoke to a crow and a lot of people wonder so why did they travel all these miles right through the middle of the crow people they seen signs of the Indians all the way they never met a crow for one reason one reason only mosquitoes these crows they was smart enough that you get back away from the rivers into the hills the high mountains you get away from the mosquitoes and mosquito time they left they left the River Country this was the time when Lewis and Clark was doing all of their things in Crow country and they stayed on the rivers they stayed down in the mosquitoes they got ate up the croww gone what was very interesting at this point right in here where they made the canoes or they made the canoes they camped there 3 days Lou and Clark did or Clark did in his group within 12 miles of where Clark was camped there was a crow Sundance going on at the very same time there was thousands of Indians there it was on the Clarks Fork River as we know it today but then to the to the crow people the Cheyenne the sue the blackbeat this is the river where we all come to dance this meant all of the tribes of Indians come there to the Clarks Forks River they would do Sund dances and they would hunt they would they would take care of their hides their meat and think and get a year supply of meat and then then they would start venturing back home nees Pur I mean there was many many tribes shonne all of the tribes would come there because the Clarks Fork River we didn’t didn’t fight on that River when we all came to that River we know that that was a place that you could set down beside your enemy break bread eat hunt together maybe we even got together and we went off and raided somebody’s horse P horses see we never stole a horse I want you to know that we never ever stole a horse we captured a horse because to capture a horse was a very honorable thing for a crow yes to capture a horse is a very honorable thing when I be when I when I wanted to become a chief I had to do four things to capture a horse from within an enemy’s Camp was one of the things I had to do within the camp that didn’t mean that he was running on the hillside out here I stuck into the camp and I cut the the rawad that was holding that horse my friend Mike he’s a sue over here Mike’s laying in his lodge he’s sound asleep but he has that cord tied around his belly cuz he don’t want to lose his favorite warhorse I sneak into his camp and I steal his horse see but really in Crow I captured that horse because I did a very honorable Brave thing I took his horse while he was hanging on to the end of the light the cord yes and so when when when we got the when Clark came down the river we uh we didn’t get the first nine that was taken further west of the of the Three Forks it was nine that was taken over there and uh the black feet claim them them nine horses that that was taken I want you to I want you to know these guys had Shon and nesp horses Shon got most of their horses a good share of their horses from the NES Pur because the the NES Pur immediately started breeding horses to get a certain type of a horse they wanted a particular horse the apaloo so they started breeding to get the appolo that’s what the Appo came from and uh but they were strong horses small horses very very good horses us Crow knew a good horse when we seen one you know and here comes Clark down the Yellowstone River you know he’s just rambling along and he’s making maps and he’s doing all of these good things you know that he’s supposed to be doing but us Crow are sitting up on the hillside counting horses and you know and one of the things that in all my years of studying the military might protect their encampment but they would put their horses over here on the hillside three miles away to graze you know so they would just very easy to get to so we would just come down and we would relieve him of these horses and uh where uh according to the Diaries uh Clark left his horses approximately one mile from the camp where he was making the canoes uh we found a site that pretty much fits the entire diary as to where the horses was being kept because it uh says that from that position there it was one mile approximately one mile to the river crossing for the where the Indians who took the horses crossed the Yellowstone River and going south in in down into Crow country and uh so we we pretty much believe that we found the spot pretty much where the horses was being held but uh no they was they was nice horses and you know we was good the first time you know we only took half of them you know and do Gunn it he went on down the river you know and they got down near where Billings is today and that’s where they crossed the river with the last 25 head of horses that they was left we’d already get took 24 in a CT and when they crossed the river prior traveled about six 7 hours and he was at a place called fly CRI today uh fly Crick is is is a is is starts from a basin this Basin is large like this 200,000 acres in it but it only has one little dry stream that goes out of it to drain it one of these big old Montana Cloud bursts come along and here was Prior he was camped on this little Dry Creek and all of a sudden I mean he has a Roaring River between him and his horses and so he spends a a few hours trying to get his horse her back together but when he went to bed he was tired and he was sleepy so he really went to sleep and he got up in the morning and when he got up in the morning he just didn’t have any more horses uh one of the crow guys wanted to let him know who got the horses so he left a moccasin and uh so we had we we had a pretty good h of her of of horses but now I’m going to tell you a story about these horses uh the crow horses the horses that the crow T took from the Clark they were taken so easily there was no danger of any kind in us taking the horses so in our Crow tradition we could not keep I could not I I’m I’m the person that took the horses I could not keep the horses I had to give them away as gifts so you know really you know Clark he made a lot of pro Indian people very very very happy because I we gave away 50 horses 49 horses in a CO as gifts because in Crow tradition we were not allowed to keep the horses because there was no risk to our life we could only keep a horse for ourself that we risk our life to get but anyway when uh after after that you know then the crow they just took took off and and took the horses and they went kind of into the Southwest Mike and I been working on a trail that goes into Big Horn Canyon National Park called the bad Pass Trail these horses was headed right for the bad Pass Trail bad Pass Trail is a is an area that when you walk you step over this rock and you stumble over the next and you have next step you have a a rock roll under your foot I mean it’s a it’s a it’s a bad Trail but it’s a it’s a trail that’s probably 10,000 years old and uh very very well marked but and it’s marked with piles of rock some of the the the the rock piles in badp Pass Trail they are 10 15 ft apart from here to the other end of the camp they may be five or six piles of rock they will be this High probably a ton or two Rock in in this pile but you know what every one of them rocks are every one of them rocks is a prayer as I’m going down the trail I pick up this Stone I carry this rock it becomes part of me my my sweat gets on this rock I carry this rock for a while and I talk to this rock and then when I get to where the places where the prayer where the prayer piles of rocks are I get up to this pile of rocks and I spit on the Rock I put part of me on my saliva I put the rock in the pile when I put the rock in the pile I say thank you grandfather for the good journey behind me give me a good journey forward and I go on the next Indian person that comes along behind me does exactly the same thing I can take you to piles of Rock down in the crow country that is growing yet today because in our belief we cannot go go past these piles of rock and we we have to stop and do prayer say a prayer Sandy and I one time we was going up into the prior mountains and she was driving along and and uh I said stop we need to stop and do the prayer well let’s we’ll do it on the way way back and I you know I said no you got to do it now Sandy and I went up onto the prior mountains we spent the entire tail on the prior mountains had a wonderful day we was coming back down off of the prior mountains that night we got within 300 ft of that that that that rock pile she blew a right front tire just blew the whole side of it out I didn’t stop and say my prayer on the way up and ask for the good journey yes no we we believe in this very very strongly we do it yet today but uh you know that’s that’s why I like to talk you say tell you a little bit about Le and Clark when they came here I mean we had people who were painting the history on the Rocks the paintings that are on the Rocks today that are a thousand years old uh right now I we’ve got near 400 located on the Yellowstone River and his tributaries uh when you sat there and you you look at these and I don’t come come up here and say okay I’m going to paint on the rock 5 minutes I’m going down the I’m going down the trail no Takes Me Maybe years to choose my spot because I want absolute perfect light at a certain time of the year things such as this I go up here I abrate the wall Till It’s Perfectly smooth I take a a black Riverstone almost every abrasive stone that we have found so far is a Black River Stone so they packed this rock a long ways to do their do their paintings but they abrak this wall perfectly smooth and these walls in this one particular spot that has been carbonated 950 to 1,000 years old this Rock today is absolutely perfectly smooth Sandstone they have break this perfectly smooth they would have put a lot of House Painters out of business business if the house painters could figure out how they made the paint because they paint their paintings on the walls the paintings we we think are just something but no that painting is part of me it tells a part of a story it tells it it tells something about my people and uh some of the paintings we one of the paintings that we find it has a circle it has inside of the circle coming to the middle the shape of lodges all the way around in series of 13 there is 13 lodges make to make the circle on the bottom of each Lodge on the outside of the on the outside of the circle there is 13 fringes but the lodge is our home is our church that the lodge means people that’s where the people live so that that that that particular painting is very sacred to us because it tells us of of of the people okay there’s another one there and that’s right beside excuse me but uh there’s another painting that’s right there beside of it and uh the painting that’s right beside there it’s got what we call a two-headed water monster on it anytime that we find something that has two heads in the paintings it means one thing I actually it means two things actually good and bad good and evil one one head is for good one head is bad and I’ll tell you a little story uh that the time took time about in the late 1800s uh Chief plenty C had been on a raiding party we went down come down in Nebraska and he got some good Sue horses I mean you know our neighbors always had good horses and Crow always needed more cuz to to to to Crow horses were wealth the more horses I had the wealthier I was because I could always trade horses for anything that I wanted but anyway when plny cluz was returning he uh got back to the Big Horn River the Big Horn River was being flooded man he got to the river and oh man we can’t get across and we’re only a day and a half Journey from home good long day we could probably make it it didn’t know what quite to do to do big shoulder blade big shoulder blade was a very tall man uh at that particular time most inro Crow people were 6 feet and more taller very very very big people not fat just tall thin people but anyway big shoulder blade he was a very big man he was riding a very very large horse and he said well I’ll go into the river and he says I I’ll I I’ll find find the way to get across so he went and chose his place for where where he entered the river when immediately when he got into the river big shoulder blade and his horse was caught by the water and it started washing him down so immediately big shoulder blade he starts singing a chant this chant song it is to the good and the the evil of the water monster he’s chanting and he’s praying that the good the good water monster will get a hold of him and the good water monster will take him to the land the bad water monster will take him into the water this is the belief this painting is on the wall thousand years old that story is a thousand years old uh the other pain painting is there is just of a lodge but the painting that’s in the center the ball in the middle of it is green do you know that in the state of Montana there is only five paintings that have green in them one is over here at Hela along the lake the weather the other four are on the Clarks Fork River the other four are all within probably less than 30 feet distance of part now it’s it’s uh uh and so green is was something that was kind of hard but we we feel that that green was for Earth the mother the grasses cuz the land the Earth turns green so that that that’s part of this part of that particular prayer that big shoulder blade was was talk was singing when uh when uh the crow people would travel like I say they would Mark the trails with the markers and they had this highway system you can go out right around I I can go around here just about any place in the country out here and I can can choose a valley a river and I will find a a trail that is marked along that river valley maybe a ridge uh one of the things about the American Indian people was they were never afraid of anything that I can see I was never afraid of anything that I could see but I was afraid of what I couldn’t see that was what was bothered me more than anything so when I traveled most of the time I traveled on a High Ridge I Could See For Miles nobody could sneak up on me no that’s the way and that’s where I we find most all of the trails and we’ve followed these Trails crossed Wyoming Montana I have a friend who followed the same particular tra in Colorado and New Mexico no it’s it’s a I can get I can I can go out here probably within one day in this area right here and find the trail right here that takes you to Manan you know why the black feet the crow that’s just shown where Nomads we don’t stop to plant to grow the Mandan down here in the river they grew the stuff that we want the English the French everybody brought their stuff here the Mandan when they brought it to Mandan all of the tribes come here there is many many trails that come to and down am I getting out of time okay I I I always talk to the last second so you know that’s that’s one thing I always tell people you know about crow about Crow history we don’t we don’t have short songs we don’t have short prayers we don’t have short stories because in our songs they talk about our history in our life our prayers talk about our history in our life our stories talk about our history and our life and as an oral historian I have to tell you in detail as to what’s going on this is why I’m talking about something and all of a sudden I’m over here talking about something else because I have to tell you the details because otherwise you’re going to get the story messed up you you need you need the details and and and that’s how an oral historian is taught I’ve been taught all my life that when I tell a story I have to tell the details but the Lis and Clark Venture was interesting to the American Indian people uh I call it the beginning of the end it was the beginning of my of the of the American Indian way of life see I I I call you a Native American you are Native Americans I am a crow American Indian Columbus gave me the name of an Indian when he came and I’m proud to be called an Indian I’m always very proud to be called an Indian because I’m very very proud of my Heritage and I’ve studied my Heritage my entire life I just turned 66 years old two days ago and I’ve got 60 years of history behind me yeah yeah thank you Howard thank you for sharing your history and your culture and your accumulated years of knowledge with us we appreciate that very much here in the ten many voices there are regular programs every hour on the

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Jeff Olsen

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

we’re going to get started in a couple of minutes if our guests and speakers would come to the front of the room and up on stage on stage mayor line I’m done good morning again my name is Jeff Olsen and I’m with the National Park Service I’m the spokes for core Discovery 2 200 years to the Future and the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail on behalf of many people in green and gray and a long list of other people that help us get core of Discovery to around the United States I want to welcome you what we’re going to do is have a combined uh program here this morning we’re going to have uh the colors posted and an honor guard with us uh Mike iall um is going to do the opening in prayer for us and then we’re going to have some brief remarks by the mayor and uh and Sam Robinson from the chinuk and then uh County Commissioner Mark bolt is going to open core two for us so if uh you would stand and we’re going to begin for he oh hey the for I I all he for you are you are heart Mike I guess uh I’d like to tell you that uh before we start I’ve obviously I I don’t have the the KET Salish or the the tium sah hapton so I’ll just speak to you as is the language we have uh we’re here to Mark the the the coming together of our two cultures and I would like you to uh to think about this the the Indian history of the Northwest is truly the ancient history of the Northwest and once you accept that then you can understand why when the tribal people are insistent about cultural resource prote protetion we are protecting your ancient history and so if it seems unreasonable please just remember that as residents of the Northwest the tribal history is your history so with that amen for uh please be seated right left face please stand for the retirement of the Native American color guard good morning I’m Roy par the mayor of America’s Vancouver and behalf of the city council of the city of Vancouver and the citizens of the city of Vancouver I want to thank you all for coming this morning for this opening ceremony but beyond that I want to thank everyone and I you know I can’t name everybody because I certainly would forget someone and someone I haven’t met who had a significant role in bringing this great core to to Vancouver and Clark County it’s a great opportunity for our County and our city to Showcase those activities which we have created to commemorate the Journey of Lewis and Clark and the interaction with with our Native American brothers and sisters I’m very proud to represent the city of Vancouver here look forward to all the crowds that will come they will enjoy they will become educated hopefully they will in fact absorb some of the diversity that will be offered here over the next several days and I look forward to participating in it it brings Great Value to our community anytime we can display the culture of our region particularly for our young people for the future of our country and the future of our world rests in our young people they are our greatest assets so I look forward to seeing them and seeing you all here as as we enjoy this great exhibit and again I want to thank everyone particularly want to thank Arlene Johnson who is the executive director of the Vancouver Clark County Lewis and Clark organization who has for years and years and of course there are City people involved and the National Park Service people involved and there people from every city involved Arlene has led the troops in this effort and she certainly deserves a round of applause I don’t even know where she is she was here earlier raise your hand she’s back there okay welcome to you all welcome to cou thank you very much God bless you all and God bless America thank you thanks here and Mike again my name is Mike iel I’m with the cge tribe um when we talk about the history because that’s what we’re here for sometimes you tend to put it too far away uh a while back somebody asked me uh is there any positive connection between you and the Hudson Bay Company about an hour later I realized the well du the way I spell my name it’s the Scottish spelling uh there’s a Jesuit spelling that’s that’s French that we we don’t use my great-grandfather used it but our family uses the Bay Company spelling so when you think about the history you need to to again realize that today we know more about Lewis and Clark than they did 100 years ago you got the Molton Journal set you still have Ruben th’s Journal set and you have the the journals of the fur Traders and what I compare the Lewis and Clark journey to is driving down a dark country road at night with your headlights on and that’s more than Lewis and Clark saw a lot of places through here they either stopped for lunch or they didn’t stop at all when leis and Clark got here they compared this to a Marketplace equal to any in world this had already been a A Gathering Place a trading place for centuries perhaps Millennia before Louis and Clark got here and when they came here they saw people wearing sailor suits using metal pots carrying pistols carrying muskets we’d already had contact Lis and Clark didn’t discover this area it was already discovered so uh with that I guess I’ll be brief and uh I’ll pass it off to Sam thank you my name’s Sam Robinson I’m a council member with the chinuk tribe and it’s just such a beautiful morning uh to hear drummers when you come in here and and uh and we’re honored by our veterans you know I mean the Native American veterans go back a long ways we I mean there was people fighting in World War I that didn’t even have the right to vote but uh I I just uh you know the ten to many voices it’s it’s brought the word of So Many Nations along the trail together and and later on today I’ll be able to speak about my ancestors and and the chinuk nation and and uh hopefully Enlighten you on all of this and I think we’re just uh uh blessed and honored to have this voice and along the ls and Clark Trail and uh let people know that there was more going on than just these guys coming down the river and and let people know that uh how we helped them you know how especially on this end of the river where they didn’t have a whole lot going for them and didn’t have a whole lot that we needed but we we we helped them survive and I hope that you all enjoy this the uh the stay that coru will be here you know for 2 weeks and and learn a lot uh thank you thank you Sam our final speaker this morning is uh Mark bold who is the county commissioner and also chairman of the Lewis and Clark committee here Mark well thank you very much and it is an honor for this County to to host this Exposition uh first of all on behalf of Clark County and the other two Commissioners I’d like to thank the park service for all your work for bringing this exposition to Clark County and uh for the thousands of students that will come here to see the the Heritage that the mayor has just talked about for the other and to uh just it’s not by accident that our uh County isn’t is named after uh of William Clark and it’s not by accident that we’re Americans so it is it’s an honor to be here uh just welcome have a good time within this camp and the rest of the this Exposition and behalf of Clark County I now now CL uh declare the Lucen Clark Exposition core Discovery 2 open thank you and God bless and good morning and welcome to all you folks here in the Ten of many voices welcome to Cor Discovery 2 we’re glad to be here in Vancouver and get things started off here on this Monday morning here in the tenam voices we have regular programming every day that we’re here we have regular programming uh we have programs every hour on the hour and we’ll be starting our day this morning hearing a little bit about Yakama history and culture so please join us for that

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