Tent of Many Voices: 03190601TMB

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