Tent of Many Voices: 04070601TMB

hey it's 9:00 a.m. so we're getting ready to start I want to welcome everyone to the Ten of Min voices um we are the only National Park Service site that comes to you so out of 390 National Park sites in the US we ended up in Stevenson Washington today and I think we're very glad to be here we're excited so thanks for having us now I don't want to waste any more of Bob's time so I'm going to introduce him we have Bob chin withth here he's with the National Park and he's going to speak about Dugout canoes of the Columbia River Plateau so please give him a warm welcome thank you um I just want to make sure all the technology is functioning here so first thing I am the museum curator at npers National Historical Park which is located about 8 miles east of Leon Idaho Leon Idaho is on the Snake River on the opposite side of the river is Clarkston Washington so you can probably guess who came through there in 1804 uh our Park was established in 1964 and it's kind of an unusual Park in the sense that uh we are made up of disconnected sit sites in four states there are 38 sites that tell the story of the relationship between euro Americans and the npers people and the relationship between the npers and their neighbors so the most of the sites are in Idaho but some are in Montana in northeastern Oregon and in northeastern Washington we tell the story of the nesp war of 18 77 of uh Oregon Trail immigration of the missionary era all sorts of things the site where our Park headquarters is located has been a living site for the nesper people for over 10,000 years the archaeological record supports that as well as the tribal history so npers park is is uh known primarily for its Museum collection we are considered to have the finest collection of plateau material culture in the world we certainly have the best documented collection of material associated with uh families and various Traditions uh on the plateau and in the nesp community one of the Striking features of our collect ction is the material culture associated with the introduction and use of the horse in NP are uh noted horse risers and breeders have been for over 300 years they're one of the few tribes that actually practice selective breeding of horses and they have a reputation throughout the the plateau for taking good care of their horses and having large herds and that sort of I think Louis and Clark talked about that at Great length when they came down uh on the weite Prairie and came down into the Clearwater Valley and got to know the npers much of this material culture is uh significant in terms of its age and we have spent a great deal of time documenting uh artifacts in for example the Spalding collection um I don't know most of you are from around here you may remember in 1995 the tribe uh organized a huge National fundraising effort to uh bring this collection back from Ohio this is material that was collected by Henry Spalding in 1836 when he established his mission on laway Creek sent back to a doctor in Ohio named Dudley Allen and the material resided there until the 1980s when it was loaned to the park Service uh for exhibit at our Museum in 1993 they asked that the collection be returned uh people were afraid that they had a buyer for the for the material and uh the nesters of course were very upset about this and wanted the material to stay in those first country so they raised money to purchase it from the Ohio historic Society but for the time prior to the introduction of the horse people not just in esper country but all over the plateau traveled uh the very extensive water highway system of the Columbia Basin and Frasier River Thompson River uh basins by boat uh when you look at the organization of Village Life when you look at family structures uh when you look at the studies that ethnographers have done over the years you begin to understand that settlement and almost all human activity was dictated by the water that was around the rivers The Creeks the lakes and so it it is a natural thing to understand that people would have developed all sorts of watercraft and that's true of the plateau uh there were hide boats there were uh boats made of bark there were various types of rafts that people made but the primary means of transportation and the thing that seemed to be most universal on the plateau and throughout the world in fact is The Dugout canoe Dugout canoes as I say are known worldwide nearly every culture on the planet uh it's built them and used them at one time um this is a very interesting one from from Vietnam that was recovered a few years ago uh some ethnographers and scientists estimate that people were using Dugout canoes as long as 40,000 years ago when you understand that that was about the time that Australia was inhabited from South Asia and from Southeast Asia you have to ask yourself how did people get around to all those islands in the Pacific and how did they get to Australia the likely answer is they did it by Dugout Community some of the oldest it does that seem like it's in focus to you no no it doesn't to me either is there any way of getting that in focus be able think that's a cable problem right now I think that's a cable problem from the computer feed problem we'll have to fix it with we done are are we stuck with it yeah for now I don't think I'm going to be able to work on it well apparently we're stuck with it the way it is so uh some of the oldest canoes that have been found in in North America have been recovered in Florida on uh there's a an area near Gainesville called Lake pioco that uh apparently was what people refer to as a canoe Nursery there are canoes that have been recovered there archaeologically that date back over 8,000 years ago um um this is drawings of several of the canoes there have been over 300 canoes uh discovered in that one lake in Florida in the Pacific Northwest we don't have such a rich archaological record of canoes and we're not exactly certain why that is it it may be that uh we just haven't found them but it may also be cultural there may be cultural reason why there aren't that many I was talking a little bit ago about the uh the river Network and unfortunately this just doesn't show up very well because of the thing being kind of out of focus but um this is just the Colombia drainage this doesn't include up into British Columbia it doesn't include the Frasier River and Thompson River es which is also part of the what they call the Columbia Plateau or the plateau cultural area so what you begin to see is this huge system of highways of water highways and as I mentioned the canoes were the canoes were the the Chevys the SUVs whatever it's what people use not only to move up and down the rivers but it's what people use to cross rivers and people use canoes to trade and to visit uh with relatives to go to places where they would then go uh and Hunt and Gather in different areas in their in their uh seasonal round I want to talk a little bit about the canoe collection that we have because this is kind of what got me started in uh investigating Dugout canoes on the plateau um we own four Cano actually we own three and the Nur tribe owns one and we know of two others uh one was just recently discovered um these canoes have these first two canoes that I'm going to show you have have a fairly long history not only in terms of the park but in terms of the area there there are uh affidavits associated with these two canoes uh 5047 and 5048 in our Museum collection um that date one of them to about the time of Lewis and Clark and date the other one to the 1830s uh because it was made specifically for the the missionary Henry spald that came in 1836 this is the the two pictures on the right and actually the the one where the conservation treatment work is being done um is the canoe that was that was built in the 1830s and associated with a number of well-known uh npers Chiefs that were involved in the construction of it um when I started looking at these Cano news in terms of their physical condition and to try to understand their significance in relation to our Museum collection and in relation to the region I wanted also to be able to um get an assessment done by a wood conservator as to their uh physical condition their state of preservation and what we could do to keep them from deteriorating from having their physical condition deteriorate any more so we were able to get a grant through the park service through the ethnography program to fund uh the assessment the treatment work and research to try to understand the significance of our particular collection of four canoes uh what that did in a nutshell was it took me around the plateau um into down in the wamt valley uh up in the Okanagan Valley and British CL IIA um over into Montana Southern Idaho any area where I might find canoes that were made by Plateau people so far I have found about 42 canoes in different museums and cultural centers and visitor centers around the Pacific Northwest and what I do with those is uh I make scale drawings of them I measure them and make drawings of them and photograph them and try to gather whatever curatorial information they have uh that that talks about the history of them or who made them or the provins or whatever this is uh another of the canoes that's that's in our collection this canoe is actually owned by the npers tribe it was given to them in the 1980s uh um it was it was originally located in this field in the in the upper right in the 1960s when they were doing archaeology along the Snake River in preparation for uh the construction of lower Monumental Dam and um the archaeologists would walk by it every day and they finally talked to the landowner the landowner agreed to give it to uh the Museum of Native American culture at Gonzaga University in Spokane and when that closed down in the 8S it was given to what's now called the Mac the museum of art and culture in Spokane but the Mac didn't want this because it was a 30ft long hunk of wood and they didn't really have any place to put it and didn't know what they were going to do with it so because it was collected off nesper land originally they offered it to the tribe the tribe took it and our maintenance division went up with the tribe and crad it up and brought it down to the park and so um this is the the same canoe undergoing treatment work in 2001 the fourth canoe in our collection is well documented to around 1900 it was made by a man named Silas Lawrence who used it for fishing and travel on the clear waterer River around around 1900 um you can see from this picture in the lower right why I was beginning to be concerned about the physical condition of the canoes there was there was starting to be splitting and material loss and I figured if this collection was worth anything then we had to take some kind of action to to stop this material loss this is a very interesting story this is a canoe that's uh located in uh Helena Montana it's owned by the Montana Historical Society it was made by the brother of the half brother of Chief Joseph uh olot who was killed in the 1877 war and uh Ott and Joseph had family in the Kalispel area of Western Montana and it was made for the the family relatives to use used there as a ferry uh prior to 1877 we also have uh one of only two toy canoes that I know of from the plateau now I I want to make it clear that when I talk about the plateau I'm not talking about the northwest coast um this is a whole different ball game than northwest coast uh canoe culture because that culture on the northwest Coast is as most of you are probably aware is alive and well people are making and using canoes uh traveling on the rivers but in the plateau that's essentially not the case the canoe culture has pretty much died out there aren't too many people around anymore that know how to make canoes but there is interest uh and I think part of that interest has been sparked by the activity on the coast uh but also up in British Columbia to to revive canoe making and canoe use and to get a better understanding of how important this was in uh in the culture of the people on the plateau and as I say I only we have one of the toy canoes this is the one we have uh and I know of one other one that's in uh the museum in Victoria British columia but that's a it's a suab canoe it's awab toy again just a look at the the whole issue of material loss this picture on the lower right is the stern end of this canoe in 1940 and the same canoe in 1998 uh this canoe unfortunately spent about 20 years out in the open before it came into the the control of the park service so the treatment work involved uh doing a complete materials analysis uh examining the wood structure um mechanical cleaning as well as stabilization and what what the conservators did was they would they would mix up a compound um the base of which is this stuff called PVB polyvinyl berite and they mix it with alcohol and you can thin it out to the point where you can actually inject it into the wood fibers and it's it consolidates the wood fibers uh if it's a little thicker about a 10 or 12% solution then you can actually use it as a glue to put pieces back together to glue pieces back together another thing they were able to do was uh to build the these uh different kinds of structures to support the canoes to keep them from losing their shape anymore that they already had and if you had sections like on the right there you can see where that that piece of the gunnel is split the split runs all the way down pretty much the length of the canoe so using uh plexiglass uh little fittings and bulkheads you can keep all that material in place so that uh um people can see what the thing looks like what what the shape is and to preserve the shape there's very little effort at trying to uh ReStore in other words put things back the way they were another aspect of the research that I've been doing uh involves historic images now obviously you're only going to be able to go to a certain point uh when you're dealing with photography but one of the interesting things that I found is that canoes in our particular area were used as late as the 1960s for fishing uh these are all photographs taken around the area um of our park and uh are in the the historic image collection at our park so this is uh I'm going to just take you on a kind of quick little trip around the plateau from a canoe point of view uh as I mentioned I've I've been down uh as as far south as clamo country um all the way down to the Nevada border uh Idaho most of Washington uh the better part of British Columbia uh looking at at canoes most of the canoes that I found uh are in some type of cultural center setting either in a museum or a tribal Visitor Center or something like that so um all these pictures you see will be mostly indoors uh the first stop in relation to where we are is uh is wanam country the wanam are cousins of the npers as it were part of the same linguistic family uh if you go up to the DS up the river a little ways you can see this canoe on the left uh it's the second largest canoe that I've looked at and documented it's a little over 33 ft long and uh the one on the right is at wam Dam Visitor Center we know who the makers are of both of those canoes um um there are quite a few canoe families among the wanam people still interested in making canoes um the last time we know of people using canoes uh on that stretch of the Columbia was in the 1950s this is up in uh the Okanagan Valley around Lake okag you have all these towns that uh Penticton and Vernon and uh nearly every Museum up in that area has a has at least one Dugout canoe these are are mostly suap made canoes from farther north but also the Okanagan are making canoes as well um these tend to have a a fairly clear cut water they tend to be a little thicker sometimes they have flared sides um they were used in rivers as well as on the Lakes so that accounts uh to some degree for their their shape uh a little closer down uh up in cordelan country this is a canoe that was collected off of Wolf Creek in the 1940s uh some ethnographers suggested that the cordelan did not even make canoes uh but we know that from their own accounts that's not the case uh one thing about ethnographies that I learned is you have to pay close attention to who the ethnographer spoke to when they were getting information about the particular culture that they were dealing with um if you talk to somebody who didn't who wasn't involved in a particular kind of activity they would tell you sometimes that people didn't do it or that they didn't know anything about it the ethnographer would often conclude then that uh oh those people didn't do that uh but that's uh almost never the case this is one of the archaeological canoes that I was able to see the Canadian government the British Columbia government did what they call the boundary survey in the 1970s uh they did archaeological surveys all along the border with the US and Canada and they found uh a canoe beaching site that had been submerged where there were uh roller logs and about a half a dozen canoes that were in a little Inlet of the river The Kettle River and they had been submerged when that section of the river was inundated uh when they finished building Chief Joseph Dam up in Northern Washington unfortunately this this canoe when it was uh put out it's actually on display on top of a an exhibit cabinet and when the when they brought the canoe in the guys that had to get it up on top of the cabinet there were just two of them working there that day and they they decided that they couldn't lift it just the two of them so what they did was they cut it in half and lifted each half and when I was examined in it um it was the curator of the museum walked by and I asked her why the canoe had been cut in half and her jaw dropped and her eyes got as big as half dollars and she said it's cut in half and so she climbed up on the ladder with me and saw that it had been cut in half that it's unfortunate that that's what happened but at the same time it allowed me to get really good measurements to get the cross-section of of that canoe so there's always there's always a a silver lining in every cloud so uh this is a canoe that this is a a very nice story U this canoe was in the shaper Museum in Wind Washington for a number of years and when I went up to look at it um and documented I I talked to the museum about I said you know the MEO people are still around they're on the cville reservation I said why don't you give this back to them so they did um they organized a little ceremony and and it's now on the cille reservation and you can see it in the the tribal Museum on the C reservation when I was up in British Columbia I had the very fortunate uh experience of meeting a couple of people who are involved in the Revival of cane making up there and uh this guy on the upper right is Herman Edward and Gordy marshan is paddling one of the boats he made um I got The Grand Tour uh learned about the different tools and things that they used in uh in Cano making apparently uh automobile leaf springs make uh really good gouges when you work them down these tools on the lower right are all made from from car leaf springs it's a good good quality metal and uh they use axes as well as adses and different kinds of Choppers for for close-in work most of this work is done uh with without the use of Burning uh I'll talk a little bit about burning because uh leis and Clark talk about burning so in uh in 2000 they did their first big public activity and that was what they called Unity track and they paddled from the north end of Lake Okanagan down to omac Washington and met up with the okon nogans that live there's okan aans both in British Columbia and in Washington state so uh they met up with their cousins in in Washington and had a big feast and and have been sharing the canoe building knowledge and everything ever since that time so it's a it's an ongoing activity this canoe that's uh that's highly decorated here is uh as you might suspect is the women's canoe and uh they said no we're not going to have just some plain looking thing we're going to have some stuff on our so and the men don't get to go in it uh this was a a real treat for me not just to go out and paddle on the lake but uh I was amazed that if if you have an idea of how important tulies are to Tuli uh plants are to Indian people um there's not a lot of tulies left unless you go down uh in clth country in southern Oregon uh um but all around the North End of Okanogan Lake that these plants that are growing there um as as all tulies and it was uh when I showed these pictures at home people didn't care so much about the canoes they said where where are those tulies we want to go up and gather tulies when Lewis and Clark came through nesper country in 1805 they stopped at the Confluence of the Clearwater River and the North Fork of the Clear Water um if you look in the in the blue part of that picture now there is a thing called DW Shack Dam there that's uh about 400 ft high and it's changed the the physical nature of this area but this is the area that Twisted hair took the Lewis and Clark expedition to because they were looking for uh trees they could use to to knock down and make their canoes and this is what the area probably was like prior to to loen Clark it was a it was a known camping area um there's been extensive archaeological work done there um that dates the site to thousands of years ago so it was a well-known place on the river for fishing and for uh for boat building this is a painting by uh nille Williamson who's a a tribal member earlier I showed you some of the sketches that he'd done uh doing research on uh horse horse gear leis and Clark don't say much about the canoes that they built at Canoe Camp in fact all they actually do say is they built four large canoes and one small canoe and they sometimes refer to the small canoe as their as their Scout or Scout but one of the one of the things that I have several people have talked to me about you know what their boats probably look like how big they were what they were made out of um and so what I've tried to do with the help of other people who are are familiar with with uh water travel and canoe making and particularly uh rafting and that sort of thing on the clear water and Snake River to try to get an idea of uh of how their boats might have looked now these are the three basic forms there's there's really uh I've Iden ified four basic forms of canoes that were made in up in our area um but this just gives you an idea of what Lewis and Clark saw you got to remember that these guys were picked because they they were competent and capable people they knew what they were doing they knew how to adapt in various situations to take advantage of the local knowledge in different situations so uh in order for them to be successful they had to have those kinds of skills and when they were there at Canoe Camp in September of 1805 they decided that they were going to leave a certain amount of their gear they they did leave all their horse gear um Twisted hairs band took care of their horses and their horse equipment for them Saddles and that sort think they also understood at this point because they they talked a great deal with the Indians the npers knew the river all the way down to the ocean they had traveled it many times they regularly came to Salo uh they knew the people up and down the river they knew what Lewis and Clark were going to encounter um they told them the number of Rapids that they would have to go through and which ones they with they could probably run and which ones they could Portage uh several Indians Drew maps for them uh and that's one of the one of the maps redrawn by uh Clark but they they knew what was ahead so that's one thing to keep in mind when you think about the the the boats that they made so what I ended up doing was everybody said as a picture is worth a thousand words um I ended up making conjectural drawings of what I think the large canoes were like and probably what the small canoes were like and people often say the canoes are made out of ponder Roa Pine so people say well you can't find a ponderosa pine up there now that's big enough to make a a canoe 50 ft long and and that's true down by the river you can but 200 years ago you and when you think about what they had to put in their canoes there were 35 people um and they built five boats so on average you're going to have to put seven people in each boat and you're going to have to put I've made a kind of a partial list of we don't know exactly what they had left at that time because they didn't keep any kind of running tally of uh what they were using but they had desks they had camping gear they had all their Botanical specimens um they had all the equipment they needed for their for their firearms uh they had surveying equipment um we know they traded for at least 20 bags of C Roots uh big bags of roots so they had a lot of stuff and they knew they were going to be on the river for about two months they also had the experience of having come from Mandan country to the Rocky Mountains coming up the Missouri River in canoes that they built they talk incessantly about how small the canoes were how they didn't make enough of them they made eight eight small canoes and they were hoping to use this they they made a metal frame boat and they were going to cover it with uh with elk hides and by the time they got enough hides to do it they were out of the area where they could get good pitch to seal the thing up and so it didn't work so that was another frustrating aspect for them that they didn't have this boat so I think when they got to to Canoe Camp when they came over uh L pass and settled into NE first country to make their canoes they were determined to make the boats big enough so that they would be able to put all their equipment in and be comfortable enough for the two-month trip down to the Pacific so these are the reasons why I think the boats were as big as as they are or as as they were um this is a canoe probably about 20 2 or 30 ft long this was taken on the on the upper Columbia uh these are yaka guys this canoe is uh loaded with stuff and you see where this fell is sitting you saw in that one picture of the of the one ofam canoes you see where the guy is sitting in the stern of the boat canoes on the plateau in general were made to be paddled by one person from the stern and one of the ways you can always tell indian-made canoes is the the physical characteristics of their construction and in a nutshell what people did was they they' knock a tree down the top end of the tree would always be the stern of the boat the lower end would be the bow the specific Gra gravity of the wood is such that if you take say a 40t log it's going to be heavier on one end than the other okay you want that heavy end to be the bow because somebody's going to be in the stern paddling the boat so then when you loaded the boat to travel if it was just one person you loaded the boat from the center out to the ends that way the boat was always balanced and the nesp say that if the boat was well made it didn't matter whether you were going up River or down river it was just as just as easy to handle so when you start putting more people in the boat you're doing the same thing you're balancing the load and you're balancing the people the other characteristic of of indian-made canoes is that they understood about the structure of the tree the the center pith of the tree is is not very stable but the wood just to the outside of that is the strongest wood so that's what you want to be the floor of the canoe and the lower edges of the sides so when you look at canoes from the end you can see whether or not that that Center section is there in relation to to the floor um I don't know if this making any sense or not but uh the problem you always had once you carved out all that that soft wood from the middle and had your firm floor was the ends so people used various techniques to to solve the problem of the wood deteriorating on the ends but when you look at the pictures of old canoes and you see that there's material loss and damage those pictures I showed you it's almost always on the on the ends where you had to retain that that pth wood from the center of the tree so these guys get in their npers style canoes their Plateau style canoes and they start paddling down the river things are going really great until they start to get to where the Colombia you know past where the snake and the Columbia come together and the river starts to get a little wider and you've got Gorge winds and you've got chop and all that sort of thing that you can see out on the river any day and then these guys are they're up against the Washington Bank of the river kind of creeping down uh taking it easy they realize that their boats aren't the best designed for that section of the river the difference between the nees Pur canoes with their straight sides for the most part and then you start to get down into bam country and the sides are flared just a little bit they're dealing with the river conditions there that design is a function of the river conditions that they have to deal with and uh when they get when they get down to Salo and they do this one Portage and they come up over the the rocks and Clark sees this canoe that he describes as having a point pointed in and flared sides this is what he's talking about and they they took one look at this and knew this that they they wanted these boats they wanted to have these boats because these boats were ideal for the conditions of the lower Colombia and as we all know these boats are also ideal for going out in the ocean that's what they're made for so this is the the so-called shinuk style Cedar canoe with flared sides this particular one this is one of the boats that I documented this is in the Oregon Historical Society collection in Portland and it's a qual made canoe but I documented it because it was used its entire life on the lore Columbia but it has those uh familiar characteristics of of Lower Columbia boats and you see what they did these guys were not artists by the way uh but they they Illustrated these boats because I think they were so unusual it was something that they had never seen before they were very complimentary of the skills that the people had and being being able to uh use these boats on the Lower Columbia uh regard regardless of the weather conditions I've only got 5 minutes left so I'm going to go kind of fast um this canoe is in wallport right now but it's also it's exactly like a canoe that they describe um when they were in that area where Portland airport is now they came onto an island where there were a lot of plank houses and they describe 100 boats uh up on the shore the houses and this is what they're describing this is a kind of boat that people use to gather uh uh WAP and was it was used mostly by women but if you want to see this boat you have to go down to walport cuz that's where it is don't ask me why this one is uh uh in the uh Columbia River Maritime Museum it's a CF lamit canoe uh probably very similar but maybe smaller than what leis and Clark purchased from the cath lamet on their return trip um these are pictures again up in NEP country historic images of canoes uh this guy on the lower right is eel fishing he's got himself an eel and his dip net there uh things are still being found this was in 2004 some scuba divers and don't ask me why these guys were in Lake pandere on New Year's Day scuba diving but that's what they were doing and they found this boat so they called the park service in to help them document it and they're still trying to decide what to do with it but uh the evidence is all over the plateau that talks about canoe use and how important the things were to people so this is the end for me if you have any questions I'll I'll try to answer your question yeah we could take maybe one or two questions but let's do it if you want to look at some of the drawings I have some of the drawings up here that I've made I have about 25 of you didn't talk about the mot and there canoes I didn't talk about the Maca because I was talking about the plateau and I the MAA are on the coast I'm very sensitive about the MAA because my museum technician Linda Pano that works with me at the park is maau she's married to anes purse but she's a Williams she's a A Williams and uh so I pay I pay pretty close attention to what the maau do I've been out to Nia Bay several times yeah okay well I think yeah you can do one I apologize I got here late and if you've already talked about this uh please forgive but uh several times in the journals they refer to pulling over to dry out the canoes and to pitch uh them and I'm not quite uh sure I understand what the difficulty is especially it seems like down in the cat lamet area or lung view area they had to pull over to uh make their canoes water worthy once again can you give a little bit of insight to that well a lot of times when canoes are made the wood the wood is the trees are taken down and then they're allowed to set for a while to kind of cure and then the boats are made but what Louis and Clark did was when they when they cut the trees and within in 10 days they had all five of their canoes made so I think what was going on was the wood was splitting in places and they were using uh pitch mixes to uh to make repairs to seal the cracks okay well we're about out of time so you're going to have to grab Bob in the back of the ENT if you have more questions for him but let's give you a round of applause and thank you for coming to us