Image provided by: Upper Left Edge; Cannon Beach, OR
About The upper left edge. (Cannon Beach, Or.) 1992-current | View Entire Issue (May 1, 1993)
Because our friend lack Schwartz was in town, we spent Easier weekend w ith the Celilo lack, an attorney, spent most of the 19M0 s successfully defending the River Tribes against evictions by the federal government from lands that belong to them evictions that coincided with the SainontcaB trials in which Indian fishermen were sent to federal prise,n for selling fish that belonged to them Now* a defense lawyer in Los Angeles, and an internationally recognized authority on native sovereignty and treaty rights Indian Jack was in Portland a city he delights in describing as the whitest in the country for the outcome of hearings to determine if the United States (government should bear the legal costs of defending Indians from illegal acts it perpetrated against (hem We went Celilo Village five of us in a van. for two reasons First, because Jack wanted to see his fam ily In 19AR m a celebration last performed half a century ago. Jack Schwartz was adopted into the tribe His Indian parents are Howard Jim Chief of the Celilo, and his wife, Maggie |im I m the only Jewish Indian from Brooklyn I know, lack points out from lim e to time His Indian mother died not long ago and lack visited her grave on a windy hilltop overhxikmg the river her people call Che Wana We went also for the spring salmon feast The religious celebration as old as the River People, honors the return of the salmon There aren i many salmon left now of course, and the gathering was smaller than I remembered it It was held, as it has been fix' thousands of springtimes, at the tile o| the great falls ol ' elilo The las time I was here. Maggie Jim told how w hen she w as a small girl, thousands of River People came from all over the Columbia Basin to feast, renew old kinships and pray The drums and singing w'ere so loud, she said, echoing from the walls of the gorge, that they drowned out the roar of the mile long cataract which was aside Irom one of the continent s natural wonders, the center of their universe The falls are gone now submerged by the waters behind the Halles Dam Drowned also were scores of villages and fishing sites w hich, contrary to treaty law and formal agreements between the River Tribes and the U S Army Corps ol Engineers, were never replaced So it goes When Lewis and Clark discovered the Columbia Basin, it was densely settled land For 300 miles, from the headwaters of the Snake to the Astoria bar. a civilization described by those who first saw it as one of the largest and richest in North America lined the banks of the river from the mountains to the sea The last bit of land left to the River People is Celilo Village a barren, windswept 34 acres cut off from the rive r by two Amtrac rail beds and sn lanes of freeway On the bank itself is a roadside rest area There are trees, emerald lawns and small lagoon for the launching of sailboards and skidms Funny how- things work out Anyway, for two days the River People fed us roast salmon, venison, elk meat fry bread, roots and huckleberries No money exchanged hands All day and all night the People danced the dances and sang the songs that link them to the Earth in ways the make western culture shrink to a lifestyle On Sunday morning at the close of four hours of prayer and a cermomal feast served on reed mats Chief Jim spoke to the w'hite people who had come to be with them to celebrate the return of the salmon It was so quiet in the longhouse at Celilo, you could hear stones rolling away r — »-1 MOTHER'S DAY POWWOW T i b i q j i has a lo t to do w ith th e n u te n o e o f a r a in dance In h o n o r o f o u r (r a n d m o th r r a a n d m o t h m l l o a l D ru m s ta n d in g l a g lr S u n d u y , M ay 9 th 1993 (¡r a n d E n try 1:00 to 9:00 pm < »«A U U .ail U'. «11 a* CU 7W M MafTW ImUta •« aalafcta fmuglkaHla >«*■»«< w •> lit m In «hr (>>m a l P o rtla n d S t a ir I n i , o r a lly 734 MW lla rrta o n , P o rtla n d OK No d ru g * o r a lcoh ol fcurrut itrr t&M may TO Didn i everyone at some pomi in their lives’ Il may be one of the genuinely unique American fantasies Cowboy conciousness lurks quietly or clamorously inside most of us Unlike a lot of people though I was able to realize at least part of the dream When I was eleven my battle weary parents gave in to my shameless relentless begging and bought me a horse We stabled him a mile from our house and. from the day we trailered him home, I tried to take up permanent residence in the barn Eicept fix inconvenient interruptions like schixil. sleep and my mother s in s ta n c e that I join the fam ily for the evening meal I would have I spent every available blissful moment brushing, riding feeding fussing over and watching my horse I pretty much worshipped the wav he rolled, pawed the ground, ate grass, crunched oats whinnied snorted walked trotted and ran Unless you were once an eleven year old girl in love with a horse I could argue that you are regrettably ingnorant of the meaning of true happiness In Eastern Washington where I grew up horse country enveloped me The nuclear power plant was an ominous anomaly in the otherwise prim itive landscape The desert was abundant with sweeping, barren vistas and endless trails that led on and on to nowhere in particular It was possible to ride no more than a half hour from civilization and forget for the next two hours that civilization existed On these rides I often became a variety of people with a variety of missions, all of criticial importance and all dependent upon my w it and resources The desert was large, empty and inviting enough to absorb all of my frontier longings Often I rode until 1 was sore and stiff legged and could barely slide down out of the saddle without an automatic flinch of pain It was sheer heaven As I got older. I stopped envisioning myself as a cowgirl, but I never lost the leeling those fantasies elicited I made friends with long, uniterrupted silences and the easy solace of the limitless spaces surrounding me Sure. I had to contend w ith the occasional barbed wire fence, but it was possible to imagine that the desert went on forever and 1 was |ust a tiny, insignificant dot traveling like a beetle across its rolling vastness Out there, I got to pretend that annoyances like other people and their needs and demands didn t exist Out there, the world was sparsely populated except fix the shy. furtive creatures that crawled and slithered around, usually after dark Out there, it was possible to be impossibly self centered, operating in an impartial sphere of absolute freedom subject only to limitations imposed by the desert climate itself This was part of the fantasy I still wish, sometimes, that it could he true But our frontier and cowboy days are over Some might convincingly argue that they never tru ly existed When the European settlers pushed westward into what was, fix them, mostly unchartered territory. they were displacing and often destroying already established, advanced cultures The American frontier consciousness possessed a particularly ugly thrust discover, claim and conquer Always, the land was viewed as something to subdue and overcome Men and women paid for it w ith their lives, the sacrifice so great, the price so high, it could be argued that they earned the right to do w ith it whatever they damned well pleased Now. instead of battling with the indigenous peoples for control of the land, we fight over tl in courts or wrangle deals •» in real estate offices But the issue is still the same who controls the land’ Who should’ How do you resolve the issue when something as precious to the American identity as personal freedom vies w ith something as vital to the life of the planet as protecting the land from harm 7 Harm can be deliberate or unintentional, it can result from outright disregard for the well being of anyone but the individual <x just plain igntxance Fix a long time it was possible to imagine (bat the resources of this continent were inexhaustible They appeared that way Who needed imposed lim its ’ It seemed ridiculous to make a fuss about planning f«x the future But we know better now and we can no longer plead ignorance Destruction of the land of crucial habitats and landscapes, occur w ith our full inHxmed participation We are reaping the rewards of our greed and disregard fix other life forms We are uncomfortably aware that we are an ever increasing population existing on ever dwindling resources an uneasy position to be in But how do we talk about our common dilem m a’ Like any relationship, ours w ith the earth is subject to permanent erosion if we make a habit of inattentiveness So who protects the land’ Is it too late, the damage done, the process now one of irreversible degeneration’ I don l think we have any real way of knowing for sure The impulse toward life is strong, persistent and yes. it often moves m mysterious ways What 15 apparent is that we have done great damage w ith our insecurity, greed and callousness But tsn t it still possible fix us to shape a world mtxe out of cooperation and less out of com petition’ Can we take the romance out of conquest? In conquest, there is always the victix and the vanquished The irony is. of course, that we have a histixy of perceiving ourselves to be one when, in fact, we may turn out to be the other Because, if we continue on our present course we w ill dominate ourselves right out of existance Perhaps the answer is education, I like to believe so, anyway It is not good enough to demand that people change their attitudes without teaching them why it is necessary We need to educate ourselves and the w txld toward a rmxe inclusive, life sustaining ethic, one that depends upon our viewing all life and life forms as interconnected and interdependent This education needs to start early, but it is never too late And w'hen we hear people talk (for example, at the Timber Summit) we need to ask ourselves if they speak from fear and a desire to keep us bogged down in past attitudes, or if they genuinely offer a new fresh and hopeful vision for how we might move forward We are still a nation of breathtaking dizzying panoramas it is still possible to be optim istic about the future, but it is time to let our frontier mentality die and to replace it w ith a vision that recognizes and w illingly accepts our dependence upon one another and upon the land