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
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l l o a l D ru m
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S u n d u y , M ay 9 th 1993
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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