Winter. Days grow dark and the sun creeps low
across the southern sky. Not that precise eyes would
detect these celestial goings-on: thick grey overcast
conceals solar positions, and natural light, muted,
shuffles down to us along innumerable, circuitous
paths. Fireplace fires and bright electric lights cast
sharp shadows on intenor walls while outdoor
shadows are vague and grey - one strains to discern
their borders.
On those rare sunny days of winter, hunkered down
in cedar-plank houses, this coast’s indigenous
inhabitants would mark northern wall planks where
sunlight shafts struck, having stolen in through holes
in south side walls. Anthropologists (east coasters
all of them, itinerant summer travelers in this soggy
neck of the woods) made guesses - that this was a
way of marking time, of charting the predictable to-
and-fro travels of the sun. This sounds suspect to
local ears. I say: native peoples who marked walls
did so out of total astonishment. Here is where light
fell sharp on that day the sun broke free. Mark this
place.
Remember. For winter is a time when the dark and
decomposition are punctuated by memories of fecund
times past, and hopes that things once departed shall
return: crops, game, loved ones and secure
childhood scenes, outdoor warmth, sun. In these
latitudes, attentions turn away from the moist and
darkening scene beyond the door; long nights draw
introspective attentions and invite reflection on things
less mundane. Tales are told. Gods are beseeched.
For northern peoples of any era or religious bent, late
December is a time of high holy days. Celebrated in
anxious solstice darkness, diverse traditions find
themselves united by a central theme: the potential for
resurrection. (Western symbols buck wintertime
trends, invoking evergreen trees and holly, birth,
feasting, festivals of light, survival in this world or
the next.) Living on stored provisions and borrowed
time, we have asked that nature’s many death
sentences be commuted.
Such metaphysical cabin fever loomed large in north
coast native life. As peak salmon runs waned and
storms grew fierce, kin converged in bay- and beach­
front homes. Food gathering ceased. Stored
salmon, smoke-dried, served as a staple until
spoiling, a casualty to late-winter mildews. Smoked
shellfish, rockfish, and elk perched in rafters.
Huckleberries and salal berries, dried and pounded,
sat submerged and preserved in oil-filled containers
for future use, alongside baskets and boxes of root
foods - camas bulbs, rhizomes of silverweed and
springbank clover. Canoes were abandoned as
winter surf went wild, ushering in the season of
travels by trail, along ancient routes still outlined by
State Park paths. Travelers’ forms were concealed
by waterproof capes of woven cedar bark, peeled
and pounded cotton-soft, and conical hats, intricately
woven from the smallest roots of the largest spruces.
As the outdoor world grew dark, the world of spirits
pulled in close around village perimeters. Both the
social world inside the longhouse, and the natural
world beyond its walls entered formative, precarious
phases. Plants sat dead and dormant; animals grew
scarce. To the native eye, their disappearance hinted
at cosmological tensions, an annual crisis as much
moral as it was material. As provisions slowly
dwindled, native peoples watched for signs of
reprieve. In longhouse interiors, perpetually lit with
pit fires, shamans would seek to intervene. Fresh
dry sand was spread over cold dirt floors, and bright
red kinnickinnick berries were scattered diffusely on
the ground. Spruce-pitch torches flickered and
hissed as people danced late into the night, fasting,
singing, marking the darkest time of year and
seeking to hasten its passage. Women beat cedar
board drums while shamans pounded carved poles,
narrow and totem-like, against ceiling planks.
Oregon coast peoples danced mask-less, it seems,
but dancers were adorned in bold colors, bedecked in
woodpecker feather capes and shell regalia. One’s
spirit was vulnerable to these celestial events, and a
person’s personal life was to be put in order in this
darkest time of the year. One repaid material and
ceremonial debts. Animal and ancestral spirits gave
moral guidance and offered impromptu career
counseling. Failing to get one’s life in order, one
was doomed, finding no peace until future winters
when, once again, the lines between the human and
spirit worlds blurred and the cosmological order
grew malleable and tenuous. As the solstice
approached, stormy south winds blew wild across
north coast beaches, and ceremonial life surged: this
was the time of tales.
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On long dark nights, mythic winter figures both
entertained and instructed, and none was as
important as South Wind. South Wind the trickster,
South Wind the transformer: like Raven to the north,
or Coyote to the east, South Wind emerged as a
powerful figure amidst myth-time chaos and brought
order to the lived-in world. In transformative times,
South Wind walked the land and shaped the land,
gluttonous, bungling, and lewd, following the
northern Oregon coast from south to north,
capriciously creating customs and landmarks. His
handiwork persists: in the awesome cliffs of
Neahkahnie, in the near-shore rocks of Silver Point,
in the hulking form of Haystack Rock, in broken
spruce tree branches and crashing winter surf. Like
the south winds which rattled roof planks and
howled at longhouse doors, seldom stopping
throughout the winter, South Wind toppled trees and
tore at shoreline lands with the help of Ocean. For
peoples huddled in winter longhouses South Wind
tales placed a human face on the incessant winter roar
beyond the door.
On long winter nights, north coast peoples would
trace his journeys, point-by-point, scene-by-scene,
“talking the coastline” from south to north.
Children, listening, taught stories rote, learned to
navigate lands seen and unseen. Yet, in solstice
darkness, South Wind tales had even greater powers.
These tales were essential to the world’s renewal: by
telling South Wind’s tales, orators recapitulated
South Wind’s walk, symbolically instigating the
landscape’s annual rebirth, ceremonially ensuring the
return of fish, game, berries, and warm weather.
Tell South Wind’s tales during any other time of year
- spring or summer - and one would reset the
cosmological clock to wintertime, inviting cold
storms and deprivation. Tell South Wind’s tales in
the winter, and one maintained nature’s cycles,
ushering the peoples of the coast through dark times,
and - if the stories were told well - back to the
abundant life and light of seasons to come. The
winds continue to blow, though South Wind’s
orators have been silenced. This winter, sit back in
the night, by the fire, and listen to the south winds
blow.
A portion of the South Wind cycle can be found,
alongside other Tillamook tales in Elizabeth Derr
Jacobs’ book, Nehalem Tillamook Tales (1990)
(Northwest Reprints Series) Corvallis: Oregon State
University Press. A much longer, annotated version
of the South Wind cycle will be available by 1998 in:
D. Deur and M. T. Thompson “South Wind’s
Journeys: A Tillamook Epic” in M.T. Thompson and
S. Egesdal (eds.) One People’s Stories: A Collection
of Salishan Myths and Legends. (Smithsonian
Native American Literatures Series). Washington
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. In the text above, IulJ
have drawn a phrase or two from the Smithsonian
manuscript.
4
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Thankful, thank you, thanksgiving - what is it to
thank? In English it is to show gratitude, to give credit.
The French 'merci' and Spanish 'gracias' sound more
like grace and mercy, as an offering or a blessing.
Herein, possibly, lies the difference between the
Romance and the Germanic perspective. What would a
mercygiving celebration be like?
All that aside, we do have this holiday, a good
holiday in theory, even though some rightly question
its validity for the American Indian. It was, like all our
other major holidays, borrowed I'll bet. The Pagans
were more than likely to drag out all their goodies
before the gods after harvest, while the frost is hedging
into another long winter, to say "Please! give us more
of the same next year, OK?"
Everyone knows a proper thank you note for a gift
is good insurance for continued generosity on the part
of the giver, or they used to anyway.
Now days, basic survival, for many, has been
surpassed to the degree that real life experience of dire
need is either non-existent, or far enough away to have
lost its sting. Being truly thankful for something as
simple as, say, food, requires a leap of the imagination.
The abundance of stuff to eat all around us remains
amazing. However, acknowledging this is still a good
thing to do.
In my extended family, which is large, we have a
thanksgiving custom. After the dinner things are
cleared away, paper and pens are passed out before
anyone leaves the table. The charge is to write a
sentence or two completing the phrase," I am thankful
for...", and leave it nameless. The papers are folded
and mixed in a basket. A reader is chosen, someone
who can: 1. attempt a straight face. 2. not give away
the writer's identity by reading grammatical errors.
The little offerings usually range from the
sublimely serious, to the ridiculously funny. My
brothers, especially, have taken to writing several
apiece. This is not only allowed, it's encouraged. This
is what you never got to do in school.
Each piece is read out loud the first time, while the
writer is speculated upon, but not named, with much
teasing and laughter. The pieces are read a second
time, and this is when formal accusations are leveled
and the writers are forced to reveal themselves. I hope
I am explaining this to be as wonderfully fun and
memorable as it always ends up being. If your holiday
gathering has never tried this game, do. It's ten times
more fun than TV football. You can do it using New
Years resolutions too.
One year my grandfather wrote, "I am thankful to
be alive." I can still see it, all in capitol letters. In two
years he was gone from us forever, only then did I
realize what he had really meant.
Always, during the holidays, my underlying wish,
beneath my gratitude, is for an equitable world, where
everyone would have the same abundance for which to
be thankful. Will being grateful help us create that
world?
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