SACRED
WATERS
KAYLA GODOWA-TUFTI WITH A
TRADITIONAL BEADED BAG AND
AN EAGLE FEATHER THAT IS
HELD IN THE RIGHT HAND WHEN
PRAYING TO THE CREATOR IN
THE LONGHOUSE RELIGION
A Native
American
perspective
on Waldo Lake
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
T
he name “Waldo” is not poetic enough to
describe the clear, pure water of this pristine
lake high in the Cascades. Kayla Godowa-Tufti,
of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs,
whose ancestors once lived in the mountains
and valleys around Waldo Lake, wonders what
the native peoples of the area called the translucent waters.
Godowa-Tufti also wants to talk about why the Native
American perspective has been excluded from the battle
over Waldo.
Waldo was once known as one of the Virgin Lakes, and
later as Pengra Lake, but what the native peoples called
it is presumably lost. The diseases brought by the white
settlers had ravaged the local tribes who hunted, fi shed and
collected huckleberries around the lake at the time of its
modern rediscovery in the mid-1800s
A wilderness is an area “untrammeled by man, where
man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” according
to the Wilderness Act of 1964. Native peoples had been
visiting the lake to pick berries and hunt food for thousands
of years before “wilderness” was a political or legal concept.
“It has been told to us by our ancestors that we are to
be caretakers of the land,” Godowa-Tufti says. Just as it
has been the tradition of the Molalla people “to keep this
water clean, free of pollutants and to treat this area with the
ultimate respect because it is sacred.”
By a quirk of law, Waldo Lake is not in the Waldo Lake
Wilderness or under federal protection, and a small group
of users want not simply to “trammel” the lake; they want
to land planes and putter around the unspoiled waters with
noisy and polluting motorboats.
Last fall, Godowa-Tufti came across an article about the
efforts of timber heir Steven Stewart, a relative of Lane County
Commissioner Faye Stewart, to lift a ban on motors on the
lake. Curious, she began to research Waldo Lake. A Google
CHARLIE TUFTI
(RIGHT) AND
HIS ADOPTED
BROTHER
search quickly yielded the information
that the modern-day discoverer of the
lake was named Charlie Tufti, a Mollala
Indian. Tufti, whose nickname in Chinook
jargon was Kwiskwis (“double-striped
little squirrel”), is Kayla Godowa-Tufti’s
great-grandfather.
Godowa-Tufti realized that she and
other family members who now live
on the Warm Springs Reservation are
the direct descendants not only of the
people who had lived around Waldo for
thousands of years, but also of the man
who rediscovered the lake.
Charlie Tufti, together with his white
adopted brother Frank Warner, also found
Salt Creek Falls. Neither natural wonder is named for the
Native American who knew the land, though Tufti Mountain
near Hills Creek Reservoir in the Willamette National Forest
bears his name. And back in 2001, when Oregon began to
get rid of offensive geographic names, Squaw Butte, east of
Oakridge, became Kwiskwis Butte.
Steven Stewart has argued that he has a cultural link to
the lake, and banning motorboats would deprive him of his
family tradition of motorboating to picnic and to pick wild
huckleberries. In legal arguments in his 2009 battle against
the ban Stewart’s attorney argued that a motorboat ban
would not only deprive his client of his picnics but of his
huckleberries as a food supplement.
They may merely be a supplement to Stewart, but
huckleberries are a sacred food source to the Warm Springs
people as well as a spiritual and cultural resource.
“This is not only an issue of water quality,” Godowa-Tufti
says of the fi ght over the motor ban, but also an issue of a racist
system that has allowed the Stewart family to have a sense of
“entitlement,” “ownership” and to accumulate what Godowa-
Tufti calls “intergenerational wealth due to white privilege.”
Godowa-Tufti, age 22, divides her time between Warm
Springs in Eastern Oregon and Eugene. She is not entirely
new to environmental activism. In 2010 she co-organized a
Native American protest against using the Columbia River
to ship megaloads of oil extracting equipment to the Cana-
dian tar sands.
She points to a map that shows the diversity of native
groups and languages that once lived throughout Oregon.
Her ancestor, Charlie Tufti, was Southern Molalla, often
referred to as “Eugene Molalla,” she says. The Molalla
inhabited Waldo Lake, the Cascade Range and surrounding
areas for more than 8,000 years, according to Godowa-Tufti.
Godowa-Tufti researched Charlie Tufti through the Lane
County Historical Society. She found that he was orphaned
as a child and raised by an aunt. But the whites wouldn’t let
the native peoples hunt, fi sh and gather berries in the 1800s,
and rather than let him starve, Tufti’s aunt traded him for a
pan of fl our and some pumpkins to the Stewart-Warners, a
white family that raised him.
Tufti was an anomaly in that he was an Indian who had
a homestead; in 1884 he was given legal claim to land near
Oakridge. Native peoples were forbidden by the white settlers
from owning land. A photo of Tufti with Warner shows him
with a gun, something else forbidden to the natives by the
white settlers seeking to drive the American Indians onto
reservations. Stories about Tufti say he was respected for his
hunting skills and generally accepted among the settlers.
PHOTO BY TRASK BEDORTHA
But Lane County Historical documents also tell of
incidents such as the time when Tufti, who kept his long
braids but wore “the clothing of the white man,” went to a
store in Pleasant Hill, where another man said within earshot,
“thought all them varmints was supposed to be caged up on
reservations … dirty, thievin’, murderin’ skonks. Scare the
women-folk clean to hell.”
The documents say Tufti was under pressure to move to
the reservation, and in 1889 Tufti sold his land and later
moved to the Warm Springs reservation where he served
as chief.
“As much as people would like to ignore the white/Indian
relations,” Godowa-Tufti says, “it is important to understand
this history in order to understand where we are today.”
When the Forest Service did its environmental assessment
of the effects the ban would have on Waldo Lake, it did try
to take Native Americans into account. In a section labeled
“Direct and Indirect Effects to Environmental Justice,” the
agency discussed briefl y whether “Native American/Indian
rights (e.g. hunting, gathering, religious) recognized by the
federal government,” would be reduced.
Godowa-Tufti doesn’t restrict her comments on Waldo
to issues of social and environmental justice; she focuses
on the science as well. Motorboats bring pollution into the
lake’s uniquely blue waters and fl oat planes can introduce
invasive species, she says.
In the end, the Forest Service’s decision to return the
lake to a “semi-primitive, non-motorized” state was not so
much overturned as disregarded — the courts decided the
lake was a state and not a federal issue. So the Oregon State
Marine Board was next to ban the motors threatening Waldo
Lake’s spectacular water.
“The chemistry and biology of the water in Waldo
Lake are exceptional and clearly classify the lake as
ultraoligotrophic,” Godowa-Tufti says in her written
comments to the Marine Board. In other words, the lake
high in the mountains in a small watershed is low in plant
nutrients and full of oxygen. Paddle a canoe or kayak out
into its water and you can see down into the remarkably
blue waters for hundreds of feet.
A long-term study of the lake’s water shows it is home
to “unique species never identifi ed before, including
phytoplankton and zooplankton and highly productive
deepwater bryophytes, particularly liverworts.”
The study also says the clarity of the lake is worsening.
Godowa-Tufti says, “If we do not recognize the
importance of our water and protect it, we are destroying a
vital life source and a place of unexplainable beauty.”
ew
PHOTO COURTESY LANE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
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EUGENE WEEKLY MARCH 29, 2012 11