Smoke Signals 3
SEPTEMBER 1,2008
Tribal Elder Don Day
continues knapping
obsidian, opal
By Ron Karten
Smoke Signals staff writer
It was the kind of hot day that
if there were buzzards above, they
would have been circling.
Tribal Elder and Cultural Protec
tion Specialist Don Day, 61, sits on
an aluminum and canvas fold-out
chair near the fish weir on Agency
Creek in the blinding sun and
strikes glasslike obsidian with a
softly rounded stone.
Day is making blades and blanks
for blades in the traditional ways.
He does not sweat.
Tribal member David Lewis, the
Tribe's Cultural Resources man
ager, introduced Day's work this
way: "Don Day is an expert flint
knapper. He is producing some tru
ly excellent blades. He also works
with Australian opal. He actually
flint knaps opal! He is likely the
only person in the world to do this
type of art.... He will be a legend
someday."
"I got into
opal," Day
says, "because
everybody is
doing obsid
ian. The price
is too high for
their work, es
pecially when
they use a ma
chine. I came
up with idea,
if I could learn
to work opal I
could make it into a market, but
the supply is difficult. I found the
material and workability to be chal
lenging. If you break a piece in half,
you're out. There may be a future
in it, though."
Day has produced 40 opal points
for sale or trade, but the future
of this effort, he says, depends on
obtaining quality opal at an afford
able price.
On Aug. 14 in the afternoon, he
is wearing khaki shorts in the hot
sun, and has two layers of leather
on top of his thigh. He knows from
experience. He's already had chips
and blades cut him down to the
bone.
The chips pile up at his feet as he
strikes obsidian blank with an oval
stone. He steadies the obsidian on
the leather. The stone is slightly
larger than what you might pick
up at the riverside to skip across
the water, and it has that same
soft-edged oval shape.
With many strikes on the edges
of n piece of obsidian, the new chips
leave sharp edges and form a blank
for later use or trade.
One edge. Day says, would he
good for cleaning fish. Another for
cutting through game.
He tosses the stone he has been
using five feet to the gravel of the
roadway. It stands out for its soft-
WIT ! lM
3
0
iff
a-?s
Photos by Michelle Alalmo
Tribal Elder and Cultural Protection Specialist Don Day abrades a piece
of obsidian to make a blank which he will then make into a tool as he
demonstrates flint knapping on Thursday, Aug. 1 4. At left, Day uses various
stones, elk antler billets and bones as his tools for flint knapping
ness and roundness, and though
you couldn't tell by looking at it,
its hardness, too. All around it are
sharp-edged, mined rock less than
half the size of the stone.
"If you looked at that, would you
know it was a tool?" Day asks.
Rocks, he says, are what you find
in nature. Stones are rocks made
into tools. And each stone has its
own name - an abrading stone,
for example, removes sharp edges
and prepares the sides for striking
depending on its use.
"Look for what doesn't belong to
the stone from the rocks around
it," Day says. For one thing, they
all have sharp edges. "If it wasn't
a tool, in this place it would have
sharp edges," he says.
Day brought a collection of hun
dreds of pounds of obsidian rock in
all different stages of completion
down by the creek to show what this
part of Indian culture may have
looked like as it was practiced.
He points to finished blades,
to sharp edges that when tied to
a pole, he says, would "go right
through a buffalo."
He takes up a billet made of elk
antler to chip away at the edges
of obsidian blank. As the glaHslikc
material splits off leaving sharp
edges behind, he stops and shifts
the billet in his hand and soys,
"You're looking for a different area
of the billet to strike it with." He
goes back to striking the obsidian.
One piece has some unfortunate
cracks in it, what Day says is part
of "the makeup of the material,"
and when at one point the striking
removes too much, he says, "We're
losing ground on this one."
On top of a frayed, once green or
blue tarp spread out in front of him,
obsidian sits in finished blades on a
chunk of wood, the kind of display
a knapper might set up for sale or
trading.
The obsidian also sits in blanks
that will be made into blades and
larger chunks that don't look at all
like the volcanic glass that obsid
ian is on the inside. (They look
just like big regular rocks.) And
five feet underground where they
may be found, Day says, you have
to recognize what they are to know
to dig them up.
And you have to know where to
dig.
"Nobody will tell you where they
are," Day says.
Day has been knapping obsidian
"on and ofT for the past six or seven
years.
"I just had an interest in it," he
soys. "I have an interest in primi
tive technology."
His teachers were "this person,
that person. Someone in Idaho
taught me to work Folsom points. It
was one of the earliest points found
around here. 1 can't do that yet,
except sometimes I get lucky."
As many in the community know,
Day also is a traditional craftsman
with cedar, splitting it and build
ing traditional structures. He has
been involved in the effort to put
the plankhouse up above the new
Uyxat Powwow Grounds and has
also been a part of many other
traditional structures, including
an exhibit at the University of
Oregon Museum of Cultural and
Natural History, and the miniature
plankhouse at the Roloff farm in
Hillsboro featured in the cable TV
show "Little People, Big World."
He has long been respected as a
teacher of these traditional skills
here in Grand Ronde.
Traditional practices often come
with stories, and Day knows many
of those, too. He points out finished
blades that back in the day may
have been used by a teenaged boy
or girl to indicate an interest in
the other.
Day calls it a "youth dance blade,"
and says that it worked like an in
vitation. After being presented with
a blade as an invitation to a dance,
for example, "You would return
the blade to her if you accept," Day
says, "and you would return it to
her lodge if you did not."
Another blade might have been
used as "a wealth blade," Day says.
"It was for trading. You could trade
one for a canoe. It was not used
as a tool, but only as a show of
wealth."
He calls one blade "a Molalla
hundred dollar bill." Tools made of
obsidian were a form of currency for
thousands of yeors, he says.
Day is now completing his mas
ter's thesis at the University of
Oregon about western red cedar
plankhouscs in the Northwest. D