14
S moke S ignals
NOVEMBER 15, 2017
Book tells story of Tribal language’s last speaker
By Dean Rhodes
Smoke Signals editor
For approximately 51 years, Lou-
is Kenoyer was truly unique.
He was the only person who
spoke the Tualatin Northern Ka-
lapuya language after his father
walked on in 1886 and before his
own passing in 1937.
Kenoyer’s first-person narra-
tive describing life on the Grand
Ronde Reservation in the late 19th
century recently was published by
Oregon State University Press in
cooperation with the Confederated
Tribes of Grand Ronde.
Titled “My Life, by Louis Kenoy-
er: Reminiscences of a Grand Ronde
Reservation Childhood,” the book
features a forward by renowned
Oregon historian Stephen Dow
Beckham, an introduction written
by linguist Henry Zenk and 13
chapters of Kenoyer’s memories of
growing up on the Grand Ronde
Reservation presented in the orig-
inal Tualatin Northern Kalapuya
with an English translation.
“By his own account, his father
was the last person with whom he
spoke Tualatin,” the book’s intro-
duction says.
Zenk, who has a Ph.D. in anthro-
pology from the University of Ore-
gon and has worked as a linguistic
consultant for the Grand Ronde
Tribe since 1998, first became
aware of the Kenoyer narrative 40
years ago.
Kenoyer originally dictated the
first part of his childhood narra-
tive to Jaime de Angulo and L.S.
(Nancy) Freeland in 1928-29 after
Angulo drove him from the Yakama
Reservation in Washington state
to their home in Berkeley, Calif.
Angulo was dispatched by Franz
Boas, known as the founder of
modern American anthropology,
to find Kenoyer and document the
threatened Native language.
The remainder of the narrative
was dictated to Melville Jacobs in
1936 and Kenoyer died a year later
before he was able to complete the
translation with Jacobs.
Zenk found the transcript with
the last quarter untranslated in
the mid-1970s.
“I came across this autobiography
during my earliest visits to the
Melville Jacobs papers at the Uni-
versity of Washington archives,”
Zenk said during the Wednesday,
Nov. 1, session of the annual Grand
Ronde History & Culture Summit
held in the Tribal gym. “Over 40
years after I first came across it,
it’s in print now.”
Zenk worked with Jedd Schrock,
who has a master’s degree in lin-
guistics from Northeastern Illinois
University and specializes in Na-
tive languages of western Oregon
and Washington, to complete the
translation.
“The result is a complete bilin-
gual English-Tualatin text, ac-
companied by extensive notes and
commentary providing historical
and ethnographic context,” the
book cover states.
Zenk said that Kenoyer’s mem-
ories are an “important source”
of information for any researcher
interested in 19th century life on
the Grand Ronde Reservation.
Photo by Michelle Alaimo
Henry Zenk talks about the book “My Life, by Louis Kenoyer: Reminiscences
of a Grand Ronde Reservation Childhood” during the Grand Ronde History &
Culture Summit in the Tribal gym on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
“My Life, by Louis Kenoyer:
Reminiscences of a Grand
Ronde Reservation
Childhood”
Published:
By Oregon State
University Press in
cooperation with
the Confederated
Tribes of Grand
Ronde
To order: Visit www.osupress.
oregonstate.edu
Cost: $35
The cover photo of Kenoyer read-
ing The San Francisco Chronicle
was taken during his stay in Berke-
ley and was donated courtesy of
Gui Mayo, Angulo and Freeland’s
daughter.
Kenoyer was born at the Grand
Ronde Reservation in 1868, a mere
11 years after President James Bu-
chanan established the Reservation
through an executive order.
Kenoyer’s father, Peter, came to
the Reservation as an adult from
a part of the Tualatin homeland
that centered on Wapato Lake near
modern-day Gaston. At home, Lou-
is spoke Tualatin while at school he
spoke chinuk wawa and English.
Angulo and Freeland turned over
their Tualatin manuscripts to Ja-
cobs, who started documenting the
endangered indigenous languages
of western Oregon when he joined
the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Washington
in 1928.
Jacobs' work with Kenoyer in
the summer of 1936 to go over
Angulo’s and Freeland’s previous
transcriptions and also to contin-
ue his autobiography ended when
Kenoyer walked on in the winter of
1937, leaving the last quarter of the
complete narrative untranslated.
“In the end, the passing of the
language’s last known fluent speak-
er rendered this large chunk of the
narrative, for all practical purpos-
es, unusable to him (Jacobs),” Zenk
writes in his introduction.
Zenk and Schrock learned to read
Tualatin Northern Kalapuya from
the previous translations and were
able to translate 99 percent of the
words and vocabulary appearing in
the untranslated text.
Zenk says in the introduction
that Kenoyer’s narrative “is an
important addition to the record
of this transformation” as Native
Americans’ traditional hunting and
gathering economies transformed
to subsistence farming on the Eu-
ro-American model.
“With this shift of economy there
came a wholesale adoption of Eu-
ro-American rural dress, housing,
technology and work habits,” Zenk
writes.
Comparing Kenoyer’s narrative
with Jacobs’ accounts from John B.
Hudson and Victoria Howard, two
other Grand Ronde Elders, Zenk
notes that “Kenoyer’s narrative
adds a third perspective on daily
life at 19th century Grand Ronde
Reservation, one much more at-
tuned to the meeting and inter-pen-
etration of old indigenous practices
and beliefs with newly introduced
Euro-American influences.”
For instance, Zenk cites Kenoyer
remembering a death in the family
in which Catholic priest Father
Adrien-Joseph Croquet and the Tu-
alatin Tamanawas doctor Shumkhi
both appeared.
Kenoyer recalls the event in the
book’s second chapter:
“Then they sat in the house.
“One man, a half-woman named
Shumkhi, a great Tamanawas
doctor, her power was dead-people
(Tamanawas).
“Then she ‘threw’ her song.
“She took five bundles of pitch
sticks.
“She took one pitch bundle.
“Then she lit it.
“Then she shook it everywhere in
the house.
“She drove away the dead person’s
spirit-breath.”
Kenoyer and his younger sister
were the only children out of per-
haps 10 who reached adulthood. He
moved away from Grand Ronde and
boarded at Chemawa Indian School
in Salem around the time his father
died and eventually received an
allotment in Grand Ronde in 1891.
He had two families in Grand
Ronde. He had two boys and two
stepchildren, all of whom died young.
Sometime before 1914, he left Grand
Ronde after the death of his second
wife, ending up at the Yakama Res-
ervation in Washington state.
He died, taking an indigenous
language with him, on Jan. 16,
1937, at the town of Harrah, Ya-
kama Reservation, from influenza.
Zenk said during the summit that
the lack of knowledge about Kenoy-
er’s adulthood leaves him a “man of
mystery.” “We don’t have much on
Kenoyer … the man,” he said.
However, Kenoyer the Reserva-
tion child has been preserved, Beck-
ham said in the book’s foreword.
“The autobiography of Louis
Kenoyer is in a class of its own,”
writes Beckham, Pamplin profes-
sor of History-emeritus at Lewis &
Clark College. “It is one of the rare
first-person narratives by a Native
American discussing life on an Or-
egon Reservation. This volume res-
cues from obscurity the story of his
life, conditions on the Grand Ronde
Reservation, and, for the first time,
completes the translation of his
narrative from the Tualatin dialect
of Northern Kalapuya into English.
“It is Kenoyer’s story recounted
in the traditional narrative style of
the Tualatin speakers of the north-
ern Willamette Valley. The account
covers the 1870s to the 1880s and
provides a heretofore unavailable
record of the forced acculturation
and transformation of Oregon Indi-
ans from their traditional fishing,
hunting and gathering cultures
into sedentary agrarians speaking
English and worshipping the deity
of their conquerors.” 
Casino seeking Tribal
member artists
Spirit Mountain Casino is seeking Grand Ronde Tribal member artists
to participate in the design process for the 2018 casino Grand Floral
Parade float.
All conceptual designs submitted must be a Tribal member’s own
creation and represent the casino and the Confederated Tribes of Grand
Ronde. A complete copy of the scope-of-work packet can be obtained by
contacting Jocelyn Huffman via e-mail at Jocelyn.Huffman@spiritmtn.
com or calling 503-879-3054.
Full details are available only to Grand Ronde Tribal members request-
ing the scope of work.
Requests must be made no later than Monday, Dec. 11.
Designs and concepts become the property of Spirit Mountain Casino
once submitted and are subject to change or alteration to meet the needs
of float construction. 