The KJ Report

La Push - Day 5

Have I mentioned that it rains here? The sun hasn’t been out since it got lost in the fog on Thursday. The locals tell me that it may find it’s way out again sometime next Spring right after the worst of the storms and wind provides enough repair work to keep folks busy for the summer.

On Friday I was successful in speaking with Porky and he was at least somewhat successful in speaking a bit of Quileute with me. Porky will be 86 in December and is well-known now for his failing memory. He’s a lively old gentleman, as betrayed by a constant twitch in his legs, darting glances, and a self-deprecating sense of humor. I was taken to see Porky by one of his daughters, a woman in her 40’s, with four school-aged children who’s not shy about sharing the challenges and despair of her life on the reservation. We met after her weekly English class at the offices of the tribal council. Although all of the students speak only English, the classes are given to help local people improve their speaking and writing skills, and hopefully by extension, their advancement prospects in their jobs. On the drive she told me that she had lost a grown son to a car accident just this past year, that she’d grown up in poverty, but never imagined she would live in poverty as an adult or not be able to adequately provide for her children. She has a decent job that she’s held long term, but recently came under a new, younger supervisor who’s lack of positive encouragement causes her great stress. She was especially gloomy about the prospects of any man ever having an interest in a woman her age with four children and no money.

Her sister lives in “Quileute Heights”, a tidy two block sub-division of small, boxy, nearly identical and similarly aging, cape-cod style houses that sit on a hill behind the new and modern Akalat tribal center which serves as a school to 26 teens and home to Indian basketball tournaments in it's nicely appointed gym. I met Porky at the next to last house on the left on Ba-yak lane.

One of the key phrases showing up in my taping sessions so far is “I can’t remember, because I’m so old now”.  Porky was able to tell me at least a little bit about some of the traditional Quileute stories – most of them seem to have been designed to frighten the children for the sake of keeping them safe in a wilderness area. Think Grimm’s Fairy tales. For example, the one that clearly had the deepest lasting impact on Porky was about a witch who would steal children, put pitch in their eyes to blind them and carry them away in the back-pack basket normally used for carrying wood. He also commented that he doesn’t see her (the witch) anymore now that he’s gotten so old. Or maybe because the village has changed

Friday morning I visited with the high school students. We talked about music, being a composer, life in New York, the world, travel, the uniqueness of the Quileute language – you get the idea. It was a small group of students (8 or 10). It wasn’t clear to me where the rest of the 26 were that morning and I didn’t ask. However all of the students who were there expressed the desire to go to college  and most were reasonably engaged in the conversation (ok – 2 fell asleep, but I have to admit that I didn’t come prepared to entertain and I definitely don’t hold it against them).

I spent much of the rest of Friday trying to discern whether I was going to have any chance of meeting up with Charlotte and Leta – by all accounts the two most fluent remaining speakers of the Quileute language. At 5:30, after several walks from one end of the rez to the other, a couple dozen unanswered phone calls, a few discouraging conversations and the news that most of the people I’d hoped to get help from were out of town for the weekend, I left the tribal office feeling that it simply was not going to happen and contemplating which day to head to Seattle.

As I came outside I met up with Tony, the Quileute fish and game warden, and his wife Anne. I’d run into Tony several times over the course of the day, but hadn’t actually been introduced yet. We joked a bit about the lost-looking white guy who was following him around and I shared about my efforts to find Charlotte and Leta. To which Anne replied in a quick, matter of fact tone: “Oh, they’re down at the basket-weavers conference in Quinault. I think my dad’s going down there tomorrow…”

Ohhhh-kay – from there on out the conversation was a flurry of phone numbers, trying to keep nicknames and familial relationships straight (hopeless task), and advice on how to know when Jiggs (Anne’s father) was pulling your leg or not. Anne seems to have the phone number of every tribal member memorized, so I was left scrambling for my notepad and a pen that works. In the end, I managed to reach Jiggs and arrange a ride with his daughter and grandson to finally go see Charlotte and Leta.

Saturday morning I piled in the car, made all the introductions and promptly fell asleep for the entire two hour ride. If you’ve read my earlier entries, you know that insomnia is sometimes an issue for me – and so far on this trip I’ve been going to sleep on local time and waking up on New York time, which has brought me down to about four hours of sleep per night. It seems that all I needed was a fast moving car in dicey weather on a treacherous road, but I was sorry to miss the towns along the way, with colorful names such as Queets and Humptulip.

The Northwest Native American Indian Basket Weavers annual gathering was held this year at the Quinault reservation casino. It’s a very new facility with a large open conference room (home to the gathering), a gaming room of equal size filled with row upon row of slots and a line of craps and black-jack tables down the center, a snack bar, an upscale restaurant, a small sports bar and a much smaller sushi bar. I can say with great certainty that I’ll never understand the lure of a casino.

Charlotte and Leta  were at a table somewhere among the maze of hundreds of basket weavers, all seated at round banquet tables working their hands and fingers through cedar strips and bear grass and raffia and many other materials that I couldn’t identify and don’t remember the names of. Leta Shale was one of the “featured weavers”. Her baskets are highly crafted, uniquely designed and prized by collectors. Leta is 80 years old, but seems much younger. She has black curly hair and large, powerful, black rimmed glasses and a razor sharp wit. When I met her, she immediately informed me that her rate for such services is $1500 per hour. Naturally, if I needed to take pictures the price would go up significantly - modeling is extra. And if I wanted her in a bathing suit that would require some further negotiations. She always wears a bikini.

Charlotte Kalama was the “Honorary Weaver” for the conference. She is among the most highly recognized basket weavers of the Northwest. Her baskets are brilliant and colorful. Her designs are both traditional and innovative. Her baskets are part of the collections of museums across the US and in Europe. Who knew? (not me).

Charlotte is 86 years old. Although she’s still mobile, she has arthritis that tends to keep her from  weaving anymore and causes her to use a wheelchair much of the time. Charlotte is a tiny, dear woman, just a bit over 4 feet tall, but clearly never to be taken lightly. A riveter at the Seattle shipyards during WWII, Charlotte learned both basket weaving and the Quileute language from her grandmother when she was a little girl. Both Charlotte and Leta are devout Shakers and both have been ministers and leaders of the Shaker church in their communities.

The big discovery I made as I spent the majority of the day with these two very lovely ladies was that there are no remaining Quileute speakers who are truly fluent in the language. Each of the people who I’ve spoken to are facile with those portions of the language that they still use (Leta did teach me a few words and insisted that I pronounced them all badly), but none of them is able to converse freely in Quileute, even on familiar subjects. That said, I was very honored to spend time with Charlotte and Leta and was pleased with the recordings I was able to capture: Charlotte praying in Quileute, Leta singing her Quaker hymns while she prepared strips of cedar bark for weaving.

My time with the Quileute is nearing it’s end. On Sunday I’ll meet again with Porky to see if he can remember all the words to the Quileute “drunk” song and tell me a bit more about his life. On Monday morning I’ll spend more time at the school sorting through their archive of audio recordings. Monday afternoon I head back to Seattle.

Side note for all the Twilight fans who’ve been bored reading about my language project – I’ve asked around a bit about the location of Jacob Black’s house in hopes of learning more about their family, but have been told that  “it isn’t wise to go poking around about such things”. I’ve never been one to care too much about what’s wise and what’s not though………

Here's Porky on a smoking break following a rousing rendition of the Quileute drunk song.

Here are the ever-charming Charlotte and Leta sharing a laugh, almost certainly at my expense.

La Push - Day 3

The day began today with the news that “Aunt Pearl” was being taken to Seattle Harbor View Hospital via helicopter. No news yet, but the preliminary outlook wasn’t good. As far as I’ve been able to determine today, there are four remaining native speakers of the Quileute language and Pearl is one of them. They are all well into their 80’s. Two of four are not currently living in La Push, although they are just down the road a piece. It seems that there are a few others who learned the language as adults and speak it relatively well, but I’m not clear yet on just how well they speak it or who they might practice it with.

I’m hoping to be able to get together later on today (which probably means tomorrow) with “Porky”, the last native speaker currently in town. Everyone here has a nickname, so it can be challenging figuring out who you’re talking to or about at times. Today has also been productive in that calls are being made to see if the other two native speakers can be brought up to La Push to chatter away in Quileute for me (I understand that they speak with one another in Quileute when they don’t want anyone around them to know what they’re saying). I’m also looking forward to recording the meeting of the drum group this evening, although I’ll need to be rather sensitive to the wishes of all of the members, as some of the “family” songs are considered to be sacred and secret and cannot be shared outside of the Quileute community.

Last of the “interesting” news today, is my discovery that the Shaker religion has been a deeply rooted part of the Quileute community, at least since the mid 1800’s. The Shaker services here are held only at night, a tradition which began when the religion was repressed for suspected “devil worship” and forced to go on in secret. Services will begin in the evening and go on until morning for several nights in a row. Of the greatest interest to me is the discovery that the shaker hymns at these services are sung in the Quileute language, using traditional bells and foot-stomping as the only means of accompaniment. I’m waiting to hear whether any services will take place this weekend, otherwise there will be a multi-community shaker gathering here just before I head back to New York, so I’ll definitely have an opportunity to witness and document some of this phenomenon.

Continued…

Thursday morning – rain today. Not a surprise. Yesterday the dense fog coming in off the water only threatened to invade, creeping up close enough to hide Ak-A-Lat  and make the boats coming in seem like they were emerging from some alien spirit realm. It would lift for a time then try to sneak back in. Today it’s found it’s courage. The fog is zippered right up to the shore and the rain is coming down in big, heavy drops.

I’m still hurrying up and waiting for my opportunity to meet and record Porky. I’m expecting to meet with his daughter shortly to plan a time, although I’m finding that planning a time to do things can be a  formality without consequences. Meanwhile I’ve taken a look at the Quileute school’s video and cassette collection and will be helping to devise a realistic plan for archiving those materials – hundreds of hours of cassettes and videos recorded over the past 40 years (!!), stored unceremoniously in cardboard boxes. I believe that these mostly consist of tribal elders teaching the children about the tribal traditions and culture. I’m very concerned that this work may be or have already been lost. 

Keep checking back - I'll be adding some pictures soon.

Here's a view of the town, with the school in the foreground

La Push Day 1 - The Language Project Update

So my travels have begun. La Push Washington. Home of the Quileute peoples. Fishermen. Sealers and whalers. Boat builders. Descended from wolves. And of course, speakers of the Quileute language. Quileute is a language unrelated to any other, which contains no nasal sounds and is spoken with the tongue between the teeth a great deal of the time (not unlike Sylvester the cat). Quileute is a language that will also soon be extinct. Its not that there’s no record of the language or that no memory of its existence will remain, but only the most elderly Quileute are native speakers. Soon there will be no one left who learned and used the language in their home as children. It will cease to be a living language.

It was a beautiful day in La Push when I arrived on Monday afternoon. As I drove through the densely forested valleys of the Olympic Mountains heading toward Forks, I could feel the temperature inching it’s way up from the upper 50’s around the shores of the icy and deeply mysterious Crescent Lake to the low 80’s by the time I rolled past the Lonesome River store – La Push’s only store, a nicely appointed convenience mart with a traditional cedar front adorned with carved pictures of fish and whales in the distinctive Northwest Native American style and the correlating Quileute words spelled out next to them.

Yes, La Push is predictably small, a vibrant mix of small houses and trailers set on narrow plots in various states of repair and disrepair, many surrounded by boats and motors and vehicles ranging from bikes and Big Wheels to ATVs to cars of every age and state and dogs of a similar variety. Others are neat and clean and surrounded by flower gardens and brown picket fences. There is no division or discernable order to their arrangement – the neatest and cleanest shares a fence with the least maintained. Taken together, it's a picture of gritty charm.

But development and progress are also apparent everywhere you look or walk, with newer buildings such as the tribal office and the school along the main street, as well as a brand new hotel and cabins and an RV park under construction as part of the Oceanside Resort. Along the waterfront there’s  a small, but seemingly active fishery, a charming diner with stunning views of the bay, a post office, a marina and a Coast Guard Station. But the draw here is not the architecture. It’s the ocean.

The Quileute have occupied this spit of land, the Westernmost on the Olympic Peninsula, for thousands of years (really!) – the shoreline is shaped by a series of wide coves or bays. The town sits on a “corner” of land facing two of these coves, one of which is protected by a large natural breakwater and tall butte-like, tree-topped islets. When I say tall – I mean breathtaking. Up to 160 feet in the case of Ak-A-Lat or James Isle, where tribal elders were traditionally taken after their death and placed in their canoes in the tops of the trees to be delivered to the gods. The breakwaters are covered in stone and course grasses and huge pieces of driftwood. Entire trees in most cases, bleached by sun and water, stripped and polished and impressive. The resort faces the widest of these bays, which lacks such a breakwater, meaning it has a sandy beach and a view out to sea and a virtual wall of tree-sized driftwood at the high water mark, barring access to anyone unwilling to climb or wend their way through the natural maze.

Although sunny days can be rare around here (La Push is only a few miles from the Hoh Rainforest and receives about 115 inches of rain a year), Monday was spectacular and the views were glorious.

It turned out that I had my wires crossed with the Quileute leadership and wasn’t expected until Tuesday– so I did my best to make the most of it and spent some time in the evening recording the sound of the surf roaring in to the beach. I needed to test my equipment and my set-up and besides, it was unusually clear and moonless, so the stars and Venus and the Milky Way were putting on a show that I didn’t want to miss.

Tuesday (which is actually day 2) I was able to meet with the tribal council, but not much else. Life moves slowly here, schedules are somewhat fluid. This evening I meet with the school administrators. Tomorrow evening I attend a drum group. In between I hope to be able to track down a few of the elders and get some of the more serious work of the trip set in motion.

A side note to all the teenage girls who may be reading – I have not met any boys names Edward Black or any girls named Bella. I’m not aware of having come across any werewolves or any vampires, however I’ve been told that I would be unlikely to recognize it if I had. If I discover anything even slightly suspicious, you’ll be the first to know.

Here's a view of First Beach from the far West end - the driftwood detritus gets larger as you move up the beach. At the far end many of the washed up tree trunks have diameters of over 8 foot.