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.
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