 George Lonegran carved the 14-foot black and red canoe that is traveling across the nation with the Lewis and Clark Corps II exhibit. It is named “Little Wolf” in chinuk wawa. He’s working on another canoe now, this one bigger, and it is laid backside up in the open stall of a shed in his home in Bay Center. A bucket of tools is nearby. Beyond the shed is a pile of cedar logs, including a log nearly four feet in diameter that he plans to carve into his largest canoe yet. He pauses and says that when it is done he probably won’t be able to ride in it. He’s in his 80s now.
George’s father was Swedish and left home at 14 years old, an orphan, to work as a cabin boy. He sailed for years, then jumped ship in Bellingham for a highway project on the Long Beach peninsula. He traded his work for land and settled in the lush Nemah valley, where he met and married George’s mother, a Chinook woman. He had three sons, of which George was the eldest. George and his brothers paddled the bay between home and the peninsula gathering Willapa Bay oysters and counting the Chinook villages — always on the protected northeast banks — by their piles of oyster shells. George also married a Chinook woman, Milly, and fathered nine children.
During the Second World War, George enlisted in the Navy, as many thousands of American Indians did. From the top of his gun on his ship he watched the bloodshed at Iwo Jima. “There were thousands of young men dead on the beach.” George told us that he watched the first flag raised at Iwo Jima in the morning and the larger and more famous flag, pulled from his ship, raised in the afternoon.
Out in his shed, George shows how he gently shapes a curve into the cedar log. He says that when you’re on the water with no power but a paddle, the canoe must be swift and nimble. He says that you must pay attention to the tide, use the tide, not fight against it. “You can use your paddle to push against the water to go straight,” he says, “but you can’t fight the tide.”
The Chinooks have a float in the parade at the Astoria regatta. It is two canoes, on trailers pulled by trucks, and children and elders are riding in the canoes. When the tribe’s float passes by the announcers’ booth, one of the announcers mispronounces the tribe’s name.
Marching in the parade ahead of them are the descendants of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Over 700 descendants and friends had been to a dinner the night before where they heard lectures about the Corps and shared family stories. Now they march, grouped by the member of the Corps from which they are descended. The progeny of Sergeant Patrick Gass dwarf the number of Chinooks in the parade.
The private tribal opening of the plankhouse falls on a rainy Saturday in March. Gary, Greg, and Tony are here, as well as George and Milly Lonergan and almost 100 other Chinook tribe members. Kids run around, one of them with a bow and arrow with which he is getting handier as the after-noon wears on. A group of elderly women sit with blankets on a bench. A fire burns steadily in one of the hearths, but the air is damp and room is dim, and rain drizzles in where the ceiling planks were moved to let smoke escape.
It has been nearly five years since the Chinooks started work on the Cathlapotle plankhouse. Refuge officials have agreed to allow the Chinooks to use the plankhouse for ceremonies, gatherings, and cultural events. The Refuge abandoned the idea of the THIS IS NOT AN EXIT sign over the exit. The house is ready to be cleansed. Today the building will cease to be a site and will become a house.
Tony gathers members of the tribe and hands each participant a cedar branch. While some members drum and sing, the cleansers will walk through the house counterclockwise, sweeping the house with cedar branches. When they have completed their circuit, they will leave the branches in a pile. The branches will then be taken to the river and dropped into the current.
The drumming, solid and sure, begins. Members of the tribe, and a few non-Indians who have been closely involved with the plankhouse, enter the house and brush their cedar branches over its surfaces. They sweep the cedar steps inside the door, the hand-hewn benches, and the grain of the cedar planks of the house’s walls. They sweep the carved poles. They sweep the box of Costco paper towels someone has brought for the salmon and oyster roast later. One woman sweeps the air.
After the cleansing ceremony, members of the tribe and visitors from other tribes speak. Alma, near ninety years old, tells how her grandmother saw longhouses at Cathlapotle in 1848. Bobby Mercier, a Grand Ronde drummer and spiritual leader whose cell phone plays rap music, thanks the Chinooks for their work. Lyle Deschand, who with another non-Indian, artist Adam McIsaac, was instrumental in building the plankhouse, talks about his interest in primitive technology, and how he and his son make arrowheads and other tools from stone during the winter while they watch television.
The public opening of the plankhouse is set for March 29 — 199 years to the day since Meriwether Lewis recorded Cathlapotle in his journal. The parking lot is full and people dressed in period clothing serve cookies. The plank-house is packed. After the usual speeches, Gary Johnson takes the microphone. He stands near the pole painted to represent transition from this world to the next. He speaks for a few minutes about the importance of the plankhouse to the Chinook tribe, and then he concludes with these words: We must not reach for the past, but bring our values to the future.
Angela Sanders (asanders@hevanet.com), who wrote a memorable piece about the eight Paul Bunyan statues in the West in the Summer 2004 issue of this magazine, is a writer in Portland.
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