Chinook Nation

For thousands of years the University's campus was graced by generations of Chinook people. Where are the Chinook today?

By Angela Sanders

... at the distance of three miles above the inlet of the N. side behind the lower point of an island we arrived at the village of the Cath-lah-poh-tle wich consists of 14 large wooden houses ... the floors of most of their houses are on a level with the surface of the earth tho’ some of them are sunk two or 3 feet beneath. the internal arrangement ... is the same with those of the nations below. they are also fond of sculpture. various figures are carved and painted on the peices which support the center of the roof, about their doors and beads [beds]…
— Captain Meriweather Lewis, March 29, 1806

Lewis was writing about Cathlapotle, a Chinookan village on what is now the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on the Washington side of the Columbia River, about 14 miles north of Portland. Two hundred years ago, Cathlapotle was one of the largest Indian villages on the Columbia, with nearly a thousand people living in the plankhouses that Lewis described. Cathlapotle was also a popular site trading site for wapato, canoes, and other goods upstream. Lewis and Clark noted the village first on their journey to the Pacific Ocean, and then camped a few miles outside of it on their return trip four and a half months later, just before Clark wandered south to the bluff where the University was born in 1901.

Two centuries after the Corps of Discovery passed Cathlapotle, a sign reading HOME OF THE U-HAUL TRUCK welcomes visitors to Ridgefield. In the Wildlife Reserve, past a dike with blue herons standing guard, is the South Shop Building, where a group of volunteers splits cedar logs into planks that will be used to build a new Chinookan plankhouse at Cathlapotle.

The project manager for the plankhouse is a Chinook Indian named Greg Robinson, a plasterer by trade. He explains how he and his colleagues came to be building the sort of house that his ancestors built for thousands of years in Oregon and Washington. It’s a joint project, planned by staff from the Refuge, scholars from Portland State University, and Chinook people in the area. Made of cedar, it will be 90 feet long and 40 feet wide, resting on a 3 foot deep trench. The center will be one long room, with bunks along the side and two hearths down the middle. As with traditional plankhouses, one end will be the “wealth” end, with detailed carving and painting. Visitors will enter through a round hole on the other end of the plankhouse and step down into the room.

One morning, Greg tells me, he was at work in his trailer office on the site when the wind rose in the ash trees outside. The trailer began to shudder and Greg crawled under his desk. When the wind finished ripping the tops off the trees, it lifted the trailer into the air and spun it around. Lights shattered, spewing glass, and Greg watched as a half-full water cooler bottle rose from his desk, floated across the room, and landed, unspilt, in a chair. A rack of elk antlers pierced the trailer’s floor, and the coyote fetish that Greg wore around his neck split in half. The wind deposited Greg and his trailer fifty feet away. The tornado then jumped the river and sped up the valley.

Some people took this as a bad omen.

*

The Chinook Nation is a confederation of the five westernmost tribes of Chinookan people: the Lower Chinook, the Clatsop, the Willapa, the Wahkia-kum, and the Kathlamet. Chinookan tribes once stretched from the Pacific Ocean up to the Dalles, and include tribes that are now part of other recognized groups, such as the Wasco, one of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs.

The Chinook Nation has about 2,300 enrolled members and is governed by a council of nine members. The council members are all volunteers. The Chinooks do have a chief, Cliff Snyder, but for the Chinooks, “chief” is an honorary title without governing power, and Chief Snyder hasn’t been to a tribal council meeting in years.

The tribal office is in the Old Chinook School on the main drag of Chinook, Washington, across the Columbia River from Astoria. The tribal office is unmarked; in fact, the sign in front of the school announces dog obedience classes. The building’s white wooden sides are peeling, and two dead rhododendrons flank the front door. The windows on the back of the building are boarded up with plywood, and blackberries grow up to the second floor. Inside the building, a cedar canoe stretches out in the main hall. A handwritten “out of order” sign is posted on the door of one bathroom. In the other bathroom, two of the stalls have “out of order” signs on them, and the other says “use at your own risk”. It turns out that the toilet’s flushability varies with the tide.

Tonight is the monthly Chinook Cultural Committee’s meeting. Gary Johnson, the Tribal Chairman, is there, as is his son Tony, the committee’s chairman. Greg Robinson is vice chairman. They are seated around an old office table. Lining the room are boxes of hotdog buns, napkins, and empty coolers, for a barbecue coming up.

Gary grew up in Bay Center, Washington, in an extended family that he likens to a village of longhouses, with three families living side by side. He grew up hearing chinuk wawa, as he says, from his great aunts and uncles. (Chinuk wawa is a variant of Chinook proper, used to communicate with non-Indians and Indians from other tribes.) His father lived on the Quinault reservation, and his dad and uncles were in an all-Indian crew of the Civilian Conservation Corps working at Warm Springs and other Indian reservations. Gary studied psychology and mediation in college and became a football coach, teacher, and counselor at the high school in South Bend, Washington. For years, he says, he blended into the white world to the extent that he could; but after Tony’s birth, he enrolled his sons in the Chinook tribe and began attending council meetings regularly.

Tonight’s guest at the meeting asks permission to include the tribe in a documentary she is making about the Indians at the mouth of the Columbia River. The documentary will accompany the Lewis and Clark exhibition at the Oregon Historical Society and is sponsored by the Council of Tribal Advisors. The Council of Tribal Ad-visors includes the Clatsop-Nehalem tribe, which is enough for the Chinooks to refuse participation in the film.

Gary explains. The Clatsops are one of the five tribes comprising the Chinook Nation. A former member of the Chinook Tribal Council seceded from the tribe and decided to start his own tribe a few years ago, claiming that the Clatsops should be allied with the Nehalems, who are from an area just south of the Clatsop homeland near Astoria. The Chinooks view his secession as a betrayal. Most people who have studied the matter see the combination of Clatsops and Nehalems as a forced fit at best, and say that the Nehalem tribe is more closely related to the Tillamooks.

Tony Johnson is adamant in his refusal to have anything to do with a project including the Clatsop-Nehalems. He expresses himself more passionately than his dad, likes to break suddenly into chinuk wawa and leave his non-Indian audience in the dark (“he has fun with that,” says Gary), and has a reputation as tough and unbending — a reputation not gentled by his occasional reminders that the Chinooks are still warriors. On the other hand this is a man who runs a Chinook language immersion day care center (where children call him Teacher Tony), carries photos of his two foster daughters, and has taken being Chinook as a calling, spending much time with tribal elders, learning their stories and language.

The next guests at the Chinook Cultural Committee meeting are doing an archeological dig at Station Camp, in preparation for construction, and are turning up Chinook artifacts. They file in, hats in hand, looking for empty chairs. Tony cheerfully tells them, in chinuk wawa, to sit on the coolers.

Behind the tribal office is the school’s old gym, where the tribe holds rummage sales to fund operations. The gym is dark and smells damp, and the floor lists toward the door. Inside, tables are set up by price — the dollar table of tools, dinner plates, and records; the 25-cent table with old mugs. Piles of clothing skirt the perimeter of the gym. I briefly consider some crocheted lap blankets smelling of cigarette smoke and end up buying a stack of 78s by Yorgi Yorgesson, a Swedish humorist with hits such as “Yingle Bells” and “Mrs. Yohnson, Turn Me Loose!”

If the Chinooks are lucky, the rummage sale will earn a couple of thousand dollars to put toward the tribe’s lean operating budget.     

Meanwhile, the staff of the Confluence Project are raising $22 million to fund art installations by Maya Lin along the Columbia River. The goal of the Lin installations is to explore Native American culture and stewardship of natural resources along the route of the Corps of Discovery. How these installations will look, no one is really sure, since, as staff say, “Maya likes to work in narrative.” Apparently most of her narrative is constructed in her studio in New York, since the Chinooks say she hasn’t stopped by to talk to them. The first installation scheduled to be unveiled is a Chinook fish cleaning station.

*

Lewis and Clark weren’t the first outsiders to encounter the Chinook people. As early as the mid-1700s, Spanish sailors washed ashore, and they were followed by enterprising sailors from China and Great Britain who traded copper and iron (and in one ill-advised case, jews’ harps and mouse traps) for sea-otter skins. The sailors passing through often enjoyed the Chinook women’s hospitality, as well. Meriwether Lewis reported encountering a Chinook woman with J. Bowmon scratched on her arm.

If their journals are evidence, Lewis and Clark were ungrateful guests during the winter of 1805-06 they spent at Fort Clatsop. The Chinooks paddled in to Point Ellice and brought the Corps food when their own boats could not manage the turbulent Columbia. Lewis and Clark praised the Chinooks’ skill and beautifully crafted canoes, then stole one on their way home. The Chinooks pointed to an area just south of the mouth of the river where elk were plentiful. The Corps set up camp where the tribe had suggested and in one winter wiped out the local elk population. The Chinooks valued the abundant salmon the river supported, but Lewis and Clark saw fresh salmon as unhealthy and instead preferred to eat dogs.

Lewis and Clark admired the conical hats the Chinooks wove of cedar bark and bear grass and wore to keep the rain off, but Lewis especially was put off by the tribe’s partial nudity. They found the Chinook women loose and the men inclined to pilfer and were astounded at the tribe’s ability to flourish in such a foul climate. Lewis and Clark’s men were more generous in their assessment of the tribe, especially of the women, and Lewis had to treat many of the Corps for venereal disease.

The Corps of Discovery was the vanguard of a steadily increasing flow of traders, both from sea and inland. Within a few years, white people established trading posts in Astoria and in Vancouver. They pushed the Chinooks deeper inland and brought with them disease, including smallpox, malaria, and measles, wiping out almost 90 percent of the tribe. Where Lewis and Clark and their men once drifted down the Columbia past the fires of hundreds of Chinookan villages, now all that was left were abandoned longhouses and hastily dug graves.

To survive, the Chinooks married into other tribes and lived in insulated pockets where they could still fish and carry out their traditions as much as possible. One of these pockets of Chinooks was, and still is, the town of Bay Center, Washington.

*

Bay Center is on the Washington coast, across from the tip of the North Beach peninsula. It is still a Chinook stronghold, although many of the younger generation have moved away. At its peak, over a third of Bay Center’s inhabitants were Chinook. Charles Cultee, the Clatsop whose stories Frank Boas transcribed in 1894 in the book Chinook Texts, was one of the Indians who lived in a cabin along the beach. Phillip Hawk’s father, John Hawks, was another. Phillip was the last Chinook born in the village. His family moved up the hill to Bay Center when he was 5 or 6 years old and enrolled him in school. That’s when he learned to speak English.

Phillip is in his mid-80s now, but still strong from fishing crab and oysters and from his daily walks along the beach and through the swamp of cattails near the old Chinook village site. Walking today, we pass the carcass of a bear. We pass where the orchards used to be. We pass posts that once held up boardwalks through the swamp. Finally we come to the old village site on Willapa Bay, plotted out long ago so that people could walk out of their houses be at work immediately harvesting oysters. These days the beach is covered with spartina, an invasive weed from China that was carried in the bilge water of passing ships. The spartina chokes out the sweetgrass used by Chinooks in making baskets. The sweet, small native oysters are nearly gone, too, muscled out by the vigorous Pacific oysters seeded by Japanese fishermen.

The village site is grown over by alder and underbrush. Phillip shows us the plots that belonged to his family, the Cultees, and the Chinook minister. Cabins without electricity or running water sat in each plot. By the 1930s, the Chinooks abandoned most of the cabins for land on the Quinault reservation or houses with electricity in Bay Center. The last Chinook to live in the village, an elderly bachelor and one of the few Indians who could drive a car in Bay Center at the time, abandoned his cabin in 1953. A run of honeysuckle over 70 years old trails through the underbrush and a few tufts of daffodils are nearby. We pass a community well, filled with rocks.

We also see the corner post of an old Shaker church. Many of the Indians at Bay Center were Shakers. Tony Johnson explains that Shakers believed people didn’t need Bibles, they could talk directly to God — a belief that dovetailed smoothly with American Indian tradition. Through shaking and ringing bells, the Indians received messages straight from heaven. One time in the 1930s, says Tony, a stranger came to town and things started disappearing. Phillip Hawk’s aunt Rosa lost her radio. She spent two days ringing her bell and communing with the spirits. Finally, she gathered a few people and gave them precise directions — go here, turn right, go there, look under the stump, and sure enough, there was Rosa’s radio and a cache of other stolen goods.

All day I hear stories of the Chinooks who lived in Bay Center: the boat maker whose wooden boats were tight and lithe; the boxer whose girlfriend wore a fur coat in all weathers and seasons; the Indians who drank whiskey behind the trees in Bush Park; the grandmother who talked to bears; the young Chinook hot-rodder who spun out in the swamp one night and the community, disapproving, let him spin and spin. The rusted pieces of his truck are halfway buried in the swamp even now.

*

The federal government only treats as Indian nations those tribes that are formally “recognized.” To become recognized, a tribe must submit exhaustive documentation. The tribe’s application and supporting documentation are reviewed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. If the application is approved, the decision is open for appeal for 90 days, after which the tribe is certified as recognized. Once recognized, a tribe can receive health care, fishing rights, access to federal grants, and in some cases, land.

The Chinook Nation is not federally recognized, which is a sore point with the Chinooks.

Council chairman Gary Johnson says that the tribe has always been recognized and shouldn’t have to apply for recognition. He points to the Halbert Decision of 1934 that granted land allotments to Chinooks and other tribal nations, and he notes that members of the tribe had received fishing rights for years. In 1967, the Bureau of Indian Affairs unilaterally delisted about 100 tribes, including the Chinooks, saying that they didn’t have reservations and therefore weren’t official tribes. (Later, the Sammish tribe claimed that the delisting was illegal and had its recognition re-instated.)  In 1978, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established a Branch of Acknowledgement and Research to approve the recognition of tribes, and the Chinooks began a 23-year process to regain recognition.

At last, on January 3, 2001, the Chinook Nation was formally re-recognized. The tribe was elated. On the 89th day of the appeal period, the Quinault Tribe filed an appeal, saying that the Chinooks hadn’t followed the correct procedures in applying for recognition. Gary says that over half of the Quinault reservation’s allotments are held by Chinooks, and that federal recognition of the Chinooks was a threat to Quinault control of the reservation and its resources, including its casino. The appeals court reaffirmed the Chinooks’ recognition, but the appeal still had to be approved once again by the Department of the Interior.

By now, President George W. Bush had succeeded President Bill Clinton and appointed a new Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton. Rather than simply approving the judge’s confirmation of the tribe’s recognition, the Secretary subjected the appeal to a full review. The tribe was on pins and needles, but became optimistic when Gary Johnson and his wife were invited to a luncheon at the White House to commemorate tribal involvement with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Two days later the tribe received word that their recognition was denied.

*

Cathlapotle is one of the richest archeological sites in the Pacific North-west. Staff at the Refuge are cagey about its exact location, to prevent looters from digging it up, and Fish and Wildlife Service archeologists are concentrated these days on other sites, such as nearby Bachelor Island, where the remains of a Chinookan village over 2,300 years old were recently discovered — a settlement pre-dating Julius Caesar.

In its heyday, though, Cathlapotle was some town: fourteen plankhouses, some more than 200 feet long. The houses were aligned in rows parallel with the river. Each house was divided into compartments separated by woven cedar hangings. Each compartment probably housed two families, meaning that a 200-foot long house could sleep 65 people. The door to each plank-house was an oval opening through the short end of the building. The family with the highest status lived furthest from the entrance, and slaves or lower status people lived near the door. The people of Cathlapotle made fires in sunken hearths running down the center of the house and dried fish from the house’s rafters.

I went there one day recently, guided by Fish and Wildlife archeologists and by Greg Robinson, the plasterer who is building the new plankhouse. We stand in a long trough in the weeds and swat at mosquitos. We are standing in what was once a plankhouse filled with men and woman and children and smoke and fish and laughter and talk. We are quiet. The air is sweet with the smell of the cottonwoods.

*

Construction is moving slowly on the new plankhouse. Federal environmental requirements stalled construction for a few months. The house will have to be handicapped-accessible. Refuge officials have told the tribe that they may not be able to build fires in the hearths, and the Chinooks may be forced to install a lighted sign saying THIS IS NOT AN EXIT over the main entrance, which is also the exit. The architect has quit the project in disgust.

The tribe stays with the project, though, helped especially by dozens of volunteers who come every week. Lots of them are retired loggers who skillfully carve posts and split logs three feet thick into even planks. On the day of the ceremony to set the first pole, a bunch of kids on a school field trip watch intently. As the post is lowered, a group of coyotes begins to howl, and the children quail.

*

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.