Indian Island Vigil 2005

The Indian Island Candlelight Vigil is held on the last Saturday of February, which this year fell on the actual date of the 1860 massacre on Indian Island: February 26. So when several hundred participants gathered at the west end of Woodley Island, Tribal Chair Cheryl Seidner recalled how the vigil started in 1992, as did two of the other organizers, Marylee Rohde and another woman whose name I heard only as "Ann", though I thought it might be Peggy Betsels.

This was Ann/Peggy's first vigil in ten years, since she had moved away from the area. She said the night before the meeting with Cheryl and Marylee where they would decide what to do to commemorate the Wiyot massacred on Indian Island, she had a "powerful dream" in which she asked for and got the approval of a council of angels.

Just as she was talking about this, people at the vigil began to hear a distant, insistent honking sound, becoming louder. It was the honking of geese, and we looked up to the cloudy sky in the last light to see several long connected lines of geese flying high above us out to the bay. Everyone stopped to watch.

It wasn't the first time that birds had flown in groups over the vigil, but in my experience this was the largest and most vocal presence. It was very impressive. It was impossible not to think of the souls going home to the island.

Especially when Cheryl announced that a deal had been struck with the city of Eureka for 60 more acres of Indian Island. Now that the Wiyot will take possession of almost the entire northern part of Indian Island, Cheryl sounded more hopeful than ever that soon they would be able to invite others to the island for the completion of the ceremonies brutally interrupted 145 years ago, "and the second part of the healing can begin."

During the vigil, Marylee Rohde spoke about how a small group of people "made a difference" when they began the vigils, and how this larger group continues to make a difference. A Native elder whose name I didn't catch reminded everyone that there were other massacres and oppressions in that terrifying time. He said that for example hundreds of Yurok and Tolowa were imprisoned on a small lighthouse island at Crescent City. A Yurok group of fine singers sang Brush Dance songs, which, the leader said, were appropriate because the Bush Dance is a ceremony of healing.

It was a cool night, but not as cold as some have been here. There was only a drop or two of rain, though it seemed to fall only when I had my knitted cap off during Cheryl's prayer.

Someone announced that Cheryl Seidner had been nominated Woman of the Year for District 1. She said that the award was really for everyone who together had accomplished so much. She remembered her parents and others who had come before.

The vigil ended as it has in recent years with Cheryl gathering as many Wiyot as could squeeze into the center of the group and singing with them her Coming Home song. The rest of the assembled took up the song.

I stood near a very old Native couple who were sitting together in two folding chairs, gripping small candles, their heads bowed for most the evening. I couldn't help thinking that their grandparents could have been alive when the last ceremony on Indian Island began, and told them stories of what had happened. The woman's chair was slightly farther ahead of the man's, and at a certain point I saw her reach her hand back to him without looking, and he took it, and they held hands like that for awhile.

Then I watched the speakers and the singers, and when I looked back to where the elders were sitting, they were gone.

Cheryl Seidner (Wiyot) and representatives of other local tribes on their way from Indian Island to the historic signing of an agreement with the city of Eureka that returned sacred land to the Wiyot. Kowinski photo 2004

The Place in Native

Here in the far northwestern region, we live along the Pacific Ocean coast, along rivers such as the Klamath and Eel, and among rugged mountains, vast forests, deep valleys and fertile flatlands. Redwood and Douglas fir, madrone and pines, oaks and maples fill our forests. Flowers and edible plants as well as those used in basketry once grew in great profusion, and are still present in some abundance. Multiple species of eagle, hawk, hummingbird, salmon, bear, wolf, fox, cat, dog, rabbit, squirrel, elk, deer and antelope were (and to some degree remain) present in daily life, as well as the more local and exotic species the region hosted, such as the alpine chipmunk, snowshoe rabbit, bighorn sheep and yellow-haired porcupine; the osprey, the wolverine, condor, and cougar.

All of this is directly reflected in foods, materials used for implements and shelter, stories, ceremony and many other ways. A lot of these influences are easy to see once they are pointed out, but a less obvious and more difficult one is the relationship to language.

Recently Cheryl Seidner (elected chair of the Wiyot tribe at Table Bluff) commented to me that the Wiyot don't have a word for "tree." They have words for many kinds of trees, in various states and stages. But they didn't conceptualize "tree" as a general or generic term, which tells us a lot about how specific and thorough their knowledge was, and also about relationship. The use of "tree" in non-Native language suggests they are objects rather than individuals or members of a species. For one thing, this makes it easier to categorize them as commodities, according to how profitable they are.

Here is some of what I learned from Julian Lang and others, in person and in my reading: The language of each tribe was derived from where they lived, and their experience in relationship with that land, with its creatures and weather, its plants and seasons. The places and their experiences formed the very structures of these language in ways that is difficult to understand for those raised with a language that has a very different history of development, such as English.

Native scholars have documented this aspect of Native languages. Often the words are based on sounds from the specific natural setting. (The name of a particular bird, for instance, may be based on the sound that bird makes.) The structures of words themselves reflect ways of relating to the world that is different from the world view that forms the basis for English words, sentence structure and even the use of tenses.

These differences matter, for they reflect entire world-views. Differences in the nature of these languages when compared to English have resulted in widely influential mis-translations of Native concepts, giving the world a false or incomplete idea of Native knowledge.
Traditional practices, traditional knowledge, aboriginal geography, material and non-material culture, the stories and mythology that are the core of our identity, are all intimately related and interdependent, so that they cannot really be separated. But the basis for all of them is language.

This is a reason that preserving and reviving their languages is so important to Native peoples of the North Coast. Some tribes have few if any speakers who learned the language as children. Apart from supporting our neighbors in their efforts to revive their languages, we have a second incentive: in comparing these languages to the English American language we have in common, we will learn more about being native to this place.

There is much more about the Native North Coast on the companion blog, North Coast Texts, including a Primer on local tribes with links; reporting on the recent return of Indian Island land to the Wiyot, and more on my own experiences and interests concerning Native peoples before I got to the North Coast. See how they compare with yours.

In the meantime, some questions you might address in the Comments below could include: if you are non-Native, what were your first experiences and impressions concerning Native peoples and cultures on the North Coast? What do you, as either non-Native or Native, believe are the special contributions of our indigenous North Coast Native cultures to how we all can become native to this place?