Riverplaces as Sacred Geography: The Columbia Wild and Free

Presented by William Layman, author of Native River: The Columbia Remembered

Part of the Humanities Fellows Sense of Place Seminar Series

Synopsis by Nancy Chaney, Assistant

Time: Thursday March 6, 2003, 3:30-5:30

Place: Whitewater Room, University of Idaho Commons

About 40-45 people attended the presentation, including Fellows Kenton Bird, Mary DuPree, & Rodney Frey, seminarians Rula Awwad-Rafferty, Anne Marshall, Nick Sanyal, Bill McLaughlin, Natalie Kreutzer, Julia Parker, Gary Reed, Barbara Andersen, and J.D. Wulfhorst, assistant Nancy Chaney, and members of the general public and campus community, including faculty, retired faculty, staff, and students. Bob Greene, owner of Bookpeople was available for book sales and Glen Lindeman, Editor of WSU Press, and Mary Read, Assoc. Director of Publications at WSU, were also present.

Kenton Bird offered preliminary remarks and introductions, and reiterated the group’s interest in the ways watersheds define place.

Author Bill Layman lives in Wenatchee, where he has a mental health counseling practice and is involved in playback theater, wherein actors engage in a sort of impromptu mirroring of audience members’ stories. He has found the process to be therapeutic, insightful, and a means of strengthening connectedness, for both the actors and their audiences. (The troupe solicited personal stories from residents around Chelan, one year after wildfires threatened their communities, for example.)

Layman’s first exposure to the Columbia River came at age 8, with a school assignment to write about an unfamiliar, faraway place. He lived in Ohio at the time, so Washington seemed to suit the criteria. When he and his wife eventually moved to Wenatchee in 1979, he was both curious and troubled to see large pictograph-decorated basalt boulders ironically displayed in front of a locomotive, a symbol of conquest, and behind a barbed wire fence in town. He wanted to learn more about the Columbia River place from which the boulders had come and about the people who crafted the pictographs. Layman views it as his calling to “have it be a remembered river rather than a dismembered river.” He set about doing that through a dual slide projector presentation, a videotape (ca. ~ 1939) of the free-flowing Columbia, an audio recording of the rapids, and his carefully researched, heartfelt narrative. Merging carefully matched slide images of sections of the Columbia before dams with images of the same sections after was a powerfully effective complement to Layman’s words.

Until three or four generations ago, and for 450 or so generations before that, populations along the Columbia were almost exclusively Native American. According to Wanapum tradition, Creator took Sun Man and his light away from the people. “Maybe we’ve forgotten the song,” they thought. One child remembered one of the words. Someone else remembered a phrase. Eventually, the people reassembled the whole song. Creator then set forth the great commandment that they should, “Sing and dance that you may remember.” To those people, all life began on an island, now inundated, at Priest Rapids.

According to Layman, “The most important experiences in our lives involve all of our senses.” His explanation of photographs of Rock Island were vivid and multi-sensory: Hot, windy, canyon walls carried the sounds of the rapids 15-miles; it was “a place with a tremendous amount of energy,” with a great fishery, and “enormous excitement.” The area served as a winter village for Plateau peoples and was renown as a spiritual place for vision quests and prayerful contemplation.

Tying the Sense of Place thread of imagination into his presentation, Layman remarked that, “It takes an imaginative leap to imagine rapids and waterfalls where there are none now. He spoke of connections between landforms and traditional stories, and provided an example of using imagination as the fuel and Coyote and Crawfish as the vehicles to convey valuable messages through storytelling. Coyote and Crawfish were in a race on an island in the Columbia, and for most of the race, Crawfish was firmly latched to the end of his rival’s tail. Each time Coyote looked back, he was astounded to see Crawfish so near. Finally, as they approached the finish line, Crawfish gave a firm pinch, causing Coyote to flinch and flick his tail, launching Crawfish over the finish line to victory. The story emphasizes that in life, it’s not just speed that counts. One must use cunning and special talents to succeed. Landforms linked to this story and others serve as reminders of their messages.

The dialog between indigenous peoples and newcomers began in 1811, when David Thompson became the first white person to travel the entire length of the Columbia River. At Kettle Falls, Layman said, 70-100# Chinook, sometimes numbering 50 at a time, resembled flying birds as they leaped up Lower Kettle Falls. He cited archaeologist David Chance as the source of the statistic that at one time, one million fish were caught at the falls per year. Now, he says, pools of water and silence have replaced the “thunderous noise at the waterfalls.”

Layman marveled at the irony of a 1941 article in National Geographic that celebrated Grand Coulee Dam’s obliteration of ugly basalt chasms along the Columbia. Humans’ ability to bring so much power to so many households was a greatly admired accomplishment. Using 20 tons of dynamite to blast away rapids to improve navigation, etc. has been deemed, “river improvement work.”

As part of his playback theater efforts, Layman interviewed a 94-year-old man who lived 5-miles south from the falls when he was a young boy. One of the man’s most powerful memories from his youth involved going with his mother to the falls, where she took some photographs. Some time later, an Indian woman came to their door to ask whether the photographs included any of her own son, who had drowned on the afternoon that they were there. Contrary to the expectation that she would be angry that the camera had captured her son’s spirit or somehow been responsible for his death, the Indian woman had come to try to retrieve an image of her son, so that she could see him again. Layman reminded his audience that once the elders are gone, no one will be alive who lived those stories or remembers the river as it was.

Salish-speaking elders recall some 400 place-names for the Columbia, it was such an integral part of their lives, their heritage, and their spiritual being. Sense of Place seminarian Rula remarked on the concept of having the water that we drink become part of us at the cellular level, and considered that in some ways, people of the river may have been more sacred themselves.

Layman closed his presentation by telling the group about his fascination with sturgeon. They have been known as sacred beings, he said, teachers themselves, and “Water Monster’s pet.” How cool is that?, he wanted to know. Oh, and those pictographs on the boulders behind the barbed wire? They have been respectfully relocated at the local Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center.