The Ceremony at the Heart of "Salmon Nation"
About 18 months ago, an
extraordinary woman came to my home on
the Rogue River in southern Oregon. At
age 83, Agnes Baker Pilgrim is the
oldest living Takelma Indian and chair
of the International Council of 13
Indigenous Grandmothers. “Grandma Aggie”
had recently returned from Dharamsala,
India, where the grandmothers met with
the Dalai Lama. Using a satellite link,
they simultaneously addressed some 3,000
environmentalists gathered for the
annual Bioneers Conference in Marin
County, California, where Spencer Beebe
was outlining Salmon Nation. If one
person represents the heart of Salmon
Nation, it is Grandma Aggie, keeper of
the Takelma Sacred Salmon Ceremony.
Grandma Aggie’s bloodline is to the
chiefs and medicine women of the Takelma,
but she was born about 200 miles north
of the Takelma homeland on the Rogue, at
the reservation of the Confederated
Tribes of Siletz, where her people were
herded at gunpoint during the 1850s.
Many were killed during that “Trail of
Tears,” and her tribe lost its identity.
Among other things, she’s been a logger,
a singer, a bouncer, a jail barber, and
a stock-car racer. She’s been married
three times, given birth to six
children, and has 18 grandchildren, 27
great-grandchildren, and the most
beautiful great-great-granddaughter one
can imagine. She has adopted countless
more. The Siletz consider her a “living
treasure.” She considers herself a
grandmother to the world.
Grandma Aggie has witnessed her
proud history all but destroyed. She has
seen her warriors, unable to fight back,
struggle with myriad physical
manifestations of oppression. She has
buried husbands and sons. Yet somehow
she grows stronger in her mission to
heal her people and the planet. In 1970
she took the Takelma name Taowhywee
(Morning Star). She then left Siletz
because Takelma means People of the
River, and her river is the Rogue. In
1994 she helped re-create the Salmon
Ceremony on National Park Service land
along a tributary to the Rogue called
the Applegate River. In a ceremony in
2005, the Maoris added the traditional
three vertical tattoos to her chin, and
to the chin of her daughter Nadine.
Grandma Aggie came to visit me in
2007 because my friend Thomas Doty and I
were fairly sure that the waterfall at
the base of my property was the actual
site of the ancient Salmon Ceremony, a
place once known as Ti’lomikh. According
to a Takelma creation story, the Great
Dragonfly Daldal noticed bodies floating
down the Rogue River from Ti’lomikh.
Daldal shot an arrow straight into the
air, which then came down and split him
in two, creating another being. Daldal
and his new brother then flew upriver,
creating the plants and animals we
recognize today. When Daldal reached
Ti’lomikh, he gave the humans a ceremony
to remind them that the lives of the
people, the river, and the salmon are
forever intertwined. This happened
before Mount Mazama blew up and formed
Crater Lake, 7,000 years ago. Ti’lomikh
was a place of peace and the center of a
story older than the Abrahamic
religions.
Owning the land that contains the
path to someone else’s sacred site is a
potentially awkward situation,
especially when the land was originally
taken by brute force and dishonesty. But
when I stepped ashore from my
white-water kayak eight years ago, I
knew only that this land was for sale
and that it had been ripped up by gold
miners. I was hurting from the breakup
of my family, and I felt ripped up as
well. This land and I spoke to each
other. For six years I lived in Ashland,
half an hour away, working evenings and
weekends to restore the health of the
land, to heal its wounds. And I paid off
the mortgage as fast as I could so that
no one could ever take the land from me.
When I heard about the Salmon
Ceremony, it was like learning about the
history of my adopted child. I
commissioned Doty, a historian and
storyteller, to write about it. I
learned that Takelma sacred sites were
natural places. There was a large
village on both sides of the river, but
the centerpiece of the site was a
natural stone seat at the base of the
falls called the “story chair,” where
the village elder would wait to net the
first salmon of the spring run. In the
days it took for the first fish to dry
in the sun, no other fish would be taken
in order to allow the salmon to make
their way upstream. After this first
fish was dried, it was divided among the
people, and divers returned its bones
and skin to the bottom of the pool below
the falls. Doty learned about the
ceremony at Ti’lomikh in field notes
archived at the Smithsonian by a
linguist named John Peabody Harrington.
For 20 years, Doty had been looking for
the story chair to prove that my land
was indeed the site of the Salmon
Ceremony.
When Grandma Aggie came to visit,
she sat in my living room and listened
patiently as Doty read from Harrington’s
notes about the story chair. After he
finished, there was a pause; then
Grandma Aggie informed us that Doty had
been reading about Harrington’s meeting
with her father, George Baker, who came
down from Siletz. She had a photo that
Harrington had taken of her father on a
rock in the river, but until that moment
she hadn’t fully appreciated what it
meant. She entrusted me with a copy of
the photo, and a couple of weeks later,
I put on a wet suit and life jacket and,
holding the photo in a plastic bag, I
waded the swift channel toward the falls
to find the chair, hidden in plain
sight.
Shortly thereafter, Grandma Aggie
got to work restoring the Salmon
Ceremony to Ti’lomikh, which first
required a cultural officer from Siletz
to authenticate the find. When Robert
Kentta came to visit, he had no doubts
about the find but was not enthusiastic,
especially because the proposed ceremony
would be open to the public. He worried
that the site would be vandalized. “But
why?” I asked.
“My great-great grandfather was shot
by miners,” he replied, exasperated. He
pointed upriver toward Table Rock.
“There was a massacre up there.” As we
spoke, it became clear that all the land
is sacred and alive with stories, which
have been consciously and systematically
obliterated, along with the tribal
languages. In the cultural officer’s
estimation, this sort of effort to bring
back the old stories was as likely to
rub salt into old wounds as it was to
heal anything.
Some of my neighbors were equally
worried. “The Indians will take your
land,” they told me.
But Grandma Aggie is a force of
nature, and when she is moving forward,
there is really no option but to move
with her. Native Americans began to drop
by to scout the site for fire pits and
camping. As the date of the Salmon
Ceremony approached, a lodge builder
named Gary Vanderwall and I waded out to
the island nearest the chair and found a
circle of sand amidst the boulders,
perfect for a sweat lodge. Smack in the
center of the circle, Vanderwall found a
stone tool. All around us were lava
rocks from Mount Mazama, the sacred
stones known as “grandfathers” that are
heated in the fire for a sweat lodge. As
a pair of osprey circled overhead, there
was a palpable sense of taking part in
something that had happened here
thousands of times before.
THE DAY OF THE CEREMONY
The heart of the Salmon Ceremony is the
dive from a rock outcropping above the
story chair into the pool below the
falls. Every few years a rafter drowns
in this pool. But diving into a flow of
2,000 cubic feet per second to reach a
bottom was a rite of passage, done
because the survival of the people
through the winter depended on the
salmon.
The day before the ceremony, we put
a man in a life jacket, tied to a rope,
in the pool — and the force of the water
against the tight rope sucked him under.
We were very lucky to pull him back, and
we learned that the divers would have to
leap beyond a submerged rock outcropping
that extended several feet into the
pool.
By Friday night a couple of hundred
people were camped along the river in
tents and teepees, and on Saturday
morning, hundreds more arrived as
Grandma Aggie and two of her daughters
began cooking three wild salmon on
redwood planks around an alder fire. The
ceremony and the weekend meals for
everyone were free — paid for by the
Confederated Tribes of Siletz, the Cow
Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, and
Grandma Aggie’s many friends.
As Grandma Aggie cooked, the divers
and I did a sweat-lodge ritual of
purification led by a Sun Dancer named
Randy Austin from the Confederated
Tribes of Siletz. Four teenage boys
prepared to return some of the salmon
bones and skin into the slack water away
from the falls, and two other young men
and I prepared for our dive into the
pool.
A sweat lodge is a powerful ceremony
for cleansing and centering. To sweat
beside the falls in a ceremony led by
someone baring chest scars from the
hooks of the Sun Dance was something
different for me. They sang and prayed
in their people’s language. I thought of
my former tenant, my age, who drowned
here two years earlier. I remembered
being trapped under the falls in my
kayak, thinking I would never see my
children again. I thought of my children
now, who really didn’t like all the
people camped on our land. I wondered if
any of this would actually help the fish
or the people. I wondered about the
rocks in the river and was really glad
that the young Native Americans would be
diving first.
As luck would have it, our local
search-and-rescue team was doing its
annual white-water rescue training. For
the first ceremonial dive in 150 years,
we would have a dozen firefighters in
wet suits on hand to pull us out.
Around noon we proceeded back to the
fire pit, where Grandma Aggie was
slicing salmon. In silence we ate it
with the others, then put the bones and
skin into a beautiful ceremonial bowl
carved by a man named Gray Eagle. Our
hands were covered first in cedar
boughs, then in remains of the fish; we
were blessed by Grandma and, to the
sound of drums, we proceeded back to the
falls.
First to dive into the calm waters
were the four boys. They left the salmon
bones at the bottom of the river as they
prayed for the return of the salmon.
When they returned to us, they were
radiant. Finally, we three older divers
helped each other cross the swift
channel to the rock of the story chair
above the churning pool.
The first to dive looked like an
athlete. He knelt before the chair for a
long time before climbing up to the rock
outcropping for the first ceremonial
dive in 150 years. A natural leader, he
dove and disappeared. He was down a long
time. Maybe he’s reached the bottom, I
thought. Finally, with a whoop of
triumph, he emerged downstream, narrowly
avoiding being swept over the rocks. The
second diver was more hesitant, jumping
feet first and coming up quickly. And
then it was my turn. Saying a prayer, I
dove, plunging fast into bright, clear
water that bubbled like champagne. In
the sheer bliss of the moment, I forgot
what I was supposed to do. Then, shocked
by how fast I was moving and how deep
the water was, I regained focus, let go
of my offering, and swam as hard as I
could to the surface and up to the hands
of my fellow divers.
The only people who were not
completely happy were those on the
search-and-rescue team, who had looked
forward to fishing us out. Victorious,
we smoked a ceremonial pipe with Randy
Austin and returned to the gathering,
where we were blessed by Grandma Aggie.
And somehow during these proceedings, I
seem to have been adopted by her family,
who began planning an even bigger Salmon
Ceremony for 2008.
One postscript: Although hundreds of
Native Americans had camped out on my
land for two days and nights, when they
left, the land was cleaner than before
they arrived. The only new additions
were two sweat lodges and a pair of bald
eagles that perched for the rest of the
week in a cottonwood above Grandma
Aggie’s cooking fire. I’d never seen
them before.
Stephen Kiesling is editor-in-chief of S&H.