Reflections From the Mouth of the River: Chinook Nation Stop

This is the first entry in a series of dispatches from the traveling party on the Spirit of the Waters Journey. You can find the original post here.

“Two hundred twenty-nine years and three hundred sixty three days” was the refrain from JoDe Goudy that reverberated through the Clatsop Community College gymnasium during the Astoria stop of the Spirit of the Waters Totem Pole Journey. Goudy, former Chairman of the Yakama Nation, was referring to the arrival of Euro-American Captain Gray to the mouth of the Columbia River, an inauspicious beginning of dramatic change and tragedy for the five Tribal nations who call Yakaitl-Wimakl home.

Within this refrain was an invocation to remember the richness and vitality of this place that existed prior to the arrival of Captain Gray and the domination-fueled destruction that would follow, both of the land and the people. As the indigenous people know, the Columbia River used to be so teeming with wild salmon that one could walk across the river on their backs. It was also once the case that fifty percent of the Spring Chinook that returned to the mouth of the Columbia came from the Snake River prior to the dams.

Representatives from Chinook Nation - the gracious hosts for Monday’s event – spoke to the crowd about attending oppressive boarding schools and being banned from speaking their native language as children, well into the 1950s and 60s. They spoke of the struggles of still fighting for federal recognition, a price being paid as retaliation for their ancestors choosing to remain in their rightful homeland. ‘Two hundred twenty-nine years, three hundred and sixty three days’ is really not that long ago, precisely because the waves made that day on the Columbia continue to reverberate into our present.

However, there was another message in Goudy’s refrain: If so much destruction can happen in such a short period of time, then we must recognize how much restoration can happen in the next two hundred twenty-nine years, three hundred and sixty three days. This recognition of a restored future and a healing past was made manifest throughout the event. It was brought alive in the many resonant songs shared by both Chinook tribal members and Lummi Totem Pole carvers Jewell and Doug James; and it was witnessed in the many Native youth that participated throughout the ceremony, including Angela Goudy, JoDe’s teenage daughter, who fought back tears and expressed with so much heart the importance of saving wild Salmon from extinction and the thriving future that both she and the Salmon deserve.