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In his search to rediscover the meaning of having an Indian background, Chuck Jackson discovered the older people sometimes suffered because they were Indian.
One of the purposes of the organization of the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which Jackson helped to found, is to seek ways for the Indian past to be preserved with pride.
The Cow Creek Band has been meeting regularly since the middle of the 1970's as a non-profit organization and there are records of tribal meetings in the 1920's and 1930's.
By Marguerite Taliaferro
How much of the old Umpqua Indian ways remain alive in Douglas County today? That a question being pursued by the Cow Creek Bank of Umpqua Indians headquartered in Canyonville. It's a question which tribal member Chuck Jackson has pondered much of his life.
The 45-year old historian, storyteller and craftsman is one-eighth Umpqua Indian, but he has raised close to his Indian background in Drew where generations of Cow Creek Indian families have always lived. Some of knowledge of the old Indian ways comes from the thing he grew up knowing as a child.
"I was 12 years old before I realized we were the only ones doing these things. I didn't know other people didn't go out and pulverize their dried meat between to rocks."
However, much of his Indian lore comes from the close questioning of relatives like his Indian grandmother, Dollie, who died at 90 and his uncle and great uncles.
Yes, Jackson can talk for hours on how the older Indians constructed nets and how the camas was dried after it was gathered in the spring.
But more important to us who have no Indian background are the words he has to say on understanding how the Indians thought and felt."There was a time for everything, " he says. "When the fish were running, that was the time to eat fish.
"There were also natural signs for everything the Indians needed to know. He says an Indian could tell the fish were ready to run from examining the size of the leaves of the white oak tree in spring.
A different sign would reveal the proper time to move to the higher altitudes to pick huckleberries. The Indians would watch carefully the white moths which flitted around the trees in the forest. As the summer progressed, the moths would fly higher and higher in the trees. "When they got to the top, the huckleberries would be ripe," he says.
The Indians also had different values from whites, who pay for all the food, clothes and housing which they use. Jackson illustrates this by talking about his grandmother.
She lived simply, he says. In the summertime, she slept outdoors. Her camp consisted of a fire ring, a stool, a bench and boards nailed to a tree for a kitchen.
The land where she camped belonged to a lumber company, he continues, but his grandmother didn't really understand that: "To her, you should be able to live wherever you wanted to."
The older people also had a hard time understanding money, he says, for of course the measure of an Indian was not this bank account but how easily he could convert the things around him into what he needed to live.
"My grandmother never went hunting with a knife, " he says. When she shot a deer, would find a stone lying nearby and start chipping at it to make a stone knife to skin the animal. (Jackson's own kit for making stone knives and arrowheads consists of a piece of bear hid to wrap the stone in and a deer antler which he uses to do the chipping.)
Jackson himself will often joke about being on "Indian time." On Indian time, an event happens not according to a schedule but when everyone is ready for it to happen.
Of the Indians, he says with amusement, "You have to remember they were my relatives and they weren't ambitious.
They took the easiest way to do things."
But those "easy ways" were often the smartest way.
"Do you want to know the lazy man's way to catch a deer?" asks Jackson. The Indians would follow a deer trail until they found a spot at the base of a steep bank where the deer had to leap across a creek. Once the correct spot was chose, the hunter would cut a stick about four and a half feet and fire-harden one end. The stick would then be shoved at a precise angle into the ground where hoof prints indicated the deer would land when they leaped across the stream. Then the hunter sits back and waits for nightfall.
However, if the hunter was inclined, he could also watch for deer in the meadows and run them down the trail toward the waiting sticks. According to Jackson, "If you're a good Indian, you'll get the deer right in the upper chest where there's a soft spot."
Jackson also has another observation to make about Indians: "Indians are bashful. They're not forward. If they know something someone else doesn't know and get pressured a bit to tell it, they'll back out. They feel you have to earn it."
An incident from his own life illustrates this. Jackson is a carver of pipes and small figures from a local white pipestone. The stone is worked when it first comes out the ground is soft, but it soon hardens on exposure to the air. Previously only his grandmother knew the quarry where the unusual white stone was located. Jackson would ask her many time s to show it to him, but should only reply. "Sometime I'll tell you."
Eventually she was satisfied he really wanted to know. However, she still would not reveal the location but directed him to a certain spot and told him the pipestone "is not far from here." By the length of time she dwelled on the word far," he knew the quarry was somewhere within a two-mile radius of the spot. He then hunted for the quarry until he found. His grandmother felt if he had to look for it, the pipestones would mean more to him.
She also had another admonition about the stone. "If you only use what you need," she them him, "it'll always be there. But if you get greedy, there'll come a time when the stone will no longer be there.
He still owns his grandmother's pipe. Toward the end of her life she smoked regular tobacco in the pipe, he says, but earlier she should would smoke a dried mixture of mint and a common weed" which we call Indian Tobacco." His grandmother was also an artist who made her own paintbrushes. The paintbrushes, one of which Jackson has preserved, consists of a quill which holds the animal hair to a stick which has been whittled to fit the quill. Badger hair was preferable for the brushes, says Jackson, but hog hair will do.
Here are some other comments that Jackson offers on Indians ways: On taking care of horses—"These Indians didn't have horses until later on, but they respected the horse. The horse was like an automobile is to us, only we don't think about it. They thought about it. If you take of it, it'll take care of you."
On praise – "I made my first Indian basket of reed and raffia in 1941. I showed it to an Indian woman. 'It's not good enough,' she said. 'Why?' I wanted to know. I thought I had done a good job. 'It won't hold water,' she said. Now, here's the point she was trying to make: She didn't say I did really good. Then I would never improve. They praised you for what you did but they left it so that the next time you'd try to do better."
On stories – Indian children were schooled by stories, hearing the stories over and over. Jackson can remember one story about Crater Lake. "The story goes something like this: The older people would 'Crater Lake is of the demons.' Then your answer would be 'Why?' They would reply, 'For the many seasons of the fire and smoke that went on. It made the rocks run like they were water.' (That's the lava, of course.) 'It ruined lakes and streams and ruined much of the hunting and fishing.'
Jackson says he recently read an article about the discovery of old lakebeds under the lava from the Crater Lake eruption. The article confirms what the old story has always said.
There were also songs to sing for the children, and he adds, "they tell me there were songs for all occasions."
On the past – Jackson also mentions one problem he has occasionally encountered in his search to rediscover the meaning of Indian background. The older people sometimes suffered because they were Indian.
They lived in a time when it was not fashionable to remember their Indian past. And even now, when probing about the past, Jackson says he asked, "Why not let sleeping dogs lie?"
But the organization of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, which Jackson helped found, is seeking a way for the Indian past to be preserved with pride.
The Band has been meeting regularly now for five or six years as a nonprofit organization. But, says Jackson, the members of the group have always kept in touch and records exist of tribal meetings that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.