Camas Meadows with Randy Lewis

hey everybody welcome it's great to see you all thanks for joining us we're uh uh in camis meadows north of ellensburg west of wenatchee and i'm with a very important friend randy lewis randy you want to say hi to these guys right hello randy lewis we're here in the land of the wenatchee and fascosa people and at a very special spot in time the special spot we call which means white these white uh white mountains and old timers called yak what you're looking at used to be in the heart of the earth and then the creator pushed it up he brought it up and with it he brought an energy and a power and for thousands of years our speaking people are they would come here i guess kind of like recharging your batteries recharging your phone they would come here because their their power their metaphysical power their energy their their chomach their meriam was tied a lot of them it was tied to this place my great-great-great aunt my great-grandmother they they were connected to it and they would have to come up here and when they came up they would take bits of this of this stone with them and they used it for you know it was it was both um a what you would call a metaphysical energy but they also used to clean their buckskin over here out on this side you've got a white almost a chalky like yup over here it's more uh what you would call it's more like rock yeah but over here it's a little chalkier and they used to clean their white buckskin dresses and their leggings and their clothing along here i just want to share with you that these mountains right here were at what do you call these in in english wenatchee mountains the wenatchee mountains yeah um they're old uh great grandma said these were not like those mountains over there these were not like the cascades she said when when the ice covered everything they did not cover here so that the plants the vegetation and the animals they grew up i mean they evolved in a very very how did you put that they're uh they're isolates yes they grew up as as floral and fauna isolates a weird little island almost yeah it's a pretty good sized island when you think about it yeah going down to the clockham yeah and over into the kittitas well it's it's a it's a pretty good land base uh but it's old and how do they know how did they know it was old well because that's how connected they are they may not have been here 800 000 years ago they may not have been here a million years ago but there were things that were here this power was here this energy was here the the ancient there's old there's things much older than we are that still live here and they live in this world that we cannot see and i don't know whether you can understand it i think people from from different parts of the world will share that we'll share them sorry i got distracted by annoying i thought we were going to have a visitor right now from the netherworld well that's where you were standing in it yeah we're standing in yes on we're standing right at the edge and my my mom interpreted it once she said there's there's people there's things here that you don't understand and you don't believe that that exist right around the corner of your mind they're there there are people and there are beings that live in this world of half shadows and we're we're on this energy line right now where two worlds actually are coming together right here in this uh it's that world it's that it's a dividing line wow of ancient and real ancient and so are the beings that live here they live in a world that we can't see and i'm i know i'm not making any sense but i think i can feel it i can feel it and you can feel it here when you're here or you go out there you can feel that energy and when actually people occupied this whole area the pascrossa people and they drew the people and the land are one they drew their energy they drew their mental health they drew their physical health from this land um there's i remember when we were kids grandma would have us eat dirt eat dirt and when we were up up here in this area she would find a wet spot or she would pour water into it then she'd have us eat that that clay she and grandpa said i asked grandpa my grandpa jerome ashlachen why does grandma make us eat dirt and he said you know there's not nobody in this world that comes as close to you as and this land as we are we spraying from this land and for thousands of years we've occupied it so there's nothing that's as close to the chemical composition of the soil as we are and the animals that live here so they would make us they would have us and then he said there's medicine in that there's power there's energy there's medicine in that soil so we would eat it and he said that'll help you physically it helps you mentally it helps you and if you get out of line in public we'll just call you a dirt eater don't complain about this food remember you eat dirt [Laughter] you didn't use the word magnetic but you inferred magnetic what was well there's an energy here uh folks used to say that they came here and you could feel you could feel a power you could feel an energy and they never said magnetic because i don't think that really was in their thinking right but it sounds like it that there's a there's a power that you can feel and the only thing i can equate it to is magnetism when you got two magnetic poles going at it right and they would feel that and many times young people were brought here if a person was displayed potential and power they were brought here and they were placed at different they were brought out onto these very very private areas and then the old indian doctors you know you know the the wisened ones would leave them there and they would go and they would camp elsewhere and they would leave them there until the person had received a vision it was like a vision quest a knowledge quest a spirit quest it's fingers to god it's fingers to the creator it's like the it's like when i when the creator pushed up the hands of god is basically how we how we view that and so they're they're special in that regard and when these were done when this happened there were there was other life there were many things there was a period of giants you know uh giant animals we say trinito is one of the last carryovers choi naito you call bigfoot those are some of the from the last era and before that was specimens people okay that came from this very area here where you see the the split in the rock that's where that's where specsmen and his kind came from they were born they're the oldest non-how would you say it they're the oldest form of life outside of fire rock water wind then came specimen so he was he and his his kind he and his people they were the first and they were the most powerful and from there they spread out from these fishers they came from and so we know from our old stories that power is everywhere around us but some some areas are real vortexes of energy i don't you know i don't entreat people to come up here because it's very dangerous just focus just bring your camera there and show it yeah this is what the land is like it's dangerous it's dangerous it's unforgiving you get poor cell reception up here so anything happens to you you just lay there and die with the timber rattlers crawling around on you well you really don't want people to come up here a lot of timber rattlers up here just fair warning okay gotcha i gotcha so welcome to our world welcome to the world of the wenatchee to the paschosa people this is just a bit of our of a huge domain actually we we didn't have a huge domain we were you know when it comes to we didn't need one because basically everything we needed as a people you look here you turn around i was showing you earlier this flower the white blossom plant that to us is a medicine and i'm not going to tell you how we use it because otherwise it'll disappear but to us it's a medicine what do you call this we call it husk which means it'll kill you in more ways than you can die [Laughter] like a timber rattler uh-huh welcome then right next to it is buck brush buck brush it grows everywhere but here they like the the medicinal powers of it they took this they dried it they powdered it up and they used it for wounds as an antiseptic but it was used as baby powder and another form of it that grows down at camus meadows it's got different chemical properties to it and they used that for like the baby's umbilical cord when the baby was born they would put that powder on it and they kept infections but it also made the the uh belly button go in instead of pushing out and so you know i had one brother with a with an audi and grandma goes he was doctored with white man's medicine inferior medicine but all around us yeah there's nothing here in this world in our landscape here that we did not use everything except for the cheatgrass and that came in with y'all yes it did like to apologize for that yeah the cheatgrass and the um there's a couple other items that i saw here oh the russian thistle uh-huh but everything here we exploited we used it was medicine it was food as my grandad kashlachan would say he could look at a place and it was the it was the pantry it was the pharmacy and it was the hardware store all in one spot all in one place we got everything so our area didn't have to be big because we got so much the rivers were you know loaded with salmon the mountains the hills around here there were types of you know there's bighorn sheep lemur your mule deer mountain goats mountain sheep grizzly bears black bears all of the apex predators they're all here everything that could kill you and eat you are right here you didn't have to travel far now to take advantage of this spot because this is a rare opportunity to be here with you you've conveyed how important this particular spot is but i'm having a hard time visualizing is there a uh a shaman that's up here or is there just individual families or like a group no it's let's get away from the whole shamanic that's you know that's that's white men's okay uh yeah uh we you know it's our we you know if we were to break it down we'd say we just say indian doctors okay and when they it wasn't necessarily an indian doctor everybody had every family had their their elders that were knowledgeable in song in dream in story and history yeah and they would accompany the the younger person up here and generally it was just those two or maybe there was three of them they would place them and the person the young person was fasting from food from water they gave them a little water that you you drank during the morning and then at night but only a sip from each time and during that period they were if they were so gifted a vision would come and many other things gifts of of knowledge were imparted to them and every every plant has got a song every plant has got a spirit every plant has got it's got energy it's got it's got to spark that the creator imbues in all things that were created and so your my medicine my power could have been chakalosa it could have been kamus it could have been itchwa the black canvas and somebody says that's got a power oh it's darn right it's way older than we are it's known how to exist in the land that gives you very very little opportunity to exist and all of these plants every plant here one plant that we may dig can be a food in the springtime and a couple weeks later it becomes a medicine then in the fall time it's deadly poison so trial and error i guess you don't want to you don't want to eff around with these they're a lot more serious there's a lot more to these so i don't have qualms about sharing this much information i won't tell you how things are used sure because uh that's kind of taboo i understand and and besides you know uh dupont and dow will be in here digging it all up as far as central washington is concerned can you think of other places that are similar to this as far as the uniqueness and the quest type oh come on you've you've been moses cooley okay oh my okay my god some of the areas around here this is just this is one of many yep one of many lind cooley moses cool all the coolies grant grand coulee dry falls they've all got just incredible antiquity to them timelessness to it and you can always tell them because they're inconquerable you don't see much going on around them as far as human activity why because they're too powerful it's like this somebody's going to say let's do a zipline i will shoot you yeah i will sit here and target practice on people now for you personally you came up here earlier in life to this very spot before you were born before i was born yeah yeah actually it was over there it was over there was we started out over there then we came over here and i was with people that were born in the 1870s 1880s wait a minute yeah my auntie lucy she was born in 1884 my great-grandpa he was born 1879 and and they brought you here in the 1950s yeah i came with i came with my granddad that was his that was his father his great aunt and there was one other old-timer that was with us and but i think i think he might have been from the coast because i don't recall he's i don't recall his his name and connection to us but that's another thing is that you had people coming up and down the the wenatchee river yeah from the sock seattle from snoqualmie that were coming through and their ancestry may have stemmed from here so it's a pilgrimage for them to have come here you were how old when you came up in the late 50s 40 45 something like that but i was old enough you're old enough and do you remember the occasion did they say hey we were going to take we were down here we were down at uh we were down at camus meadows and we were doing digging stockholm which is indian carrots okay about this time of the year a little later just a little later sure and uh my grandfolks decided we should go up there and say hello they would always go up wherever we were at they would bring offerings of food of personal possession and they would leave them in thanks sometimes they would bring indian tobacco and they would smoke and they would make make a gift and what better place can you find that's right to talk to the creator than right here you can hear him in the air oh this is a real treat i really appreciate it randy walk down memory lane yeah i just want to do a shout out to my brother ernie williams and roberta they are both uh isolated right now them and their families are all all suffering from the effects of covet 19 and i told them that i was going to come to the mountains and say hello from the mountains to them so hey y'all thinking about you guys yes get well get strong i hope this is this is medicine for you because we're in one of the most medicinally metaphysically powerful areas in our domain thank you and it's named after the blue blue star canvas and this is ancient this is so old this is where in the springtime the late spring our people the wenatchee people would come up here and this was like the the great gathering the people of chiefs were up here the the ipa family the uh oh wistahans yakshums all these great people the haremelts they all came up here and they had their camps all around throughout the meadow here then you had people come over from the kittitas yeah uh beshwanapums they would come over and they would camp here oh old time but now these yellow pines have grown but it's the quaken aspen it seems to take over they used to traditionally burn it after they're right now indian carrots are growing all over out there everywhere you walk there's indian carrots wild carrots are called stockholm and so our people would be up here usually gathering those but it's so bloody hot and that ground is just like concrete right now yeah do you remember a very different looking forest because when you saw it as a younger man there was a lot of natural burning yeah and now there hasn't been any natural burning you don't have any of this undergrowth over here you didn't have any of that uh quaken aspen but there's there's weeds out here now there's all kinds of weeds there's um what's it called canary grass which is a type of reed which it's natural but the thing is is that it's it's not good for animals to eat because it's it's got uh dmt hallucinogens in it you'll end up with a mad cow disease you end up with a mad wife for letting your animals graze on it that's a that's a decent shot is we're still just looking at a portion yeah it used to be one and a quarter miles wide i think by two and a half miles long but you can see the wonderful clear cutting that's gone on up on top yeah magical it's magical yeah it's magical how those trees just disappear i'm starting to get pissed moral outrage that's what we need more of even some immoral outrage amoral i don't care and you can see the uh you can see the there's there's springs that pop up all over out there and they form those little oasis of quake and aspen and water birch these thorns in northern shrike they're called a butcher bird because they catch little animals like mice and chipmunks then they bring them up and they impale them they hang them on here all right and they'll hunt all day and every now and then you'll come across a bush just loaded with these like little ornaments and the the desiccated ones that he didn't get back in time they're just like the mummy road show and this here this crunch this is the black moss or the black lichen old man's beard it's the only time i have a beard looks good and we bake this we clean it we we soak it then we bake it and then it it all bakes down and congeals into a slab licorice and yeah it really is just i don't understand the biology of this is this your hair you're around or is this a it's so dry here why is this stuff even here like i just did and chew on it get some saliva in it and you can and you'll see how it nice huh it is it's got good texture nice crunch yeah that doesn't mean i want everybody up here grazing on it see here's a tree of it your name again for the moss crunch clinch checker mallow yeah they have that it's called uh chum stick mallow blew it mallow okay it grows here nowhere else in the world wenatchee larkspur nowhere else in the world right here grows in a five squat about a five square mile area we're looking at food this here beautiful look at that little feathery yeah yam pow yum pow sounds very uh japanese but it's a it's a form of uh what do i say fennel okay caraway oh you got another edible delight yeah this is prime time for those mm-hmm i'm out of sight milo and shea french you know service berry service terry very woody like a carrot and it's got it it's got a similar taste to carrot so what time of year was the biggest gathering here was july actually a lot of people stayed up here and dug then other people went down and they fished okay other people were hunting this camp was alive with many activities hunters would be out hunting people would be down on the river fishing then coming up with their fish and they'd have their dry they'd some of them would have dry racks up here or they'd be drying it and bring it up here and then they would break it down and package it and get ready for the long haul over into the kittitas or the clay alum area cut that work yeah yeah yeah yeah no hard seed got it last year when i was here we were standing here and it was a little moisture and i looked down and there's a projectile point laying there so i went down and i pulled it up and i brought it over to a friend of mine from central washington state university and he took a look at it and it was what i thought it's it's an archaic point about 4 000 years old that gives you an idea between four and eight thousand years old so that gives you an idea of how long they've been utilizing this area think of that yep patterns of culture have been here soon since before the beginning of time watch your step so it goes up to there to that house then cuts up another half a mile or more why is there a house on sacred land uh because it's church i don't know because there's squatters i don't know i church you know church camp remember when we were driving over there and we saw the sign yep it gets really damp here probably because the snow is like this deep in the wintertime it's like four feet deep out here what's our elevation did you suggest about 2600 about 24 to 2600 feet this is probably about 26 because i see a mix of boreal trees you have uh white pine which grows a little higher than your dog pine some lodgepole so you're up there you're probably close to closer to three thousand twenty eight hundred foot you're taller you can reach the taller we dry these then when we want to use them we just rehydrate them in water make pies out of them they're really good pie when you wash them that little dried top breaks off that's buckthorn wow right in front of me my eyes i sincerely hope that you enjoyed this program on camas meadow randy lewis nichola the place of the camus here in the meadow and those amazing white spires of rock nearby thanks for joining us we'll see you next time

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 17,765

Keywords: Nick Zentner, Camas Meadows, Wenatchee Mountains, Randy Lewis, Nick From The Field

Id: nCDYVVHJc_w

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020