Native Storytelling Festival: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves

may know this weekend we're celebrating storytelling storytelling is a great way that native cultures pass on their tradition their history their lessons their morals to the young ones so that they can pass it on to their children and grandchildren and we've had storytelling in many different ways this weekend some of you may have picked up a comic book at the information table that's how the chickasaw nation is reaching out to youth with their stories we had yesterday a totem pole from the simsian people dedicated and unveiled you may have seen that in the very large potomac atrium that tells the story of a young chief and an eagle and we also had a dance group here yesterday from the simsian people and today we had dance group from the saint labre indian school in montana so there's lots of ways that you can see that native peoples tell their story so today we have for you an elder from the qiyu tribe mr chris morgenroth and chris has been telling stories for a long time and passing on his culture in many different ways through carving and through being kind of a culture bearer for his people to visitors to the reservation to government agencies to educators and to children and families so you will get some insight into a couple things today who are the quilliot people where do they live what do they do what's their culture like some of their traditional stories and then also any of you that are kind of up on pop culture may know that the quilliuts are featured in a certain way in some of the twilight books and movies so chris will be able to address who are the quillutes in reality versus who are the quilliots in hollywood so there will be an opportunity to hear about some of that as well if you've not seen i would recommend that you please check out on the second floor there's a new exhibit about the quillia people and wolves versus werewolves related to uh that movie series and that book series it kind of gives you a deeper and broader picture picture rather of who the quillio people are so you don't just get movie stereotypes about werewolves and vampires there's much more to the culture than that and like i said you'll get to see what's real and what's not real also if you've not had a chance to see i would recommend that you get to see the horses exhibit on the third floor song for a horse nation celebrates those cultures that have had horses as a long part of their culture just a couple theater etiquette rules that we ask you to please be respectful of we ask that if you have a cell phone you please turn it off so that it does not ring during the storytelling there is no videography permitted there is no audio recording permitted you are able to take a photo if you do it judiciously and rarely and do not interrupt your neighbor from hearing the storytelling by lots of clicking so with all that said i really want to thank you for being here and i ask you to please join me in giving a very warm welcome to mr chris morgenroth of the quilliot culture in my language that means good morning at home i told my people a long time ago hot j because a lot of them were forgetting our language and i say that anytime any day any day of the week midnight morning afternoon hot j and they all caught on so they knew at least two words and quilliot hot stay good morning and after i got to teaching the language in some of the classes that uh it grew a little bit more but it was the younger people who were more receptive to the language teaching and some of the kids that were in high school were less receptive and uh but i developed a way to teach the language to them where they were jumping up and down and i'll oh like i can do what i can do and i can do it so i uh when i retired nobody else was teaching that language and so uh they don't really have a language teacher there anymore they they're using the books and the dictionaries and and the cds and the dvds and things like that because we have all of the all of those uh things to work with the school and and the teachers are uh are willing to to utilize those instruments and they would like to have me come back and i asked him i saw could you make one day a week available for me to teach the quality language because we don't want to lose our language i i always said that uh when anybody loses their language they lose their identity and we don't want to do that at our school we teach every aspect of our culture we we do the basket weaving the drumming singing dancing uh the traditional foods the medicines the everything we we have to learn from from everybody that still knows how to teach the various things that they know and we have a lot of basket weavers and i help them go out to get their material to bring back home to help them maintain their their needs for the basket weaving and things like that so we we still try to keep our culture alive and to teach it to others as well and i grew up in a home where my mother left home actually when i was eight months old and i regretted that and i i still regret that today but she's gone gone to be with the lord but my grandmother raised me from the time i was eight months old until she passed on when i was about 12 and she didn't speak english she she spoke only the quillian language so i learned the quillian language and she taught me stories and she she uh told different stories every week almost and i was very uh fortunate to have this kind of an environment in the home and the thing about having stories is that you don't have books you don't have pencils you don't have tv you don't have radio or anything like that so uh the the teaching way for for my people was by way of story and uh different uh stories have different meanings and and uh some of them are our ways of uh relating to the young people how to how to get along in the world and and how to recognize evil things and and stay away from those things that are evil and to uh understand why the things are the way they are today as they were compared with uh at the beginnings of time in the beginnings of time my people always said that they they had the ability to turn into animals and back and back into people again at will uh i don't know you know my this is the way my teacher or my uh ancestors were teaching me my grandmother especially and my and my father and other other members of my family extended family they they wanted to teach me as much as they could and i wanted to learn as much as i could and uh well there was a period of time when when i didn't have any of those things and uh when after my grandmother passed away then i lived more with my father because he was traveling around a lot he he worked for places like boeing he worked for todd shipyard during the war he was also a he watched for the uh the ships in the airplanes from a lookout up in the mountains because he was a great mountain climber and when the navy found out about him and his knowledge of the mountains and his knowledge about all the different things that go on on the coastline they hired him to be to head the program of identifying any uh aircraft whether it be friendly or enemy or ship along the coastline and in his lookout he had pictures of all the ships and all the aircraft from the world and three-dimensional uh brown cardboard all around all the walls and he could identify any of these during the war and uh uh i was fortunate to go up into his lookout and he showed me all the things that he did he worked for the navy for something like five years but uh when he worked with his work for todd shipyard he helped build one of the big ships that were sunk by uh uh the enemy during the war on the pacific ocean and uh so he he learned a lot of different things from from the from the world as well as having a great knowledge of uh my culture and my people and so i as i said i was very fortunate to be there and uh when my when my grandmother took the task of raising both my my uh two older sisters and myself and when she told stories she was used to always begin the stories by saying cycula which mean a long time ago and the longer she held it out it was a longer time ago so i talked like 11 minute just a few years ago but as she said cycula and tom sometimes she would say as long ago of course in the in the cleveland language as long ago as 10 cedar trees can live which are or you know cedar trees can be very old uh cedar trees in my area grow to be as old as 2000 years and older and there are still standing cedar trees that have that age and they they age them by looking at the annular rings that they they they uh send in a uh uh thing that twists into the bark and it pulls out a great big long core and then they count the annular rings on that then they could tell how old that tree is or that stump or whatever it is they're they're trying to age and uh these these trees that that exist there were that got that over mainly the cedar trees and uh the cedar tree was very important to my people for building homes and canoes and and the bark was used for various things making clothing and basket weaving and and things to cook with and uh all kinds of different things came from the cedar tree and there were other trees as well uh canoes and homes were probably the most important longhouses and canoes of different sizes they had river canoes and ocean going canoes sometimes those ocean going canoes were as long as 50 feet and i'm a canoe builder myself i i've only built them up to 30 feet long and i've repaired those that were up to 36 feet long which were actually known as whaling canoes in my language obey it and the seal hunting canoe is 26 feet long uh a lot cut the river canoe it's a a bale and all of these there were different kinds of avail some of them were small some of them were long but nevertheless they they had a use in the in the river and i learned how to carve these canoes from from the elders and i still carve them today but we we have changed our ways of of carving because of the environmental changes that have gone on for and from the the logging industry has taken almost every cedar tree that existed on the on the west coast where i'm from with the exception of those that are still growing in the uh olympic national park and summon some in the uh uh u.s forest service lands but uh the ones that are still growing there some of them as i said are pretty old and they average uh close to a thousand years old right now and uh the the succession of these trees have been going on for for uh thousands and thousands of years and even during and after the ice age some of the some of the uh cedar trees still grew in some some certain areas where it wasn't that cold but you can always tell when the cedar tree was was growing very slow because the annular rings were really really tight especially in the alaskan yellow cedar tree you had to look at that if you had a small section of a tree or a board from out of a alaskan yellow cedar tree maybe a half an inch you have to look at it through a mic a magnifying glass or a microscope and see how close those annular rings are rinse is about a half an inch or three quarters of an inch maybe maybe comprised of 100 to 200 years old or 200 years of growth that's how tight some of those were and we built canoes out of the cedar tree mainly the the female cedar tree it's because the females tree grew straight and the annular rings were very tight so it was a stronger tree than the male tree and we could tell the difference between the two trees by looking at the seed pods the male tree had seed pods that may have one or two or three little seeds inside of it but the female tree usually had seed pods in it uh eight to ten or maybe more seed pods in in the seed in the in the pod so we could recognize that as a female tree and sometimes you could just look at it or if you were looking at a tree that had been down for a long time and was cutting out you just look at this look at the uh the annular rings but uh cedar uh was one of the things that was really important to us i always said that this uh the buffalo to the plains people was like the cedar tree is to the west coast to my people over here and uh same way with the salmon they depended largely on those too because they were in such great abundance in in the uh pacific northwest and uh i want to sit down now when i want to maybe get into some stories how many uh hard to see you all with all this lecture but anyway how many of you are are twilight fans only three oh there's more over here yeah maybe half of you are more are members of the twilight group but uh i'm i'm thankful in many ways for the twilight group and in some ways for the book that was produced by steph myers and uh the only thing that i didn't care for it was she didn't get permission from the coulio tribe where she got her information from on the website for the tribe and she saw the the wolves and uh began to take advantage of uh the stories that were in there and and because she wanted to depict the werewolf and of course none of my people are werewolves nor are they vampires we don't suck blood we don't do that sort of thing and might look like it when we're kissing but uh don't tell that to my wife she's in here somewhere anyway uh the uh the vampire and the werewolf were never a part of my culture i want to tell you uh how we became who we are and where we came from and how it got to be that way there was one called quatti he was the a transformer or the changer it was put on the face of the earth by the creator and the creator gave orders to quatti to do certain things to make life on earth more pleasant for every living thing on the face of the earth which included the crawling things that that go through the through the ground and through the uh woods the floor uh over the uh the uh floor in the in the uh wooded areas and the animals from the very small to the very large all of these according to my grandmother have a living spirit or a spirit that that is within them and so then we had to understand that and to respect all of these living organisms because they had a spirit like we do and just for a little bit of trivia my whenever my grandmother got ill she would ask me to go get a medicine man and the medicine man would come to my our home and he would sit down for a long period of time with my grandmother until it was time for him to go and to touch my grandmother's shoulders or somewhere to find out where the uh the sickness was and uh whenever a the the spirit or her soul was moved from her heart into another part of her body say down her leg or on her arm or up on top of her head that meant she was ill and it was up to the medicine man to find out where that illness was and to remove it take it outside and and throw it away and have it never come back and then that the spirit that was uh dislocated would be put back where her heart is and that that was how how the healing process was done for uh done through some of our medicine that some of them were more powerful than the others and some of them had different means of doing it but that was the main way that my my grandmother got healing from the uh and she was a great believer in the great spirit she was a very religious person she prayed almost every day she prayed a lot from my dad and my dad was uh everywhere and he he worked for boeing he worked for todd's shipyard he worked for the navy he'd done a lot of different things but my father had a great knowledge of all the things that he learned from my grandmother and his uh his grandparents too uh they gave him the name or his other name was tawarado in 1945 my grandmother gave me the name dwasab it was i was six years old and it was during the war and when we lived up the push that there were no there was no electricity we didn't have lights we we had gas lanterns and and uh coal oil or kerosene and we had candles and and during the war there was a siren that lapush that would sound it off and when that siren sounded that mean we had to snuff out all our lights because we they sensed that there was some enemy in the in either on the ocean or flying over and of course some of the enemies did come come this far and a lot of times we know but we never we don't know that and when i uh hear about things that that have happened to to some kids that were opening up a package that they found in the woods and found out it was a a bomb that that came from japan by way of a uh a very small uh what they call these air balloons very small air balloon and they would put a bomb in it and it floated in the air for several thousand miles it would land somewhere and it was just a way of terrorism well somebody found one one time on the in oregon and it exploded and injured a lot of people there but that's just to give you an example of what what they're what we still contend with today even though the wars are over well anyway i'm i'm getting sidetracked here a little bit i hope you don't mind okay that thank you from my heart and i want to thank all of you that it means watch at least also still thank all of you from my heart and uh there's other ways of saying thank you but i want to do that at the end of my talk i i wanted to tell you about the origin of my people i'm wearing the shirt that depicts the wolf and uh kwati the changer started from down south in a place called uh cuidais and that's the uh the cool name for uh the place called quinault and anybody ever heard of conault very few of you quinault is the uh it's a reservation just south of my people about 60 miles or 70 miles as the crow flies well quatti was uh down there to his his brother and when he was down there there was this big beautiful lake huge huge lake and it was just like looking into a glass of water that's sitting on your your shelf or your table it was so clear you could see clear down to the bottom of that lake it was so clear but it was devoid of life there was nothing living in that water and koat said to himself he said this is a beautiful place for to put some life so he reached into the water with his hands and he began to rub his hands like this he pulled his hands out of the water and he kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing until he felt the little pellets of dead skin coming off on his hands from the dampness of it and then he he felt that there was enough uh dead skin on his hands he put his hands back in the water and swished him back and forth and the the dead skin it was a wave of his hand the dead skin suddenly became to life and formed the uh sockeye salmon and he summoned two sockeye salmon after he did that he summoned two of them out one male and one female and he transformed those two salmon into the quinault people or qidahyak and that's the origin of those people and he saw to it that they had everything that they needed including a great abundance of sockeye salmon so the lake that is there at kudayak still produces a great abundance of sockeye salmon and when koati was moving further north he came to a place called chillah and chala is the name of the whole river people and a beautiful river just full of robust salmon the spring salmon get to be 60 and 70 pounds in the shape of a football just really big robust bright beautiful tasty salmon and it's been that way for millennium uh we don't know how many millennium but that nevertheless those fish are still there because quatti made it so and when these people were at whole river the whole river people were walking on their hands instead of their feet kind of abnormal and so they were dipping smelts with their dip nets in in the surf in the ocean and as they dipped their their uh dip net into the surf with their with their feet they would raise it up and cloth he said this isn't right so he he made them walk upright under on their feet and he showed them how to hold the dip net and when you put the dip net into the water the waves would wash the smelt in and they would raise it up like that maybe have uh five to twenty pounds of smelt in one dip and very tasty fish and they only get to be about 10 inches long but when you've got thousands of them they there's a lot of food and he made sure that the whole river people or the chalet had all kinds of smell and they still do today they're the first ones along that coastline to get smelt every year and it's early in in the year and then a little bit later on we to the north but the coulee gets our we get the smelt at least a month and a half or two months later and the smelt wore back when i was a child is millions and millions of them tons and tons of them my dad one time dipped eight thousand pounds i think was eight thousand pounds of smelt in one night and they loaded them into boxes and shipped them off to the buyers where they were distributed around the various places who uh bought smelt for food well anyway that's just to give you an idea of what happened to the smelt they were just in great abundance now with the advent of the logging industry they have inundated some of the watershed and the siltation and all this have gone into the ocean and caused the demise of many different things because of the sedimentation that that came from the uh from the watershed all kinds of different changes that that occurred in the environment that we don't like today because of uh we've had every every time the environment changes we have to change to cope with it and so uh this is one of the things and i was talking to you a little bit earlier about building a canoe and what the shortage is of the cedar tree well a long time ago the cedar tree was very abundant and now there's probably one tenth of one percent of the cedar trees left that are harvestable and we have to be careful about how we manage what's left because that's going to be all anyway we have to change our way of producing a canoe we no longer carve out a canoe to make a single canoe out of a log we take it to a sawmill and have it cut into strips and make strip built canoes and we put on a traditional bow and a traditional stern so it looks exactly like the canoes of yesteryear and so we have the wolf head on the on the bow we have the little protrusion that's on the bow it's called a heart because uh we wanted to have that canoe have a spirit so it was a living thing and as it was growing as a tree it was living and so as a canoe it's still alive with that heart carved into the bow and given a spiritual name that would help it to go out into the ocean and have it come back safely to where it originated to bring the food back to their people so canoes are important when the quatti got through with all these things that he was making available to the whole river people he moved a little bit further north to a place called usat oset today as it's named and it was just a small village at one time and nobody lives there anymore but there's a burial ground there and there's a rock right off shore it was higher than this building is and it's got a great big hole right in the middle of it and that's what totally act means totally means hole in the wall and so it we don't name p we don't name places after people like the white man does you know he named cooks inlet and named all kinds of different places after famous captains of a long time ago who came from europe and we decided that it was it was good to name these places after what that place uh produced or what it looked like or there's a there's a island right off of the push called mussel rock because that there's mussels growing all around it on the on the uh uh high high part of the the tide the ti the high tidal zone and so that's where we one of the places that we get are some of our mussels to to eat and we just steamed them just like you would steamers or clams very tasty and you can still get them most places today and they're grown they're grown usually in a different environment and man-made but anyway uh kwati saw that everything was was uh pretty much the same there there were no people but he moved to a place called layout which is the name of my people quote layout we anglicized it many i know i shouldn't say we but the people anglicized it to quillute so we are known as the kullut people but in my language i like to call it layout it has a little grotto stop in there and uh there was nobody there no people no human beings but there are two great big beautiful wolves timberwolves they always travel in pairs male and female and he transformed these two wolves into the coulee people you see my shirt here i depict that i'm proud to wear this shirt because it means i'm i'm respectable to who i am and where i'm from uh my my cousin made this shirt for me several years ago and i'm even surprised that it still fits me you know i was in the service here back in 1958 59 60 and my my uniform feels i can't even begin to tell you how it fits but anyway i can't get it on uh it happens i think everybody will one one day find that it happens anyway uh when he when he was there at court layout he made some rules about the wolf that was there and the people that were there he said you can still have more than one wife and the chiefs or the the the leaders of the tribe could have more than one wife just like the wolf did he was the leader he was the alpha and the the leader of the group and so he was the chief and it was that way so with the chief of a tribe that he was able to have more than one wife but when they wrote the treaty in 1855 they put a clause in there saying you can only have one wife from now on so the united states government saw to it that that was uh so well anyway uh quatty saw to it that everything was was uh needed and and uh put there for the tribal people for their needs their wants their desires and uh all the food they ever wanted all the the things they needed for making canoes and homes and baskets and and hunting implements uh fishing implements the tools and everything was there the the rocks the the the bones the everything and so the quality of life was just great and they had everything they ever wanted they the berries the the the little animals uh the deer the elk the bear great abundances of everything uh the whale the in the ocean on on the shoreline the crab and the clams and all those things that everybody likes to eat i i hope everybody likes to eat clams and crab not too many i guess that that don't like those things but uh they're they're there for a purpose and god put them there for a for a real purpose and we take advantage of it and uh my people have many different things that we fish for in the ocean we have halibut we have crab we have black cod we have bottom fish we have an abundance of salmon five different uh species of salmon that that come from my area and the steelhead and all kinds of trout just a myriad of different kinds of things that we uh go after for our livelihood well quantity saw to it that everything was was needed there at the coulee and uh and don't forget that the the coulee were were very powerful people because they came from the wolf and i'm proud to be a member of the couplet tribe and my heritage is there and i depict it right here and he he walked a little bit further to a place called usfed or ozet as some people call it today and the books also because it's hard to spell and uh it was that there were no people no human beings but there were long-haired dogs that were all in the in the area there and these long-haired dogs were kind of in a in a small abundance and he transformed a male and a female of the long-haired dogs into people and so this is the origin of the ozet people the ozet people don't don't live there anymore they're all no more ozet people living on that reservation the reservation doesn't have anybody living there it's just a square piece of land that nobody occupies and uh he thought to it that they had everything there was a beautiful big lake there he put sockeye into that lake for for their our use and the ocean was uh full of seals and sea lions and other mammals and fish of different kinds of shellfish and everything they ever needed for their quality of life and he moved a little bit further to a place called deoct and we have no m's and n's in our language in our alphabet and deox is like the the n in uh in our alphabet d so it became near to the white man so we call it near bay and from comes from the word deoc and uh the the people that were were there had just come ashore from across to canada and they went through a storm and their canoes were broken up and they were hungry they had no food they were wet they were cold and just miserable and when when kwati got there he waved his hands like this and the canoes were suddenly repaired and all the implements were there put back into the canoe the paddles the pools the baling apparatus the mat for comfort and all the things that they needed to to make that canoe what it was and the sails and and the macaw people as they are called today the the macaw tribe at mia bay uh have a great abundance of halibut and that's what was was uh done by kwati he made sure that the macaw people always had a great abundance of halibut and so that that is one of their uh strong uh points of their area where they are is that the halibut are in great abundance and the halibut spread out to as far as central oregon all the way up into alaska and those halibut will sometimes grow up to be 800 pounds and that that's a lot of meat a lot of fish the other day we they served halibut over here to some of our group that we were we were hungry when we first came here from uh our homes and so they fed us and and i was surprised to find halibut on the menu and there was also a buffalo i had never mixed buffalo and halibut together but it was delicious and i love buffalo burger whenever i go to polson montana i eat buffalo burger when i go to seattle i eat sushi well sushi was part of my culture too my grandmother had a a log that was anchored in the middle of the river at uh they kato docked in dickie river and they she had this little log anchored there and then she would go up into the into the bushes cut off a salmonberry bush clean off all the leaves and then dangle it into the water with a little anchor and we'll go back one or two days later and that that little shrub would be full of herring eggs would just break off a stick yum sushi right there and that was my my introduction to sushi way back in 1943-44 but it was it was good and our quality of life was great because we had everything we ever needed to eat and if we didn't eat it we had to starve because our our grandmothers and our grandfathers always said eat or starve so we ate and i'm healthy today i'm 72 years old and still healthy what i can do with a hundred yard dash in 15 minutes flat and by the time i get there my knees hurt but anyway uh the all the quality of life was put on the coast for all these people and this is the origin of all the people that were on the coast of washington from uh nia bay all the way down to quinault and my people are right in the center from either direction and we have this homeland as we call it we at one time owned were living on several pieces of land that we kept open by fire acres hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of acres of land that we kept open by fire and that was our homeland uh the forks prairie the prairie and the coolute prairie had a canvas it's a little bulb like a a daffodil bulb and it was one of our staple foods and we wanted to make sure that when the government made their the treaties with the tribe that they would make sure that we had those available to us and they're still there today anyway uh um that that's the order i'm going to say that again that's the origin of our people and uh when stephanie meyers was writing her her beginnings of her writings and she took advantage of that and made millions and millions of dollars and she's still making millions of dollars today off of uh one little thing that she saw on the coolio website and uh it it's good that we we uh we were able to make somebody wealthy but at the same time she doesn't offer anything to us but nevertheless we have everything we need and uh i i did give her a drum very similar to this one it came from the last elk that i shot 12 years ago and she was very happy and glad to get that drum as a gift because of her writings and uh things that happened to my people after the advent of the first book twilight and the people coming to the push to look for the people that were depicted in that book they would write letters to uh our tribal council and say we want to come to la push and meet these people that are in the book it's a novel it is a fictitious book and of course when these people say that we just have to laugh and we welcome the people so anybody that is a a fan of twilight come to la push sometime you'll find there's a boundary line there and it's the boundary line of the uh of the werewolves and the what is it right anyway there's a boundary line there says you're not to go beyond this because we we don't want werewolves on our reservation and uh so that all the people that come to our area they look at that sign and everybody jumps out of the car with their cameras and almost everywhere around that area there's something having to do with twilight and all these fans come from all over the world and we welcome them so come to the push sometime i'm i i want to say that you're very welcome there and uh you'll enjoy the the ocean you'll enjoy the the different things that we we have there uh uh we have a wonderful restaurant we have our school there and and just a a really beautiful place to be and i want to talk to you again a little maybe i'll get into a story that my grandmother my favorite story it's about two little girls that were taken captive by one called tatakwayo they were out very very picking with their elders that the the grandmothers and and the ants and the and the other little children they all went out to pick berries and it was a ways from their their village and uh there were two little girls that told them they they wanted to go home because they were tired and they had picked enough berries and you could tell this by looking at their face it was all purple and blue from the berries and their hands were blue and purple from the berries and so they they had their fill and and they they did help to pick a few and put them in the bucket but anyway they wanted to go home and the elders admonished the two little children they said go straight home don't go off the trail go straight home and hurry don't stop and so after this admonishment they they agreed that they would go straight home and when the girls were on their way home they saw this big beautiful middle and the grass was standing nice and tall wasn't even wavering with the the there was hardly any wind at all and this grass was it just looked so welcome said come on in here and lay down and rest and sleep and so that's what the two little girls did they went and you could see where they walked all the grass was pointing in one direction and you could see where the girls had laid down and uh when when the elders and all these people got home from berry picking they couldn't find the two little girls and everybody went out with torches and looked around all over uh see if they could find the two little girls but they they gave up the search when their torches ran out and so uh so we'll come back in the morning we'll continue our search again so it was the chiefs and the leaders that went out first because they knew what to look for and they knew the land they knew everything and so they looked around and they came up on this meadow and they saw where the paths of two people had walked out and they saw a place where the where the grass was laid down where it looked like they it ended there and they laid down and went to sleep and all the grass was still pointing in one direction so this gave them the the answer that those two children were still there so they walked out in these two little paths come to the end of it and there was a where somebody had laid down here and somebody had laid down here and there was nobody there but all the grass was still pointing in one direction whereas if they had come out the grass would have broken and would have been pointed the other way it wasn't so so uh the leaders had uh something in their mind that they they knew that it must have been to talk whale because he had done this sort of thing before he liked to steal little children and so when they they made this uh assumption that uh tatakwayo was the guilty one then they had to make a plan to go and rescue the two little girls taken by talk whale and uh one of the things to do is because the talk we all lived in the sky way way up in the sky and his home was like one of the stars that you could see and uh they they gathered together to see what they could do and what the best way to do it and somebody's come up with the idea of making a ladder out of trees huge trees the biggest trees that they could find they went to the foothills and they cut down uh several hundred uh hemlock trees they were tall straight no limbs for a long ways up so that the only limbs were at the very canopy of the tree itself and so then they cut down these trees and they carved them into arrows and they needed a bowl say where they went higher up into the mountain where the alaskan yellow cedar grows and the alaska neola cedar tree is a a very tight grain very resilient wood made a very strong bow and they made a huge bow out of this tree and then when they gathered together to where they had the bow and the arrows then they were looking for the place where uh to talk whale's home was and the one that that noticed for his home was was the sharp-eyed slug really sharp eyes and uh he looked up in the sky and he pointed up there with his uh feeler and said right there that's the tuck whale's home i could see it and standing next to him was the jealous one because he thought he was the sharpest eyed the hawk so he tucked he he plucked the eyes out of poor little slug uh yet oak what else was his name and the the the hawk hooked his eyes out and said i am the sharpest eyed one i can see that far and now you can't see so when you go out into the woods and you happen to come up on a slug going full speed down the trail with his feelers sticking out and see the two holes on the sides of his head that's where his eyes used to be no longer there and so uh as they were talking to one another they they said uh what we're going to do is make this uh ladder out of all these uh arrows that were made out of a hemlock tree and shoot them end to end all the way down from from where to tackle's home was down to the ground and then they could they could ascend that uh tree uh ladder all the way up to to talk whale's home well then uh the sharpshooters got together and when they got together they began to shoot and the first arrow went up and the second arrow went into the first arrow the third arrow went into the second arrow the fourth arrow went into the third era and saw all the way down to the ground where they were made this ladder uh arrows stuck end to end all the way to the ground and uh then they decided well who's all going up this ladder you've got to be brave you've got to be strong so all the strong ones and the brave ones even the robin thought he was brave enough and strong enough which he was and uh well one of the things i'm forgetting is that they had to string this boat this powerful boat and the one to say i i am the strongest one here was the killer oil and uh pot or he's uh i'll think of his name pretty soon anyway he's i can string this bowl because i'm the biggest and i'm the strongest so a killer hoyle grabbed that bow and he put one in the ground and he was pulling up on the string to to put the string into the notch and he couldn't do it he just failed so uh ochil the bear said i'm the strongest i i'm stronger than you are i know i am in the meantime in the background there is a voice small voice coming from i can string the ball let me try i can string the bow let me try chocho is a little tiny bird red and he's just a little bit bigger than a hummingbird and they looked back there and they laughed at him who are you who do you think you are you see you're not strong enough to string that bully you can't even lift that bow and they just laughed at him and and uh little choco got back into his uh little place behind everybody and said i want to string that bow and uh uh the elk and all his splendor of his antlers beautiful strong looking animal i can string this bow i'm the strongest one here so he pulled and he grunted and he groaned and he strained and he could not string that bow in the meantime here's chocho in the backside let me try let me try so finally everybody conceded okay tough guy he's only a little tiny thing okay you little runt come on get up here and let's see what you can do and he actually did lift up the boat surprised everybody and then uh he took that bow he stuck one end into the ground pulled up on the string notched it twine and the string on that bow was so tight when he plucked it sounded like a a beautiful music come up coming from a guitar string anyway they they had the bow strung so now the sharp shooters were going to take their turn to uh shoot and make the ladder and they did so as i said the ladder came all the way to the ground and then then they decided who was going to ascend this ladder uh the big uh ochil and his son the big bear and the little bear they were going to go up the ladder and then uh uh cake the bull elk said i am going up this ladder and uh the audit the beaver says i'm going up this ladder and of course the leader was the eagle he was wise and strong he said i'm going to lead you people i'm going up too so as he is called and the eagle got on the ladder and began to ascend and now he's begin to follow him and uh there were several that were following him to the to the home of chautauqua when they got to the top end of the ladder it was so cold they didn't realize that being up there in that heavenly body that it was going to be that cold almost like this morning outside maybe it was colder and uh picked it up said let's go out and find things to burn and and then bring them back here and we'll we'll build a fire right here and we'll get warm and then we can go to to talk wheels home so everybody went out all all of them went out different directions and brought back things that they could burn to make a fire and they looked at each other and said we have no way of starting this fire what are we going to do and somebody looked across this body of water where they had missed their mark by a few miles from to talk whale's home and there was this body of water toward his home and they looked across this body of water and they saw this column of smoke going up into the air great big column of white smoke and they said look over there to talk well's got a fire in his home he said we can get some hot coals off of his fire and bring it back here and start our own fire and uh said i'll go i'll go so the little robin he took off flying over that body of water and he flew all the way over to uh to talk whale's home and he sneaked in the very stealthy like and he heard the snoring noise because to talk wheel loved to sleep and they could hear him snoring and it gave him a sign that it was time for him to go in because he could hear him snoring well kidokuko went inside but he never went back everybody was wondering they said to talk well probably got kedokuko and made him into a meal and so uh we need somebody else to go across to get some of those hot coals so the audit the beaver says i can go there i can swim in this cold water so the beaver entered into the water and swam all the way across to to talkwell's home and when he got to talk whale's home uh he walked in very stealthy he could hear to talk whale snoring again but the funny part of it was there was two snorings going on he goes and the other one was was a slighter slightly lighter snore and uh bieber ah dick looked over at the fireplace where the fire was whether all the hot coals were and who should be standing up there next to that fire sound asleep and comfortable getting warm from the fire it was cheeto coco the robin he so he was up against that fire for so long his breast turned red and he woke him up and said we need to get some of these hot coals and bring them back to our friends across over here and build a fire so they can get warm and then we'll come back all together and rescue the two little girls that were taken captive by tatak whale so uh they loaded all the hot coals that they could put on the audit's tail and the audi swim all the way across just barely holding his tail out of the water and of course flew over and they all went back to their friends and and they built this fire out of the hot coals and uh one thing that happened to uh the audi they looked at the audit and his tail was burnt no more fur it was black and wrinkled where he had a lot of fur and today beaver still has no fur on his tail it's still black and it's wrinkled that was because he carried those hot coals back and was the hero that made the fire well anyway after they made the fire and they decided who was all going everybody was going across this body of water and they decided how they were going to do it they made this plan they agreed what their plan was going to be and they began to go across and one called pacquad escape fish he had to swim and it was deep and he went down down down into the depths of this water and all the other beings were going across and it was like gears to tackle's home here's the group straight line shorter than the distance that pacquad had to go underwater so they got out they all that group got over there first and here come pakwad he was trying to catch everybody catch up to everybody but he was he was growing and swimming as fast as he could puckwood the skate fish i don't know if you know what escape fish look like they're huge and they're flat just like a kite and they live on the bottom of the ocean and uh just like a halibut but anyway he come out about water just as fast as he could and he flew for a ways because he glided and landed right there with a resounding curved plop right on to tockwell's front door woke to talk well up and tatakway all come lumbering out who's there who was over there and little was it bieber said it is me the audi beaver and uh oh wait i'm sorry i'm getting mixed up here happens when you get this age anyway uh uh i'm trying to repeat myself and i don't want to do that uh talk well was uh woken up by this resounding kerplop from uh from skatefish and he went to the doorway and he looked around and he looked around he said i must be dreaming i must have dreamed this i didn't i don't see anybody i don't see anything here so uh pacquiao was there laying on the ground in front of him and the reason he couldn't see him was because pacquad or skate fish has the ability to camouflage himself and make his color the same color as all the background where he where he's laying on the bottom of the ocean and here he was on the on neck next to him on his on his ground next to his home and he turned into the color of the same surroundings there so to talk well couldn't see him and uh he he agreed to himself that there was nobody there is going to go back and go to sleep but before he could do that he said hmm i got a urinate poor old pacquad he got it pretty bad and uh if you ever happen to eat skate fish and wonder where that weird flavor comes from so that that's it see whether you believe it or not skate fish is still eaten today and it is it is uh they don't call it skate fish they they call it something else and it's they they take like a cookie cutter and they'll go around and cut out little round pieces of the flesh of uh pacquad or escape fish and it is sold for uh oh what is that all around anyway uh that that's the food stuff that that it's fake stuff that and it has a weird flavor anyway uh everybody agreed that after uh to talk or all went back to bed they could hear him snoring again so this was their cue that they were going to go into to tackle's home and look for the two little girls that were probably bound and gagged so they went into the home of tatak whale very stealthily and when they walked into the home they could hear tatakway all snoring again and that was their cue that they could look all over in his house and be quiet while they were looking for the two little girls they found the two little girls that were bound and gagged and they took the ropes off and un-gagged them and said we've come to rescue you you're going home come we thank you for for uh being quiet and being good so that you didn't make noise to to uh to talk well that he would come out while we were making noise we won't make any more noise so uh they unbound the little girls and said we're going home ticoa left the hole so everybody met out in the front of uh to talk whale's home like they had planned and except one it was very slow that was uh uh yeah the slug he was in the back of the house still looking around and uh everybody was gonna go to the back to the ladder then he saw that he had to catch up to them so he began to speed up a little bit and then he ran into a pile of uh firewood and he knocked down this pile of firewood and they made all kinds of rumbling and racket noise and and this woke the talk whale up again to talk whale got up to see what was going on and he could see all these going toward the ladder and he didn't know what was going on for sure but they had the two little girls with them and they were rescued and they were going to go home and they all got to the ladder every one of them and they began to descend on the ladder and they didn't get very far when to talk wheel jumped on the ladder and he was so big and so heavy the ladder fell apart and broke so when we look up into the sky we see the heavenly bodies we see the big dipper in the little dipper ursa major ursa miner the big bear and the little bear over in some of the area we see cassiopeia in the rocking chair and over here we might see taurus the bull and over here pacqua the skate fish that's shaped like a kite all these constellations that were created as a result of to talk will breaking the ladder and so that that's my story of how our constellations got to be but one of the things that happened after that was a strange thing to talk well or being so big and heavy he fell all the way to earth he landed in a place called oset and it was a swampy area really soft ground when he landed there he made a big huge indentation in the ground because the ground was so soft and he got up and shook himself off and this great big huge indentation water began to flow into it so that became ozet lake and it's still there today but the the other part is that uh tatakwayo made this him his new homeland and he uh met a mate another to talk well and there they lived and raised many many many children and they spread out to other parts of the country and we still have them here today they're all over but they're very very stealthy very quiet we don't see them very much or hear about them very much and you're lucky to see one we call them sasquatch but uh there's so many skeptical people i've seen sasquatch myself honestly and i hunt for sasquatch to prove to the world that he exists there are other people around the world that go out looking for sasquatch because they they know that he exists they've heard him they have seen some of the signs that he leaves behind and some of some of the signs that he makes with if you go to a farmland and they have cattle there all these cattle will all of a sudden huddle together because they fear sasquatch they could sense when he's there and you can hear the dogs barking or some other noises coming from some other area which give us the signs that sasquatch is there so we know when he's in the area and it's usually in springtime when it comes down from the high hills and the vegetation begins to sprout new uh abundances of all different kinds of buds that come from the from the shrubs and that he's he's largely vegetarian believe it or not but he does eat meat he loves fish he loves clams he loves to eat different smaller animals like the raccoon and he's a very good hunter very stealthily and the thing about suspect is that he can make any noise he can mimic anything that's out there in those woods he can mimic the sound of the deer or the frog or the tree frog and so it may give you the idea that there's something else there other than sasquatch so uh some of you skeptics if you have ever happened to go out into the woods and hear some strange noises out there uh it could be you never know i'm gonna stop there and i want to ask for any questions anybody got any questions out there please i'll be happy to answer please raise your hand if you have any questions no questions yes the two girls did they become a constellation the two girls yes i know the one of them was cassiopeia and i'm not but you know when they were telling me the story that they just talked about cassiopeia and uh that that's uh they're probably more if you look at some of the history of some of the areas like i was talking to a young lady from china yesterday and she said they have a very similar story and you go to europe and you'll find that they have a very similar story and it never ceases to amaze me it's that some of these stories are like like the great flood that's depicted with uh noah in the bible we had a great flood here also and uh there's a story about that and uh it's a long story but if we'll come back here next year maybe we'll go through it ladies and gentlemen we need to wrap it up here so if you could please join me thank you chris culture of western washington thank you all for coming and enjoy your visit to the museum as you uh depart i want to sing you a song of the great wolf and the song is about the wolf howling to the people and the people talking back to him we are i'll think of it tomorrow it's uh anyway i i'm so proud to be here and glad to have a group that is are good listeners and i hope you understand who we are now we're not werewolves we are the wolf and thank you very much walter you

Channel: SmithsonianNMAI

Views: 59,091

Rating: 4.9445543 out of 5

Keywords: NMAI, Quileute, Elder Chris Morganroth, Twilight books and movies, werewolves, webcast, Native culture, storytelling, wolves, origin stories

Id: hmfbQRclFf8

Length: 70min 4sec (4204 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2012