Randy Lewis in Moses Coulee (part 4)

what do you think [Music] anywhere from 300 to 450. sounds right to me then you get into some areas where it's six hundred like when you get up to akua that's where you were steamboat rock oh that's 800 900. give me that name of steamboat rock one more time [Music] oh it's a pretty name it's a pretty name and i'm sure there's like when you when you take a uh mortar and turn it over on the ground okay that's what that is and on top of steamboat rock is all of the roots the whole area is a garden of all of the roots all of our root foods are berries harvest berries currants everything grows up there so up on top of it i mean yeah so we would go up there just to take samplings of it it was a pilgrimage it was just so cool first time i was up there i got i'm on top of the world then i looked over and there were some parts of the plateau that were higher right no but i never really thought about that i mean if you talk about playing communities that have been untouched yeah you know there you go it's like the topoe in venezuela there's great big huge rorima that sticks up there 8 000 feet or so flat as a pancake [Music] everything up there is its unique life form everything has been geographically isolated for millions of years [Music] well we should we should go up there too i suppose at some point so i think so oh steamboat rock yeah yeah if there's a whole story instead of characters up there again that's where coyote was flattened out indiscretions he was indiscrete all the time he just never learned he's his answer to everything is i knew that i knew that was gonna happen yeah i knew that was gonna happen in order to get after his brother fox for not reanimating him by stepping over him three times so he'd get mad at fox what took you i wanted to i wanted it to sink in how long have i been gone oh 5 000 years well i didn't know we were heading to jameson lake today and i'm a little surprised i didn't know that you have intimate family history up here see how it's all burned off i do oh my god there they are yep yep are we catching this magic window for these guys yeah not mariposa lily but your name yuck your corpse yeah yuck your corpse depending upon which area of town you're from are they beautiful they are it's a little garden all the spring it has been a continual show from one after another but look out there maripo says the butterfly lily oh there are thousands of them holy cow they're millions of them the wildfire was a curse to some it was a blessing to others and always the animal people they stan they stand as sentinels along the rim of the canyons around here [Music] this was some of the last buffalo jumps were in this canyon really into the 1600s now is that what i think that is where you've got folks running buffalo and you've seen the movie alpha one no but about the boy and the wolf when boy and when man and wolf came together first first first pet dog you know the first flopper doodle was a wolf labra wolfel and uh it shows them it shows a beautiful picture these are the ice age buffalo with the horns that are wider than your car here a little bigger like half again as large as beefy and okay as we progress along here in the evening is the best time to view these oh yeah because they're silhouetted against the evening's horizon [Music] but all along here if you look at the horizon you'll see all of the those are the animal people that are bearing witness to keep an eye oh [Music] all along here and my auntie she had them all named so it was not they weren't random they were very and each one of them had a story just this stretch right in here yep come on gizmo oh yeah and the magic time to be out here is the winter with a full moon i'll bet so she had names for each yeah i said did you know them no thinking that my gran my great aunt was so old right you know them personally ah yes next question see now they become more and more pronounced they do i think i gotta get out to really do this right wow i never would have noticed these guys before in the time before time sentinels overlooking sentinels of the valley yeah the incoming they were the they were the gatekeepers because people would be coming in or life would be coming in through there or through there they guarded the valley to protect the people to protect the animal people the other you know the other beings i don't think there were human beings so much as other life forms to protect their valley and again you notice there's there's some mariposas here but very few because the the sage toxifies the ground it puts down oils chemicals into the soil that um deter any other life forms except cheatgrass and i think a lot of the european sages that we have evolved with cheatgrass in asia europe and asia so they're first-hand nuisance cousins so if you and i were standing here in 1805 we wouldn't see this sage we'd have grasses bunch grasses and mariposa lilies and about 50 different types of lamatiums we had 12 in here 12 different types of lamatiums that we harvested and still do that was the case for more than 10 000 years until uh the last 200 the last 150 for 20 000 30 000 see the people up there so you asked your grandmother if she knew those i told her they were i said white people call them gargoyles same purpose you know they keep an eye they're watchers so we're quite a ways from wenatchee now so this uh was import this area was this upper grand coulee sorry this upper moses coulee was important to your folks yeah your people well my great great grandpa great great grandpa um ishwar when they were driven out of frenchman's coulee they were driven they had to make a choice go to the yakima reservation or to the newly established moses columbia reservation which extended from the cascades all the way to i mean from the cascades to the okanagan river from the canadian border south to lake chelan that was the new the newly formed moses columbia reservation so those speaking people or salish people were told they had to leave 1878 right after the nez perce wars the cavalry showed up told them that they had to abandon that place and relocate so the first place they went was to wenatchee but they got kind of a hostile reception there so ishwar took his people and came up here to their old digging grounds one of their camous digging grounds up here and there they stayed for two years and they lost a lot of people died because it was a forced march and so their graves are all along we buried them secreted them away so this is the burial grounds for my people for some of my ancestors and he was there and um a beautiful spot and so there was a pilgrimage for us when we were kids it meant a lot to my grandma and my grandpa because my grandpa knew him it was his great-grandfather great-grandfather grandfather yeah charlie was born ishwar was born in 1829. so and he died or 1839 he died in 1939 he was 100 years old he was married to my great-great-grandmother los marie and uh who was about the same age but they didn't get along and so they separated but she me she cursed him and said that she would live to bury him i will i'm going to stick around long enough to see you underground he died in 1939 a week later she died and grandpa said he stuck around all that time hoping that she would never see him never underestimate the healing power of hatred but i don't you know i don't i don't fault either them you know that's it works or it doesn't work at least they had the good sense to get out of it and he moved over to the spielem and took a he he left his allotment that had been assigned to him by the government there at as well where the dam of aswell is now that was our property that's where we lived that's where mom and em's ranch was or my grandpa's ranch but he missed his people they had gone to nespelum a lot of them they didn't take allotments onto moses columbia which only lasted for four years before the government came in and told us you're going to have to get out of here again really and they dissolved the moses columbia reservation three and a half million acres of it white people need it why people so what year are we talking now wasn't it 1882 1880 they were driven out of there in 1886. didn't last long that was a treaty you know it's like how much are your treaties worth you know let's move before i have to have a cigarette yep um see the canyon there oh yeah okay the canyon was really important because there was a there was ferrous oxide that leached out in great abundance up there for red paint okay that they mixed with the orange lichens the red lichens and then you look up there there's another canyon about i guess this is about a mile stretch across from one canyon to the other okay and that one produced another color another pigment in the rocks okay and below that between them is a creek that runs through here and that's where the the village was of my great-granddad great-great-granddad this is where they came when they were driven out of frenchman's coulee really so this means so much to us as far as a part of our history and so for a little over two years they stayed here until the government came in and said you have to leave here because we're uh we've chosen we've chosen an allotment for you they placed it as well right on the count the the okanagan chelan county line and uh that was okay that was okay with one of my grandma's great grandmas because her folks had been there it was a big wintering encampment at one time but that's where their village would be i mean that's where their allotment would be so one of my great great grandmothers she was okay with that the others okay we just have to take what we get you know they're very pragmatic i wouldn't say they liked being driven out of frenchman schooly because let's face it that is spectacular yes it is but you can see some of the same geology from the the baklava down there and the baklava up here by that i mean the layering but this isn't uh again this is just spectacular this is home the creek was still it was still active this spring when i was here we went down and i brought a group from history and archaeology out from the colville tribe they'd never been here but this was such an important and rich ground the soil you could put your digging stick in over there and literally go right to your lips there was no rocks what do you call that yes i guess yeah um truffle tuffler because it is just so over here it's a little rockier but over there is you get then once you get closer to the hill over there that first rise connected to the lump yep uh then you get this wild escarpment it looks like it's been paved by a by a um stone mason uh-huh all next to each other close and you see the most crazy things coming up there'll be coming up through those rocks there's nothing else but rock just flat all flat like it's been paved but there's camus bitterroots coming up through it so i'm sorry i want to guess i want to ask maybe you already said it forgive me if i didn't hear it right so after two years they're driven out of here yeah and they only really can go one place yeah which is colville reservation or to the moses columbia reservation and no they could either go to the colville or the moses columbia a lot of them went into spelum where chief moses was and the remnants of his tribe of the moses colombia people and interesting it's interesting to see what survived what grew this is the last remnant of mariposa's here last week it was totally bloomed out over here across the road was just a solid sea of lavender they're so perfect they are they're so beautiful and tasty and yummy they taste as good as they look you eat the petals the bulb it's got a perfect bulb it's about the size of a shallot what can you tell me about that lump nothing okay that's why i brought you [Laughter] i was on a field trip here five years ago and it was a major source of discussion but damned if i remember well um before it all burned off there was a huge sage-grouse habitat oh really and when we were here earlier this year there were pronghorns out here eating the tops of the lamatiums because they loved the tops of the lamatiums and there were probably eight or ten maybe a dozen pronghorn antelope right here last year yeah no this spring this spring yeah that's news to me i didn't know there were any antelope here yeah huh they love uh outside of indians they probably like that la mesa more than any animal because they were just going from one to the other snipping off the tops keeping an eye on us then i'd see their butts flare white i'm going okay you're you're getting too close to them so then i just sat and i dug in one spot and then their curiosity got the best of them they had to come and check us out oh sure they're such a curious animal full of full of curious wow i'm just i'm really surprised by that huh i just never heard they were driven uh the fire drove them out here oh they were actually they've been out here they come they're they're seasonal visitors out here but they came from the reservation caldwell's got the majority of them but the fact that they came across columbia all right how does that work they have got these hollow hairs that are life jackets you can't sink one of them if you shot one it would never sink they're just buoyant as heck crazy in the evolution you know in in times evolution they're probably one of the oldest animals on this continent so we're here we're looking out at moses stronghold and uh some clutter up there but you see the oasis down here yeah there's always a source of water there's rattlesnake creek but it drops down into the coulee there and it's a beautiful this is an extension that goes up where we crossed over earlier to come down into the gui if you followed this coulee it would go straight up to where we were at yup it's just rich and visually that was the road they didn't that was the original equestrian highway mm-hmm it came down and there was always places along here with water little oasis and the creek the creeks always seemed to up until nineteen i think was the first time that the creeks dried up here and it was because their water source had been tapped by farmers and ranchers and so it upset the balance here the water would generally go down into the cisterns that were all rock so if you look out across the would you call these the scab lance or out here across there sure the plateau there's this it's rich it's rich in biodiversity and you see all this good the good down here well i do and i'm also noticing how windy we are right here i'm going to pay a particular note when we drop down to those levels to just see how get out how protected we get you know that's going to be a really interesting way to compare well in the summertime yeah you appreciate this breeze down there but in the winter time your breezes that are coming up from the south not from the north i'm just seeing this whole transition zone between the upper and lower moses coulee in a totally different way now thanks to you today i just i just didn't see the power of this or the life that exists yes the life that's it oh i've had a one-track mind you know we got we got a story here and i'm not too sure how to unravel the story a refreshment here on a friday afternoon looks like they were enjoying the good here and oh yes [Music] okay let's swing down through down past this singing stone look at the beauty of that louis lamour would had a wonderful time the writers of the purple sage oh my gosh [Music] oh that is heaven that really is heaven when somebody asked me to describe a smell i said i wouldn't know how to describe this smell truly truly oh no kidding oh no there's no kidding about that [Music] coyote or fox that's a fox it's a gray fox see him yep look at that i can't get any closer boy did he move how can you tell between a coyote and a fox just a color really there can't be that many fox in this coley can there uh fox are a little more secretive ah there but you see them cross fox gray fox red fox they're all here really my granddad used to go out here to spiva spy by butte you know where that's at no north douglas county okay big view we call it lightning butte and uh because there were gray foxes out there and he would snare them for his uncle who was a medicine man and he shared the medicine man's power came from that fox so he would get them for him so he could make medicine bottles oh wow huh and i felt sorry for the fox krampus said don't because it's done in a holy way i tell that to the fox [Music] you always feel sorry for for the wrong reasons you watched you were spoiled when you saw a bambi [Music] so yeah dropping in here on a late november afternoon and your whole family is smoking your whole community is here yes smoke is sitting above this and as you're as you're coming in you're seeing the poles from the lodges all sticking above the horizon here and just wrapped around the entire bend of the cui scattered out or logic little groups of three or four together [Music] and this is not a place where you've been here for two years this place you've been for two thousand twelve yeah it's been a going on just that permanency and having everybody know every square inch of this place yes knowing everything that's the polar over here sure that nice that's nice what's the bird huh what's the name of the bird a p martin martin look at the falls there was a if there was a fiery hell that's where they came from the underworld i think every culture has got an underworld i suppose so whether it's judeo-christian whether it's asian yeah whether it's african definitely the aborigines of south of australia they have it so i guess that only you know it only makes sense that we have an underworld also yep that's where the fire came from it's where first life came from when we honor when we honor our our elements or our animals when we talk about the beings fire was fire water and land fire and land became fire and earth became the first life so rock so we we talk to our rocks we honor them we show them respect when we take rocks we honor it we show respect when we use them in sweat house all of the elements are there sweat lodge you have fire you have stone you have water and then you have the lodge which is the organic and so you're paying you're paying honor you're paying homage to homage homage to the first the first life we didn't come along as a life form until well we were always we were always life because we're from that we come from that we were just a different um what do you say we're a different evolutionary stage of becoming who we are we're born of water we're born of fire we're spraying from a wave we spring from the fire uh my friend sand sandy she said we spraying from the water a meeting of waves and together rose is one we sprang from the fire a meeting of waves and together rose is one that's our that's our uh chronicle of our past is that yes we were because we're a part of everything that is it's a continuum so my grandfolks used to always say you respect fire fire's old timer fire has seen the the beginning of our world was born we were born of fire fire begot water the second life so it kind of parallels contemporary thought and it was the collision of those two that gave birth to land it gave birth to wind air everything everything we have comes from fire everything we are everything that is is born of a fire this spells it out in such a dramatic way yes yep so you get a different you get a different type of great basin and european wild rye very gentle very soft this is different than the other one yeah and this is eurasian wild rye continually drawn back to these for good reason it's a retreat to the sacred you know later on in the summer you gotta watch these areas because they're they're great cover for rattlesnakes the birds and the rodents are attracted by the berries i see and it's cool so it protects the snakes see notice notice how the air changed here i yep one mile away different amazing you've led a very sheltered life ah for my world simple compared to a metamorphic rock that's going through about five different lives you know and uh very difficult on anhydrous stones like opal yeah yeah i find opal just a little bit too much especially what they call precious opal black opal it just gets a little bit too plasticky looking the thing they're looking for is all of the glitz and glitter yeah i guess that's the reason i like jade nephrite i prefer nephrite over jadeite it's got a certain softness to it it doesn't look as treated and also important in your family history as far as trade and yeah i think it was um i think it was my great grandparents really valued it a lot because it just meant the antiquity it was the stone of heaven it was indestructible jade yeah that's reason when i i have an adds blade that's about that long out of that green jade and grandpa said that's probably maybe a thousand years old just by the wear on it so because it was probably this long now it's about this long oh from centuries of use yeah but it took centuries to get it down that far that's wild he said the best the prettiest ones were those that were unused they were they were given as gifts and your family just valued them because of the the nature of nephrite the nature of jade is to be indestructible and conquerable you just can't shape it any uh you know it's it gives you a lot of resistance it takes a lot of expertise to shape it then you see these beautiful beautiful silky finishes on an ads blade just a simple adds plate a a silt or a kilt and it's just so beautiful and but you look at it and you think the only way they carved this is sandpaper sand and water and how long that takes to wear it down it's almost geologic time but one piece you would work on for a year two years three years wasn't instantaneous they didn't have the equipment they have now and so those would be given as gifts and kind of like any great valuable gift you hold on to it and you just appreciate the the nature of how it was created and what it's made for probably the most beautiful thing that i've ever had with is a pipe made out of blue nephrite comes from alta lake was that a gift it was my great grandma's and she smoked it and i used to help help her put her packet for her and i'd give a turn she'd light up then fall over now i waited for a while then i go and i take the pipe clean it out wrap it back up put it in her little her little bundle above her bed every night pull it out hand it to me take it clean it out pack it and there was no destroying it you couldn't hurt it you can't scratch it fire didn't seem to do any damage to it at all i could clean it out and look just as clean it retained no smell not like uh catalanite will retain a smell right anhydrous stones for the most part do no idea the history of that if that was given to her when she was younger it was given to her by her grandmother wow really has been handed down and handed down and she has a little pipe bag that goes with it a little compartment for her indian tobacco like the stuff we were smelling up there and oh it was quite beautiful it was in its simplicity when she died grandpa gave it or no when she died it was given to grandpa then when my grandma died her mother-in-law they gave it to me my grandpa goes here he said he said i'm going to give this to you you know more you've been or you've been closer to it than me he said but don't you start smoking look she said don't you start smoking that killed your grandma that looks nice she was 104 and he goes yeah well she'd live to be 120 if she hadn't started smoking i said and would you have liked that and he goes no we won't go there so you still got the pipe nice i don't know who i'm going to give it to probably my niece and tell her she has to smoke it though because that's the fulfillment of it it's not a man's pipe it's a woman's pipe you know and it should go to somebody in the family not as a a goddamn bookshelf piece to sit in the bookshelf stare at yeah but something to you keep it alive it had purpose it had a life you formed it you shaped it to you created this role don't deny it it's role don't deny it all the prayers all the prayers that have gone through it every time she every time she used it she prayed with it and the smoke carried her messages to the creator so maintain that there's a reason for that it's been blessed by 10 000 smokes you know and so i think it's important but i think it's important that a woman smoke it have you ever been up to the pipe stone quarry up in winthrop twisp never catlinite red pipestone the only i know there's a stone formation a geologic formation that's all i know bucket list what the you gonna let me in you keep getting locked out what the heck your car hates me i guess so i guess it really does i'm white you're red that's what i'm saying that was immediate thought there wasn't there wasn't there were singing rocks some of these are singing rocks here but most of them are over there but it's um it's interesting um okay along here no um there's three areas within the coulee that are really kind of unique um this year you get a lot of playback from resonation down here you get resonation but you also get sounds that emanate from the rocks during the heating and cooling of the stone in the springtime and all of a sudden early in the morning you'll get voices shooting out of the stones here yeah [Music] why would that be because here there's a crystalline material inside some of the stones and like crystals they capture sound vibration and under optimal conditions they release it that's my explanation for it it's the same lava flow all the way through i know but that's the reason you're i'm looking for cryptocrystalline materials deposits because that's generally when you find them [Music] also down at as well because of the granitic outcroppings there yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of uh quartz in there quartz crystals the same kind of singing yeah great acoustics yeah well there you literally have voices coming out of the walls in the springtime so i asked tupa about that and he said those are old people who thousands of years ago they were sitting there and they were talking and that rock was right at the right temperature and it captured them only to be released again under the same exact conditions that may not happen for a thousand years but once it's expelled they don't play back wow a once in a lifetime i said but there were a lot he said well there were a lot of people who lived here over 10 000 years yeah damn right no well i mean we got into this acoustics thing because a few hours ago we were standing right here and uh i don't know if the microphone picked it up but i i could hear this amazing this yeah reverberation or resonation yeah not resonation this is the echo but it wasn't really delayed you were like amplified on this yes yes in real time it's like i've never really heard that before i was broadcasting live radio free europe yeah it's a rock talk coming to you live all we know is the only thing we can be sure of is that uh there's yet to be uh how do you say it we got a lot to know yep more you learn the more you learn about something the more you realize this is probably just this we're skimming the surface about everything we ain't all that bright i'm glad they have this and this is what happens every time oh sure okay okay you give it more than two moving parts i'm baffled i'd be the perfect migrant farmer just picking lettuce not beautiful it is do we have a name no i it's don't it's pretty can't eat pretty you know when you're growing up and you see everything change but you come back you know that split rock looks just the same as when it when i was a kid it has not changed how long has it sat here split look at that isn't that beautiful you can't call it a desert or it shouldn't be because it's not deserted there's life and there's so much it's interesting how our food cycles in the in on the plateau here are so balanced from spring through the spring your gathering consists of roots the vegetables it moves on they die down or go back to sleep and then you're into the fish and berries so you're busy harvesting the the salmon the huckleberries the sarvis berries and the choked cherries that moves into fall and you go into fall foods deer elk sheep and so we have feasts for all of these our salmon feast or fish feasts are the deer the deer feast which encompasses elk and moose and then your fall run of fall run of fish again king salmon and so it gives you time to fill those niches yeah every one of them you just move which means we were i wouldn't say semi-nomadic as much as we were very what do you say uh for were mobile we were mobile we were agile and we were hostile [Laughter] the nature of our being [Laughter] the three aisles yes yeah i think i'd live here in a heartbeat probably over there don't want to spoil it by you know the best way to appreciate something is by letting it be so maybe i wouldn't maybe oh building so you had the right idea down where he's at moisture over there some sort burden makes me wonder about the early days of the billingsley place like when they coming in as soon as your folks were departing yeah actually i think they were um yeah about that time because great great grandpa with the miller fair trading post supplied all these people out here from 1882 to 1906 or 1912 he supplied the people out here on the plateau he greeted matter of fact he probably invited them by the sounds of it german families from wisconsin ohio minnesota to come out here and they did so if you get up on the waterville plateau and wenatchee heights is pretty much a german enclave this is and then you have duca boards that were coming in they were being pushed out by the russians then by the germans they moved into canada about 40 or 50 000 of them ex exited to canada and then feeling the some of the pressure there they moved into british columbia then not feeling welcome there they moved down here to waterville but again the first the first wave of drought it destroyed the dry land farmers a lot of them and so they moved on down to oregon into the willamette valley which didn't seem to be impacted by the the drought feel that yeah it's changed every 10 minutes out here man yeah it really has that's wonderful i opened more than two drops okay that was it a great thunderstorm so your grandpa was jerome miller yeah his father was sam miller and his father was samuel c miller founder of the miller fair trading post miller street in wenatchee prairie stars yeah those are prairie stars yet again another beauty loving the burn from last year these guys are really yeah well i don't think this burned glass oh you don't no this is as natural as it gets okay this is what chocolate or white gamus we call it it loves this type of non-competitive that's not competing with sagebrush it's not competing with cheatgrass so you'll find bitterroot and white canvas in these areas but uh so much so much of it was destroyed during the the great sheep herds of the 20s oh yeah 30s they over grazed stripped areas i think they were not i don't think they were doing it consciously probably an unwitting move unfortunately when they got into moses cooley and the upper moses coulee this side of just on the other side of highway two yep they hit delphinium and death cameras and it wiped out their whole herd when over a two-day period really yeah they had a band of sheep over two thousand unreal was like okay karma's quick here [Laughter] you over grazed zap god will punish you in this case thomas will punish you i guess so well just the fact that we're revisiting yeah uh a playground of yours from the 1950s essentially you know yeah it was a curious fulfilling my curiosity well i got a deer trail you take the high road and i'll take the low road and i'll be in cloudy before you uh whatever you

Channel: Nick Zentner

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Id: 9WV_CYCUbg0

Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024