As a child, one time every student in the class received a free book, so I skimmed through the Scholastic catalog of covers but knew we couldn’t afford to buy books — except once, when every student in class received a free book.
I selected one called “Susan” because the girl on the cover looked like me, although her long straight hair was black and mine auburn. The book told of a Chippewa girl named Susan Bearskin whose family moved from a reservation into the city, where she faced insults and prejudice.
It opened my heart to Native Americans, so much so that I later bought the book on Ebay to read again. I plan to give it to Roy Wilson of Winlock to add to the Indian library he started three years ago with 200 books; it now contains more than 3,000 volumes. In fact, the 91-year-old honorary Cowlitz chief and spiritual leader said they recently poured a concrete slab and erected the foundation for an addition to the library near his home at the end of Dorning Road. It’ll hold oral histories recorded on audio and video; he started with nine and now has nearly 150.
It was his library, museum, and longhouse that drew well-known Native American storyteller Johnny Moses to Winlock Sunday.
“I heard so much about it,” said Moses, a soft-spoken Tulalip with ancestral ties to the Cowlitz, whom he described as peacemakers and ambassadors. “Someone from far away has been there and I haven’t been there.”
Moses, a cultural lecturer and oral historian who speaks nine native languages, was born in 1961 in Ohiat, a remote Nootka village on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He lived with grandparents who taught him their songs, stories, dances and healing traditions as medicine people. His Indian name, Whis.stem.men.knee, means Walking Medicine Robe. After earning a degree in education from the University of British Columbia, he traveled nationwide as a renowned Native American master storyteller.
While most native children attended boarding schools at age four to better assimilate into Canadian culture, Moses said his family kept him home until he was nine, when government agents threatened to have him adopted out.
“That’s how a lot of Indians were lost,” he said. “Adopted out. Taken away from their parents or grandparents.”
When he asked why his native tongue didn’t have words like the English do for “me, myself and I,” his grandmother explained that they’re a communal people who use the word “we.”
“The word ‘we’ is better because just in case you get in trouble, it’s not just your fault,” she told him. “It’s everybody’s fault.”
Sick with cancer at 13, Moses said he was taken to the hospital and then sent home to die.
“I was lucky,” he said. “My grandparents were doctoring people. They took over. I had to drink all this horrible Indian medicine.”
He insisted on sugar to sweeten it. People of all faiths also prayed for his healing.
It worked.
“The elders believed laughter is healing medicine,” Moses said. “I know that it’s true. Laughter is healing.
“We know that God has a sense of humor because God created you and me.”
Moses shared a potlatch song from his mother’s side, a happy song given to the Cowlitz people many years ago. Potlatch means “to share.”
“Instead of going to war, you’d have a potlatch,” Moses said. “It was a wonderful way to communicate. Letting us know that we’re all one people. Human beings. We’re all one spirit.”
Old people called it the tree of life song after a woman cried so much over her arranged marriage because she would miss her family. “Then the spirit told her you have a new family,” Moses said. “You can have a bigger family. Where you go, you can have more relatives. It comforted her. Wherever she traveled, the song traveled. That’s how the song became a potlatch song.”
With arranged marriages, he said, people married into an entire tribe and brought their songs, stories and traditions with them. Moses said his grandparents’ arranged marriage lasted 65 years.
Anthropologists have recorded elders telling stories, but translators often lost the end of the tale when it was buried by raucous laughter. Often those were what Moses called “coyote” stories, a bit indecent.
With waving arms, wiggling fingers, and swaying body, Moses shared the story of Grandmother Cedar Tree. He also sang “Song of the Heart.”
Before leaving, he gave Wilson a white eagle feather and described the longhouse as a “beautiful home.”
“They took our longhouses away,” Moses said. “We still knew that the forest and the rivers are our cathedral. Our church they could never take away.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
