Remembering the old ways (fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

Remembering the old ways

2004-01-12
by Mike Archbold
Journal Reporter
http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/153432

The little girl, a third-grader, carefully leaned forward and whispered
in Arthur Ballard's ear.

She stepped back and looked him square in the face, as if expecting a
reply. Then she whispered again in his ear before following her
classmates into the museum.

Patricia Cosgrove, executive director of the White River Valley Museum
in Auburn, tells that story, delighting in the interaction fostered by
the museum's newest acquisition: ``Listen My Nephew,'' life-size bronze
statues of Ballard and his friend, Big John, a Muckleshoot tribal
elder.

A large group of Muckleshoot tribal members attended the unveiling late
last year. Cosgrove said the rendering by New Mexico sculptor Reynaldo
Rivera brought tears to their eyes.

The two men greet visitors just inside the museum entrance.

Ballard is sitting. He wears a hat and balances a tablet on his knee; a
pen poised in his hand. His head is tilted upward at an angle as he
waits intently for Big John standing in front of him to speak.

Big John, who was born around 1840, is a big man with a regal head. His
features are heavy, especially his nose, which dominates his face. A
cane is hooked over his right arm. He is gazing into the distance or
perhaps into the past.

The sculptor was helped by photographs of Big John's great grandson,
Harold Moses, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Big John. Moses, the
last fluent native speaker in the Muckleshoot tribe, died last
February.

Preserving tribe's culture

The sculpture's message is clear: Big John is the teacher; Ballard the
student.

Working together, the two helped preserve a portion of the complex and
highly developed culture and spirituality of the Muckleshoot Tribe,
whose villages once dotted the rivers banks of the Green and White
rivers before white men arrived.

Ballard's work became the foundation for much of the knowledge about
Puget Sound Salish Indian traditions and life before the settlers
arrived. He also testified in court from the 1920s to the 1960s on
behalf of Indian land and resource claims.

The Salish Indian culture was an oral tradition carried on the wings of
their shared language -- Lushootseed. When winter came, the families
retreated to their longhouses or smokehouses to tell stories and
legends, dance and sing. The stories taught morality, geography,
history and behavior.

To read what Ballard translated is to realize how developed and
intricate was the history and culture of what he termed ``the elder
race.''

Both men took a risk

Valerie Bellack, who heads the Muckleshoot Tribe's language program and
teaches, said both men took a risk that is not easy to take:

``Asking to learn from a person so different than yourself or just to
get along together can be scary. It is risky for both sides. We today
need to know that and remember these men's efforts.

``Without the materials that resulted from their shared work, the
Muckleshoot would not have any significant historical records. I just
can't say how thankful I am for what Arthur Ballard did and his
friendship to the Muckleshoot people.''

Ballard had to learn the language before he could talk to Big John or
many of the other Puget Sound Indians he listened to called
``informants.'' It is not too much of a stretch to imagine Big John
patiently teaching the words to his younger companion.

And they were friends. They met in the winter of 1911-12, according to
Greg Watson, when Ballard walked from his home in Auburn up the hill
several miles to the Muckleshoot Reservation to talk with Sukwa'lAsxt
(Big John).

Big John, who was born around 1840 and was a teenager when white men
first arrived in the Puget Sound country, was a well-known orator among
the Muckleshoots and knew the old stories and the old ways intimately.
He died in the late 1920s or 1930s.

Watson, who teaches at the Auburn School District's Virginia Cross
Native American Education Center on the Muckleshoot reservation and is
former director of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, profiled
Ballard in the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum's reprint of
Ballard's 1929 publication, ``Mythology of Southern Puget Sound,
Legends Shared by Tribal Members.''

An endangered way of life

Ballard, who developed an interest in Indians as a teenager, knew as did
Big John that the culture of the Puget Sound Salish tribes was in
danger of being lost forever, he said.

Ballard also understood what had happened to the tribes, particularly
his neighbors, the Muckleshoots.

``In the olden times, before civilization came to blight and destroy,''
Ballard wrote in an Auburn newspaper article in 1912, ``there were
nearly a dozen villages, some of them containing hundreds of souls, on
streams above named points convenient for trapping the ever needed
salmon.

``Their populations have faded and their names are all but forgotten. A
new race has established itself in their place, little mindful of them
and their life and they were little aware of its coming.''

The Muckleshoots liked and trusted Ballard, who would trek up to the
reservation to talk with them in their homes and opened his house to
any Muckleshoot who needed help. He came not to take or steal what was
theirs but to share what he discovered for no gain, for the sheer
importance of knowledge.

When the museum proposed the ``Listen My Nephew'' project, the tribe
agreed to pay $22,000 for the statue of Big John. The sculptor went
ahead and created Ballard also, but there was no money yet to pay for
it. With a week to go before the sculptor was to bring Big John to the
museum, Bellack went to the Tribal Council to ask if they could pay for
Ballard, too. The Council said yes immediately, cut the check and both
statues arrived together.

Bernice White, 87, and a Muckleshoot tribal member who helped unveil the
statues, remembered Ballard coming up to their house every day for two
weeks to talk to her

``I remember him as a child. He came to my mother's home to see my
grandfather, James Daniel. My grandfather was close to 90. He went
every day for two weeks.''

Anthropology was a night job

Of Ballard and Big John, she said: ``They established a right for use
that the white people don't try to understand. It sets us firmly in the
ground that we were who we were.''

Anthropology was Ballard's night job. Though a graduate of the
University of Washington, he graduated with a degree in Latin. There
was no anthropology program. His meticulous work later earned him
respect and recognition in academic circles.

One of his original publications is in the archives of the Royal
Anthropological Society in London.

Thomas Talbot Waterman, the first anthropologist hired by the UW, said
of Ballard in his 1973 ``Notes on the Ethnology of the Indians of Puget
Sound:''

``Mr. Ballard may be regarded as the leading authority on the Indians of
the state of Washington. His acquaintance with them and with their mode
of life has extended over a long period and is extremely intimate.''

By day, Ballard worked variously as a school teacher, postal worker and
city clerk of the city of Auburn. The son of Dr. Levi Ballard, a
physician who recorded the first plat in what would become Auburn,
Arthur was a member of the town's gentry.

Final manuscript locked up

While Ballard published a number of papers before he died in 1962, the
bulk of his legacy is locked up by a family member in California.

No one has seen all of it. It includes original tribal items such as
handmade fish weirs like Big John used to make, as well as photographs
and tapes.

It also includes his final manuscript, a summation of his work with
Puget Sound tribes, which was about to be published when he died. The
family took the manuscript back before it could be published. A copy of
the book that was in the safe at the museum also disappeared.

Both the museum, anthropologists and Puget Sound tribes hope that
someday that the material Ballard so painstakingly collected will be
made public.

The story of Blanket Rock

The following was told to Native American historian Arthur Ballard by
Ann Jack, born about 1840, who lived on the Green River.Blanket Rock

The young wife of a member of the Taitida'pabc, a tribe near Squally,
became homesick and wished to go back to her parents who lived on the
shore of Puget Sound near Three Tree Point. When she got there, her
people had set off with their camp equipment in a canoe. The young
woman hastened along the shore until she caught sight of the boat in
the distance. Crying to her mother, ``Wait for me,'' she sank down
exhausted. There she is to this day in the form of a white rock.

Her husband was dressed in a blanket of whistling-marmot skins. He was
turned into another boulder, down the beach. The surface of the boulder
looks like a wrinkled blanket. The white people call it Blanket Rock
(qoiqwi'ltse or qoqoi/ltse.) It now stands on the beach near Buenna.
The boat and cargo were turned to stone and the poles to trees.Crow,
who was the slave of the old people, was carrying water in a basket.
This she hid. It turned into a spring on the south slope of Three Tree
Point. That spring is hard to find and brings back luck to those who
drink it. We call Three Tree Point, Sqe'leb, which means ``loading
things into a canoe.''

-- from Arthur Ballard's ``Mythology of Southern Puget Sound,'' 1929.

* * *

Blanket Rock is an example of a story that explains a specific
geographic place in Puget Sound that Salish Indians knew well.

``This is the kind of legend that makes me reflect on the tremendous
intimacy the native people had with their surroundings,'' said Patricia
Cosgrove, director of the White River Valley Museum. ``A large rock
would be named and have its own legend.

``To me that is very intimate. You have to have been in that place so
long that every little feature in the place has significance. It makes
sense for communities that have been in this place for thousands of
years.''

Therein lies part of the value of the Salish Indian stories that Ballard
translated to non-Indians today, she said. They can give a sense of
time and place about the land and the people who were here and thriving
when white men arrived.

Greg Watson, who wrote an introduction to a 1999 reprint of Ballard's
``Mythology of Southern Puget Sound'' said the stories, when translated
as well as Ballard did, give a reader an insight into the Salish
language, its grammar and how it organized thought.

``These particular narratives have a great deal of spiritual content,''
Watson said. They are akin to the Koran or Bible for a people with
their oral tradition.''

The stories were told over and over and heard by both young and old.
Figuring out the point of a story and applying it to one's own life is
an important part of the educational process, he explained.

One of Watson's favorite stories that young people like a lot is the
tale of Elk woman and the flea people. He likes it because there really
was a place between Kent and Des Moines called the Flea House.

It tells the story of Elk woman, who is captured by the flea people who
plan to kill her. But she relies on her own resources and discovery of
supernatural powers to dispatch them all, turning them from monsters
into tiny fleas that can no longer kill.

Fleas as monsters?

``Have you ever looked at flea under a microscope?'' Watson asked.

-- Mike Archbold