Chapter Two
Secularization in the Period Since 1850

One half of him was lost in the dim past of conceptions that are almost unintelligible to the White man. The other half of him seemed utterly at home in the modern world of scientific application and religious scepticism. At one moment Sam would speak of some mysterious rock, which one is forbidden to touch, with obvious faith and awe. At another he would turn around and declare that the old beliefs were "all imagination."
From Edward Sapir's description of Sam Brown (Hupa) in 1927 as a man caught between two worlds (Golla, in press)

The End of Indian Time

In explaining their culture to an outsider, elderly Indian persons most often begin with a statement about the past: the first thing they want understood is that in ancient times, everything used to be religious. Even the act of walking along a trail, they might say, was made religious because of certain places where a person was supposed to rest, speak a certain prayer, or simply drop a piece of twig onto a pile of other twigs—just as some wo'gey had done.

Wo'gey is the Yurok word for the prehuman beings who occupied the landscape before Indians came, while in Hupa they are called kixunai and the Karok word is ikhareyev . In aboriginal thought there was no conception of a human history, but rather all culture was believed to have been inherited from these miraculous beings, who had occupied the territory just a few generations before. The early Indians believed that they lived where the wo'gey had lived,

fished where they had fished, and spoke prayers and sang just as the wo'gey had done. Indeed, the prayers and songs Indians used were gifts from the wo'gey , who felt sorry for humans and wanted them to have medicine. Aristocratic Indians sought to emulate the wo'gey in all things, as this was the key to power, while departures from the wo'gey lifestyle caused bad luck for a person and ruined the world in general.

But curiously, the word wo'gey also means "white person," and a Yurok might even use the expression very derisively today, so that it has the connotation of "white boy" or "honkie." This was something I discovered quite soon after moving to Weitchpec, and the experience was all the more shocking because I was honestly confused about what he meant. Here was a word that I had heard mentioned only in reverence, but now I was being called wo'gey in a clearly insulting voice. I had a Yurok friend named Dick Myers, who lived downriver at Sregon, and I asked him about it the next day.

"Oh Rich," he said, answering me as if I were a child even though we were both in our thirties, "when they brought Indians to live in the world, they never said it would last forever. They said they'd be back, and then that'd be the end of Indian time. So when Indians seen the first white people, they figured it was them come back."^[1]

For me, that always explained the sardonic fatalism that set Yuroks apart from the Hupas and the upriver Karoks. During the late 1970s, when I was staying in Humboldt County, the main spokesman for this brand of thinking was Calvin Rube, who had a small ranch on the hillside at Wahsek, not far from the Martin's Ferry bridge, a few miles downriver from Weitchpec.

Mr. Rube said it was wrong to put on dances like the Hupas did, now that Indians didn't live the way they were supposed to. If a dance were done wrong or conducted by an improper person (and some objection always seemed to apply), then the Creator's power would work in a "vice-versa" manner, according to him. Moreover, he said that people violated "the Creator's Program" so openly nowadays that the world was going to end pretty soon anyway. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and other, more recent disasters such as floods or tidal waves were cited as evidence.^[2]

While Calvin Rube's reactionary teachings were far from typical,

feelings of antagonism between past and present seem to have been shared among other, more moderate persons I met. Indians of the 1970s were no longer so divided between two worlds as Sam Brown had been during the 1920s, but the disparity between an idealized past and an imperfect present was still troublesome for many in the rural community. The character of the dissonance and the specific nature of the disparities between past and present can be illustrated by describing a Brush Dance I attended in 1979.

A Brush Dance in Hoopa Valley

To begin with, I noticed that people found things to criticize about nearly any dance that came up during the year. The main complaint against the Brush Dance at Matilton Ranch was that the pit was built on a cemetery. That was considered reason enough not to go, and some people made it pretty clear to me that they didn't intend to. One Yurok woman (Ella Norris) said,

They put [that pit] right on a cemetery. Something's going to happen. They found bones when they was digging it, and you're not supposed to disturb the dead. You're supposed to show respect. And something's going to happen. You just watch.

I talked to one Hupa man (Elmer Jarnaghan) who had even more to say about the pit at Matilton Ranch. He said that he had known the two men who first got the idea of building a pit up on that fiat above the riverbank, a long time back.

They're both dead now. They was gonna fix a pit there, and some older people told them, "No. Don't bother. That's a cemetery." So they covered it up and never bothered no more. Two or three years ago, some boys got to fixing it up. My grandson was one who helped work on it. And believe it or not, when they got through working, he couldn't walk. . . . Damn near a year. He could walk, but he had a hell of a time.

I wanted company for my first Brush Dance, but it seemed as if none of the Yuroks I knew intended on going. That afternoon, I mentioned it to some younger guys outside of Pearson's Store in Weitchpec and asked them if they were going. They just laughed off my question, and one guy just shook his head and said, "We

weren't invited." They said they were going to spend the night hooking eels down by Tuley Creek, so I dropped the subject.

Others who considered themselves more respectable than the bunch outside Pearson's told me that the Brush Dance was not important anyway. They would attend the Deerskin Dance or the Jump Dance, but in their opinion the Brush Dance wasn't even religious anymore. "Nowadays," one Christian woman said, "I call it the Devil's Playground," presumably because the dance had occasionally been marred by drinking and other roughhouse behavior during recent decades. Another person said that I would probably enjoy the dance quite a bit, as long as I didn't go walking around by myself in the parking lot. If I stayed around the area of the pit, I would be fine.

On the night of the dance, I found myself standing on a gravel turnout off Highway 96, considering this advice and wondering if anybody I knew would be at the dance, which I could see in the distance out across the river. From this high embankment, I could make out several camps in a small grove of fruit trees. Several separate groups of people seemed to be having a nighttime picnic, each little bunch illuminated by the cooking fire in the middle, and I gathered that they were taking a break between dances.

This was Matilton Ranch, the family name being derived from a Hupa word meaning "boat place." The Trinity River makes a huge hairpin turn around the Matilton plain, and below where the yellowish grass starts growing, the beach is wide and sandy. Even though the moon was new, I could see water eddying in great slow spirals, and two sleek Indian boats, carved from redwood logs, slanting into the water. For a city person like myself, the scene looked much like a museum display, except that some young Hupas had placed stones on the sand so as to spell out the words FISH ON. This was a protest against federal restrictions on Indians taking salmon with their gill nets, and the words were written in letters as tall as a man and designed to be read by someone standing on the turnout, as I was.

But here on the opposite bank, I realized that I had driven too far, and that I should have turned off the highway about five miles back, before even crossing to this side. I had to drive back to Hoopa Valley, cross a cement bridge, and head back upstream along Tish Tang Road. Turning off where the sign said "Hospital," I soon

passed the small but modern Hupa Tribal Clinic. The road went on for a quarter mile to where there was a small airport, and then the blacktop ended. For about three hundred yards I avoided potholes that pocked a dusty construction road, and then my Volkswagen climbed a steep bank to bring the area of the Brush Dance pit into view.

There were about thirty or forty pickup trucks, vans, and cars parked helter-skelter around the fireplaces, and when I killed my engine, I felt at once how pleasant it was to be there. I could hear gently syncopated singing emanating from the pit, and saw silhouettes of the dancers lit by firelight. Out under the stars there was a pervading silence which framed the music, and the songs had a sobering and spiritual character that more consciously artful music could never have achieved.

The earth was built up around the pit, and split logs made four rows of seats, as if the pit was a miniature amphitheater. There were a couple of families who stayed well after midnight, but only a handful of people had committed themselves to watching the dances until dawn. Tomorrow, Sunday morning, the seats would all be taken as sleepers awoke and others arrived to watch the climactic final dances, but now there was plenty of room, and some of us even stretched out on the logs between dances to stare up at the stars.

There were two middle-aged women, probably the wives of singers, who left the pit between dances to govern the cooking and other family affairs, then returned for each set of songs. They watched very carefully, in a critical yet approving way. They were very nice and, seeing that I was alone, they decided to chat. Before long, one began explaining that the dance had been different in earlier times.

She pointed out that the dance was originally held in the family house and not in one of these permanent Brush Dance "pits." She explained that the modern pit was a stylized replica of the (semisubterranean) houses in which precontact Indians actually lived.^[3] She also noted that the dancers only came from two "sides" tonight, whereas before (when there were more dancers), groups came from several different villages, each competing to outshine the others with their songs.

Most important, she wanted me to know that the original Brush

Dance was not just an annual affair, but rather something that could happen any time during the warm season that began with the spring salmon run. Originally, the ceremony was held in order to cure a child who was weak or sickly. The parents hired a specialist to make medicine for the baby in the family house, and this curing was the core event around which the rest of the singing and dancing took place. The roof planks were removed from the house during the dance so that people could watch from outside, and gradually the Brush Dance developed into an occasion for community entertainment and courtship, as well as serving its central purpose.

Since it was now an annual community event, I concluded that the dance had become largely symbolic in function, but I found out later that this impression was incorrect. I became acquainted with Alice Pratt (Hupa), a medicine woman for the Brush Dance, and then I learned that concessions to modernization in the modern Brush Dance were remarkably slight. The culture around it had become much more secularized, but the ritual itself had remained very much the same, despite (or perhaps because of) the criticism it received.

For Alice Pratt, the ritual begins well before the dance itself, as she gathers the plant substances that will be needed, going without food or water and speaking prayers as she collects the medicine.^[4] On the first night of the public ritual, she builds a fire in a particular way,^[5] and then she makes medicine over the baby for three days in much the same way as it has been done for at least one hundred years.

One important element is the waving of burning sticks of pitch-wood over the baby. The wood must be sugar pine, and a certain song is sung while this is done. Mrs. Pratt described the fire waving in these words:

First we take that salal brush and we throw it on our fire, and it just burns. It goes click, click, click. My father used to call it firecrackers because it crackles like that. Then you stick your pitch on the end and get it started, and it's got to be rotten. Used to be some nice ones but they've logged everything out and it's getting hard to find. You stick it in the fire and it blazes. So that's what we go this way with [she sings, swinging the sticks at waist level as if waving them over the baby]. If the baby is sick or not doing well, that is why we wave that fire. It scares away things. It helps the baby to grow stronger.

She also uses the bark of the sugar pine, pounding it up and mixing it in water that the child will drink. Other medicines are used to steam the child at various points in the three-day ritual.

This is my medicine basket. We put herbs in it, and we steam it with hot rocks. You put it underneath the blanket and steam the baby. It cleans them out, and it works on them so they grow up healthy. Some of the same stuff goes into these [other] two baskets, only it's not steamed. It's Colt's Foot, and you put that in there, and you put a pine, a new growth of pine bough, on top. I pick them about three o'clock in the morning. Both of them. And I dance. (August 24, 1979)

On the last night of the dance, Mrs. Pratt speaks a medicine formula which is perhaps the single most important element in the ritual.

About three in the morning I pick up both of the medicines and I dance. Towards Mount Shasta. That's where we call for our medicine. There's a sharp rock, and you pound on the rock and you talk. Then you hit it again twice. No answer. Talking in Indian all the time. You pound three times, and the third time he's giving it to you. (August 24, 1979)

Alice Pratt told me that she had learned the entire Brush Dance ritual from her mother, who in turn was instructed by a woman named Queen McCann (Hupa). An explanation of the ceremony was obtained from Queen McCann by Goddard in 1901, and it is interesting to compare the information given by Mrs. Pratt with that found in Goddard (1904:241-251) and in another account given by Sam Brown (Hupa) during the 1920s (Golla, in press). Each of the three versions gives only a partial view of this complex event, besides having been affected by the interviewer's methodology and other factors, but nonetheless it seems clear that the medicine has remained remarkably intact.

Some slight changes seem to have occurred, though it is hard to be sure, and these seem significant. The spoken formula given by Alice Pratt seems to be less detailed than that collected by Goddard, and she made it very clear that her prayers were largely improvised rather than fixed in form. The significance of this is not perfectly clear, as Goddard may have failed to note the improvisatory element in Queen McCann's prayers, and I may have failed to obtain a complete account from Alice Pratt. She may have had

her own reasons for not giving me more complete information, for knowledge of spoken formulas is traditionally quite valuable.

Asked if she always spoke the same prayers, Alice said,

No, just whatever you think. Whatever comes into your heart that's beautiful. You begin [thinking], "Oh what am I going to say?" And before you know it you'll be just talking, on and on.

She also made it clear that she prayed for the dancers and not only for the child being doctored. This was not indicated in the earlier accounts, and it struck me that this fits perfectly with the modern status of the dance as an event that serves the entire community (rather than only the family of a single child). She said the following words in Hupa, then translated,^[6]

I wish my people would be good. I wish they wouldn't go up against anything bad. Hey in sah [spoken like an amen].

Then (only in English) she said,

And the little fellers they get in there. I say a special prayer for them. It's supposed to be in the spring of the year when they have this Brush Dance, so I pray that the child will grow with the leaves and everything else that's growing. That he or she will grow up in that, the blossoms and the grass, everything. And he'll be just like that.

It was also highly interesting to me that even Alice Pratt had complaints to make about the modern Brush Dance. I mentioned another dance I had attended and Alice criticized the medicine woman for not being active enough.

She just sat there. Every time the dancers [leave the pit], well you're there, and you pick up the miewluh and make your flame go again, and brush off the baby again. When the singers go out, you're supposed to raise up that pitch again. So we sat there and sat there, and she never did.

More important, she complained at several points during our talk that logging activities were making it hard to obtain sugar pine for the medicine.

I went to Pekwan, and they told me, "Oh there's a lot of pitch out there." Then I said I'd go [to perform a Brush Dance], and we walked and walked. I don't know how many miles. We just found a few. I told him it wasn't

going to be enough. Then one guy says there's lots that way. We traveled all around, and only found a few. It's terrible.

Because of that, she had to allow about two weeks for gathering the medicine substances, and even then it was not possible to wave the fire as many times on the first night as one really should.

Generally speaking, however, it was clear that the Brush Dance had changed relatively little over the past one hundred years or so, and indeed I learned that the ceremonial life as a whole was among the most conservative to be found anywhere in North America. Nonetheless, other aspects of society had changed considerably during the historical period, and it seems important at this point to speak about the genocide that prompted these transformations.

The Devastation of Indian Cultures in Northwestern California

The earliest definite contacts between coastal Yurok Indians and whites was in 1775, when the Spanish explorer Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra landed at the Yurok village of Tsurai, which is now called Trinidad.^[7] However, accounts of that visit indicate that the Yuroks who met Bodega's boats were already using iron implements and that they were prepared to trade pelts for more of them. Spanish ships had presumably been passing relatively close to these beaches since the start of the regular Manila galleon run in 1565.

The first known contacts between inland Yuroks and whites occurred much later, in 1827. In that year, fur traders from the Hudson's Bay Company reported having seen various trading articles from American ships. In May, 1828, Jedediah Smith crossed through the area from the southeast. Beginning from the Sacramento Valley, the Smith party first reached the upper Trinity River, then descended along the Trinity and the Klamath rivers downstream to the Pacific Ocean. Reports of this expedition stated that the Yuroks possessed what must have been glass trade beads and iron knives and arrowheads. Again it was noted that the Indians wanted to trade beaver pelts for more knives.

Except for these incidental contacts, the indigenous civilization

was not seriously disrupted until 1850, when prospectors began flooding into the local Indian territories. During the course of the next fifty years, mainly on account of the Gold Rush, the aspects of Yurok, Hupa, and Karok culture which derived from aboriginal patterns were much diminished. Several adjacent tribes were driven virtually to extinction during the 1850s and early 1860s, including the Indians now known as Konomihu, Chilula, Wiyot, Chimariko, and Whilkuts.^[8]

Since Karok land on the Klamath offered the best prospects for mining, the Karoks suffered most, initially. In 1852, most of the Karok towns between present-day Bluff Creek and the mouth of the Salmon River were burned to the ground, the Indians having been driven out. On returning to their villages, the Indians found houses and farms of white settlers on their land (Bright 1978:188). The Karoks fought back, and their persistence was noted in newspaper accounts, but these reports of the Indians' resistance only fed the temper of indignation and incited vigilante groups to greater violence against them.

There was also a climate of outright violence downriver at Weitchpec, but as might be expected the Yuroks responded as individuals rather than by fighting collectively.^[9] This anarchic temperament played right into the hands of white journalists: they portrayed Yuroks who resisted as outlaws, observing that many other Indians took decent jobs working for whites. Pilling notes that Yuroks of the period (circa 1850) were indeed working for whites at Trinidad, Gold Bluffs, Klamath City, Kepel, and Weitchpec, while other Yuroks were openly hostile (Pilling 1978:140).

Meanwhile, greater populations of whites flowed into the cities that were developing on the coast. Adequate seaports were necessary to transport goods and supplies for the inland mining industry, and soon there was also a booming trade in lumber and commercial fishing. Warnersville, now called Trinidad, and Klamath City (near the mouth of the river) were both founded in 1850, and the town of Union, now called Arcata, was founded shortly thereafter. Rather than bringing a civilizing influence to the region, however, the growth of urban populations only intensified the violence against Indians, who were hounded and killed on the least excuse.

Government officials spoke out against these crimes, but were unable to stop them. George M. Hanson, a federal Indian agent

assigned to northern California, makes the following charges concerning the treatment of Indians in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in a report for the year 1861.

Indian children are seized and carried into the lower counties and sold into virtual slavery. These crimes against humanity so excited the Indians that they began to retaliate by killing the cattle of Whites. At once an order was given to chastise the guilty. Under this indefinite order, a company of United States troops, attended by a considerable volunteer force, has been pursuing the poor creatures from one retreat to another. Ten kidnappers follow at the heels of the soldiers to seize the children when their parents are murdered and sell them to the best advantage. (Coy 1929:167)

In Hoopa Valley, things went somewhat differently than along the Klamath, as the valley became a center for government administration of Indians quite early. By the year 1858, the Hupa had not been involved in direct conflict with the white settlers, but they were suspected of assisting some Bald Hills Indians who were known as "outlaws." Settlers in the valley wanted to defuse Indian resistance before it could develop, and one fellow came up with the idea of taking a respected elder down to San Francisco, to show him how futile it would be to resist against the newcomers who were moving into the valley.

A Hupa leader named John Matilton was taken south by steamboat, and a witness describes his response as follows:

[He] could not control his wonder when our city burst into view . . . as the steamer rounded the point, and he very anxiously inquired, "How long it took to build it?", expressing strong doubt of the statement that it had all been done in ten years. He said that his people had never seen so many Whites, and they believed our numbers to be few, and thought that by killing five or six at one time, and as many at another, in a short while they would have killed them all off, but now he felt how greatly they had deceived themselves. (Anderson 1956:97; quoted in Nelson 1978:68)

When he returned to the valley and stood before his people, Captain John scooped up dry sand from the riverbank and let it trickle through his fingers to show how numerous the whites really were (Nelson 1978:68).

The reservation at Hoopa Valley was established soon after-

wards. This provided a place where Indians from all over northwestern California could be moved, to keep them safe from murderous whites, and at the same time it provided a base for dealing with Indian "lawlessness." Goddard, whose "Life and Culture of the Hupa" (1903-1904) would be published some forty years later, assesses the impact of martial law on the Indian populations in Hoopa Valley in these words:

One company of soldiers, and sometimes two, had been kept here twenty-five years after all need of their presence had passed. This was done in the face of oft-repeated protests of the Agents in charge, civilian and military alike. Nothing could have been worse for these Indians than the maintenance of these men in their midst. It may be said in truth that if the government, in 1864, had resolved to do all that lay in its power to demoralize this people, it could hardly have taken a course more sure to reach that end than the one followed. (Goddard 1903-1904:11)

He also includes the following comment from H. S. Knight, a lawyer from Eureka who spent several months on the Hoopa Reservation in 1871.

If the reservation was a plantation, the Indians were the most degraded slaves. I found them poor, miserable, vicious, dirty, diseased, and ill-fed. The oldest men, or stout middle-aged fathers of families, were spoken to just as children or slaves. They know no law but the will of the Agent. (Goddard 1903-1904:11)

As time went on, reservation officials systematically began trying to educate the Indians in modern Western culture and to dissuade them from traditional customs and beliefs, which were viewed as immoral by those in charge. There was compulsory attendance at a reservation school, but this seems to have been little more than a farm which supported itself through the labor of Indians who were supposed to be its students. Nelson provides this account of the reservation school (circa 1895) based on information in a letter sent by William E. Dougherty, Acting Indian Agent, to another official.

At Hoopa, as at many reservation schools, "manual labor" made up fifty percent of the curriculum. Boys worked on a small farm, and girls did the cooking, sewing, and housekeeping. Since the students did this as "part of their training," the school did not have to hire many employees. (Nelson 1978:122-123)

By 1900, this forced acculturation had largely succeeded, and Goddard would summarize the accomplishments of the reservation in these words:

Allotments of land have now been made, and the Hupas are now self-supporting and capable of becoming useful citizens. They are good farmers and stock-raisers. A few adults have enough education to do smith and carpenter work. They are fairly honest, a few perfectly so, and nearly as temperate as White men under similar temptation. (Goddard 1903-1904:11)

William Wallace has stated that the concentration of Indian populations at the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation tended to assist the survival of indigenous traditions and slowed down the disruption of native culture (1978a :176). This seems valid enough, especially since the Indians here shared a similar culture, unlike those at other California reservations (or at the Missions), where Indians of many tribes were often mixed together. But the reservation experience also left these people severely demoralized by 1900. From that date onward, they would tend to view their customs as whites saw them, and even the most elderly Indians who are alive today tend to describe their customs in terms that have been very much influenced by Euro-American values.

Carl Meyer, who traveled among the Yurok at Trinidad in 1851, left notes describing them as a proud people who considered themselves morally superior to whites and little interested in them except to acquire iron tools and other trade goods. The Yuroks that Meyer met were secretive and aloof, as the following comment reveals.

[The] beliefs of the Indians are very involved, and it is very difficult, in the absence of an exact knowledge of their language, to investigate their significance . . . for they strive to conceal them even from their most trusted alien friends. (Meyer 1855, in Heizer and Mills 1952:131)

The Yurok of 1900 were also secretive, but sometimes for different reasons. By that time, some had become ashamed of their own customs, which were viewed as "old-fashioned" and stigmatizing. One writer of the period notes that this was especially true of the younger generation.

Of the Indian ceremonial and tradition it is very hard to gain satisfactory information. The things one learns must be learned a little here and a little there. . . . [The] younger generation of Indians . . . does not wish to talk about the old ways because [they] feel [themselves] above them. (Fry 1904:8)

Even after 1900, however, there were pockets of real resistance, especially in those places farthest from the sphere of white authority. This was something that T. T. Waterman notes in describing his fieldwork among the Yuroks near Sregon.

This place was not large; but its people were all related and all excessively rich. Even yet, the Sregon people assume a rather overbearing attitude toward other Indians. The people here were unwilling to tell me anything about house-names or geography, and I think they passed the word around that I was not to be told by anybody else. (Waterman 1920:244)

No matter how proud or defiant they were, all would have their lives greatly altered through influence from the economically dominant culture, and the delicate relationship between Indians and wo'gey became more tenuous with the passing of each decade.

Transformations

Today, some families take considerable amounts of salmon through gill-netting; other traditional foods such as deer, eel, sturgeon, and acorn soup are also still consumed, but nowadays the Indians of this region rely mainly on markets for their supplies. Those living in Hoopa Valley have a modern tribal facility (with indoor basketball court), two schools, a shopping center, an airport, a medical clinic, and a tribal museum. By comparison, Yuroks living along the lower Klamath have much less in the way of modern American conveniences. The only public buildings in Weitchpec are Pearson's Store and an elementary school; twenty-five miles downstream from there, the road ends at a place called Johnson's, which is smaller yet, and the only telephone in the whole area today is a radio phone setup at Pearson's Store. But even in these remote "downriver" locations, Indian life has been dramatically transformed.

Economic Dimensions of Secularization

The influence of American economy and values connected with it naturally had a central importance in this process. Stephen Powers notes that Yuroks of the 1870s did not consider American gold and silver pieces to be as valuable as Indian shell money (1877 [1976]: 56),^[10] but he also reveals that the Yuroks and Karoks had already become very much involved in the white economy by that time.

Though they have not the American's all day industry, both these Klamath tribes are job thrifty, and contrive to have a considerable amount of money by them. . . . I often peeped into their cabins, and seldom failed to see there wheaten bread, coffee, matches, bacon, and a very considerable wardrobe hanging in the smoky attic. They are more generally dressed in complete civilized suits, and more generally ride on horseback, than any others, except the mission Indians. . . . How do they get these things? They mine a little, drive pack trains a good deal, transport goods and passengers on the river, make and sell canoes, whipsaw lumber for the miners, fetch and carry about the mining camps, go over to Scott Valley and hire themselves out on the farms, etc. These Indians are enterprising. When we remember that they learned all these things by imitation, never having been on a reservation, it is no little to their credit. (Powers 1877 [1976]:46)

Comments such as these tend to obscure the fact that the Yurok was always enterprising in his own way. In aboriginal times, the aristocrat was energetic in the quest for wealth and influence, but the ecstatic practices connected with Indian medicine were viewed with disdain by the early white settlers, as indicated in the following comment from Powers's description of a Karok person gathering sweathouse wood.

While crying and sobbing thus, as he goes along bending under his back load of limbs, no amount of flouting or jeering from a white man will elicit from him anything more than a glance of sorrowful reproach. (Powers 1877 [1976]:25)

Early medicine making seems to have been repressed because it was both offensive to whites and also alien to the American work ethic, and the decline of Indian gambling might be interpreted as part of the same trend. Today, the local Indian gambling game is demonstrated on special occasions, and many young singers can

perform the distinctive songs which are used in playing. But social and economic transformations have greatly diminished the primary status it once had as an indicator of spiritual power. Its place in aboriginal culture is revealed in Powers's description of gambling among the South Fork Hupa (Kelta) Indians.

Like all savages, the Kelta are inveterate gamblers, either with the game of "guessing the sticks" or with cards; and they have a curious way of mortifying themselves for failure therein. When one has been unsuccessful in gaming, he frequently scarifies himself with flints or glass on the outside of the leg from the knee down to the ankle, scratching the limb all up criss-cross until it bleeds freely. He does this "for luck," believing that it will appease some bad spirit who is against him. (Powers 1877 [1976]:91)

The Influence of Christianity

The aboriginal belief system was also influenced by Judeo-Christian thought at a very early period. Powers (1877 [1976]) notes that Indians of the 1870s were fascinated by biblical imagery and had little problem viewing Christian themes in familiar terms. According to him, Karoks of the period already believed in God but rated him slightly lower than Coyote as "a useful and practical deity" (1877 [1976]:24). He also mentions a Yurok legend in which the aboriginal superhero Wohpekemeu was banished from the world because he disobeyed one of God's commandments (Powers 1877 [1976]:62).

The early blending of Indian thought and Christian monotheism is poignantly illustrated in the following remark, though these are of course the words of Powers himself rather than being those of an Indian person.

The Supreme Being of Yurok mythology is called Card; he created all things, and gave them their language, and now lives in the mountains. Anyone who will for the space of ten or fifteen days eat only acorn soup and think only of him will have good fortune and get rich, and when he goes out hunting will find a white deer—the highest earthly object of desire to a Yurok. (Powers 1877 [1976]:64)

Besides introducing the concept of monotheism, Christian thinking has also produced a greater emphasis on religiosity and on

moralistic aspects of the local belief system. This was evident in the modern teachings of Calvin Rube (Yurok), who often referred to "the Creator's Program" and spoke of sickness or bad luck as a "penalty" for violating one of the Creator's Laws. Far from being unique to Calvin Rube, the same basic ideas were shared by many of the Indian people I knew. They reflect a distinctly Indian view of sickness but also have been influenced by Christian thought and contemporary social circumstances.

The accommodation to modem conditions could be illustrated by any number of examples. In one case, a Yurok man's child started having mild seizures, and they were talking about having him doctored down at the Shaker Church. Later, when the man was gone, I heard an elderly Indian woman say, "Of course he [the child] got sick, poor thing. He [the father] was on drugs when he made the baby."

Drinking was another new problem that Indian religion had to address. During the 1970s, young male Indians often spoke of "training" and of being "clean." This no longer means using the sweathouse, but the men do train in the high country, and they also have to avoid using alcohol. Calvin Rube (Yurok) often said that he did not want any visitors at his ranch unless they were "clean," and when I asked Dick Meyers (Yurok) what he meant by this, specifically, Meyers said no sex or alcohol for at least three days.

The blending of Indian belief and Christian thought is nowhere more evident than in the Indian Shaker Church.^[11] In a Shaker service, songs and prayers are addressed to God or to Jesus Christ, and in return the worshiper sometimes receives a curative power which is manifest in the spasmodic trembling that gives the church its name. Once blessed with "the shake," a church member will try to cure another by rubbing the person and scraping the "sickness" off onto candles standing at the altar of the church. Confessions and hymns, sung amidst the ringing of large handbells, comprise the remainder of a Shaker service.

Here again, despite the obvious accretion of Christian elements, the curing is based on distinctly Indian notions of sickness or misfortune as a penalty for some spiritual offense, whether committed by a troubled person himself or by a relative. Accordingly, personal confessions have a central importance in Shaker services, and at

one meeting I attended in 1979 a woman blamed a certain problem on the fact that her father was always gambling Indian style. Thus, ironically, her "testimonial" seemed to imply that the sickness derived from following what she called "old Indian ways" instead of modern Christian ones.

The growth of Shakerism may even have contributed to the extinction of shamanism among these tribes, according to Barnett (1957). He argues that the social function of the Indian sucking doctor was replaced by the Indian Shaker Church, which also allows for ritual curing in a communal setting, and in his opinion this is confirmed by conflicts that occurred during the 1930s and 1940s between Shakers and those who supported shamanism (1957:172-173). While Barnett's explanation may be partially true, the ascendance of Shakerism and the decline of shamanism are perhaps better understood by viewing them in relation to the general process of secularization that occurred as white influence disturbed the delicate balance between Indian culture and the natural environment.

Secularization of the Natural Landscape

Many of the rituals relating to assuring subsistence needs gradually fell into disuse during the historical period as Indian life was increasingly shaped by patterns of the dominant American economy. Like the Brush Dance, surviving dances of the so-called World Renewal complex have assumed a slightly different significance than they once had, but in most respects they have remained remarkably intact. Similarly, songs and formulas used by individuals for practical reasons have also become less common, but many have survived. I recorded some myself during the late 1970s, and others were mentioned to me by persons who declined to sing them except when they were actually needed.

The most severe transformations are in those areas where modern technology has alienated the Indians from mythological understandings they once relied upon for survival, and changing methods and attitudes toward deer hunting provide a dramatic example of this. In earlier times, as the next chapter reveals, a hunter relied upon pleasing the spirit-animal, and one tried to live correctly in order to avoid insulting him. A violation of the flesh was always necessary, but the early hunter seems to have been highly sensitive

to this and sought to excuse himself through rituals which placated deer and other game animals.

By contrast, modern deer hunting is not much different whether done by Indians or whites in this area. In my experience, both generally use a pickup truck or a car and usually hunt at night. Places where a walking Indian might have been obliged to stop and pray in passing are ignored as the hunter speeds by, perhaps tuned in to the radio or maybe even using a CB to keep tabs on the Forest Service. When he does spot a deer, he hypnotizes the animal with his spotlight for as long as it takes to blow him down with a rifle. A headshot is about the only consideration that the animal can hope for nowadays.

Adaptability and Survival

In the introduction to his book on the Yurok language (1958), R. H. Robins paints a grim picture of cultural extinction in describing the character of modern Indian life.

The fabric of Yurok culture . . . has completely disintegrated under the impact of American contacts. . . . The ceremonies and rituals described by Kroeber have been extinct for some years. Debased derivatives of one or two Yurok dances have occasionally been incorporated, much to the annoyance of "old time Indians," into commercial festivities organized by members of the white community in Klamath. (Robins 1958:xiii-xiv)

It should be emphasized from the outset that this view resulted at least partially from inadequate fieldwork. A visiting researcher from the University of London, Robins obtained his linguistic data from six Yurok speakers who lived near the mouth of the Klamath and only stayed in the area from March until June of 1951. As noted previously, the coastal Indian communities were influenced by white settlement at a very early period, and it is not clear that Robins ever visited the more rural Indian communities in Hoopa Valley or along the Klamath River between Pekwan and Happy Camp. Moreover, the dates of his visit would seem to preclude his attendance at any traditional ceremony, as the earliest in the year (the Brush Dance) is held no sooner than the last part of June.

What I found during the 1970s was that Indian culture was not only still alive but was growing in so many directions that it was

hard to get a grip on it. There was cranky old Calvin Rube (Yurok), spreading a sort of neoconservative message that helped produce a generation of Yuroks who were probably more intense about "training" and being "clean" than their parents. There was gentle Alice Pratt (Hupa), quietly performing the Brush Dance medicine much as it had always been done. There were literally scores of Yurok, Hupa, and Karok people I knew personally for whom traditional culture had a slightly different meaning.

None lived as Indians had lived before 1850, but all seemed to regard Indian heritage as the central fact of their personal identity. If there was anything that most of them had in common it was that tendency to criticize whatever transformations did occur: first they want you to know that everything used to be religious, and next they want to tell you that it is not that way anymore. It is not difficult for me to visualize the elderly people whom Robins interviewed complaining to the visitor from England that some people were doing religious dances for demonstration purposes, for this type of finger pointing is a traditional mode of Yurok discourse. This is one thing that the Indians always like to talk about, either to an outsider or among themselves. Far from being a symptom of cultural extinction, this could be viewed as the muscle that holds everything together so tightly as Indian life is grudgingly adapted to modern conditions. And rather than being a modern characteristic, this complaining is probably rather ancient, as earlier Indians also seem to have been obsessed with the disparities between their own lives and that of the wo'gey whose existence they sought in vain to duplicate. Viewed from this perspective, Indian culture has changed very little in the years since 1850.