March 11, 2007

McKeown takes up quest for Wy’am rights

     Martha Ferguson McKeown was a respected teacher and author who lived for many years in the Hood River Valley and taught for a time in The Dalles and Hood River. She was the granddaughter of a Virginia architect, who left his home, moved to Missouri and then joined the wagon trains headed for the California gold fields in 1849, before sailing up the coast to Oregon. Her grandfather, Albert Ferguson, was also a two-term Wasco County sheriff.
     While living in The Dalles, the family forged many connections and experiences that would help form granddaughter Martha’s future intellect and emotion.
     Young James Earnest Ferguson, Martha’s father, worked with his father during summer vacations. He carried chain when his father was running surveys for the proposed Dalles-Sandy wagon road. J.E. Ferguson also worked on the portage road along the Oregon shore of the Cascades. He met and made friends with, through his father, many of the area’s pioneer families, and also with the local Indians whose culture remained an interest throughout his life.
     Martha grew up knowing many of the people and families, both Indians and pioneers, who played significant parts in the early days of the Mid-Columbia area.
     Martha’s granddaughter, writer Davinne McKeown-Ellis of Hood River, wrote the following account, part of a larger story about her grandmother that appeared more than 15 years ago in the Hood River News.

By Davine McKeown-Ellis
for The Chronicle

     We spent the night, on occasion, at my Grandmother McKeown’s home, my younger brother and I, in the year after my grandfather died. We were five and seven, respectively, and slept in the heavy, dark-wood beds which furnished her guest rooms.
     Before we went to sleep, after she had combed out her long gray hair, worn carefully braided and coiled at the back of her head during the day, she would read us a bedtime story — one time in my brother’s room, the next overnight visit in mine.
     But no Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fair Tales, or contemporary children’s books were read. Our bedtime stories came from a worn, turn-of-the-century collection of Northwest Indian legends.
     “Listen, T’solo the Wanderer,” the stories would begin, “and I will tell you the tale of Yelth the Raven, or Skam-son the Thunderer, or Wee-nat-chee the Rainbow.” And as we curled beneath the covers, waiting for sleep, she read to us of the Haida Indian legend of acquiring fire, which explains why ravens are black, or described the same Northwest coastal tribe’s explanation of thunder and lightning, or recited the Yakama’s story of why there are rainbows.
     While a bit unusual, her selection of children’s bedtime stories was appropriate, for the Indian culture of the Northwest, and especially of the Columbia River area, was of life-long interest to her. And, although I don’t remember if she ever said so, I suspect that the same collection of stories was read to her as a little girl.
     Following the family tradition, Martha took up the cause of the Wy’am Indians, whose traditional way of life had been severely disrupted by the white culture and government. She followed her father, who in 1917 circulated petitions in an attempt to obtain new homes for Indians displaced by the Celilo canal and locks, built to provide riverboat passage around Celilo Falls.
     In the 1940s and 1950s, when the concept of the American melting pot bubbled furiously, and ethnic heritage (especially of non-European groups) had little popular value, the assault on the Wy’am way of life seemed to come from every quarter.
     Although they had signed the Treaty of 1855, granting them ownership to their ancestral lands and fishing places, and though they had never — as their famous chief and religious leader Tommy Kuni Thompson repeated again and again — signed any later agreements, the Wy’ams were assailed by a bureaucracy that paid tribes without traditional Celilo fishing rights for the loss of the fishing rocks. The government planned a campground for tourists and the edge of the Wy’am village, and offered the Wy’am people little aid as their economic situation worsened.
     There were, indeed, government agents who disputed their existence as a tribe, lumping them with peoples of different heritage and tribal history.
     The final blow came when The Dalles Dam project was accepted in the early 1950s. The pool behind the proposed dam would flood the ancient falls, and the way of life dependent on them.
     All this concerned Chief Tommy Thompson greatly. Time and again he asked his friend Martha McKeown why the white people behaved this way.
     He pointed out that the Wy’ams had never warred against the whites, that his uncle, Chief Stocketli, had smoked the peace pipe with Lewis and Clark, and had later died while acting as a U.S. Army scout during the Oregon Indian wars. He showed Martha the photos of Wy’am men who had served proudly during both world wars, and displayed the ornately beaded bag one woman had made — with the American bald eagle carrying the Stars and Stripes unfurled in its talons.
     Chief Thompson saw the salmon that his people depended upon grow smaller and more scarce — and believed it was because the government forced Wy’am boys to go to the white school, and to cut their long braids.
     He saw gambling, alcohol, and the promise of material goods of the white society turn the young men of his own and visiting tribes from their traditional life, yet he fought to keep the old ways fresh for his people.
     He rose shortly after midnight each morning to offer the prayers of his people to the Almighty through the five layers of dawn. And he never spoke of the sacred salmon, except in the Wy’am tongue.
     Martha used her writing, organizational, and communication skills to aid the Wy’ams — a friendship that earned her adoption into the tribe — the only white woman ever so honored.
     And Archie McKeown, plagued by health problems which had brought son David home from college in 1950 to help manage the family orchard, used his semi-retirement to pursue an interest which meshed well with Martha’s research and literary skills — photography.
     The McKeowns were able, due to their long and close relationship with the Wy’ams, to view and photograph family scenes and ceremonies closed to other whites. Their intimacy permitted the production of a unique photographic record of an aboriginal people in transition.
     Through presentations on radio and to civic groups, films, articles, two children’s books about the Wy’ams, “Linda’s Indian Home” in 1956, and “Come to Our Salmon Feast,” in 1959, and through communications with civic and political leaders, Martha sought to make the culture and plight of the Wy’ams known.
     Her files contain correspondence with many of the best-known Northwest political and media figures of the day. She contacted anyone in a position to help, as this letter, dated March 27, 1953, illustrates:
     “To President and Mrs. Eisenhower:
     ‘‘My husband and I send you, instead of a formal letter, this brief introduction, by picture, to a few of the many folk who depend upon the Celilo Falls fishery for their living.
     ‘‘This great fishery on the Columbia River, to be flooded by backwater upon the completion of The Dalles Dam, does not belong to the United States Government. It was reserved for all time by the Indian signers of the 1855 treaties, ceding the lands of the Mid-Columbia.
     ‘‘Chief Tommy Kuni Thompson, venerable leader of the non-reservation Indians living in the Columbia Gorge, continually repeats these words, ‘We have never signatured our salmon away.’
     ‘‘To us, there is a much greater problem than that of our Indian neighbors, great as is their need: How can we as a Nation hope to chart the course for other nations, if we fail to keep our pledged word to these people.
     ‘‘Respectfully,
     ‘‘Martha Ferguson McKeown”
     The efforts of those championing the Wy’am cause were not enough, however, and in March 1957 the gates of The Dalles Dam closed — and the major Indian fishery on the Columbia River slowly disappeared beneath the rising waters.
     Archie KcKeown died in November of the same year, but Martha’s efforts to help the Wy’ams who remained at Celilo continued. The old ways were gone, and for many of the people, the basics of food and clothing the river and surrounding hills had always supplied in abundance, were gone with them.      Martha’s contacts with many civic groups and individuals resulted in donations of food and clothing.
     The Wy’ams also found themselves in the situation of having to depend on income from the sale to tourists of women’s beadwork. Martha aided in the promotion of this industry, and also assisted the Wy’ams in their often stormy dealings with the public agencies with jurisdiction over them. The following letter, written in the bold script of Martha’s friend, Chief Thompson’s wife, Flora, best describes the situation:
     “To whom it may concern,
     ‘‘We the Celilo indians are quite in need of assistance in selling our bead work. There are no Indian service to help us in time of need — further more, the people are all having hard times. Many of them has no lights — no wood.
     ‘‘Mr. Supt. Galibaith has mentioned that he spoke to some of the indian women at Celilo. These women telling him they sell lot of bead work. But Whose? We women don’t know where. There is no assistance from the Bureau of indian affairs. There has been no one to come help us making our living since we lost our fishing industry. We are denied from treaty rights yet. We have our Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855.
     ‘‘Mrs. Flora Thompson
     ‘‘Mrs. Chief Henry Kuni Thompson”
     Martha had accepted a teaching position at Wy’east High School in 1955, and she continued to teach there after her husband’s death.
     Many of her former students remain in the Hood River area, and they recount memories of the visits of Chief Thompson and other Wy’ams to their classroom.      They also note that if the sun of a bright spring day, or excitement over some upcoming school event made student concentration on verb forms, Shakespeare, or a composition lesson too difficult, it was often possible to turn the lecture to a lively discussion of Northwest Indian problems, history, or lore, with a few well-placed questions designed to play on their teacher’s great interest in the local history and Indian people.
     In the final years of the 1950s, Flora Thompson turned to Martha for help with the Old Chief. Too feeble to be cared for any longer at Celilo, Martha arranged for him to be moved to Hanby’s Nursing Home (now Hood River Care Center). He was given a room facing east — that he might continue to pray as the sun rose each morning. He died there in 1959, at age 105.
     Even after moving away from the Hood River Valley in 1960, Martha kept in touch with the Wy’ams, and for several years after she moved to Portland, a group of her Indian friends, led by chief Tommy Thompson’s son, Chief Henry Thompson, continued to visit the McKeown home in Odell to pick flowers from the garden Archie McKeown had tended so carefully, for placement on the graves of Indian war dead on Memorial Day.
     Chronic illness gradually took its toll on Martha.
     In the final months before Martha’s condition forced a move to the Portland convalescent hospital, where she died in August 1974, Flora, the diminutive and highly respected widow of Chief Tommy Thompson, visited Martha, as she had several times before, in Martha’s apartment overlooking the Park Blocks and Portland State University.
     To the east, Mt. Hood could be seen from the balcony on clear days. And, with its location near the top of the building, the noise of the traffic below was muted to a vague and distant roar. Perhaps, with imagination, the noise reminded the two old friends of other days beside the rainbow-crossed spray of Celilo Falls.