Elsie David

OREGON VOICES

Elsie David is enrolled with the Yakama Nation and has lived near Goldendale, Washington, her entire life. Her grandparents, parents, and older sisters taught her how to gather and preserve traditional foods, activities she continues to the present. In this selection of her oral history interview, she discusses traditional food preservation and some of the challenges that Indian people face in their efforts to gather the native foods of the Columbia Basin.
Katrine Barber interviewed Elsie David on August 6, 2007, for this special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. A complete transcript is archived at the Oregon Historical Society

MY NAME IS ELSIE DAVID. My maiden name is Jim, and I live here in Goldendale, Washington. I was born and raised here. My family comes from the Kamilt-pah, otherwise known as Rock Creek, Wyam, and Pawanpat bands of the Yakama Nation. They are originally from the mid-Columbia River. My parents are Bronsco and the late Ella Jim. My [paternal] grandparents are the late Howard and Maggie Jim, and my maternal grandparents are the late Louise Billy and the late Henry George. All of my grandparents are from the river area. They lived in their respected areas along the Big River until the dams were built. My people that live in the Rock Creek Canyon area were told that their homes would be flooded when the dam was finished. That flood never happened.

Around the treaty time and after, our people, my family, were divided. That's when the government was saying, "you need to pick a tribe/reservation" and forcing our people to move from their homeland. That's how my maternal grandmother's family got separated. There were a bunch of brothers, and they divided and moved to the Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Yakama [reservations] and as far north as Colville. That was a big division there, and the reason why I have relatives near and far. Celilo, Wyam, has been a central point for all of the people, all up and down the river and throughout the Northwest. My elders used to say the Paiute people from present-day southern Oregon would come. Natives from northern California, British Columbia area, the Plains Indians — they would come from all over to trade. They would trade for buffalo hides; they'd trade for salmon. Coastal people would come over, and they'd trade shells for salmon. It was a big thing. The visitors either fish for themselves — they were welcome to fish for themselves — or they'd come there to trade, visit family, share songs and dances, things like that. That's what my elders taught me about Wyam. It was a big trading place. Our people were trading to make a living and survive. They already had a market going before any department store was built here. That's how it was, and my people still trade and fish along this river.

I learned from my grandmother that our Creator made both men and women equal. Men and women each have their special traits and they work together in life. My dad's grandmother, she used to hunt. There are women that fish and hunt and there are men that dig roots and pick berries. There are certain ceremonies that have a protocol and are gender specific, and my family respects that. As for gathering the food, it's about preparing for the year, feeding your family and nourishing them as well the community. You could say we gather and preserve our food to live and survive. It's always been like that, even pre-Columbus and now — it's about surviving.

I was taught to dig roots and pick berries when I was a little girl. You get to know the basics and, when you get older, that's when you learn to preserve it — drying roots, canning huckleberries, and drying salmon and deer. I didn't learn drying techniques until I was about twelve. My mom taught me how to fillet fish, cut it up for canning. When I got a little older, my sister taught me how to dry it. You have to be a little bit more detailed with a knife; it takes a little bit more experience with a knife. And then preserving deer meat, I learned how to can that when I was a young girl. Basically just cutting it up into chunks and getting it ready or helping cut it up for drying. The same sister taught me how to dry it as well. My father taught me how to skin and quarter a deer. My brother-in-law taught me how to clean a sturgeon. So I've had a lot of teachers.

It takes a lot of time and effort to get the food. It takes a lot of roots to feed your family as well as the community. We gather food for other events that happen — name givings, birthday dinners, winter dances, or Sunday services. You've got to preserve a lot of food in order to have enough for the whole year of events.

My eight-year-old son — he helped us peel roots this year, and that's pretty basic. You start out right there, basically peeling and helping washing them and lay them out to dry, maybe helping grind them up, stuff like that. But there's another way, you can make cookies and you just kind of help. When you get to be a teenager, that's when you know how to mix up [recipes], know the right roots in these recipes. You graduate to that level; it's called learning by doing. And it's the same with drying fish. You got to know what kind of weather to set it out to dry in, how thick to fillet it and things like that. A twelve-year-old, they could fillet it up, but somebody older would probably go behind them and advise, just help them.

Violet Tomaskin digs roots on the Yakama Reservation in April 1974.

Courtesy of Mary Schlick, photographer

I would say if you [work] every year from your teenage years to your forties, you are considered a master. Well, that's just what I think anyway. And some people, it depends on where they live. I know one man who lives in The Dalles, he lives right by the river and he has access to fish more than what I would, because I live about twenty minutes away. He has a drying shed near his home, and he does a lot of fish drying. He probably could fillet and hang twenty fish or more in one day. That's really good. It just depends on where you live and how much time you have. He's probably about forty-something. I hear a lot of people say he's the guy to go to for dried salmon and he fillets perfectly. He knows his business.

People get reputations. Like our grandma, maternal side. She was well-known for having roots and berries. If someone needed roots for a funeral or a naming they knew that they could ask her. She was well-known for taking care of our food.

Huckleberries are kind of a big issue right now with our people. We have to race now, because it's become a big commercial product. We're taught to wait until they're ready and feast. We need to pick with care, just like how any person would take care of a berry garden. It's just common sense. Most of our people pick huckleberries for their own use at home or at ceremonies — that's the biggest use — a few of our people sell to help with the family budget. I hear comments from people that it's like a city up there in the huckleberry fields. We even get people who say they've been approached by a person who has a gun saying stay away — and this is a non-Indian — this is my picking area.

There are areas to dig roots around [Goldendale] and [the elders] knew the local farmers and land owners and they respected each other. My grandma used to trade handmade gloves for hides (deer or cow) with some. They agreed with my elders and allowed them to dig roots on their property. Most of the land around this area is not reservation or trust land. So, a big difference from their time to my time is that we are getting a lot of new people moving here and they don't know anything about our food, they don't know anything about our people, they don't know anything about our ceremonies. It doesn't mean anything to them and, so, most of the time, we're not allowed to dig roots on their property. Some of those places I used to go with my grandma and, as I said before, it was an understanding between her and the owner. They think we're tearing up the land. Whereas they'll lease their land to cattlemen and let the cows tear it up. The land and food on the land were placed here for us; land is not something to be owned. Personally, I don't think we should even ask for permission. It should just be a given; we were here before they were a so-called property owner. It should just be assumed, but that's just me.

There is one place that we used to dig, and it's been over-used. There are some farmers out there that own the land — I don't know what kind of crop they have — we go back and it's changed every year. The last time I was there, there were weeds growing there; the roots were overgrown with those weeds and we're getting less of a root crop. So that's another thing that's changing too, all of the crops that have changed the Native landscape.

[In the Columbia River], when the water's not flowing, then you don't have anything moving. It's just like your body. If you're not getting oxygen through or blood flow is slow, you're going to get build-up. It's just like a river — if you dam it up, then you get back-up, and then it's ruined along with the life that depends on the water. It's a cycle. Things are made for a reason — like the sand, rocks, dirt and the rest of the ecosystem. Flooding is a way, to me, of flushing out the system; flushing out the bad stuff. That's how I see the dam; it's backing everything up and clogging the arteries of the Earth.

To me, [gathering traditional foods is] our way of life. We had this before colonization; we had this before white men arrived. It was nothing that was brought over on a ship by the pilgrims or Columbus. Our food is a part of our religion and is medicine to our body. Everything to my people [is] interrelated — our religion, Mother Earth, the animals, the trees, the rocks — they all work together. And for our people now, yes, we have to work and we have challenges, but I think most of our people would rather go to their cellar and get a can of fish than go to the grocery store and buy a pound of hamburger. That's what identifies us. I don't think I would know a great deal of my culture if I just lived on cow and non-tradition food. My grandma used to say, "you're not going to know anything about our people if you don't eat our food." If you're going to eat cows, you're going to be dumb like a cow.

OHS neg., OrHi 92191

Native foods: camas bulb, above, and serviceberry

OHS neg., OrHi 92180

If you're going out and gathering your food, you appreciate it more. You appreciate the process; you appreciate it going into your body. Whoever does this work, you appreciate them as well. You also have more appreciation of Mother Earth. I notice there's a lot of organic farming and people are thinking green and I think, why wasn't that thought of before we messed it all up? I'm not saying all Indian people gather food, and some aren't able for good reason. But I notice that some of our youth who don't know the gathering process eat less of traditional foods, have less appreciation of the foods. They'll eat a whole bowl of it because it tastes so good, but they don't know how long it took to [pick] that. Whereas the kids I know who pick berries, they're more slow at dishing out a bowl of berries and think of other people when they're dishing out. They think, oh, I know how long it takes to pick berries so I'm just going to take this much and I'm not going to waste it, I'm going to eat all of it.

Mostly we, my family, preserve food for ceremonies and personal eating. Like I said earlier, we attend different events throughout the whole year. We have to have all of these foods at any longhouse event like a name giving, a funeral, Sunday services, and the First Food ceremony/feast. We can huckleberries around [late summer] so we have them ready for feasts the following spring, like salmon feast in April. The first salmon that has been caught that year is brought into the longhouse a certain way along with the other first foods. I don't really elaborate about that because it's a religious ceremony. If anyone wants to witness that, they're welcome. You can't record it and cannot take pictures or anything, because it's a ceremony. They're welcome to record it in their mind and their eyes, their heart.

Nancy Jim and Hannah Sohappy, Wyam, prepare first-caught salmon for a traditional feast on May 12, 1940.

OHS neg., CN 001479

Our people are still actively preserving our food and gathering it. I read a lot in books, you know, that they used to do this or they used to do that or they had this — a lot of wording is in past tense and I just think, geez, do they think Indians just fell off the face of the earth or what? You know, we're still here, we still do this, and that's why it's so important for us to take care of our earth. I wish more people could understand.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.