Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Purifying Vapors
November 2008

We now learned that the spearing of the Salmon was attended with many ceremonies . . .
David Thompson upon arriving at Kettle Falls, June 21, 1811

When North West Company fur trader David Thompson arrived at Kettle Falls two hundred years ago, he happened to coincide with the summer run of Chinook salmon up the Columbia. While Thompson was on a very specific mission that summer -- he had orders to make it to the mouth of the big river, spreading the message of beaver pelts for European trade goods all the way downstream -- he could not help but notice that the local people practiced a host of rituals around the great fishery.

Even with thousands of fish moving upstream against the falls, at the beginning of the event all the spearing was entrusted to a single man. When the white visitors went out to watch him work, the spearman did not take his place on the rocks until high noon.

Upon enquiry, I learned, that his spear had come in sight of the Bones of the head of a Dog, long since dead, [and] to spear Salmon with such a polluted Spear would have driven all the Salmon away. He therefore scraped the bark of the red Thorn, boiled it, washing the Spear Head in it, and his face and Eyes; thus removing the pollution of the old bones of a Dog's Head. During his five years of contact with Salish-speaking tribes, Thompson learned that the idea of purification, accomplished through a process of special plants, heat, and steam, spread far beyond that polluted spear. All through the north Columbia country he saw people regularly use sweat lodges to cleanse body and spirit.

When the oven of a sweating House is heated, the Fire is taken out, clean Grass or Branches put on the bottom, they then creep in, one or two at a time, & are soon in a most violent perspiration - from hence they rush headlong into the River, or roll in the Snow. Even Boys of 10 years old have their share of this Luxury.

While Thompson raised an ironic eyebrow with that final "Luxury," indicating that there was no way a man like himself could gain anything from such behavior, early white visitors who were paying attention watched similar sweating practices all up and down the Columbia. On May 1, 1825, as he collected plants near modern Portland, David Douglas passed several tribal sweat lodges "formed of sticks, mud, and turfs, with a small hole for means of entering." The naturalist stopped to describe these "steaming huts or vapour baths." He learned about their ritual use after hunting and war parties. He marked each man's naked entrance and well-steamed stay in the hut, and how they capped off the experience with a plunge into a nearby pool.

But "my curiosity," Douglas wrote, shrugging off the obviously serious rituals he was witnessing in the same way Thompson had, "was not so strong as to regale myself with a bath." When Canadian artist Paul Kane made a rough sketch of a sweat house at Kettle Falls in the summer of 1847, he also depicted the rocks and firewood that provided the steam. But like Thompson and Douglas, Kane did not go inside. None of these visitors looked into the lodges to see what was really going on with the sweating ritual and the spiritual idea of purification. None of them mentioned whether the tribal people involved ever invited them to participate.

That gap between watching the entry hole and not understanding what went on inside may be part of what allowed the use of the sweat lodge to continue unchanged for so long. On one end of the time span, Coyote sweats in some of the most ancient of tribal stories. On the other end, Alan Fackenthal, the son of an early homesteader below Nine Mile Falls on the Spokane River, recounts how his family used to watch Kalispel people walk down Sand Canyon to the river. The Kalispel, just as they had for untold generations, were coming from Cusick in the Pend Oreille country to participate in the salmon fishery at the confluence of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers. At the bottom of Sand Canyon sat the frame of a sweat lodge that had always been there. The Kalispel would pause to refurbish the structure, gather the materials necessary for a good sweat, and carry out the ritual before they went fishing.

Spokane tribal elder Pauline Flett tells exactly the same story about her grandfather Titus Garry. When she was a little girl she had a special bond with her selah, and wanted to follow him everywhere. Early every morning she would wake up to the sound of him putting on his shoes and padding down the hallway to go outside. She would quick get dressed and follow him out, and sometimes her little brother would follow her. The two would trail their grandfather across the flat to the edge of a sandy bench where the land dropped off. Right there Titus Garry would turn around and stop them.

"You stay here," he would say. "Go back to the house." Then as soon as the children turned around, Titus Garry would make his way down the steep hill.

Years later, when Pauline Flett was looking to build a house on her original family allotment, she walked down that hill herself to see where her grandfather had gone. At the bottom of the hill she found an old stock watering trough.

"Behind that trough I saw the bent sticks of a small sweathouse," Mrs. Flett says, spreading both hands together to form an arch. "Just a few stick-like bones were all that was left. He had done it so many times that I could see where the ground was all tamped down from my grandfather's sweating. That's where he had gone every morning, to take his sweat before he want out to sing the sun up."

When David Thompson watched the salmon fisherman at Kettle Falls cleanse his polluted spear in a suffusion of hawthorn bark, he did not understand the process. But after two weeks of camping at the Falls, he did realize that everything the people did there grew organically from many generations of living in that place.

"Experience," Thompson wrote just before he got in his canoe to paddle downstream, "has taught them the delicate perceptions of this fish."

By then Thompson would have understood that whatever Titus Garry was doing in his sweat lodge at the bottom of the hill, he had his reasons to be there, and they stretch all the way back to dawn of everyone's first day.

Illustration: Paul Kane 1847: Sketch along the Columbia River. Courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

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