Monthly Archives: January 2021

Culture Fest in the Willamette Valley

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by Emily Hartlerode, Associate Director

Following each leg of the statewide folklife survey, OFN invites organizations in the surveyed region to partner with us on programs featuring artists from the Culture Keepers Roster. Cheers to our 2020 Culture Fest partners from the Willamette Valley who worked creatively with their $3000 awards to ensure continued cultural programming during the pandemic.

  • Salem Multicultural Institute (SMI)’s World Beat Festival turned their annual live event to a series of Facebook talks, performances, and demonstrations featuring five OFN artists in the World Beat Wednesdays program. “Without the Culture Fest Partnership with OFN, it is difficult to imagine how SMI would have produced cultural programming throughout this summer. To put it simply, this collaboration allowed us to fulfill our mission despite challenging times and to proceed in the face of great uncertainty.”
  • Whiteaker Community Market partnered with Eugene Arte Latino and Noche Cultural to present pre-recorded Latin American music, dance, and performances with livestreamed commentary by four OFN artists as part of the market’s “Cozy & Connected” series. “Many people who have been marginalized do not feel safe in public space or to go to a public market in fear of harassment, cultural appropriation, or exclusion. Funding from OFN to connect market-goers with culture keepers has allowed us to further cultivate our commitment to supporting multicultural artists, musicians, and foodways.”
  • West African Cultural Arts Institute presented six OFN artists in an Oregon Black Artist Spotlight Series presented through blogs plus live and pre-recorded interviews. “Thanks so much for understanding this need to create programs that intentionally give organizational support and exposure to new audiences to marginalized artists as well as an artist honorarium to compensate us for our time, energy, and expertise. […]. Offering artists exposure is not enough and I am so grateful that Culture Fest recognizes this.”
  • McKenzie River Guides gave three recorded interviews for a future exhibit on their place-based livelihoods, tight-knit community, and the ongoing impacts of the Holiday Farm Fire. The exhibit is slated to go on view at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History in the coming year.

Watch for 2021 Culture Fest programs in Oregon’s North and Central coast regions with partners at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center and Columbia River Maritime Museum.

Culture Fest is funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Oregon Cultural Trust.

In This Together: Connecting Culture Across the State

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OFN partners with Four Rivers Cultural Center (Ontario) and High Desert Museum (Bend) to support staff folklorists who sustain folklife programming across this large and diverse state.

Latham Wood, PhD candidate (anthropology) conducting fieldwork in Vanuatu.

We are excited to announce that Latham T. Wood, a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon and former OFN graduate employee, has accepted a folklorist position at the Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario, Oregon. During his time with OFN, Latham coordinated our 2018-19 Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, working with many former TAAP masters to pilot the first of what we hope will be many artist mentorship gatherings. His primary responsibility at Four Rivers Cultural Center will be to coordinate the annual Tradition Keepers Folklife Festivals in 2021 and 2022. Other projects will include implementing regional public programs with cultural nonprofits in the region, producing and distributing podcasts and videos featuring traditional artists, and fieldwork documenting cultures in Eastern Oregon and into Idaho.

High Desert, Central, and Eastern Oregon

by Riki Saltzman, Folklore Specialist, OFN and Folklorist, High Desert Museum

Around the same time that I started OFN’s folklife survey, I also began working with the High Desert Museum in Bend to fulfill a National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts contract—this one to follow up on leads that previous OFN contract folklorists had identified in nine central and eastern Oregon counties. Over the years, folklorists Nancy Nusz, Douglas Manger, LuAnne Kozma, Debbie Fant, Joe O’Connell, and Douglas Manger interviewed hundreds of culture keepers in their surveys of eleven Oregon counties, the Klamath Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Burns Paiute Tribe. But they couldn’t interview everyone in the allotted time.

Thanks to this new NEA funding, I’ve been able to follow up with many of the identified culture keepers—so far talking to buckaroos, a cowboy poet, saddle and gear makers, a hat maker and farrier, ranchers, rawhide and buckskin tanners, basket makers, a fishing guide, and more. What has struck me in spending time with all of these folks is how connected they are, especially over the vastness of central and eastern Oregon, from Wasco in the north to Lake and Harney counties in the south. The ranchers and Western gear makers often know each other. And despite the forced displacement that federal and white settler violence against Indigenous communities caused in Oregon, family connections among those who with different Tribal affiliations become evident after only a few minutes of talking. People throughout our state are related—and they nurture those relationships as they practice their cultural traditions.

Folklorist LuAnne Kozma first interviewed Lisa Robinson back in 2014; what follows is an update from Kozma’s biography of Robinson.

Lisa Robinson, Silver Lake, cowboy hats, farrier

Lisa Robinson (2014), photo by LuAnne Kozma

Lisa Robinson grew up in a cowboying family in south central Oregon. After years of ranching, running cattle, and farriering, she learned to make quality, custom-made Western hats of 100 percent beaver for working cowboys. “I don’t do any wool or rabbit or blends because they don’t hold up as well. [The beaver hats] hold up better when they’re wet, snow and cold. The beaver hats don’t shrink, and they don’t bleed dye when they get wet. They hold.” As a working cowboy (she and her husband, Paul Robinson, run their own small ranch as well as run cattle for other ranches), she knows the value and necessity of a well-made, well-fitted hat; she tailors her individuals and has her own special identifying mark—dots on the ribbon band, which, along with the look of her beaver felt hats, she can spot from a distance.

Lisa Robinson (2014), photo by LuAnne Kozma

Robinson’s father, Al Prom, is a legendary cowboy in Lake County and her mother, Marcie Prom, who is known for her outdoor cooking, used to own the Cowboy Dinner Tree. Their children, Lisa and Josh, grew up learning how to ride and shoe horses from their father. At a young age, Lisa Robinson decided that horseshoeing and working was what she wanted to do most, and at age 14, she got right to it full time. When her father was injured and unable to continue horseshoeing, Lisa and Josh (also a farrier and cowboy) took over the family business. Lisa gradually took on most of the work, which meant shoeing at least 10 horses 2 to 3 days a week from March to October and cowboying 3 to 4 days a week—that kept her in the saddle from 4:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.

In the early 2010s, after 25 years of full-time horse shoeing and part-time cowboying, Robinson decided on a less physically demanding career—building cowboy hats. She knew from experience that good hat makers who make custom hats are hard to come by, so she set out to learn how, with the goal of eventually retiring from her physically demanding work as a farrier. In early 2014 she apprenticed with two skilled master hat makers, Mike Moore, who owns Buckaroo Hatters in Tennessee, and James Whittington (JW) of JW Hats in Salt Lake City; JW taught Moore, and Moore taught Robinson. Several years later, she has a workshop complete with refurbished antique haberdashery equipment for her thriving business, Top Knot Hats. She and her father built the log workshop, which is filled with her custom creations. From the beaver and/or rabbit felt hat body, Lisa works to size, shape, style, and press (or tighten up) the felt into a custom-made hat.

As Robinson explained, the beaver felt hat blanks come with “no structure to them. And then I use steam and I block them stretching down over block to the size I’m going to use, and then I sand and fire it and set the felt. And then it goes into a plate machine and that sets your 90-degree angle on your hat brim. And then you do some more sand and then work on the brim when you get it out. You cut it down to whatever size somebody wants and then I build the sweatband to their size and…put the liners in for them. It’s all dependent on what a person wants in their order. You just build it from scratch.”

Robinson also refurbishes and rebuilds hats—replacing ribbons, sweatbands, and more for “work and dress and rodeo and play.” Each hat takes about 10-12 hours, and she usually has several going at once because they have to rest at different stages. She customizes hats for size, style, color, and the kind of crease folks want; she’ll also add ribbons and buckles. As Robinson explained, people have different style hats. “And you can recognize who it is by the crease in their hat and the silhouette in the sky.”

Perry Chocktoot, Director, Culture and Heritage Department, Klamath Tribes (Klamath Reservation, Chiloquin, OR), tule duck decoy maker, fisherman, cook, cultural expert

Perry Chocktoot, September 2020 Zoom interview with Riki Saltzman (insert).

Perry Chocktoot is a member of all three of the Klamath Tribes: Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin Paiute. He was raised in the traditional lands of the Klamath Tribes and the history of his family is found throughout the area—most notably with Chocktoot Street, the main street in Chiloquin, which he explains, is “named after my two great grandpas that signed the Treaty of 1864.” Chocktoot is the director of the Culture and Heritage Department of the Klamath Tribes and sits on the governor’s taskforce for Cultural Resource Identification. He is also a former Tribal Council member and former chairman of the Intertribal Fish and Water Commission. Besides those duties, Chocktoot also conducts the C-waam Ceremony of the Klamath Tribes every year in March. A lifelong fisherman, he helps out anyway he can on restoration of the C-waam fishery and supports stream restoration to aid in their recovery.

A cultural expert, Chocktoot is an avid fisherman, cook, a lifelong hunter, obsidian knife maker, and is actively involved in reinvigorating the tradition of making and using tule duck decoys, also indigenous to the Klamath Basin. He first watched another Native man from Nevada make the decoys. Later, he asked Klamath elders if they used them; they told him, “of course, we did.” “And then,” Perry explains, “I just started making them. I found out real soon that the tule and cattail had to be dried out first and then reintroduced to water.” After researching the process and trial and error, he learned to harvest and process tule and cattails at the right time of year, to dry them, soak them, and then prepare the natural pigments to paint the decoys. He also makes a fair number of miniatures, which family members use to decorate their annual Christmas tree, as well as full-size decoys for hunting over.

Chocktoot’s parents, grandparents and elders raised him to be self-sufficient, to live off of the land and waterways. He grew up learning to fish for salmon, steelhead, c’waam, red band trout; hunt deer, ducks, and geese; cook or smoke his catch; and share his bounty with others. “That’s a tradition passed on . . . When I married and I had children of my own, I taught my family to smoke fish, can fish and how to harvest. And so I’m not sending them into the world . . . having a lack of knowledge to fend for themselves. . . . If need be my boys and my daughter could make an earth lodge, fish and dry it, hunt and dry it, can if need be, smoke trout, salmon, steelhead, deer meat, elk meat, and survive. I’ve given them the tools.”

Observing the year’s round of food gathering is critical to survival. Chocktoot explains, “You know, we function on that seasonal round gathering. Spring, May and June we do root digging. We do a lot of root digging. . . . [apos, camus, biscuit root]. In the spring, it’s fish; summer, it’s meat to make dry meat out of and continue fishing. . . . The huckleberries are just coming in. . . . Then in the fall, the meat is in its prime. . . . During the fall, deer and elk hunting occur as well as berry picking. . . . And all of it ends. And all of it comes to a screeching halt when there’s four foot of snow on the ground. Then it’s time to eat what you harvest.”

In all that he does, conservation is a part. As he explains in speaking of his ancestors, “there are different phases of life which were known to be harvested by the indigenous people—eggs. But it was a practice that you never took all the eggs out of a single nest. You never take all the berries off a single bush. You always leave something– either for procreation or for another animal. And so it was our way of existing in harmony with our environment.”

As with fieldwork on Oregon’s coast, my interviewing work with those in central and eastern Oregon will continue through the late spring. The High Desert Museum is also planning on some virtual public programs in March or April—women in ranching, saddle and gear makers, and perhaps others. Stay tuned!

Perry Chocktoot and Riki Saltzman collaborated to craft this description of who he is and how he preserves his cultural traditions.

Folklife fieldwork at the High Desert Museum is funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program.

Pandemic Fieldwork on Oregon’s Southern Coast

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by Riki Saltzman, Folklore Specialist, OFN and Folklorist, High Desert Museum

During this pandemic year, I’ve had the privilege of doing folklife fieldwork for two projects—OFN’s statewide folklife survey, taking place this year on Oregon’s southern coast, and the High Desert Museum’s central and eastern Oregon folklife documentation project. It’s been rather amazing to flit back and forth across two mountain ranges and travel along the coast, through the high desert, on ranchland, and on the sovereign lands of four federally recognized Tribes—particularly since it’s all been virtual, taking place on the phone, and over Zoom.

Normally, ethnographic fieldwork involves driving—lots of driving—to meet up with culture keepers around the state who so graciously and generously share their cultural traditions with me. With my camera and my audio recorder, I’d spend several hours documenting and asking questions—lots of questions—before saying my goodbyes and heading off to the next scheduled interview. Back home or in my hotel room, I’d identify photos, create audio logs, and write up fieldnotes to record the day’s observations—all of which becomes metadata for OFN’s archives in the University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections.

But this year, so much is different. While I’ve started out with emails and phone calls to those I know in both regions, I’m restricted to Zoom for interviews—and in some cases recorded phone calls for those without sufficient internet access. While Zooming has brought its share of glitches, fits and starts, and technical challenges, the platform does make it possible to meet new people, find out about their cultural traditions and artistry, and get to know them better. A pre-interview phone call with the folk artist helps us figure out together what aspects of their cultural traditions to focus on. I’ve found that asking people to describe the processes of how they do what they do, especially when I’m not there in person to observe and document for myself, enables me (and future researchers) to “see” their process. For food preparation, that might include the steps involved in cooking, preserving, or baking. For traditional crafts, we’d explore the gathering and preparation of materials as well as how to make a traditional item like a Klamath Tribes’ tule duck decoy. For storytelling or cowboy poetry, we might discuss what makes a good story or poem, who taught the artists, when and why they tell certain stories, and to whom they tell them.

Oregon’s Southern Coast

For OFN’s south coast survey, I started out looking at the County and Tribal Community Cultural Plans for Coos and Curry counties, the Coquille Indian Tribe, and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. A press release announced the start of the project, detailed the kinds of traditions we were wanting to document, and enabled me to find contacts for culture keepers from the region. I also wrote many emails—to those I already knew in the region and to those others had recommended. While work in the region will continue through June 2021, we now have some brief snapshots from culture keepers who have shared their traditions:

Don Ivy, Chief, Coquille Tribe, is a fisherman’s fisherman and the possessor of a wealth of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that he shares generously. Ivy grew up fishing in the waters of Coos Bay, along the estuaries, and in the Pacific. “My relation to the natural world is always in the context of water—where is it and what’s in it,” he said.

But Ivy didn’t know that what he and his cousins were doing as children was traditional. “I cannot remember a time in my growing up days when I didn’t have a fishing pole—a stick…plunking around in a crick or lake or off the dock in Charleston. I never was not around people who fished.” His mother and her sisters, who grew up in Charleston, worked on the dock and picked crab and shrimp; her father and brothers were fishermen. He recalls, “Everyone fished—catching crabs or digging clams. It was part of the routine of life. If you didn’t fish, someone who’d been fishing came by and shared food.”

Coquille Salmon Bake, 2015

The turning point for Ivy came when his mother told him to come home from Portland, where he was working, to prepare the salmon bake for the Coquille Indian Tribe’s first Restoration Day powwow in 1989. The event involved not just eating but cultural sustenance, the very essence of potlatch, as Ivy and others wove the traditional knowledge from ancestors—the year’s round of fishing, different fishing techniques for different fish, cooking technologies, and then serving the traditional food (first to elders)—to honor the day and federal recognition of the Coquille Tribe’s sovereignty. Ivy recalled how he met many cousins and others from this large extended family as his elders guided him in preparing traditional foods in traditional ways.

Reflecting upon his childhood, Ivy explained that he could recognize parts of traditional culture that weren’t identified as Indian at the time. For instance, “the places we went for picnics were important places in the history of the Coquille people: Whisky Run, South Slough…we went back to places important to previous generations.”

Ivy, who has done extensive archeological research over the years, has partnered with Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife and others both to restore traditional knowledge and use it to restore balance to Oregon’s waterways and wetlands, in particular the Coos and Coquille river systems. Traditional foods and lifeways—including lamprey habitat, basket making (gathering, processing, weaving), and, as Don Ivy puts it, “the fundamentals of safety, shelter, sustenance”—are key aspects of that knowledge. The trick, he said, is to combine the archeological record with the storytelling that is part of every family’s tradition—”those family experiences, the little glimpses from some elder that resonated and got retold.”

Stacy Rose, South Coast Folk Society, is a traditional Jewish cook and baker, Israeli folk dance teacher, and musician based in North Bend. Rose, who grew up in Philadelphia, is the child of first-generation American parents raised in Eastern European Orthodox Jewish families. She came to Oregon to visit her sister in the early 1980s and stayed. Her Jewishness is part and parcel of her ethos, and she joyously shares her knowledge of traditional dance with her congregation and the greater south coast community. A traditional and innovative cook, she is known for her bagel brigade and matzah ball soup, which she delivers to those who need their comfort and sustenance.

Stacy Rose teaching Israeli folk dance

Sharing is at the center of who Stacy Rose is and what she does. When she first came to Oregon, she and friends started the South Coast Folk Society. “Out of that we started doing community dance, including Israeli folk dancing. From there, it was easy to make the transition of sharing that passion for Israeli folk dancing with Congregation Mayim Shalom…We always have live music and dancing, and it’s just a part of who we are…It’s great to join hands in a circle with your friends and feel that energy and share that connection. When we get out there and people hear the music and some of them have this ‘oh, I remember when we used to do this’ and it brings back and they join the circle. It touches an old place and…it just triggers something.”

Eight bagels neatly lined on a cooling rack.

Stacy Rose’s bagels

Jewish food traditions also touch people in a deep way. Rose, whose maternal grandmother emigrated from Lithuania, recalls that her first memory of Jewish food goes back to her childhood in the Philadelphia area. “[M]y bubbe [grandmother] would come from Chicago…with a suitcase filled with ingredients…. And I remember walking home from elementary school and opening the door just a crack and smelling the cooking. Smelling her food…meant she was there.”

Rose especially remembers her grandmother’s borscht (beet soup) and matzah brei (fried matzah and eggs). “The only time we ever had borscht was when bubbe came. One thing that she always made for breakfast was fried matzah…And I like to make fried matzah for my grandsons. I never make it for myself, but I always make it for them. And they have been a part of that, making it, too, so that the two older ones know how to make it now.”

“I [also] like to make matzah ball soup. I find comfort in that. I tell people it really does heal, it’s a healing bowl, a bowl of health.” But not everyone understood the particularities of this traditional Jewish remedy, and Rose was surprised to find that the first time she made the soup for an ill friend, that the person (not Jewish) assumed that the soup contained only plain broth and matzah balls because “she doesn’t have money to put anything in the soup, you know, to buy ingredients…So that was an interesting eye opening experience…other people in other traditions are not expecting [such a plain soup, but] …That’s soup. So, I do like to share matzah ball soup because I believe in it.”

She also likes to make bagels, partly because “people love bagels. And it’s hard to find a good bagel.” Living where she does, Rose explains, “my bagels are good, just like my playing music is good because I live in a small town. So, you know, being a big fish in a small pond has its advantages. But I do like to make bagels for people because it makes people happy.”

These are just two of several people who’ve been generous enough to respond to my emails and messages during this leg of the survey. Both Don Ivy and Stacy Rose also referred me to other culture keepers in the region, which is the way that fieldwork works. I’m in the process of doing interviews with those folks and lining up more. Look for updates about Oregon’s coast in future newsletters!

Folklife fieldwork at OFN is funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts Folk & Traditional Arts Program.

Welcome New Student Staff

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OFN welcomes new University of Oregon student staff member Jenna Ehlinger and intern Madison Howard. Congratulations to fall intern Melodie Moore who recently earned her master’s degree in journalism from the UO!

Jenna Ehlinger, first year MA candidate in folklore and public culture

Jenna Ehlinger, OFN’s graduate employee, is a Folklore and Public Culture graduate student at the University of Oregon. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Wisconsin Lutheran College in spring 2020 with a double emphasis in archaeological and cultural anthropology. While her interests are far-reaching, her heart belongs to Celtic folklore, Native American studies, and museum work. After studying folklore at University College Cork in Ireland, her research interest in Celtic folklore flourished. She previously worked for the Milwaukee Public Museum’s anthropology department working in research and public programming.

Madison Howard, undergraduate senior in family and human services, folklore and public culture

Madison Howard is an undergraduate senior at the University of Oregon, double-majoring in family and human services and folklore and public culture. Madison spent fall term updating the Culture Keepers Roster with Willamette Valley contacts. She will continue updating the roster in 2021, improving current artist profiles and adding new ones including north and central coast artists and others. Along with her studies and her work with OFN, Madison is an avid lover of metal music, special effects makeup, horror media, and animals. She hopes to work in archiving and folkloric research after graduation.

Melodie Moore is a videographer and multimedia journalist based in Eugene, Oregon. Moore recently completed her Master of Arts in journalism from the University of Oregon, where she worked as a media production assistant intern for OFN during fall 2020. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in cinema studies from the University of Oregon with departmental honors, where she minored in the folklore and public culture program. For more information, visit https://melodiemoore.media

Melodie Moore, MA journalism

Melodie edited the Culture Fest videos for the Oregon Black Artist Spotlight Series. She also played an important role on our team of volunteers documenting and presenting Four Rivers Cultural Center’s 2020 Tradition Keepers Festival.