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.