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Sahaptin Celilo Introduction by Virginia Hymes In the mid-1980s, Larry George, a Sahaptin artist and storyteller from Toppenish, Washington, sent a cassette titled ‘‘Celilo’’ to my husband and me. The note that accompanied it said simply, ‘‘Do what you do with this.’’ For this paper I have done ‘‘what we do,’’ that is, verse analysis; I have ‘‘translated’’ an oral text into a written one in a way that shows the poetic artistry of the original. We had come to know Larry in the 1970s, and in the fall of 1974, when the American Folklore Society held its annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, he and a Warm Springs Sahaptin, Nathan Jim, a mutual friend, spent part of one night in our room. In the course of that evening Larry proclaimed the famous speech attributed to Chief Seattle. What he proclaimed was of course an English translation . Chief Seattle spoke a Salish language, and his speech reached English by way of being noted down at the time in Chinook Jargon. A few years ago Vi Hilbert, a speaker of that Salish language, Lushootseed, worked with several of her elders to reconstruct the original. Transmission through several languages was hardly new in the large coastal and plateau areas of Washington and Oregon. Long before French or English speakers appeared, speakers of three quite different language families, Chinookan, Salishan, and Sahaptian, had traded, intermarried, and in many cases learned one another’s languages and customs. Bilingual and even multilingual individuals were not rare. Charles Cultee dictated myths and historical narratives to Franz Boas in both Kathlamet Chinook (a language he learned when he lived with his mother’s people on the Oregon side of the Columbia River) and Shoalwater Chinook (presumably learned among his father’s people). He knew Chehalis Salish, which he used with his wife and children, and Chinook Jargon, which he used with Boas. This was certainly the case with the Columbia River Sahaptins who were the ancestors of Larry George and other residents of Yakima Reservation in Washington , and it was the case for the Sahaptins and Wasco Chinookans of the Warm Springs Reservation, where Dell and I have worked. At Warm Springs a small number of Paiutes added to the mix. By 1955, a hundred years after the treaty 196 sahaptin that triggered the removal of those living along or near the Columbia to reservations roughly one hundred miles north (Yakima) and south (Warm Springs) of the river, a switch to English as first language had accelerated. English had been the only language of the reservation schools, the Christian churches (which many attended), and the government offices for well over fifty years. After the Second World War English became the language in most homes. When I interviewed a teacher at the Warm Springs school in 1956, she said that only some of the children from one small district, Simnasho, were coming to first grade knowing no English. By the time I began to study Sahaptin there in 1972, there were just two very old sisters in Simnasho who were monolingual, and people who had been raised with it as their first language were scarce and into their thirties and forties. Fear of the death of the languages prompted a project (for which I was the linguist) to prepare teaching materials for language classes in Sahaptin, classes that had that year been introduced at the school—for half an hour each day. The teachers were three women, eighty, seventy, and forty years old. Their supervisor was a sixty-year-old man. Larry George, whom we met at around that time, was about the age of the youngest. As an artist, trained elsewhere in his youth, he had begun to illustrate some of the traditional narratives, presenting them in English with slides of his paintings. (We were present at one of these events, arranged by Nathan Jim when he was cultural heritage director at Warm Springs.) In such a context it is not surprising that the words of Larry’s ‘‘Celilo’’ are English words. Evidently he wanted to reach as many people as possible, both Indian and non-Indian. And although the words are English, the patterns that organize them are not.The patterns are those of Sahaptin oral narrative, just as the concerns are those of someone devoted to Sahaptin ways of life. There is originality as well. The narrative on the cassette Larry sent us is unlike any I had heard before in several years...

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