Warm Springs Program; Songs and Dances

Welcome to the Warm Springs program, this production of KWSO Radio focuses on matters involving culture and education. Every year at the end of June, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs celebrate the Puyamcha Treaty Days. This program we will talk with some of the local Warm Springs members who do participate in the Powell field. We will find out about the difference in songs from old to new, how the Jingle Dance came to Warm Springs, the making of a person's outfit and certain traditions that are still carried out today from years ago. Mary Ann Miannis talks about the methods of singing. Mary Ann, could you tell me what is the difference between the old songs that are sung and the new ones of today? Oh,

I have to think about that because the new songs to us might be new because the people that sing those songs are from another tribe, a different area of this country, and their method of singing, their manner of singing is much different from ours. They have the word songs for war dancing, or fancy dancing, whatever you want to call it, and our songs to us are old, our local songs because those are the songs that we have sung all these years. Even though some might have come from another area, we have adapted them for our own, what you call, what our rendition of a song. Maybe we changed it a little bit, but

to me those types of songs are more in unison with the drumming, what they like they call syncopation, or some of the word songs that the other drummers sing that are from another reservation. The words, I don't know, it's hard to keep in time when I dance, maybe others can have become so accustomed to it, but when I dance I don't know whether to keep time with the song or with the drum. They're beautiful, they're beautiful songs and there's nothing wrong with them, it's just that I'm just from the old school and I prefer our own local

songs which are beautiful too. How has the songs changed over the years? Well like I say, what we have come to think of is the name, drums that are well known throughout the country, throughout Indian country. Have their songs and a lot of our young people have taken to those songs and they sing those a lot, and they're a much faster temple than our songs because I believe anyway, it's just my own opinion, the songs that we sang. We're truly what we call war dance songs and had a very spiritual meaning to them because

our men danced to these songs, oh for generations back. As they danced I believe there was like a prayer involved with the dancing and rejoicing, perhaps they returned from a battle or perhaps they had gone on a big, what we call today is ceremonial hunt and they would prepare for this type of thing by praying, dancing and just kind of siking themselves out for a successful hunt. And I hear them saying, asking today which song, which song shall we sing? What song are we going to sing? What song are we going to sing? And it began to

happen in our own particular drumming group, Dry Creek Drum. And as I listen to the boys and as I never mind what song we're going to sing, just lead off and we'll pick you up. You know what songs we're seeing? And just yet we'll pick you up. For the people that don't know what it means to sweat, did you give them a definition to the meaning of a sweat? Oh my goodness, go way back. To me, Sweat House has always been there, it's been a way of cleansing our bodies and as songs and the prayers go with cleanse our hearts and our minds as well. I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who have never entered a sweat house, but it's just something that's always been there for me. It's a very cleansing,

soothing, calming effect. There just is nothing so clean as getting into the sweat house and cleaning all of it. What we call Loi Loi off of your body, and you just come away from there feeling good, feeling clean, spiritually fulfilled. If you're the praying type of person, and it just gives you an all around good feeling, you sleep well, you get a good rest after having had a sweat bath. That was Mary Ann Miannis. Arlita Rohn tells us when the jingle dance was introduced to the Warm Springs Reservation. Back in the 1970s, I guess the first time

I saw jingle dancers in our area, they came up to Hihi for the Huckleberry Festival Power. We held there and it was in the contest dance in that time. It was just a war dance in socializing together with war dancing. We called it war dancing, but it consisted of many other kind of dances. We had some visitors come in from Ontario, Canada, and they were jingle dancers. They danced very different compared to the competition dancing that's going on now with the jingle dance. I was told before that years ago the women didn't participate. Yes, that's right. Women were never allowed to participate years ago for the simple reason. We always followed the creation where male was born, made first, and then the woman taken from the man's rib. We kind of fell in that kind of line up, you know,

as far as being women, we always were on the sidelines. But as far as I can remember, we had a long house here, the old one, and we used to just powwow, then it wasn't contest dancing. And I remember as ladies, we had to sit on the sidelines up until the middle 50s, was when I remember we were allowed to dance. And how this came about was other people ventured out in some of the leaders ventured out to other areas, and when they seen the women participating, and then they came back and did some adjusting here, and we were allowed to dance along with the men during the war dancing. And I just don't really remember how it took place, you know. All I remember is just getting to get out there and dance with the men. We didn't have, I don't remember any ceremony that we did to do this, and it's really odd because

as Indians, we always did special ceremonies to change something in our culture or either our tradition or our custom here. Do you have a favorite dance, a social dance that we do here? Oh yes, I don't know whether I have a favorite, one I guess, the one I like to do mostly was the outside, and it's a fast dance. You kick up your feet backwards pretty fast, move forward and backwards. I love to do that. I always did love to do something lively, even as a traditional dance, right? Dance pretty lively. Now all the dancers say, not a traditional dancer say, not that they're working their own outfits, they make what they want to wear. Like me, I say, my whole outfit is all black and white. Joe Tukta is a traditional men's dancer. He explains the difference between

traditional and fancy. Each piece I made, I made it for the blacks to that, the white, when they didn't know how to get it, and it was evenly colored out with two outfits. So like I said, my heighter, it's our buckskin, buckskin in ribbon, it's our black and white, and I got my shafts, they're all black, and I got my belt. It's made in design, it's got the Buffalo Skull, it's half black and white, all the way through, and it switches around half black, half white, and half black and half white, all the way across. It matches my arm bands. I got my cuffs, breastplate, choker, twin mocksons, and I got, there were

two sets of bells, one's got deer hoofs, and the square cowbells, and the old time style on bells. Additionally, most of the traditional, it's our eagle feather, and the fancy, they're not eagle, and I don't have eagle feathers, not on their imitation, and they got all the fluff ribbon on them, and they were two sets from high to back and one and lower, and they got the iron ones, and when the person searched the dance and they joined, sometimes they didn't have this fast work when you're out for together to dance, and that's what I started out, I didn't have very much without fit, I just had a ribbon shirt and belt, hider, chaps, and bustle and roach, because I didn't know nothing about making outfits

then, I was just four years, I went four years, up to making general dress, girls fancy, boys, grass, traditional, I can make all those now, the only thing I haven't made is I have a women's traditional outfit, that's one thing I haven't ever made yet, but I do all the bustles in my family, all the beadwork, I made all my kids' outfits, my boy and nobody's five, it's got a grass dance, my little girl, she's got about five outfits I made for her, she's got one general dress and I think about three fancy outfits. The art of making an outfit to dance in is an old one, tribal peoples have been working

with materials of deer hide, sinew, beads, and shells for years. Roberta Kirk is the curator for the Museum at Warm Springs, Sue Ryan spoke with her about a tribal regalia in the collection and some of its history. Regalia includes a lot of different areas here, and we have quite a few examples here at the museum, we try to gather regalia and clothing from the three tribes at Warm Springs, that entails a lot of different styles. We mostly have Warm Springs and Wasco clothing, we've been advertising for different types

of clothing like the Paiutes and the Wasco dresses, but we haven't been getting a very big response and we only had a couple of dresses come in that were Wasco, but anyway as far as regalia, I guess that would entail the moxons for the men and the leggings and breech cloth, a shirt or a vest, and it depends on what type of pattern that they want to beat if it's floral or geometrical, and sometimes they have pictures beaded on them. And for the women, we have quite a few buckskin dresses and shell dresses and the women's hats, putt-lapaz, we have the corn husk hats and the beaded hats, and we have the otter

furs and neck size, and just a lot of Wampum, we have quite a few pieces of Wampum here. We have the feathers, we have the bustles for the men and the men's and women's eagle fans, I think if you name it, we have it here. If someone were to get dressed for a celebration, say a hundred years ago, I mean I'm taking a guess here because I don't know what the dates are for the regalia, the museum has in its collection, but if someone were to take and get dressed for a celebration a hundred years ago versus today, what would be the main difference in how styles have changed? I think that a long time ago that they're, I know that when the women did bookskin dresses and they did a lazy stitch, their strands were really, really long versus today when you

do the lazy stitches, they're kind of narrow and they're not as wide as they used to be. I know that's one big difference, and then the old style also was that when you had a pattern that you did contour beading, you beat it all the way around that pattern versus today when you beat around that pattern, but you go in straight lines and that's another difference. So mirrors are pretty popular, we still use them now, but they are kind of hard to find. So I don't know if you would say that that's some mark because there are still popular, still using them, sometimes at a spiritual level too for protection to keep anybody's bad thoughts off of you.

Among the regalia you have in the collection here at the museum though, is there things that you just don't see today that you would have seen in costumes back then? No, I don't really think so, I don't think that the things that we have in our collection are pretty representative of what's still out there, what's still being used right now. I don't think that it's that different because our culture and our styles are pretty much the same, you don't wander off too much from the original way. We did adopt quite a few things, we did borrow from other tribes, but we made it into our own also. You know, I've heard that they say, can you tell when you have items coming to the museum if they belong to certain families just by the way they're made?

Yeah, you can, we acquired a large collection from the dowels, it was a Brian Stovall collection, his father read Stovall on the trading post over in the dowels and they had bought quite a few things from Indian people that lived around the dowels and I brought that collection back and showed the elders here a few of them and they were able to recognize some of the work and a lot of nice things came out of there and we got 169 artifacts and that's about seven or eight Huckleberry baskets and that's one buckskin dress and a man's buckskin shirt that's beaded and the leggings, the breech cloth and we've been asking for a man's

buckskin shirt for I don't know how long and we finally got one and we got it without paying anything, that was, that was this spectacular, a lot of people are donating things back to the museum now, partly because of the repatriation, that act, the law and partly because of their own personal feelings that they think that what they have at home doesn't really belong to them that it should go back to its rightful owners, during a recent red thunder performance in Madras, Joe Tukta danced during the recent collage of culture celebration in Madras, Joe Tukta performed a powerful version of the Ego dance, I asked him how he became involved with this dance style, I think there's only something like my second year doing that, and I never used to know how to Ego dance and seven in this dance group was

Rudy Clemens, we've got a dance group, we dance year-round, however, and when we started this dance group my voice boy was doing Ego dance, nice, just watch, so Rudy asked me if I'd like to try it, so I tried it, and I had more movement, and I acted at more action in my voice, so I've been stuck with it since, and I thought, good by doing that because my knees just miss one thing, well mine, I got from a state, I had to go to natural resources and get an application, and I had to have an elder of the long house sign, and I had to show my purpose for that, but I ordered an Ego from a state, and I had to tell him how to use it for, and I couldn't sell it, if I had to use it for my own purposes, so he personally Mitchell signed my application, and I sent it to a state that goes to Ashland, and took

me two and a half years away to get it, and they sent me a whole golden Ego, and I used that to use all of the parts I can from it, and I just had no waste in it. The state found out I sold some of the feathers, or wasted it, and they'd come and confiscate the whole thing from me, and I just lose out. I asked Grant Wajinika to explain how does one earn an Ego feather? I'll just use an example, during my time in the service, Ego feathers were earned by the wire, or any other individual, if he had taken the trophies from the enemy, whatever it was, their weapon, that aren't he my feather, in some cases some of the tribes earned their

feathers by taking a scalp, but in my case thousands of lives were taken, because I served on a heavy bomber, dropping bombs on the enemy. One instance, we took the lives of over a thousand of the Chinese and Koreans during the Korean War. It entitled me to have a war bonded with the traitor, which is one way of earning the feathers. I guess maybe the only way of earning a feather, no? Sometimes by declaration of the key for someone, would give a feather to the individual for some deed, whatever he'd done, or 200 feather, to write to wear a feather.

The feather is, we have many terms for the Ego feather, and it's a symbol of the American Indian, also the United States government. We hold the Ego feather in many ways, the Ego feather. He might be part of the sacred, part of our lives, and when the Ego is dropped on the floor for any reason, someone has to pick it up, and in most cases someone who has lived through some accident or wartime services. Many times I have been called to pick up the Ego feather in many places, all over this country, and up in Canada, I've been

asked to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of ceremonies, or by the chief of the tribe. They will ask me to pick up the feather because of my services in the military, living through wartime conditions. It's an honor to pick up the feather. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of the United States government. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host and pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of the

United States government. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host and pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of the United States government. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host and pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of the

United States government. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the host and pick up the feather with an explanation by the host, by the master of the United States government. I would ask to pick up the feather with an explanation by the join in the 25th celebration of the Treaty of 1855.

Thanks to Grant Wojenika, Marya Miannis, Arlita Rohn, Joe Tukta, and Roberta Kirk, who were guests during the songs and dances. Sue Ryan contributed to this segment, I'm Carol Hurtchen, reporting for the Warm Springs program. You've been listening to the Warm Springs program, broadcast Wednesday nights at 5, and Sunday mornings at 8 on 91.9 FM, the Public Radio Station of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, KWSO.