Youngsters Camp With Traditions Tribes’ Weeklong Sessions Provide Learning Opportunity

Cultural traditions can shelter the soul like an ancient pine tree or, if you’re not careful, prick your finger like a seed cone.

Ask some of the kids who attended the Colville Confederated Tribes culture camp at Twin Lakes for the last four weeks.

“Ow, I quit now. That hurt,” Dawn Phillips said after poking her finger with a needle while pinning curled snuff-can lids onto a jingle dress.

The big smile on her face said the 13-year-old from Spokane had no intention of quitting, though.

A finger with a half-dozen punctures proved Jeremiah “Bear” Carden, 12, of Nespelem, Wash., didn’t quit either. He got his scars from sewing buckskin moccasins for a traditional dance outfit, one of several styles from which the children could choose.

Carden chose the traditional style because it was easier to make. The decision may have spared him a blood transfusion.

Carden and Phillips were among some 200 youngsters, ages 8 through 17, who came from all around Eastern Washington to learn some of their traditions in four weeklong sessions at the tribal camp. They picked huckleberries, dried venison, played stick games, made powwow outfits and learned the distinctive drum beats, songs and steps of various Indian dances.

Each session ended with a powwow, and all the group gathered Friday for a traditional dinner - including the huckleberries they gathered - and a grand finale powwow.

“I’ve been around here for a long time, and I’ve never seen 200 new dancers entering the sacred circle,” said camp storyteller Kast Hast Tak Tak Kamil (Bad Good Woman), otherwise known as Loretta Watt.

The camp has been offered sporadically for several decades, but Watt considers this year’s one of the most successful.

“We learn respect,” 12-year-old Toni Gunshows of Malott, Wash., said with enough innocent sincerity to choke some companions who preferred to expound on the swimming hole. “Respect for the Creator, Mother Nature, the sky, the moon, the stars.”

Being thankful for simple things like swimming in the lake is good, said camp director Doll Watt, also known as Haustecou, or Calm Water. The camp teaches respect for nature, for others and, most of all, self respect.

“Be proud that you’re Indian, carrying yourself in a good way, an Indian way,” said Watt, a member of the tribal council and a teacher at Omak’s Paschal Sherman Indian School.

Teaching religious beliefs and traditions can be a problem for the culture camp because the Colville Confederated Tribes incorporates 11 different bands.

“We try to use some commonalities,” Watt said, noting she is a Colville, while some of the campers are Okanogans, Lakes, even descendants of Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce from northeastern Oregon.

For example, they all believe in a single creator, known to Indians in this area as Kwelencooten. Others call him God or Jehova, Watt said.

The Indian “circle of life,” with Kwelencooten at the center, represents all directions, seasons and races.

“We just carry different colors down here on Earth,” Watt said. “We all just live in different times and seasons.”

Some cultural differences among the Indians from this area are like the differences in their Salish dialects: A few different words and pronunciations don’t keep them from talking to one another in their native tongues. Not if they know the language, at least, and the campers learned a few words.

The youthfulness of the campers and lack of time prevented any indepth study of spirituality, but many of the children already had picked up a few things from their parents. Most of the kids recognized a blessing when an eagle flew over camp, Watt said.

Watt was pleased when the campers lined up for a field trip to practice dance steps at a nearby Indian sobriety camp. The children quickly doffed their hats and faced the sun when she began singing the song of a deceased elder who used to pray for the Colville Reservation to be drug and alcohol free.

At the sobriety camp on the banks of the Columbia River, Watt continued the lesson by example. She gave a small gift, a “tobacco offering,” to sobriety camp director Pierre Louie. “Pierre always has good prayers, especially for kids,” she said.

The children also watched and participated as Watt solicited prayers for a relative who had gone to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., to deal with bad memories from the war. People walked around the sacred fire in the center of the powwow arena and tossed in pieces of cigarettes to bless their prayers.

Another lesson the children learned was not to call their dance outfit a costume.

“Costumes are for Halloween,” Watt said.

They’re for pretending you’re something you’re not. Dance outfits, or regalia, are about being Indian.

The outfits and powwows themselves have no religious significance, however, Watt said. Powwows are social occasions that incorporate dances and outfits from tribes all across the country.

Colville Confederated Tribes members show respect by standing up for dancers wearing the traditional outfits of this region: buckskin dresses for women and eagle-feather bustles for men. But imported outfits also are popular.

Many boys at the camp used yarn to make grass-dancing outfits that originated with Plains Indians. With movements intended to simulate the wind, grass dancers symbolically pat down the grass with the feet to bless the powwow grounds.

Similarly, girls at the camp were fond of the jingle dress that originated early in this century with the Ojibwa Tribe in Minnesota or Ontario. Snuff-can lids curled into cones make a tinkling sound when the girls dance.

Some campers also chose “fancy dancing,” another form that is practiced at powwows across the country.

Male fancy dancers try to outdo each other with complicated, high-energy steps. What they do with one foot must be mirrored with the other. Women and girls use shawls to simulate butterflies that emerge from cocoons of mourning after a mate is lost in battle.

Then there’s the owl dance, a Sadie Hawkins affair in which women draft men to dance with them - or else.

“If the boy refuses, he has to give you something like an eagle feather or $20,” said Suzette Seymour, 12, of Spokane, as she and some other girls worked on a jingle dress.

“We’re not cheap, are we?” 11-year-old Judy Carson of Spokane added with a sly smile.

No one got to collect, though.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo