The Colville Tribes are grieving thousands of acres of sacred land torched in a raging wildfire: ‘Something happened to Mother Earth’
NESPELEM, Wash. – Land that the Colville Tribes have long protected was torched with one strike of lightning.
“I could see where the trees were getting hit, and I told (my son-in-law) it takes 24 to 40 hours for the lightning to go all the way to the root. And once it starts coming up, it’s just going to explode,” Colville Tribes Elder Dee Gun Shows said. “And that’s what happened.”
Through this north-central Washington town on Tuesday, charred vegetation cascaded over the hills and mountains next to the highway. Smoke still rose into the air from smoldering trees and bushes. Some homes were left untouched within a ring of brown, dry brush.
The Colville Tribes are attempting to contain the Kaiser Canyon fire, which has burned more than 68,000 acres of the 1.4 million-acre reservation since Thursday. A call for help netted aid from several other fire districts from around the state.
“Something happened to Mother Earth,” said Gun Shows, the first female police officer of the Colville Tribes. “She’s getting mad because somebody is doing something to our land that we shouldn’t be doing. We need to start taking better care of her, because if it wasn’t for her, nobody would be here. She’s our air. She’s our water.”
A few months ago, the Colville Tribes began to slowly reseed the Kaiser Canyon to bring back the natural vegetation after a wildfire burned the area less than a year ago. But the new growth – nowhere near the size of the massive, old-growth trees Gun Shows would describe as “grandpas and grandmas” – was razed once again.
Gun Shows lost her Nespelem home to the fire and took refuge at the American Red Cross shelter at Lake Roosevelt High School. She worries that the younger children in the tribe one day won’t be able to see the older trees that have stood tall on her land for decades.
While Gun Shows and her family lost their home, two cars and an RV to the fire, the history of the land and the irreplaceable items they couldn’t take with them have left the family among about 1,000 other displaced people grieving. The highway to Nespelem is open, though some roads inside the town are still under a Level 3 “go now” evacuation.
Perhaps most devastatingly, the fire burned through the Nespelem Cemetery, where her mother, sister, son, aunts and uncles were all buried. While she said firefighters tried to dig a line around the area, many graves and headstones were charred, melted or otherwise damaged.
“It’s really hard for me now because they’re saying maybe you can go home in two days, and I’m like, ‘Where? Where am I gonna go?’ ” Gun Shows said. “I have nothing.”
Hot, dry and unstable weather is predicted through Thursday. Temperatures are forecast to increase to the low 100s, with wind gusts between 15 and 20 mph Wednesday and Thursday.
Thunderstorms followed by a dry cold front on Thursday will bring critical fire condition potential into Friday and Saturday.
Sitting at a picnic table under the smoky skies outside the Lake Roosevelt High School gym, Dee Gun Shows and her daughter Alisia Gun Shows tried to put the loss they were feeling into words as fellow evacuees alerted her that boxed lunches had been served by Red Cross employees.
Teary-eyed, Dee sat next to a plastic bag filled with yarn that was donated to her to help pass the time spent at the shelter. In times of hardship, Dee said she would crochet gifts for her friends and family, so when she was given the yarn, it made her realize everything she had lost, including yarn she had saved from her deceased mother and sister.
“For somebody to come and bring this,” Dee said, holding the full plastic bag of donated yarn, “that’s why I cried. Because I know somebody out there cares.”
When the fire first ignited, Dee said she was trapped in Nespelem for two days watching the flames get bigger and closer. She didn’t have any food or water prepared, and road closures blocked her from fleeing town and away from the smoke and fire.
“I’ve always been the helper,” Dee said. “I’ve always helped other people, and then I felt like a failure because at the time I couldn’t even help myself.”
Alisia, who had just decided to move from Spokane back to Nespelem, was still in Spokane for a doctor’s appointment when the fire started. It meant she would arrive at the shelter one day sooner than her mother. Her car and her RV were destroyed by the fire.
“I stayed here by myself one night to wait for my mom,” Alisia said. “The saddest part is we’ve always been that family that always helped others. You know, we always gathered stuff to help others, and that for this to happen – and I was like telling my mom – I don’t know how to ask for help.”
Alisia’s twin sister, who lives with her boyfriend and Dee, stayed in Nespelem to ensure the safety of her animals and pets. Alisia said she’s struggled to communicate with her sister the past few days.
Junior, a 61-year-old tribal elder, sat outside the American Red Cross shelter Tuesday and cried. His body shook, but no sound left his mouth. He felt uncomfortable giving his last name Tuesday, or even taking off his sunglasses, due to tribal beliefs entrenched in him that should he look at a camera, he may lose “part of my soul.”
The heritage of his people and their graves all lie around Omak and Nespelem, he said. Some had been burned over in the fire.
“It’s our homeland,” Junior said. He fled Nespelem a few times but always found his way back home.
His cousin, 26-year-old Ryan Moon, chirped from beside him on the grass: “We can’t leave home. We will never leave home. Tribal land is sacred. It’s sad to see it burned, all gone.”
Junior and Moon are both of the Seven Drum religion, or a tribal religion known as Washat, which holds that humans must honor the link between nature and their species by singing, drumming, dancing and taking part in rituals. Foods like salmon and huckleberries, even water, are viewed as sacraments.
And in the Washat religion, Mother Earth is sacred.
“That’s what’s helping me to get through this,” Junior said as he began to cry. “I pray when I go to sleep.”
Much like other tribal members, Junior’s ancestors have been in the area for generations. He just reconnected with his late 102-year-old grandmother Isabel Arcasa through a painting of her and other local elders, hung up in Lake Roosevelt High School’s gym, he said. She was alive when Chief Joseph lived on the reservation, according to newspaper archives.
Those who are not tribal members likely will never be able to understand the significance, Junior believes.
“They’d have to see it for themselves.”
Another historic loss to some members of the tribe is the Shaker Church, located off of Charlie Williams Road in Nespelem. A Christian church for Indian tribal members, it was part of a shrinking number of other Shaker churches. The syncretic tribal-Shaker religion was founded in 1881 by John Slocum, a member of the Squaxin band who lived near Olympia.
The Nespelem location , officially incorporated in the 1930s, is one of eight primary towns in the Colville Indian Reservation. It’s now burned to the ground.
“I cried when I found out,” said Marianne Charley, the minister for the church in Malott, who comes to Nespelem to pray. Now 70, she began attending church with her parents more than six decades ago. She resides in Okanogan.
At the time of its founding in Nespelem, the church was built by two brothers, by hand, using logs. There used to be 35 members of the Nespelem church, but as numbers dwindled, there are now three, Charley said. That’s no matter, she added. The church will carry on.
“I pray with people on the phone,” Charley said. “I still have my altar here in my house … It’s sad when you don’t have a place to go home to, and now I got to pray that much harder when I do.”
Also a tribal member, Charley has spent her life relishing the gifts of the Earth – its wind, its air and its dirt.
“When I was growing up with my mother and father, they would always explain what the dirt meant that we walked on. When we stand under a tree, there’s your shade. When you walk out, there’s the sun; when it’s nighttime, there is the moon,” Charley said. “It belonged to Mother Earth.”