Passage to Juneau Read online

  An elder made a speech of welcome in Lushootseed, the local tribal language. Although no native speakers remained, a revival of the language was under way in evening classes, guided by anthropologists from the University of Washington. “Anthros,” as Indians called them, taught tribes how to build canoes in the old way, and to reconstruct such lost rituals as the First Salmon ceremony and the winter dances.

  When everyone was seated in a wide semicircle around the floor, the dancing started with a sudden howl from a pear-shaped man in his thirties, wearing a burgundy-colored windbreaker with TULALIP BINGO on the back. Eyes squinched shut, twitching and moaning, he writhed in his chair, possessed by a spirit, then stumbled blindly to his feet and began to chant his spirit song in a glossolalic tongue, neither English nor Lushootseed. His head, arms, and upper torso quaked violently as he gave vent to a long dirge of nonsense syllables.

  The rhythm of his song was taken up by men with rattles and drums. The drums—deerskin stretched over octagonal fir hoops—gave off a dull thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. The rattles were sticks with eagle heads carved on their tops, further decorated with deer’s dewclaws bunched together like clusters of mussel shells. The drums thumped, the rattles clacked. The man with the spirit did his dance, circling the floor in a series of ponderous and clumsy jumps, encouraged by the audience’s chant, “Kiro-k! Kiro-k! Kiro-k! Kiro-k!” To my profane eye, the dancer looked like an obese frog with the jitters.

  In 1794, at the head of Nootka Sound, George Vancouver watched a tribal dance mounted for him by Chief Maquinna: “an exhibition, that consisted principally of jumping in a very peculiar manner.” In 1859, James G. Swan witnessed a similar dance by the Clallam Indians: “a series of spasmodic jumps, displaying neither grace nor agility.” In 1887, the missionary Myron Eells wrote of the Skokomish version in Hood Canal: “white people would not call it dancing, for it is simply a jumping up and down.” Two hundred and five years later, the dance still amounted to jumping, though it was now accompanied by frenzied trembling and a tuneless guttural warble.

  Early observers of Indian winter dancing believed that they were seeing a secular entertainment. James Swan was impressed by the lifelike impersonations of bears, wolves, and lizards, as masked dancers assumed the characters of wild creatures. But he saw no spirits.

  Like “blanket,” the word “spirit” is a dubious piece of translation. Anthropological and folkloric literature is full of spirits. At puberty, the Northwest Indians, girls as well as boys, were said to go on “spirit quests,” capturing the spirits of natural powers like the whirlpool, the orca, the grizzly bear, the loon, and the wolf. One young man went on a spirit quest and came back with the spirit of a steam locomotive.

  But according to Wayne Suttles, a veteran ethnologist of the Coastal Salish, and the most reliable authority on their language, “There is no precise Native equivalent of ‘spirit.’ ” He found little evidence to suggest that Indians had “worshiped” any deities before white contact. In his broadly suggestive essay “On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch,” Suttles argued that in Northwest Indian cosmology no distinct line, or bead curtain, separated “natural” and “supernatural” domains. A rare beast such as the two-headed flying serpent (s’inetlequy) existed in the same temporal dimension as frequently seen animals like bears and whales. So “spirit,” with its connotation of the supernatural, was a Eurocentric dualistic imposition on a monist culture and language. Whatever the elusive quarry of a “spirit quest,” it certainly wasn’t the incorporeal wraith of Western religious lore.

  The strip-lit dancers in the Teen Center were clearly miming possession by post-Christian, Western-style spirits. Sometime between the 1850s and the 1990s, the assumption of animal consciousness had turned into a religious rite, the dancer going into an ecstatic trance and speaking in tongues.

  During the 1880s, Shakerism—with its frenzied bodily communion with the Holy Spirit, amongst others—swept through the reservations of the Northwest, much to the consternation of old-guard Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries. By then the Indians spoke of “the Great Spirit” as their one-god creator—a Victorian invention put about, with no evident basis in aboriginal beliefs, by the mission churches. Shaker worship, trance states, and holy shivers caught on. What I was seeing was a curious mixture of animist tribal custom, Shakerism, and Pentecostalism, all refurbished for service in the late twentieth century by white American anthros.

  One after another, the dancers took turns to howl, shake, jump, and chant their spirit-songs, while the drums banged, the rattles clattered, and the audience shouted “Kiro-k! Kiro-k!” as if cheering on a basketball team. Feeling a pounding headache coming on, I sneaked a glance at my fellow guest, a producer from the local PBS station: her chin cupped in both hands, her eyes wide, her mouth framing a faint, reverent smile of approbation. I guessed that she was dreaming of some mini-series on Native American Spirituality.

  The bluish, deconstructive glare of the strip-lights afforded no cover for my growing boredom. I ached for shadows; for the log fire burning in the hearth of the longhouse, where I might have decently kept my indifference to myself. I tried cupping my chin in both hands and affecting the TV producer’s rapt gaze. Thump! Moan. Thump! Moan. Aiyeeeeee! Kiro-k! I twisted my wrist, trying to glimpse my watch. Only an hour and a half had passed—of a session that would likely last, I’d been promised, at least five hours.

  At 8:30, the din quieted, and the feast was served: sliced turkey and cold mashed potatoes served up on paper plates, with cups of bright-red Kool-Aid. I’d imagined something more along the lines of smoked salmon and wild berries.

  My hostess came to quiz me about what I’d seen.

  “Very, very interesting,” I mumbled with my mouth full. “Extremely.”

  She explained that the spirit-songs came in two groups: “black-paint,” or “saltwater,” songs; and “red paint,” or “freshwater,” songs. Black-paint songs were rough, warlike, and frightening. Red-paint songs were gentle and healing. Rough ones, she said, outnumbered the gentle by a ratio of six or seven to one.

  After ten minutes, the dancing started up again. Attuned now to what I ought to listen for, I concentrated on distinguishing between the red songs and the black—which gave me an idea. I had close to $100 in my wallet. When the dancing finally ceased, I would stop by the casino and try my luck at the roulette table. I had fond memories of late-night visits to casinos in Monte Carlo, Venice, and elsewhere; I enjoyed the intense, temporary society that forms around the wheel, under the presidency of the croupier, and to which a few dollars’ worth of chips grants admission. Never placing a chip on an individual number, I bet on blocks. A couple of chips on rouge and another couple on impair was my fallback position; though it rarely showed a profit, it kept me in the game. I lost modestly or, once in a blue moon, made a killing—as in one memorable session, in the small hours, seated among whiskey-swilling sheikhs in the Cairo Hilton casino, when I somehow managed to parlay an initial stake of $20 into a grand haul of just short of $1,000. For the next two weeks I walked the streets of Cairo with a swollen billfold, feeling like a sheikh in my own right; though the sheikh sitting next to me at the table had looked on my enormous pile of chips with disdainful amusement.

  Thinking of roulette put the dancing and the drums at a soothing distance. I heard the songs as spins of the wheel. Noir. Noir. Noir. Rouge. I bet on which color would come next and lost surprisingly often, given the huge bias in favor of blacks against reds. I looked forward keenly to the casino, thinking I might find some revealing parallel between the grave folk ritual of roulette—the most stylized and ceremonial form of gaming—and the strange ritual now taking place in the Teen Center. Roulette addicts, each with his or her secret, superstitious numerology, certainly believed in the spirit of the wheel, and in the gifted player’s ability to commune with it …

  It was after 11:30 when the last dancer finally subsided into his chair. Getting
up to leave, I was asked if I could give one of the dancers a ride home to Seattle. No roulette for me.

  I was wary of my passenger. Only minutes before, I’d watched Ron shuddering and groaning as he came out of his spirit-trance. I needn’t have worried. When I opened the door of the car for him, he slung his rattle and regalia in the back, climbed into the seat beside me, said, “Good party, huh? Lot of fun,” and lit up a Marlboro.

  As we drove away from the reservation, I wanted to put a question to Ron, but couldn’t think quite how to phrase it. “What’s your spirit, Ron?” would be too breezy by far. “Do you have just one spirit, or can you have several?” I was in the same plight as Mr. Salter, the city editor in Waugh’s Scoop, who sits in the train from London to Boot Magna, trying to hit on a suitably knowing question with which to address his unmet rural host. Mr. Salter’s best effort is “How are your roots, Boot?”

  Fearful of that example, I kept things on a level of careful sociological generality, while the glowing casino receded behind us and the rainswept highway dazzled. As shy of me as I was of him, Ron spoke of the importance of spirit dances to young men his age. Most of the dancers were out of jobs, like Ron himself. Most had had trouble in the past with alcohol or crack cocaine. The dances helped to repair their self-esteem by putting them in touch with “olden-day traditions.”

  “You get to explore your creativity,” Ron said. “Like you find your own song, and make up your own dance. It’s real creative.”

  When I stopped the car outside his Queen Anne Hill apartment, Ron showed me his rattle. To sculpt its fierce eagle’s head must have taken him days of patient penknife craftsmanship.

  I drove the streets aimlessly for a while, in blessed quiet and solitude. Queen Anne had gone to bed; our neighborhood raccoons had the place to themselves, and raised startled, blood-orange eyes at this invasion of their territory. I felt sorry for my boredom with the evening. I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation. Yet what I’d seen was revelatory, in its jumble of long-disused customs, ecstatic Christianity, careless translation, ethnic pride, anthropology, New Age mysticism, and Oprah Winfrey–style therapy. I had gone in the hope of finding a true fragment of the lost maritime culture of the Coastal Indians. Fat chance. Cast a leadline now into the turbid water of the Salish tribal past, and it would never touch bottom.

  Basic Mazecraft. When in a labyrinth, keep one hand on the wall. However tortuous your route, you will eventually find your way out.

  This was Vancouver’s technique of exploration. He was under orders from the Admiralty to finally ascertain that the fabled Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans did not exist. It was a grim commission. No serious geographer still believed that a navigable route was to be found, but so long as ships from France, Spain, Russia, and the newly minted United States continued to nose around the Pacific coast in search of the apocryphal channel, Britain couldn’t afford to stay out of the unicorn-hunt.

  George Vancouver was the ideal candidate for the job. Unlike Cook, he cut no corners, went strictly by the book, and carried out instructions to the letter. Sailing through the maze of islands and dead-end inlets, he kept his right hand firmly on the wall.

  When he arrived in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, he named the land to starboard the “Continental Shore.” From now on, the boats would hug the starboard coast, working their way meticulously around every bay and fjord to make sure that no gloomy, pine-hung avenue of water might conceivably lead eastwards through the mountains to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.

  Captain Van gave Peter Puget command of Discovery’s launch and ordered him to explore a long, southward-trending inlet. The boat was loaded with a week’s provisions, firearms and ammunition, and a sack of trinkets. Discovery and Chatham had sailed from England with a bizarre cargo of knickknacks and novelties. A full £10,000—a dizzying sum, about $5.76 million at 1990s rates—was allocated for the purchase of assorted tools, tin kettles, beads, bracelets, Scottish tartans, ladies’ garters, feathers, buttons, sheets of copper, iron bars, calico, red baize, earrings, and fireworks. I wonder how many aggrieved taxpayers witnessed this spree through London shops, as the explorers hemorrhaged government funds on baubles for the Indians. (By comparison, Vancouver’s own pay, as the expedition’s commander, purser, and astronomer, was finally negotiated up from six shillings a day to eight shillings—about $65,000 a year in modern currency.)

  On 20 May, in weak sunshine and with a gentle following wind, Puget sailed the launch south, down a mile-wide channel between the Continental Shore and a long cigar-shaped island. The holiday weather and easy sailing turned the labor of “taking angles” into a pleasant distraction. Whenever a new landmark was sighted, Puget took a careful compass-bearing on it, sailed a measured mile, and took its bearing again. The speed of the boat through the water was monitored every few minutes by trailing the chip-log and counting the knots pulled off the freewheeling drum as the log fell astern. With the launch traveling downwind at a steady four knots, a mile was covered every fifteen minutes. Each new bearing was transferred onto a page of the folio journal, which was pegged open on the thwart. A smudgy chart of the unfolding world, its cliffs, coves, promontories, river mouths, began to emerge from the growing cobweb of penciled lines.

  Every hour or so, Puget brought the launch up, head to wind, sail flapping, while the deep-sea lead was cast. “Found no bottom,” he wrote in the small red-morocco-bound notebook in which he kept his rough diary. By now this was a monotonous refrain. In these waters, finding bottom at all was a rare surprise.

  Meanwhile, everyone on board kept an anxious lookout for signs of movement on the shore. Loaded muskets were kept within easy reach. So far, the natives had been disconcertingly inscrutable, neither obviously friendly nor obviously hostile. They could be seen, at a safe distance, going about their ordinary business; fishing from canoes, drying salmon on wooden frames on the beach, apparently indifferent to the white intruders. But when a boat was steered toward them, they scuttled into the woods. The few Indians whom Puget had met at close quarters were “low and ill made, with broad faces and small eyes,” their black hair “exceedingly dirty.” They wore rolls of copper in their perforated noses and ears, and the men’s faces were painted with “streaks of red ocher and black Glimmer.”

  Down the eighteen-mile length of the passage, no Indians were spotted; a bad sign, Puget thought, sensing the presence of invisible watchers. He kept the launch in midstream, out of bow-and-arrow range, and raked the beach with his spyglass.

  As the boat cleared the southern tip of the long island, the great white bulk of Mount Rainier came into view. The mountain kept on surprising the explorers with its unexpected appearances. Each time it showed itself, it appeared to have wandered many miles from its previous location; like a jack-in-the-box, it would pop up suddenly over the top of a wooded hill. Now it bore due southeast, and, for the first time since the mountain was sighted off Port Townshend, Puget was able to estimate its distance as between 45 and 50 miles away.

  A fast flood tide swept the launch southward toward a splinter of light between high cliffs. The mountain vanished behind a black wall of pines, and, as the passage narrowed, the water boiled around the boat in greasy swirls. The wind dropped. The launch pirouetted in a lazy circle on the turbulence, with Puget on the tiller, fighting to regain steerageway.

  As soon as the boat was back under control, soundings were tried for—and found, for once, at thirty fathoms, though the water was so broken that it looked at most only a few feet deep. The launch was now passing over one of the shallow sills (at Tacoma Narrows) that generate the fertile submarine turmoil of Puget Sound.

  The chute of disturbed water turned out to be like a door that opened, abruptly, on a sunlit panorama of low islands and serpentine channels. Steering for the shore to starboard, as per instructions, Puget saw two canoes floating close in by the beach. Two seated figures were in one canoe, four in the oth
er. He ordered the sail of the launch to be scandalized and told his men to row slowly toward them. Immediately the Indians paddled hard away from shore, making for an opening in the islands to the south.

  Puget stopped his launch. The Indians stopped their canoes. Fifty yards of water separated the two parties. From his coat pocket, Puget drew out a capacious white handkerchief and waved it at the Indians like a flag. They stared, but didn’t bolt. Smile! Puget hissed at his crew, who dutifully grinned and waved maniacally. A tidal eddy drifted the launch closer to the canoes. The faces of two of the Indians were heavily pitted with what looked like smallpox. One had lost an eye. Noticing a small green branch from a fir tree floating alongside, Puget reached for it and then waved it from side to side in slow, pacific strokes. The Indians hastily paddled a few yards farther off, then waited to see what would come next.

  It’s a seduction scene. Puget is trying to fascinate the Indians as he might fascinate a girl. Sex is very close to the surface in these colonial encounters, with the Indians being thought of as irrational, impulsive, fickle, feminine. So Puget now tried to court them with pretty things that might please an eighteenth-century girl’s eye.

  The sack of baubles was close to hand. Puget found two looking glasses, a dozen polished copper medals, a bracelet, and a silver spoon. A floating log provided a convenient showcase, and Puget piled his selection of bibelots on the two mirrors, which he tied to the log with twine. Then, hatless, sweetly smiling, his shoulders hunched forward in a gesture of submissive candor, he backed the launch away until the log was equidistant from the Indians and Englishmen. As the log swung around on the current, the heap of treasures flashed and glittered in the sun.