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<DIV style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 165px"></DIV><FONT size=+2><B>A Journey of Many
Lifetimes</B></FONT> <BR>For the Hupa and Other Indians, Museum Honors Past and
Present
<P><FONT size=-1>By David Montgomery<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Tuesday,
September 21, 2004; Page A01 </FONT>
<P><NITF>
<P>HOOPA, Calif. -- The white buckskin headrolls embroidered with red woodpecker
scalps were packed. So were the sashes spangled with iridescent mauve
hummingbird crests.</P>
<P>Luggage quandaries had been resolved: Costco nesting boxes and Tupperware
bowls to keep woven hats from being crushed. Canvas duffels to preserve
rolled-up maple bark skirts.</P>
<P>Everything had to go carry-on. No one trusted the precious items to be
checked. </P>
<P>Now in the quiet of the morning before he was to fly to Washington for
today's opening of the $219 million National Museum of the American Indian --
before this morning's unprecedented Mall procession of some 20,000 Indians from
Alaska to South America in full regalia -- a Hupa medicine man named Merv George
Sr. drove his Dodge truck to the top of Bald Hill to remember what the journey
was for.</P>
<P>The museum will open at last after 15 years of planning in an honored
position close to the Capitol. "Kind of fitting," mused George: "First peoples
here, last place on the Mall."</P>
<P>He looked over his ancient valley. The rising sun glinted off the Trinity
River winding among the homes and schools of the reservation. Steep hills of fir
and pine rose on either side. He descended to the river, to a jagged outcropping
of rock. Here the tribe launches the Boat Dance during what it considers a
10-day world-renewal ceremony every other year. </P>
<P>Tribal members still take comfort in the old spirits. The regalia they will
wear in the procession today and that will be unveiled in the new museum are
what they never stopped wearing at home in ceremonies said to restore balance to
the universe. The disastrous advent of the white man did not kill the spiritual
core of this culture. It is not just an exhibit -- it lives.</P>
<P>But inhabitants of Indian Country from Cherokee to Pine Ridge to Hoopa Valley
aren't sure the rest of America understands -- so this is what the journey is
for. Not just to experience one of the largest collections of native artifacts
in the world or the six-day festival on the Mall this week. </P>
<P>But also: "To show we still do this," George, 60, said, standing on the Boat
Dance grounds, where participants are said to gather up all the prayers that
were ever said and ever will be said. "We got modern things now. We got cars.
But our basic root -- this is still what we do. Our basic lives are still tied
to this."</P>
<P>As native people throughout the Western Hemisphere prepared for the mental
and physical journey to Washington -- capital of the land-grabbing empire, now
attempting to write a new chapter -- Emmilee Risling, 15, checked her uniquely
Hoopa look in the dining room mirror.</P>
<P>It was two days before departure. Her father, Gary, is the wildland fire
chief on the Northern California reservation, but he commutes an hour from the
family's home on the coast near Arcata.</P>
<P>Emmilee's mother and great-aunt fussed with details while she tried on a
white cape made of conical dentalium shells. It had been handed down for
generations, while her dress of buckskin, clam shells, pine nuts and beargrass
was newly made by one of her aunts, a lawyer. She also wore a woodpecker sash
dating back to the 1870s and a woven hat.</P>
<P>"My culture is really important to me," said Emmilee, president of her
sophomore class and vice president of the Native American Club. "That's the way
I've been raised."</P>
<P>Her tribe is one of the 24 that will have exhibits when the museum opens.
These exhibits will rotate to other tribes every few years. The Hupa still feel
humiliated by how they were treated in an old exhibit at the Smithsonian's
National Museum of Natural History. The regalia were mismatched, songs were
mislabeled, according to tribe members. </P>
<P>About 2,300 people belong to the Hoopa Valley Tribe. Scientists, who trust in
carbon dating, say campfires have burned in the valley going back 10,000 years.
The Hupa, who place their faith elsewhere, say their people have lived in this
remote place since the beginning of time. (The people are Hupa, the place is
Hoopa.)</P>
<P>Emmilee had never been to Washington. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to be with this many different Indian tribes," she said.</P>
<P>But first she needed moccasins. The Hupa don't wear moccasins during their
dances. Feet must touch the Earth directly. But tribe members had heard of the
gravel paths on the Mall, and they worried about broken glass.</P>
<P>Clad in a Bob Marley T-shirt, Emmilee set out moccasin-shopping with her
mother. After enduring two stores and wincing at all the souvenir Indian
footwear -- "Mom, I think I'd rather wear flip-flops!" -- Emmilee found
moccasins handmade by a tribe in Montana.</P>
<P>After shopping, Emmilee visited her great-aunt's home in Eureka. The girl
laid out her aunt's heirloom regalia on the living room rug. Aunt Viola Risling,
a petite eighty-something woman, sat on a couch with her Maltese dog.</P>
<P>"We live like this," she said, gesturing around the modern American living
room, "but we're trying to save our culture."</P>
<P>She asked Emmilee to explain the dances and regalia to a visitor.</P>
<P>The White Deerskin Dance renews and restores balance to the world. The Jump
Dance wards off misfortune. The Brush Dance aids the sick. The Flower Dance
marks a girl's passage into womanhood. Participants summon the dances down from
the <I>k'ixinay,</I> the spirits, who are always dancing. The Hupa take over the
dances for 10 days at a time to beseech the k'ixinay (pronounced "ki-hinn-ae")
to answer their prayers. As in any religion, Hupa believers run the gamut from
literal-minded fundamentalists to more liberal interpreters of the stories. </P>
<P>"I hope Emmilee will continue doing it so it will go on," Aunt Viola
said.</P>
<P>The regalia have mystical meanings, but they also evince the Hupa's location
between Pacific coast culture and high timber country -- a marriage of shells
and nuts, woven river roots and upland grass and ferns. The tribe believes that
spirits inhere in such elements of the land, and incorporating them gives the
garments spiritual resonance. The woodpecker is revered as a fellow woodland
spirit with family values, mating for life.</P>
<P>Aunt Viola's regalia are not for sale or loan to outsiders.</P>
<P>"I've got to keep my own things for our dances," she said. "They can't go to
the Smithsonian!"</P>
<P>Part of this journey is mental.</P>
<P>Between the generation of young people like Emmilee Risling and members of
the older native generation like her great-aunt, there is a middle generation
that came of age during an especially activist period for American Indians.
Members of this generation are the link between a past of culture destruction
and a present when a museum on the Mall could be contemplated.</P>
<P>The Risling clan is emblematic. Aunt Viola's brother, David Risling Jr., is
considered a father of Indian education who first imagined such a museum 30
years ago. Emmilee was traveling to Washington with her aunt and uncle, Lois
Risling, 55, and Steve Baldy, 54, who are also members of the tribe.</P>
<P>The Rislings say the white man appeared only two lifetimes ago: Lois Risling
was 10 when her great-grandmother, Nancy Sherman, died; she was more than 100
years old. Sherman, in turn, was a girl in the 1850s when white settlers entered
the valley.</P>
<P>When she was in graduate school at Stanford University, Lois Risling came
across an anthropological text about the Hupa. It contained a picture of her
grandmother -- illustrating the skull measurements of her people.</P>
<P>Lois joined in the Indian activism of the late 1960s. She was part of the
nonviolent occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. "I don't think we thought of
ourselves as radicals," she said. "I think we thought of ourselves as Indian
people doing what had to be done."</P>
<P>Baldy, 54, took part in the occupation of a surplus military base near Davis,
Calif., in 1970. That led to the founding of D-Q University, an Indian
institution still open today. Baldy was president for several years.</P>
<P>Lois Risling, now director of Indian community development at Humboldt State
University in Arcata, doesn't think a museum on the Mall can make everything
right between Indians and America. Her worst fear is that the museum will be
held up as an excuse not to take action on other problems in Indian Country. But
she sees it as an important turning point.</P>
<P>"It's a statement and a recognition: We <I>are," </I>she said. "We were here
first, and we continue to be here. That's the concept of a living museum. This
is a recognition by the United States of America that Indian people are a part
of America."</P>
<P>Postcards from the reservation:</P>
<P>One evening at dusk, children were playing in the river. There was a rope
swing -- suspended from the highway overpass. The kids dangled merrily, dropped
with a splash, and did it again.</P>
<P>There are trailer homes and beautiful wooden ranchers, a couple restaurants
and gas stations, a supermarket, no traffic lights. The Lucky Bear Casino is one
room. Few gamblers find their way to Hoopa Valley -- a mixed blessing -- so the
Lucky Bear only breaks even. But it provides 20 to 30 jobs. Unemployment is
about 60 percent.</P>
<P>The tribe was one of the first to take over all governing functions from the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, in the early 1990s. Its budget is $65 million.</P>
<P>Clifford Lyle Marshall, Hupa tribal chairman, sat in the spacious, modern
tribal council chamber. He was not making the trip to Washington. He was
troubled that so much Hupa regalia will remain under glass during the
Smithsonain's temporary exhibition. He believes regalia are for dancing, and he
worried that some visitors might think this is a museum to the past. </P>
<P>Still, he applauded the effort. "I'm not boycotting anything," he said. "I've
got a budget to do. I feel I've got to take care of business."</P>
<P>A short drive upriver leads to Hoopa Valley High School, where a Hupa
language class was in session. The taped voice of a departed elder filled the
room, telling a story in the native tongue. The dozen students answered
questions in Hupa.</P>
<P>"These guys represent who's going to fill my shoes," said the teacher,
Melodie George, 37, daughter of Merv George Sr. and one of a handful of fluent
speakers. "I don't want to be the last Hupa speaker."</P>
<P>Her daughter, Kayla Rae Carpenter, 16, was in the class. Two years ago, the
tribe held a Flower Dance for her, the coming-of-age ceremony. It was the first
Flower Dance in Hoopa Valley in a generation. Since then there have been
several.</P>
<P>Back downriver, at one of the nicer houses, Merv George Jr. opened a freezer
in his garage and pulled out a stiff woodpecker. The bird's body was black, its
scalp velvety red.</P>
<P>George, 31, is administrator of an intertribal fish and water commission. On
his own time, he makes regalia. It took him five years to craft two Jump Dance
headrolls, each decorated with about 50 woodpecker scalps. He will wear one on
the Mall today, and his son, Merv George III, 7, will wear the other. His wife,
Wendy George, a tribal council member, made dresses for their three daughters to
wear today.</P>
<P>George and his father and sister consulted with Smithsonian curators on the
Hupa exhibit, to get it right this time.</P>
<P>He held up his headroll. "This is my flag," he said, "who I am as a person
first."</P>
<P>Somewhere over America, the in-flight movie for the Rislings was "The Alamo,"
with the scene in which Davy Crockett tells a bloody tale of killing Creek
Indians. The characters use such words as "squaw" and "redskin," which the
Rislings consider derogatory.</P>
<P>A flight attendant announced the defeat of the Washington Redskins.</P>
<P>After arriving in Washington, Baldy, Lois Risling and Emmilee Risling dropped
their regalia at the hotel and paid a night visit to the museum. Its doors were
locked for one more day, but they could see this monument from the outside for
the first time.</P>
<P>The limestone curves were floodlit against the dark sky. The visitors took in
the scene, saying little.</P>
<P>Lois Risling felt drawn to the plants and herbs growing in the native-style
landscape. She and Baldy found ferns that grow in Hoopa Valley. Boulders called
grandfather rocks are scattered on the grounds. Risling patted them with a happy
sigh. Back home, during ceremonies, you draw strength from boulders.</P>
<P>Risling senses her people won't be specimens this time. No more skull
measurements of her great-grandmother. "If the inside is as impressive as what's
out here, it's going to be a tremendous wonderful thing," she said. </P>
<P>"There's something familiar about it -- and something new." </P>
<P></P></NITF>
<P>
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