Posted: Thursday, January 23, 2003 12:00 am
Man uses artifacts to tell childhood tales
By THERESA HOGUE
Gazette-Times reporter
Long ago, before the world was made, everything was covered with water.
Ed Edmo knows the magic of water, just as he knows the magic of storytelling. Edmo is a Shoshone Bannock who remembers the day Celilo Falls disappeared under the rising Colombia River after it was dammed. He spoke about his days growing up alongside the Colombia during a Chautauqua lecture Wednesday night held at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, cosponsored by the library and the Corvallis Northwest Earth Institute.
"We were raised poor, no electricity or running water," he told an audience of almost 60 members. "I didn't have a TV until I was 14 or 15. At night, when the cold east wind was blowing down the river and I heard the crackle of the fire and I was covered up with many hand sewn blankets, my father would tell me legends."
Those legends became ingrained in Edmo, so much so that he can still recite them by heart the way they have been passed down for generations. An accomplished poet, storyteller and playwright, Edmo travels the world sharing his stories.
"I learned it by hearing it, imagining it myself and remembering it," he said of the old stories he still recites.
Edmo told the history of Pacific Northwest Indians through stories and artifacts that he passed around to the audience, from trading shells to cornhusk dolls and a silky beaver pelt with tail still intact. What the Europeans brought, he said, were beads, an addition that changed Indian art.
"Indians will bead anything not nailed down," he said, displaying a headband his grandmother made him for dances, and a tiny doll covered in rainbow beads.
Edmo spoke of the customs of the Shoshone Bannock in his village, the elders who spent evenings smoking and talking politics, the elaborate stick gambling games, and most of all, the stories, most of which involve animals.
"Muskrat was good looking, ah, he was handsome," Edmo said, weaving a tale of the world's creation featuring the Great Spirit's three sons, Otter, Muskrat and Beaver. It is fat, slow Beaver's actions that cause the world to emerge from the waters that cover it.
Coyote plays a prominent role in many of the stories. He is the Trickster, whose rude actions and attending consequences are used as ways to teach children what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In one story, Coyote shuns the hospitality of Crane by refusing to eat his food. Crane pays him back by secretly removing a piece of his rump, then feeding it to him disguised as something else. When the trick is revealed, Coyote slinks off in shame.
"That is why coyotes are always off by themselves," Edmo said. "They remember the day they ate their own rump."
Edmo remembers the day his father took him out of school to watch Celilo Falls flood. It took six hours for the falls he had grown up next to disappear.
"What I miss most," he said, "is the mist blowing off the falls."
There are two more Chautauqua lectures taking place in March and April. For more information, contact Maureen Beezhold at 752-3517.