Tillikum River
A novel about a mixed-race family, living and working on a Native reservation, that infuses contemporary tribal politics and race relations with the mostly untold history of the Pacific Northwest. In the coastal mountains of present-day Oregon, what begins as the proposed removal of an obsolete river dam, part of a broader dam removal and river restoration effort turns into a five-way culture war shaped by tribal politics and reservation politics..
In the coastal mountains of the Pacific Northwest, what begins as the proposed removal of an obsolete river dam, part of a broader dam removal and river restoration effort turns into a five-way culture war shaped by tribal politics and reservation politics.
Fueled by casino money and riven with politics from 150 years of exile, the Native people struggling to reclaim their ancestral river are forced to deal with everyone else who also calls the river, its canyon, and the surrounding mountains “home.” Loggers, ranchers, river rats, and pot farmers all square off with the Tillikum as they work to restore their homeland, foodways, language, and traditional religion.
Our hosts on the reservation: Eve, a Native environmental activist hired by the tribe to manage the messy process; and Jack, her white husband, who works in the casino and volunteers with local Search & Rescue. The mysteries pile up from the first page: who tried to blow up the dam in the middle of the night? These latest newcomers?
Tillikum River is rich with details about the ancient Native civilization that arose amid the mountain ranges, old-growth forests, and waterways crisscrossing present-day Oregon and northern California, reflecting Oregon Native history. With a narrative situated on the the 4,000-year scale that is the history of the Tillikum, deeply rooted in Native American history and Pacific Northwest Native history, all other claimants are newcomers. And every natural feature in their world – many of them icons we know as something else (e.g., Mount Rainier, the Columbia River, Crater Lake) – carries an original name and story.
The result is a riveting drama about the present-day collision of cultures, and about collective redemption — of a river, a landscape, and a once-disposed people taking back what was always their own, echoing the idea of land back.
Coming soon!
Jonah Das is an author and restoration ecologist based on the land of the Esopus / Lenape (Algonquian) people in the Catskill Mountains of present-day New York State. He wrote Tillikum River while living and working on a native tree and plant farm on the land of the S’Klallam and Chemakum, on the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington state.
As a child, Jonah regularly encountered archeological evidence of the Onondaga / Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) people in the woods surrounding his home, and by middle school he was playing lacrosse with their descendants from the reservation two towns west.
Jonah is also the author of Dudeville, an adventure novel about the spiritual dimensions of mountaineering and bittersweet transformation of the American West into an outdoor sports playground; and That Golden Shore, a “road” novel about the myths, landscapes, and indigenous peoples of California.
Jonah is the managing editor of Illahee Rising, a geographic information nonprofit that documents Native historic sites missing from or misrepresented on current maps. Additional historical material developed during the research and writing of Tillikum River is available, along with geo-locations, at illaheerising.org.
For the sake of authenticity, it was tempting to situate Tillikum River among one or another of the hundreds of distinct original peoples who survived the history of the Pacific Northwest. Those peoples are all still here, if on only tiny fragments of a bioregion that was once all theirs—a sprawling geography of coastal rain forests, sagebrush prairies, and restless volcanos stretching from the redwood forests down south to the great Salish Sea up north.
But out of respect for their privacy—and the privacy of friends who have graciously shared their tribal and family histories with me—I chose instead to craft a composite tribe, river, and reservation: the Tillikum. (“Tillikum” means “people” or “us” in Chinuk Wawa, the once dominant Native trade language of the Pacific Northwest.)
Is a composite even possible, let alone useful? Every tribal government and community across this continent has its own written and unwritten history; obvious and subtle political power structures; cultural quirks, heroes, villains, sages, and fools. But there are commonalities among all Native people of a distinct bioregion, a culture forged by landscape, weather, and the myth-making tied to both; by sources of food and building materials; by migration history and proto-language. So too the Cedar & Salmon Nations of the Pacific Northwest, as the Tillikum are portrayed in this story.
But Tillikum River is, ultimately, fiction. The present-day characters who belong to the Tillikum nation—along with their namesake river, canyon, reservation, and casino—are the products of my imagination. The historic characters, however, are based on actual people, rendered from the best available evidence about their lives. Many of these people (e.g., “Chetco Jenny”) occupied the shadows and margins of history, their scant biographies distorted by the mythologizing and counter-mythologizing of their White enemies and sympathizers, tribes of origin, and the broader Native community.
Who am I to tell any of these tales? I grew up in a small town only one town over from a reservation, with free run of forests, meadows, and fields I knew had once been all theirs. But among Native peoples while researching this story four decades later, I was reminded nearly every day that I remain, first and last, a White man: “the single most dangerous thing in the history of the world.” (That’s what the member of one tribal council told me five minutes after we sat down in the restaurant of her tribe’s casino.)
Which is why I would dare write this story only from the first-person perspective of a sympathetic White man, Jack, long alienated from his family and culture of origin and only recently married into the Native world.
Neither Jack nor I presume to speak for any of these people. We speak only of how they have always appeared to my curious White eyes in all their variety, specificity, complexity, and universal humanity. If I have one ambition for Tillikum River, it is that I have created a multi-hued portrait of people typically bunched together by the dominant culture as “red.” Caricatured as savages who got what was coming to them. Then caricatured and marginalized all over again as permanent victims. Most (but not all) Native people I know are the exact opposite of that: proud, tough, resourceful, and as committed—despite a scarcity of resources and an abundance of racism all around them—to building a better world for their children as any people anywhere.
Like Natives all over this continent, the people of Tillikum River were and are survivors of unspeakable generational and often direct trauma. But they are, as importantly, witnesses, culture-bearers, and warriors still fighting for their families. They are the descendants of people who were here for thousands of years—and in some cases, tens of thousands—a time-scale that renders the “American experiment” what it has always been for them: an historical aberration, a sudden 300-year nightmare that, for all the hideous scars it will leave on the landscape, will one day end.
Given the mushrooming efforts of today’s Native peoples all over this continent to recover, reclaim, and restore who and what they are—which is the beating heart of this story—they may yet be here long after “America” has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Jonah Das
On the land of the Chemakum and the S’Klallam
Chimacum Valley, Washington
From “The Ghosts of Camas ‘Lake’”
“Yes,” Eve said. “The largest of the four Tillikum village sites they drowned with the dam.”
We stood and stared at the turgid haze of dust and pollen across the water.
“Four villages,” Eve said again. “Gabby thinks there were three or four hundred people in this one when the miners came. And it is all still down there. The pits for the houses. The things the militia or soldiers didn’t want. The graves, the bones, the ones that didn’t wash down to the bottom of the dam.”
We turned and looked down the sides of the promontory, at the moss-blackened, lichen-splotched face of what had to have been a great stone outcropping over the old river, but was now just a boulder rising up from the stagnant murk.
“And right down the face of this rock,” Eve continued, pointing below us, “will be where they made their art. Petroglyphs and pictographs, all underwater now. They’re still there,” she said, “but only the ghosts can see them.”
—
From “Winema and Half the Sky”
I stood up from the counter and headed for the door with the posters for the missing girl.
Before I left, I turned to see them—all those women, one of them a Two-Spirit—in their work circle. It was also a talking circle, and could have been a working-and-talking circle in the 1950s before Termination, or the 1880s on that horrible first Rez, or the 1830s before first contact, or in any of the centuries or millennia before that. Work had always been communal like that, and so too were their stories. Told by enough of them, over enough time, the stories would turn into shared memory, and some would morph into the supernatural, into myths that would explain who they were, how they had come to be, how they would survive this too.
If all that worked, I thought as I lingered in the casino’s office door—if through their immense collective effort they managed to find and rescue ther girl—then this too would become a story they would one day tell in their working-and-talking circles, long after all of us were gone.
—
From “The Hot-Headed Young Men”
This was the way out of all that darkness? Casino money, show business, shaking down the cultural (and occasionally literal) descendants of those who stole everything from them, herded them onto reservations, cut off their hair, and set about stealing their souls too?
Yet, it’s become my fight. And because of an accident of love? Or was it always my fight, if only because I knew all this back when I was growing up next to that very first Rez? Because I hate bullies, and have since I was old enough to walk? Still, who am I to judge any of these people?
Sure, I had a rough start; but I am a white guy. I had the option to spend the rest of my life running away from how I started out, like it had never happened. I could light out for the territories—head west—start over. What if I’d not had that option? If I’d been trapped by my skin color, a chronic illness, family affections? Would I have turned out to be an Elder and a peacemaker? Or one of those “Hot-Headed Young Men,” filled with a smoldering vehemence that never let up?
I now know some of the details: how that righteous rage goes back a century and a half, in one or two weary heartbeats, to all those raids at dawn with gunfire, torches, and swords, the slaughter of women, children, and old men when the men were out hunting, the winter marches to the concentration camps and all the cultural genocide to follow.
Now, after two years of living and working on the Rez, the greater shock for me is that more heirs to all that pain and loss are not wired like all those “Hot-Headed Young Men” the Elders couldn’t control. The ones who ran off to challenge the trespassers, triggered the 10-, 20-, or 50-fold retaliations, or simply dared to stand their ground and fight for it? Would I have been one of those guys?
—
From “The Night the Stars Fell”
Sarah was in there with the rest of them that evening, in white buckskins and feathers, dancing and singing the ceremony. I’d heard her plans to be back in that longhouse on Sunday afternoons, after church let out, teaching children how to bead, and weave, and adorn deerskin dresses with feathers and shells from down the river.
“Because God is everywhere,” she said. “In the trees, the mountains, the ocean, so why not in church too?”
I didn’t know about church. But if there was a god who showed up where people gathered, then that god was in the vibrating longhouse that night. The muffled rhythm of the ceremony was a collective pulse, like the steady insistent heartbeat of everything in nature, made loud enough to hear. The trees, the mountains, the ocean, and, of course, the rivers. The Tillikum River beneath all that muck. Big River and Celilo Falls. And all those sacred, ancestral rivers we’d visited, some saved already like the Elwha and Umatilla, and the hundreds of others still to be saved.
The souls of those rivers might be drowned, as countless of their riverside villages that had once been their homes were engulfed by the rising, slowing, deadening river. And yet, the rivers carried on down there in the darkness, tamed and tormented as they were, because they always had, past the watery graves and old petroglyphs, past all those places that fed all those people for all those thousands of years, as if to say, ‘You cannot drown us, down here in the submerged channel of our ancient river. We slumber under all this water for now, but not forever. We are still here too.’
What would they have been haggling over? Which villages would be marched west to the beach and onto Yachats and Siletz? And which would be marched east, to Table Rock and up the Willamette Valley to the Grand Ronde? What a horrible thing, I thought, nauseated with the specter of real human suffering dealt out on Ben Wright’s kitchen table like a deck of cards.
I stopped and gathered myself. No, not just ‘horrible.’ A local holocaust, lost to history, right there on the Oregon Coast. I tried to breathe in the landscape as it breathed out, to find—like I always had—a little solace and succor for so much human cruelty in the eternal patience of geology, biology, and weather. Mountain, meadow, trees, ferns, moss, flowers, and the chatter of small lives in the canopy, all of it swaying in the morning sun.
—
From “The Ghosts of Camas ‘Lake’”
Tommy was off with his aunt and cousins, Eve was off on a run by herself around the ranch, and I was alone with these three men I’d just met. They obviously wanted to show me their world, but tentatively, provisionally, as if there were a right way and a wrong way for me to enter and inhabit it, and were curious to see which way I would go.
It was a test to see what kind of a white man I was. Would I say something stupid, pompous, condescending, patronizing, unctuous, pretentious? It was the first of many tests, as it turned out, as Eve and Tommy and I navigated the color line all around the Rez, around every Rez, the borderland between two worlds in which neither of us is a full-fledged member anymore by virtue of our marriage.
So much for the prying eyes of rednecks at every highway stop, the hard, furtive glances of the Rez, the whole mad world beyond. For the first time in my long life, I had an actual family. I was suddenly grateful for all of it, for Eve, Tommy, our strange new world up here among these people. I may even have been OK, in some begrudging way, with all the mistakes, disappointments, and pain that drove me to here and now.
What I had told Tommy was exactly what I believed: the world is full of ghosts, in all the landscapes they couldn’t quit, the same way there are landscapes the living can’t quit either. Like that river down there, fifty feet below the dam, where the salmon dream of returning, looking for a way home, so they can finally spawn before they die.
My head was still spinning with all those stories, like an earworm but with pictures of horses and guns and long marches instead of music. I could say spinning with all that history, but history was a book you could close, or so I’d always thought. These were stories that may have played out in the past, but there were still tracks from them, and echoes of them, all through these hills…
Coming soon!