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>>[Carolyn Slyter] I was thinking about all the things the tribes had to do, because it
was so close for the Coos, and the Lower Umpquas too, and the Siuslaws, to go out there and
get a crab or a clam because there were so many of them. You didn't -- you just had to
be out there a short time, and you had all these shells, and that's where the middens
come in. The only thing I think about, difference from our middens here, is because ours is
like seashells, animals, stuff like that, crabs and clams and all that stuff, like Robert
was talking about. In a lot of places they would also, because that was a nice spot and
the ground wouldn't be frozen, and so they would bury their remains, if someone died,
they would put them also in the middens. We didn't do that in here - we just threw out
the bones of the things we were eating. So that's how you can tell the history, what
went on in different levels of the ground, so it's like opening a book and reading it,
on a shell midden. And we see many of them. They're talking about that big, tall one,
so you know millions of years ago, somebody had been dumping there for a long time. And
for somebody to go in there and destroy that, taking part of your culture away from you,
and so we lost some stuff that should've never been taken from that spot, cause it was a
sacred spot, a spot that people could always learn from and learn what the history is of
the tribe at that time; what they were eating, eating different things, so it's just like
a history book now, you have to read all those seashells to get that.
>>Who do we report to if we see someone destroying part of a midden? Do we call somebody?
>>You can call the Tribal office, or you can call the State Police...
>>All law enforcements are supposed to stop it when they see the law being broken. But
the State Police would probably be the most appropriate, mostly their fish and wildlife
division that are charged with enforcing cultural resources law, and they're supposed to be
trained up now. >>We send out a person that goes out, maybe
a replacement like Robert was saying, just a house or a shed, we send out one of our
tribal members there while they're doing the digging and stuff, or making a new excavation,
we always have a tribal member on the site. >>[Chief Brainard] One thing we need to do
is help educate everybody, so they know what to do, if they come across this. If you don't
know what to do, you just feel like, well they've got a right to dig, but it's kind
of like digging up some graveyard. We consider it a sacred place, the ancient ones have put
there as their resting place for eternity, and we want to protect that.
>>What...I'm new to this area, what's a midden? A grave, or a...
>>The midden was more or less a refuse pile of clam shells and bones and...
>>[Robert Kentta] Animal bones mainly. All the food remains. You'd see charcoal in there,
from cooking fires... >>Up and down the coast?
>>But as Robert said before, it's mainly remains of a house pit site, right next door, they're
interment of the ancestors are close by, it's a very visible site, much more of their ancestry.
>>Was there a Yachats tribe? You know, I heard you talking about the Alsea--
>>They were part of the Alsea people. >>Pardon?
>>[Patty Whereat Phillips] Yachats was a village, they considered part of the Alsea people.
It's kind of funny to draw divisions. In the old ways, at least for Yaquina and south,
I'm not sure about the Tillamook, but each village was politically autonomous, so when
a group became above a village level, it was kind of a shared kinship of language, and
a shared culture. So, kind of past the level of the YáxaikY people, they were considered
Alsea people, and practiced the same customs as their Alsea people, one of which made them
a bit distinctive from the tribes of the south, is that they were the southernmost tribe to
practice head flattening; which if people aren't familiar with that, is, you know newborn
babies have very soft skulls. A lot of cultures in the Pacific Northwest, further north, and
also some places in Central America, the custom was to take newborns and undergo this process
with a head presser, to shape the forehead to stay kind of sloped. And that was something
distinctive, between the Alsea people, and then from Siuslaw south, cause Coos Bay people
didn't do head flattening, and the Alseas made fun of us - they thought we looked funny
with our natural heads. They called us seal-heads, which I actually think is kind of cool, I
like that. For the Siuslaw, the Siuslaw didn't normally practice it, there were a few Siuslaws
that recognized having the head flattening, because people intermarried a lot, and especially
Siuslaws and Alseas being next-door neighbors, it wasn't that unusual that there were marriages
arranged between the two. So sometimes, someone had some Alsea in their family, you know,
when they were born, the Alsea relatives might take it to do this head-flattening process.
But pretty much, it stopped there at Tsi'imahl, at Tenmile.