A Salmon's Tale

August Green Corn Moon Moon Cycle. - I have been doing some art work I have never done before and I would like to share the first piece of a small series.  It is a woven fish I have been working on all week. It tells a story of the Columbia River Gorge.  So this is the first installment of the: Salmon's Tale A Salmon knows his Source, yet man has lost his course. I had training by a Native American teacher for 12 years. A part of that training was helping the elders. I was introduced to one of California's best basket makers at the time, Madaline. She was well into her nineties  and could no longer gather materials up the mountain for her craft. I was well versed in wildcrafting plants since I had been gathering for both food and medicine since 1970.  My Native American teacher at the time used to pick up a ceremonial basket hat, one that the Klamath River Indians women would wear in their ceremonies. He would point to one of the complex designs woven into the hat and say this is the mountain, here is the river and the ocean. I did not understand what he was saying because the design did not look like a mountain or a river.   He was one of the old school Indians who didn't always teach you directly.  Yet he put his hand on my shoulder and pray and then I would have my own direct experience with Nature. This was the way I was taught and the way I learned. Madaline and other women of their tribe were teaching how to make ceremonial dresses and basket hats all made from grasses, seeds, ocean shells and saplings.  They needed someone to gather the materials for such a project. My teacher took me to the river and we gathered young willows to make the weft of the basket hats.  Another day we went high in the mountains to a stream deep in the woods. One could tell very few people had visited this secret stream because it was so pure. There we gathered the black stems of maidenhair fern. My teacher began to sing a beautiful song as he held a bunch of maidenhair fern to honor the spirit of the plant. After the song he began to explain how a prayer would travel from a trickling stream high in the mountains down to the mighty river. That river would carry the prayer song out to the sea. At that moment I understood the encoded message of the basket hats the Native Indians were making.  The mountain was recorded in the bear grass gathered in the high mountain peaks. The river was recorded in the willow gathered at the river edge. The maiden hair fern was the trickling stream and the elder bark was the forest that dyed some of the grasses. The ocean was the sound of  shells that tinkled like wind chimes on the woven grass skirts the women wore while they danced in ceremony. At that moment I understood how nature recorded the making of ceremonial dress. We went to all these places gathering the materials for the basket weavers. When we were finished we bought arm loads of wild grasses, roots and sticks to the elders. The basket weaver's smiles were like a rising moon over water.  My teacher said we are very rich our tribe.  Their riches were not measured as a big car or how much money they had, their richness was the bounty of Nature.  I never learned very much about basket making. It is a complicated craft handed down from the tribe's highly skilled craft-women  of the tribe. When I began to weave the salmon for this project my skills were limited yet when I gathered the materials for the project they began to teach me and tell me the story of the mighty Columbia River. As I made my simple attempts to weave the bear grassess  between the red willow sticks I began to use my teeth to hold the grasses in place and then I remembered the story of tribal basket weavers getting mouth cancer because their traditional gathering places had been sprayed with herbicides by the forest service. I decided it was best not to hold the grass in between my teeth.  The Salmon Tale I now present to you through my art. May my teacher and all the old lady basket makers be blessed and have plenty of weaving materials in the Happy Hunting Grounds. Reflection Michael Young pointed out to me that the fin on the salmon fish I had backwards, since he is a fisherman he knows such things. I needed to turn his tail around so the salmon could swim up stream back to his source. Today I turned the fin shell around from my first Salmon weaving. When I did this the greater part of the shell was below the fish.  This made me think of the symbolism of this mistake...The bigger part of the fin now is not seen, just like the unconscious of the collective whole. The salmon is a creature that is living in both the river and the ocean. The water is symbolic of the unconscious mind.  In these times looking at what is happening in this world we can feel helpless. The key I felt the salmon was teaching me is;  Make aware your own un-conscious mind. Now the fin is in the right direction.