The focus of this year’s Camas festival was the purple Camas flower. This flower is an integral part of the Willamette Valley ecosystem, and has been an important food source for indigenous tribes of the area for hundreds of years.
The event took place on May 9 in Nicholson Library and included activities such as guest speakers, the Indigenous Creators Marketplace, a gallery of indigenous basketry and photography, in addition to tours of Cozine Creek.
The Indigenous Creators Marketplace took place inside the library. It included various craftspeople selling art and jewelry, and some distributed tea and plants. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, an organization representing over 30 indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest area, had a table representing their Historic Preservation Office.
Tours of Cozine Creek took participants through the Camas patch in the area, where the land has been cultivated since 2018 to allow the native Camas flower to grow. This cultivation began in 2018 as part of an Environmental Studies Capstone, and it continues today, with students and volunteers removing invasive species, cleaning up trash and more.
Linfield hosted two guest speakers for the festival– one was Joe Scott, director of the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program, which focuses on allowing indigenous youth to reconnect with the land and learn cultural methods to preserve the natural world. He spoke about fire and the practice of cultural burning, especially how it relates to the Camas flower.
“Camas is a great example of a fire-adapted food, in the sense that if you’ve ever tried to go out and dig Camas, and fill a bucket with enough bulbs to feed your community, you’re gonna encounter a layer of thatch on the soil just about anywhere you go,” Scoot said.
“Getting a shovel through that is like digging through felt; it’s really hard, and burning starts killing off those unwelcome grasses. Native grasses are bunch grasses, and there’s space in between them, so they don’t form that felt layer.”
Sentiments around cultural burning have not always been positive. Scott says that non-indigenous efforts to suppress fire have had negative ecological consequences.
“Two hundred years of poor stewardship, of bad decisions by various large agencies on the landscape have resulted in this environment where there’s so much fuel on the ground and the forests that explosive fires happen and incinerate everything,” Scott said.
“That actually can burn the soil, I didn’t even know that could happen, it gets so hot that all the nutrients, all the organic material, actually cooks out of the soil, and nothing grows there.”
On top of those ecological consequences, Scott says that intense efforts toward fire suppression also lead to consequences for native people who practice cultural burning.
“Well, when you start having fire as an enemy, you start having traditional ecological practice be the enemy, and then you put a target on native people for starting fires,” said Scott.
“There’s this historic record of the hostility that starts developing towards not just fire but the people using fire.”
Hopefully, programs like the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program and festivals like Camas will lead to a decrease in this hostility and increased cultural awareness.
The other guest speaker, David Lewis, is an assistant professor of anthropology at Oregon State University (OSU). His presentation focused on the wetlands of the Willamette Valley region.
“We’ve done a lot of work in the valley looking at tribal culture, and we know that wetlands, places like Lake Labish, Wapato Lake, lakes of the valley were probably major resource areas where you could do hunting, you could do fishing, you could do lots of stuff there, wapato’s a thing, camas is there, lots of stuff,” Lewis said.
Unfortunately, many of the wetlands that indigenous tribes used to rely on are now dry farmland. According to Lewis, the reason for this began in the 1800s, when white Americans began to settle the area and farm the land.
“This soil is like peat soil, it’s the best soil in the world for growing anything,” Lewis said. “So, they (farmers) were always complaining that their crops would be inundated, would be destroyed, by the lake, and they wanted to do something about it.”
Lewis says that after buying the land for incredibly cheap prices, they used a combination of ditches and drainage tiling to empty the lake, causing ecological damage.
“Normally the land would sort of pond, but with drain tiling, the water particulates into the ground faster, and then goes out with piping to the local ditch or creek, and that goes out to the river, and then down to the ocean faster, so you’re constantly getting rid of your groundwater,” Lewis said. “This is actually not old technology, they’re teaching this stuff in agriculture colleges right now, so it’s actually still being put in.”
Regardless of these setbacks, Lewis says that he has hope. He met a farmer who was working on restoration on his property, and it showed promising results.
“He said he had four patches of this wapato that grew back on its own,” said Lewis. “I was able to confirm through this project and a little bit of research that the tribes like the Kalapuyans would come to this lake for wapato, so seeing wapato come back, that’s pretty exciting.”
Overall, this festival was a positive way to shine light on indigenous voices and the struggles of their communities. It brought the community together, and opened a dialogue about cultural and ecological issues in the pacific northwest. More information can be found with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program.
