A Earable for Out Time? The Kathlamet-Chinook Myth of the Sun By Rick Rubin The people who used to live here before us told a story. We call those people Chinook speakers, from their language. They weren’t a nation or even a tribe, but just a string o f towns and villages along the Columbia River and its sloughs, lakes and tributaries. Wealthy villages, fu ll o f sleek, thick- waisted flathead fish eaters. Who’d lived there fo r two, or three, or four thousand years, and paddled fine canoes. I want to tell you a myth those people told. Their myths were their scriptures and their sutras, their Old Testament, Das Kapital or Upanishads. Not just stories. Their word fo r myth was the same as their wordfo r the true nature o f reality. They were sacred stories, told just so, passed around the world and down thousands o f years by exact memorization, the accumulated wisdom o f the race. They had grown stylized, thin and angular, lightweight and portable, from the honing o f a hundred generations o f recitalists. After a thousand years, such stories had a claim to be considered the truth about at least certain levels o f human reality. I want to tell you one o f those sacred stories. Franz Boas heard it from Charles Cultee, in 1891, when he was out here learning languages and writing down stories. Cultee spoke both major versions o f Chinook; he told this particular story in Kathlamet-Chinook. That’s a dialect group, about eight prosperous villages strung like wooden beads along Big River from above 8 HAPPY NEW YEAR DECEMBER LIVE ENTERTAINMENT Fridays, in December SEAN SLATTERY Dec. 8, 15, 20, 29 CAROLE DONALDSON Dec. 13, 27 LEW JONES Dec. 22 CHRIS LOZAND 1134 S.W. Jefferson 227-4209 1616RW23HVE 9 11 12 13 14 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 27 28 29 30 31 Maureen Andrews & Mark Sobolik 8-10, 10-12 Sarah Giles Maureen Andrews & Mark Sobolik 8-10, 10-12 Slavik Voices Melinda Pittman Tesseract Open Mike & Poetry Easy Tom Norris, folk guitar Sue Hirsch Barbara Galloway John Booth Lou Jones Open Mike & Poetry Bill Dickson Lee Oser PARTY “CHRISTMAS AT THE OASIS” Bill Dickson Easy Tom Norris, folk guitar Easy Tom Norris Bill Dickson PARTY NEW YEARS EVE TRIBE FROM THE OASIS 42
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