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 KELLER,
Colville Indian Reservation - As long as these sage-covered hills
have bloomed with balsamroot and salmon have come back to the great Columbia
River in the spring, there have been root feasts to celebrate the new
harvest year.
For
with spring comes the camas root, sweet and starchy, and bitterroot, with
a crunch and flavor bright as spring itself - and Indians hungry
for a taste of their aboriginal foods, served at a traditional root feast.
And
so on Saturday afternoon, scented with spring rain, the longhouse in Keller
was full of Indians from all over this reservation and beyond, feasting
on camas and bitterroot.
A
feast like this, prepared for dozens of guests, is not prepared in a day:
For the past week, Jake Atkins of the San Poil band - one of about
a dozen on this reservation - gathered roots for the feast with his
12-year-old son, Ben.
Traditionally
the first fresh food of the season, these roots mark the new year. For
tribal members who keep the old ways, the calendar comprises not just
months, but foods, each gathered in its season.
"This
is why we are here," Atkins said, holding up a bitterroot, with its
forked legs, freshly peeled and creamy white. "This is the beginning
of our year. Without our four seasons, we have nothing."
A
picture of Burned Arm, the last chief of the San Poil band and Atkins'
ancestor, hangs in the longhouse, a reminder to him and others to carry
on the tradition of the spring root feast.
Once
one of the largest bands on the Colville Indian Reservation, the San Poil
is now one of the smallest, and Atkins is one of the last fluent speakers
of his native language.
He
learned to dig roots from his elders. "We didn't ask if we could
go, we knew we were going," Atkins says. "We were the diggers,
and we would carry the water. It wasn't like we were going to be gone
three or four hours, in a car. We would camp for a couple of weeks. That's
how I learned."
According
to San Poil legend, bitterroot - called the Root That Has Many Legs
in his native language - at one time was whole and long, like a carrot.
And the roots were people; the human race was not yet born.
The
trees too, were people, and bitterroot lost a bet with them. For their
punishment, the roots were made to live in the ground, to feed the new
people: us, Atkins says.
The
camas, too, gambled with the trees and lost. Asked what it wanted to be,
Camas answered, "I want to be round, I don't want to be split, like
bitterroot, and I want to be pretty," Atkins says.
 And
so it is, according to San Poil legend, that the camas blooms with a beautiful
blue flower in the spring and has nourished Indian people always, with
its round, sweet roots.
As
the feast approaches, Atkins, who has put on this ceremony for six years,
sleeps less and less. He is full of anticipation and a thousand details:
getting a truck to pull a travel trailer for guests traveling to the feast
from the coast; peeling roots; rounding up cooks and servers.
The
night before finds him pacing the longhouse porch: "I wonder if I
need to go looking for my bus," Atkins says, fretting about his niece,
the fry-bread cook, who is overdue to arrive from Omak in a remodeled
school bus.
No
bus, no niece, Atkins turns in for the night under a sky full of stars
shining on the 1.4 million acres of this reservation, silent but for the
wind singing in the Ponderosa pines. "Everything will work out beautiful,"
he says, veteran of many root feasts.
The
morning of the feast dawns soft, with lavender clouds promising spring
rain. As cooks put the final touches on the food, Atkins rattles over
the cattle guard in his van, heading out to the highway in search of balsamroot
flowers to decorate the feast tables.
Finding
a promising patch, he works amid the sage, snapping the stems of yellow
balsamroot flowers with his fingers and singing a song to the earth, the
sky, the water and the wind.
He
wears moccasins for gathering, because they are gentle on the earth. He
offers a prayer before he takes the flowers, and lifts them to the sky
in thanks as he finishes. He leaves the largest blossoms for the birds.
"They love sunflowers."
Back
at the longhouse, more than an hour before serving time, elders begin
to arrive, their eyes fixed on the kitchen. Elsie Picard, 70, says she
has been coming to root feasts since people were served sitting on the
ground on a canvas cloth.
"This
is food as it is supposed to be," Picard says. "It is very healing."
She
often gathers balsamroot and other wild foods with salt in her pockets
for snacking on the flower stems, wild celery, tiny wild Indian potatoes
and roots as she works.
"It's
so nice to be an Indian," Picard says. "You can live anywhere
and feed yourself."
As
she talks, servers pile the tables with food: chinook salmon; bowls of
roots; beef stew; roast beef and baked ham; macaroni and potato salads;
huckleberries and raspberries; jiggling Jello salads; pitchers of Kool-Aid;
and the last-minute gift of steaming hot, fresh fry bread, rushed in the
door by Atkins' niece Stella Peters - who arrived in that school
bus after all.
Elders
Kathleen Burke, 86, and Marguerite McCuen ("I'm old" is how
she reported her age) bless the food in their native language, and everyone
digs in.
"He
makes really good camas," Burke says, sounding a bit surprised, before
uttering the highest of compliments: "Just like my mother's tasted."
Lynda
V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com
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