Tolowa Erotic

The Tolowa call themselves Dee-ni', which means simply people, and their country is the corner where redwood forest runs straight into surf: the Smith River drainage, the lagoons around Lake Earl, the headland at Point St. George, and north across what is now the California line into the Chetco and Winchuck watersheds of southwestern Oregon. It is a wet, dark, generous place. Chinook push up the Smith, smelt spawn onto the beaches in numbers, sea lions haul out on the offshore rocks, and tanoak acorns carry a household through winter. Villages sat where those things overlapped, and nearly everything structural came out of redwood, which splits cleanly: plank houses set into pits, dugout canoes shaped to handle river and open ocean both. Like their neighbors along this stretch of coast, the Tolowa kept a precise reckoning of wealth and standing. Strings of dentalium shell worked as money, obsidian blades and woodpecker scalp headbands were displayed rather than spent, and injuries were settled by negotiated payment rather than by anything resembling a court. Tolowa basketry, twined from hazel shoots and spruce root with beargrass and maidenhair fern worked into the surface, is still made and still taught.

Language is what most clearly marks them off from their immediate neighbors. Tolowa Dee-ni' Wee-ya' is Athabaskan, a Dene language, kin to Navajo and the Apachean languages far inland and closest to the Tututni and Chetco speech of the Oregon coast just above. The Yurok directly south speak an Algic language and the Karuk an unrelated one, so the Dene presence here reads as the southern tail of a long migration rather than something local. Ceremony centers on the Nee-dash, a winter dance held over successive nights to set the world right for the year coming. It lapsed under pressure and was brought back in the later twentieth century, and it is danced now at Howonquet on the Smith River. Some Tolowa families are Christian, and the two things are not treated as mutually exclusive. The nineteenth century was catastrophic here. The 1853 killings at Yontocket, a village that Tolowa accounts place at the beginning of the world, fell on a Nee-dash gathering. Further massacres and forced removal to Oregon reservations followed, and people walked home from those. Federal termination in the mid twentieth century stripped recognition that was later restored. Today the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation at Smith River and the Elk Valley Rancheria near Crescent City are the governments in the homeland, with descendants also enrolled at Siletz, and the language is back in classrooms.