Friends of the San Juans to host ‘Spirit of Water’ song, storytelling, ceremonial event.
Chenoa Egawa, a Lummi and S’Klallam speaker, author, singer and photographer, has seen cycles of cultural remembering and forgetting throughout her lifetime. Now is a period of “deep forgetting,” she said.
Through art and medicine practices, the Kingston-based performer hopes to revive her ancestor’s teachings.
“They’ve always been alive,” she said. “I’m not bringing them back to life but awakening them in my own body and my own self and having that deeper relationship and connection to the natural world and just seeing the importance of the wisdom of our elders and our ancestors and how they’ve preserved these teachings for so long.”
Friends of the San Juans will host Egawa in “Spirit of Water,” an immersive evening of Indigenous song, storytelling and ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 11, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Brickworks in Friday Harbor, in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day and Orca Recovery Month.
Egawa was inspired by the teachings of her parents and grandparents, especially her great-grandmother Aurelia Celestine, a storyteller and singer who spoke five languages.
Born in 1886 and living for 96 years, Celestine saw much change throughout her lifetime, Egawa said. She told many stories about the power and spirit of mountains, rivers, forests, songs and dances. At times, Egawa grieved for the loss of these messages.
“There have been those elders who’ve held onto our teachings and waves of life across the generations and made sure that this wisdom was not forgotten, because they knew that’s what we would need,” she said. “I feel like it’s the time now. It’s time for Indigenous wisdom to come to the forefront and help us to all understand across all cultures, without borders, without barriers, that we need to be in this together and our wealth is our diversity.”
Success has a different meaning in the “Western” concept, Egawa said. In the U.S., it is often taught that success means being at the top of an industry, having a reputation, being competitive and becoming wealthy, focusing on the self as opposed to the community.
Egawa’s teachings are often instead about the generosity of nature, she said.
“The water circulates from the oceans,” she said. “It goes up into the clouds. It comes down as rain. It travels on the winds. It’s generous. It gives all of life, and so a lot of our teachings are about how there are no borders in nature. There’s a lot that we need to learn about how we are part of those cycles and seasons and how what we are doing to nature we are doing to ourselves.”
Egawa grew up shy, she said. Ceremonies helped her “discover her spirit,” and she was especially drawn to music. She felt like she was tapping into something bigger than herself.
“You feel when you’re acknowledging and honoring life through the elements, plants, forests, mountains and rivers, that there’s something in you that opens in response,” she said.
When she visits schools, she often emphasizes the importance of water, she said.
“Water is the one that’s moving everything. It’s alive; it has a living spirit,” she said, “and so helping kids to understand that instead of just thinking it’s something that comes out of the tap for them and that they don’t have to think twice about it. That’s the purpose of a lot of our ceremonies. Maybe you’ll go on a ceremony where you have to forego food and water for four days or however long, then you understand the role of water in your life. You understand the role of food in your life, because now you’ve had to not have anything and now you feel. But it also opens up your spirit and your gratitude for those things and makes you see them in a different way.”
One of the best ways the average person can honor Mother Earth is to learn and observe, she said. Introspection can be a key part of this — learning about one’s self is a pathway to learning about connections in the community and world.
Nature can restore itself, she said, but humans must be aware of their impact. This isn’t doom and gloom, she said; how people feel is often how they treat people around them.
Keeping a good sense of humor and staying joyful emanates through words and thoughts, she said. War and anger go into the water, and humans are made mostly of water.
“When I was a little younger, some of our elders were saying we really have to kind of hang onto our teachings, because our people have been persecuted for practicing them,” she said. “We had to go underground a lot to hold onto our ways of life, but some elders have recently been saying it’s time to share now. This is our chance; are we gonna do this or are we not? It’s time to share this wisdom and memory with people in hopes that we can turn this thing around.”
— By Sam Fletcher