The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Bruce Miller

Skokomish leader GERALD BRUCE MILLER (Skokomish name: Subiyay, 1944-2005) spoke with us in May 2000 at his home near Hood Canal, Washington about the role of ecology in traditional thinking.

In the story of creation, trees were the first teachers for all the life that followed.

Trees were to develop the most powerful method of teaching, and the teaching doesn't utilize language, or words, because it's teaching by example. Which is the strongest form of teaching that can be established.

Animals teach, by example, their young ones. Things that teach by example have the unique absence of lying. Language gives us the ability to become liars and develop false sets of values. Trees were placed on earth as an example of what true harmony and contribution is to the world. Their example was: they existed side by side from the beginning of time with no criticism of one another.

They existed side by side from the beginning of time with a common goal — to hold the earth together. Because they didn't brag, and because they didn't show off, no one knew what their true value was to the earth.

But when we were established under a different value system, we placed an economic value on the trees that was foreign to our culture. One of the trees to suffer was the yew tree. It was slow growing, not very productive. Because it took a long time to grow, it was hastily eradicated. And at almost the complete annihilation of this tree, it was finally discovered to contain the valuable elements for the treatment of two types of female cancer. But it was nearly destroyed because, as humans, we placed a lower value on it than the other trees.

The forest has a purpose for containing the diversity that it has because, when it's devastated by a fire or a natural catastrophe, each tree has a way of reestablishing itself that guarantees the reestablishment of the forest as it once was.

Among these trees, in English we have a word, as close a word as I can come: vanguard. Within the vanguards are the cottonwood, the broad-leaf maple, the vine maple, and the alder tree. Should the forest proper be destroyed, it's always the cottenwoods, and the maples, and the alders that will first take root. Alders and cottonwoods are given the ability to grow rapidly and their purpose is to attain height and provide shade and to molt their leaves to form a layer on the ground to prevent soil evaporation. And they're given high amounts of nitrogen to help fix the soil for the seedling evergreens. After the alderwoods and the cottonwoods come the two kinds of maple that form a temporary canopy and allow the young evergreen to grow this way (vertically) more rapidly.

And if you look around the hillsides, you can see where that is taking place, where the hill is void of evergreens and you just see the maples changing colors, there will come a time when you can see the evergreens taking over. At which time the maples, and the cottonwoods, and the alders have the ability to fall down and die and decay very rapidly. They don't lie on the ground a long time. They start decaying right away.

A lot of other trees that are just nuisance now will in time be found to have valuable contributions to mankind. The medicines that we gather can't exist under commercial forest tree planting. With just the hemlock and the evergreens, you don't have the proper mosses, soil and mixtures to nutriate the princess pine and the bandaid plantains and all the other things that we use for our medicine because they can only grow when there's an indigenous mixture of trees.

The danger of placing one indigenous plant's value above another is that they're all connected. Within those contributions are contributions for basket materials, medicines, foods, things we make our houses and improve our environment with. The overwhelming contribution is the protection of land because in our most ancient stories the world was just water. And through different tribal variations land was created. But in the end water is still at war against the land to reclaim the world. And so, as the plants were the first created, it was their mission to help prevent the water from taking back the earth through erosion. Each mature tree absorbs up to a ton of water; you multiply that by the number of mature trees cut down and you have the loss of absorption.

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