JOHN PALMES
Lunch
Portland, Oregon
December 2001

This transcription remains unfinished...it was being done at the time I got my radio show in Portland, and I abruptly slowed on transcribing interviews

John Palmes from

Juneau, Alaska,

Juneau Alaska, and we're in Portland, Oregon right now. I'm going to ask John to take a little bit about what he's done and things like that...

That's a long story but I came to Juneau, Alaska as a graduate student in oceanography...and I met a woman there that I eventually married and I went to school in Fairbanks, got my masters in zoology and moved back to Juneau where I've worked as a biologist for the State Of Alaska Fish and Game Department and have been a TV camera operator and editor for public broadcasting, community television station and I've also done a lot of commercial fishing. I have a commercial trolling permit...to troll for salmon basically off and on since 1971 and so I've been doing that for over 30 years, but not really religiously. I've never made a LOT of money doing that, but it has defiantly paid for the time I've been out there, maybe 4 months out of the year. The thing about Juneau, I've lived there 35 years, it feels like where I've lived all my life. I spent over half my life and all my adult life...

So you think you're an Alaskan..

Yeah, I think of myself as an Alaskan and I think of myself as a Juneau person and even more than that...

Do you see a difference between the big Alaska and the Panhandle?

Very much so because Juneau is like an island. We're on the Mainland, but all around us are islands and water. You can't drive to Juneau, you can only get there by airplane or boat. The ferry is the standard way for people like me to get there.

It costs money...

Oh yeah but not a whole lot of money. It's about the same as flying. But the point is that we are not connected to any of the rest of Alaska. And our environment because it's on the coast and we get a lot of warmest air...we get a lot of rain when the rest of the state would be getting a lot of snow and ice. So it doesn't get as cold in Juneau. We don't have dog sledding. There's not a level terrain really to do any dog sledding on. We have a lot of fish and a lot of water so it's a lot of boats, boating. I wear rubber boots...

You're wearing rubber boots now.

That's really the only foot gear I have that's at all practical, rubber boots. Either rubber boots that go up to the top of my calf or some old ones that I cut off and made ankle boots out of them. Anyway, I think of myself as a Juneau person, I've been there a while and it's a place where you can actually be part of the community. You know the people who are the community leaders and feel like you have access to them...you meet them on the street. If you want to go talk to somebody like the lieutenant governor, you've known this person for 20 years. You can just walk up to the office and say "I'd like to see so-and-so." and they say wait here for a second and then they say "OK, she can see you." And I don't think I could do that in any other state. Or living in any other town in Alaska, even. I really feel connected. I feel like it's a place where I can actually accomplish something, like if I have a feeling about something, I think I can express it in a way that I can get people to listen to it. I can get a place where I can address the people. You don't feel powerless as an individual, there's a chance to accomplish something and your voice is worth more than in some other places instead of being one out of 100,000 or one out of a million or millions, you're one out of 10,000, or one out of a thousand or one out of a hundred.

How big is Juneau?

Juneau is 30,000 people now. It was less than 10 when I moved there. The big thing that has changed everything in Alaska is the pipeline. When they built the Trans-Alaska pipeline they had to settle the native claims to do that gave the native people a certain prominence that they wouldn't have in other places, because they actually own land and quite a bit of it, and resources. It also put us in the minset where we had all the money we ever needed to do all we could ever want to do. A lot of building and stuff went on. And now that the oil production from Prudhoe Bay, our big oil field...the largest on the continent is declining, people really haven't decided what to do next. The crunch hasn't come yet because we still have enough money in our various savings accounts to keep things going, but there's a tendency to...we have 28 billion in the permanent fund and there's a tendency to save it for the future rather than use it now. And the deal is that we're never going to come up with another Prudoe bay and a big oil field because the odds that you are gonna find another largest on the continent oil field are very low. The odds of finding that one were low. So basically we're just on the cusp of having to figure what we're about for the next millennium, literally. We haven't quite got there yet. But that's going to be the challenge anyway.

To go on, to change the subject, I know you've been doing music with Native People, you want to talk about that a little bit?

Well, yeah, first of all the music, I've been playing music and singing ever since I was a little kid like we had a rule in our family that there was no three part harmony at the dinner table. We just sang all the time, so for me, singing has always just been an expression of myself. It's been a way to say something and the reason I've gotten into folk music is because folk music was not out to make money, it was just out to say something and it said it in such quaint, just beautiful poetic ways. "Will the circle be unbroken?" I have no idea what that means but on the other hand it is a very poetic sort of statement, it's got a nice feel to it. And I'm just attracted to that kind of thing. So I've always played music and sung. Singing is for me another way of talking. And so I've been writing songs. If there isn't a song out there that says what I have in my head, then I guess I have to write my own song. As far as the native language business goes, I guess that's just something because I've lived in Alaska a long time and I've lived in this particular place a long time, I thought ten years ago it would be nice to finally after 20 years there to learn a little bit of the local language. So I've been doing that and I'm actually catching on to it. It's supposed to be one of the most difficult languages on earth for anybody to learn how to speak. And lo and behold I learned some of it. I've been given a great gift by those people who taught me. And I just need to continue to keep with it because I'm now in the position to give something back. I can begin to teach people and contribute something, so part of it is just the fact that not everybody gets a chance to do something worthwhile in their lifetime anyway. I just got lucky.

Do you want to talk a little bit in Tlingit?

Oh I could say...I'll just introduce myself. John Palmes

John Palmes yóo xat duwasáakw.

My name is John Palmes

Dleit Kaa xat sitée

I am a white person...Dleit kaa..is a white person, snow man actually, Dleit is white or snow.

Tsu X'wéilk' yóo xát duwaasáakw. Also I am called X'weilk. X'weilk' is my Tlingit name that was give to me by Walter Soboleff.... Táaw Chun (stinky feathers) my 93 year old first Tlingit Teacher, he's my nephew. See the tradition in Tlingit is to get a name of someone that maybe this person reminds you of. Or someone who you hold to be special somehow. My Tlingit teacher who is this 93 year old person decided that X'weilk' would be my name and X'weilk' is his uncle's name. And the way that people traditionally refer to each other is by this name relationship. So even though he's a lot older than me and I could be his son maybe. He is my nephew and I am his uncle.

So you have a choir that you work with.

Yeah and that just to learn a bit more of the language. There was a group in town the Tlingit Gospel Singers that are part of the presbyterian mission in Alaska. The Presbyterians came and colonized southeast Alaska. They translated a lot of the simple hymns like "What A Friend We have in Jesus "Kaach xasixan Jesus"??????? " or "At the Cross" which is "Yoo Kaneist????" in Tlingit. "Heen yik yax gukkwadaa??????" :

"It Shall Flow Like A River" Heen yik yax gukkhwadaa (It shall flow like a river), seew yax daak guksatan (it shall fall like the rain),k'ee a yax yeikwaxeek (it shall rise like the dawning) du kasheik ya tlatgi tlakw (in glory oer the land), haa aankaawu gaxdooskoo(and the knowledge of the lord) ya tlingit aani (the world) tlatgi tlakw (shall fill all the earth), du yakwaheiyagu haa xoo yeikwaxeex (and the spirit of the lord shall fall)<sings 8 lines>

Anyway so that's "It Shall Flow Like a River." which is a Protestant Hymn and anyway the Presbyterians translated these things. So when it was , when I was obviously a prominent Tlingit student they said "Why don't you join our group," so I joined the group and now I'm kind of the leader of the group but only because I play guitar and I'm a musician and I can just organize the musical part of the thing.

So you accompany it with guitar.

Yeah I play guitar and for instance "At the Cross" is:

At the Cross At the Cross

Where I first saw the light

or

Yoo kaneist yoo kaneist, (at the cross at the cross)

du kagani xwaasiteen (where I first saw the light)

But that is also related to another couple of hymns but the point I'm trying to make is that where I first heard these tunes was Ry Cooder's Into the Purple Valley album where he plays some of the same hymns as they were recorded by I think it was Joseph Spence and the Pindar Family from the Bahamas, so all over the world these hymns were used by missionaries as they went out and converted the local heathens to their way of thinking and they were translated in this case into Tlingit. Now my guitar playing with this group is kind of like Ry Cooder's playing because that is where I first heard these things so that comes the closest to my accompaniment for the group.

Now you were talking about how you have translated some,..was it "Silent Night" or...

Well, I haven't translated it but...I'm not really good enough to do translations by myself but I can work with people in writing them down. In other words a lot of people can't read and write the language. I can do that and so I can get in a group with a bunch of people maybe 6 or 7 speakers and they're thinking about...I don't know, I can't come up with a great example but I would be working with a group of people trying to figure out how a certain thing should be written or translated and I can work as kind of the scribe for the group and say well, shouldn't it be "hu kusteeyich?" rather than "hu kusteeyi" because "hu kusteeyich" means "because of his life" and "hu kusteeyi" just means "his life." And then they can talk about it amongst themselves and they say yes it should be "hu kusteeyich." That's what we're trying to say. So I can mediate and things like that and I can do some very basic translation but my translation would never be the final word. I'd have to run it by someone who could really speak the language before it was officially right.

What kind of music did they have or had they had? What would native music sound like?

Well, it might sound like...there's a song that goes, you have to have a beat too:

gu su wa.e (where are you) eh eh yaa aa Dakdeintaani yatx'i (Dakdeintaan children) <song> and what that means is

"Where are you, where are you

Duckdaintan People? Where are yooooooooou?"

It uses a lot of vocables (sounds that aren't words but are just used to fill in the spaces in the rhythm of the song).

But it's a song that you would use in a gathering and as different people's names, the Dakdeintaan or the Kaagwaantaan? Or the Chookaneidi (dried grass people)? As those peoples names were called out, they would stand up in the audience and dance and maybe wave their hands side to side and that kind of thing but...just to signify who they were. And in some kinds of dances, like there's this blanket dance that they do where names of different groups are called out and they not only dance but you're expected to come up to the front of the place and put money or some kind of donation on this blanket and it's a way of raising money. But anyway that's what some of it might sound like.

You know what I should do now is talk a little bit about your own music.

write: gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy