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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Tribes thank visitor for handmade canoe
PORT ANGELES -- When Gerald "Woody" Woodside took a handmade canoe to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Center, he might have expected a word of thanks.
But tribal members who had assembled for a meeting celebrated his surprise gift in traditional ways -- singing and dancing for an hour and presenting him with gifts in return.
Woodside was a stranger from Port Gamble when he showed up at the center Saturday with a 21-foot cedar-and-fiberglass canoe atop his truck. The interior is built of cedar strips and the outside is shiny black fiberglass with bright orange trim.
He wanted to donate the canoe to youths of the Lower Elwha Klallam, calling the gift simply "a good thing to do."
"I kind of surprised them with it," he told the Peninsula Daily News.
On hand were 80 people who were planning this summer's Tribal Journey, in which people from coastal tribes will travel by canoe from parts of Canada and Washington to a gathering in Port Angeles.
Fourteen men lifted the canoe from the truck and brought it into the center's gym, where they circled the basketball court, then set the craft down on tumbling mats at midcourt.
There it was blessed by elder Johnson Charles, the Lower Elwha Klallam's spiritual adviser. Singers from several tribes took turns chanting songs of celebration and thanks. When they finished, the whole group joined in the "Journey Song."
"This is a vessel that takes us to different places," said Ray Fryberg, a Tulalip Tribes member, "different places in the land, different places in our lives."
"How many people can the canoe hold?" asked Michael Evans, skipper of the Snohomish Tribe's canoe, the Blue Heron. "An infinite number, but only four or five at a time. So fill it full of people again and again. Fill it full of young people."
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