Yip,Yip, Yip, what a beautiful morning! I spent Easter weekend at the Coeur d' Alene Indian reservation. Imagine, if you can, the State of Idaho building a four lane highway to an Indian reservation. It is getting closer to being finished. What a difference a large casino can make. Twenty years ago the people of Kootenai County did their best to ignore and/or discriminate against the members of the Tribe. The Couer d' Alene Tribe is now the 2nd or 3rd (depends on the monthly figures) employer in N. Idaho. Only the Kootenai Medical Center employs more people.
There is good news and good news concerning this trip. First, I won $80.20 at the slot machines. The Casino advertisement says that the Couer d' Alene people are friendly and are good hosts. I concur. And the food in the Sweet Grass restaurant is very, very good.
The second good news is even better. I went to the Casino to observe the stick game, a gambling game that has been played by Indians and people of Asia for over ten thousand years. Archaeological digs have confirmed this. When I walked into the huge exhibition room Saturday morning, I was overwhelmed. There must have been a thousand Indians nearly half of whom were chanting and beating hand drums to conjure up some magic to confuse the opponent in their attempt to guess which hand held the marked bone. The game is reminiscent of our childhood game of "school" where we had one playmate act as teacher and the kids played the role of student and could move up the stairs (grades) by guessing the hand in which the teacher held the pebble.
Ever been a minority of one? Haha. I had lots of stares being the only white guy in the room. I found it interesting that none of the thousand or so white people playing the slot machines just on the other side of the doors had enough curiousity to enter the room and see what the stick game was all about. With all that drumming and chanting, I thought at least one white person would be curious, but I guess they had taken the childhood story about curiousity killing the cat too seriously. Heck, maybe they thought it was a scalp dance!!
What a wonderful learning experience watching the various ways different teams of five would work their magical spells to throwoff the other team from guessing correctly. Since the winning team won $10,000 and some very nice letterman type jackets, the teams played the game with great intensity. Indians gathered from all over the Northwest and Canada for this first stick game of the year.
Late Saturday evening the Cree people (about 200) from Alberta, Canada had drawn up their folding-fabric-lawn chairs (what did they ever do eight years ago before the invention of these chairs? Maybe that is why some of the players were wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Stick Game, the best damn game played in the dirt.") on one side and were playing the stick game with another tribe of nearly equal size. The game was serious in a nice way and money was flowing back and forth across the aisle between the two tribes. After all, this is a gambling game. There is also spiritual significance to this game, but that is another story.
The last week of March the wife and I spent at Lake Chelan in Washington. We had a good time, relaxed and learned a few things. Oh, yeah, and found a really fine winery. We drove to Twisp to see the school J's father had been the superintendent of and then to Winthrop, then to Omak and finally to Nespelum where Chief Joseph was exiled upon his return from Oklahoma (another exile). Deb Louie, a tribal council member and director of the Colville Confederated Tribes natural resources, was kind enough to meet with me. I pumped him for a ton of information in the 45 minutes that we conversed. Really interesting. He invited me a jump dance next February. I am going to have to lose some weight because right now I could not jump from sundown to sunrise two nights in a row.
Hope you are wearing yellow today (G) to match the beautiful sunrise that some people experienced this morning. We sure had a nice sunrise.

Bye, Bye,
Papa Coyote