The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

The Káruk-aráara have lived on the mid-stretch of the Klamath River, between the
current towns of Seiad and Weitchpec for time immemorial. My family comes from the
villages of Ka’tim’îin at the confluence of the Klamath and Salmon Rivers (Ishkêesh and
Masúhsav, respectively) and Taxasúfkara on what is now Pearch Creek. Our traditional
religion or world-view is based around the High Dances (Vuvúha) Jump or Mountain
Dance and the White Deerskin Dance, which were collective dubbed by early
anthropologists the “World Renewal Religion.” My family has been instrumental in the
continuance of these dances since they were given to us by the Creators, and continues to
be active in Mountain Dance today. Our family also collects and makes the beautiful
baskets traditional to our area. Excluding trade goods from the Chinook trade network on
the Pacific Northwest Coast and the occasional Hudson Bay trader crossing the rugged
mountains into our home country, our villages were mostly sheltered from the
cataclysmic changes happening to our north and east at the hands of the Americans, and
to the south at the hands of the Spaniards and Mexicans. All this changed when 49ers
poured into our canyons and valleys in the early 1850s, exacting a devastating price on
our people and country. After roughly two decades of laying waste to everything they
touched, in a sort of inverted Midas touch, the gold diggers disappeared for the most part.
Some, like my ancestor John A. Pearch, married Indian women and stayed to homestead
the land, and the United States established the Hoopa Valley Agency some 26 miles
down the Klamath and up the Trinity from Orleans (a mining town established on the
Karuk village of Panámniik, across the Klamath from Taxasúfkara). But beside these
sorts of contact, the United States had generally lost interest in our country, except
insofar as the timber could be economically exploited. But they didn’t lose interest in
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