classroom chatter

00:25 – I just got this in my box. They are asking me to turn in the students who haven’t been doing their work, and have been failing in this class. But what I’m going to do is get together with Ed, who’s sick right now, but I’ll get together with Ed and see how much work he had turned into him, and if there’s any work that isn’t turned in you better start turning them in because we are going to have to evaluate you and if all your work is turned in your name won’t be on the list.

classroom chatter

1:23 – I know he gave some right in the class.

1:31 – Well that’s why I thought I’d wait until I talk to him and maybe he could give me a copy of the tests and whoever didn’t take it could take it.

classroom chatter

1:50 – Yeah he’s very sick. He said he was going to come today but he must be too sick. He didn’t sound good, he talked to me last night and sounded real hoarse. I told him you have a real bad case of flu and he said I’m aching all over.

classroom chatter

3:35 – I think this is a take home test and all you have to do is, memorize all this and then fill these in. [Sahaptin]. So and so is arriving, let’s put a noun down in there. This is pretty simple. I don’t think you went to this one.

4:39 – He didn’t give you my syllabus. That’s something else I want to talk to him about. He keeps forgetting. Oh I’ll have to go to the house I guess and catch his cold. Okay. Do you know that story by (inaudible)

classroom chatter until 7:40

7:41 – and a short one by [Sahaptin], we’ll translate that into Indian.

8:04 – I don’t know why but the people from over here, I can’t translate that word, anybody from way back east they used to call [Sahaptin]. So this title is [Sahaptin], ‘The Old Woman is Talking’.

8:36 – If you don’t want to mark your text maybe you could use a separate sheet of paper.

9:14 – So let’s look at it, and you can listen and then I’ll let you folks read say a line at a time, but you listen first. [Sahaptin] Oh. Let’s start again. [Sahaptin]

13:12 – So uh, the speech has a lot of expression hopefully I’m putting it in there. I was wondering if, what you’ve taken in this class is enough for you to take this paper and see how many words you can recognize in there. So uh, that we can, sort of kill, you notice my barred I’s and barred L’s. That bar looks pretty thin in that [Sahaptin], that second word. I had so much trouble with that, and I went to see the man that programs it, and he said if that gives you trouble try running a space there and it won’t run the line through the other letters but I noticed further on down I didn’t have to do that anymore. I had to separate one repeated word here, oh that [Sahaptin]. It’s in the 1…2…3..fourth paragraph middle of the third row, let’s see where is it? Third row from the bottom. [Sahaptin]. That [Sahaptin] is supposed to be together but I didn’t have room so I had to separate it. But that means hollering around, you know how Indian men do that war hoop, that’s what that means. So i guess the best kind of word that we can use there is hollering but that really isn’t the right word as far as Indian is concerned. [Sahaptin] is different. [Sahaptin] is different.

16:30 – Do you think that you can work with this, to see how many words you can find? And this other story is almost similar and it will be fun to put that into Indian. I think that if we do this we can learn a lot more words. I knew [Sahaptin]. I can just about see him. The story was when he was on a hunting trip with a bunch of men and somehow or another he got separated from them I guess, and he says “I do not remember the name of the spot where we were camped, but it was always a good place and a resort of our tribes men far back where memories fail. Here the Indians would gamble at night, sometimes the game would last for more than one night, maybe a day and a night. This was when they came to dig roots on the hills when there was no law to bother them in any way. There was a time when they tried to stop bone games because they said it was gambling but actually it’s a traditional game that’s been played for way back you know how long, a game just like horse racing and all that. They bet you know and everything but they didn’t look at it as gambling.

18:35 – The women worked at digging and drying roots while the men hunted the deer which the women also dried by the fire. It was during these times when people gambled with bones at night. All kinds of gambling, they used to have tug of war, I found all these games at the Smithsonian and sent descriptions of them back to our tribe. The tribe didn’t sponsor my research, it was Central Washington University that sponsored my research, but I saved my copy money by just making one copy and sending it to the tribe and somewhere in between, things got lost. So I don’t know whether or not they have record of all these games they used to play here.

19:49 – My mother, One day I came oh look at this old game, I saw this picture of this game and I was explaining it to my mom, oh we played that a long time ago, why didn’t you tell me these things, well you never ask me! This is one story that a lot of people have experienced, and they never put it into writing, it’s oral history. This last paragraph, I heard the Shadow Indians, the [Sahaptin], or the ghost people, singing and playing with sticks at night. Gambling noises just as if they were living still. These old people are long dead and that’s why I heard the Shadow Indians, no I was not scared. It was only the spirit people who loved to dwell above the ancient home. So if we had a map we could see where [Sahaptin] is, there was a big, I guess there was a lake there and somebody purchased that land and made the lake bigger. I guess all the irrigation water empties into it and it’s a big lake now but my mother said it was quite that big at that time and it’s right in the way of the old road between Ellensburg and Yakima. The old road. We didn’t have the canyon road we had the old road that takes you over the mountain and it’s en route there and we happened to drive through there one day. And she was like oh this is that lake where the Indian people used to gather and raise horses and camp and do all kinds of things. So she told us all these stories and we had the little children and we went down there and rented a boat, they just loved the fish. They went down there, and the man took them out and he didn’t charge them anything, he just took them out and taught them how to fish. So she sat there and told all these stories and he said well he’d never heard these stories and he tried to keep her there (laughs) so there’s quite a few stories like this. People keep them in their family they don’t share it. I think this would be fun to put into Indian.

23:12 – So that will be our project maybe for the latter part of this semester. In the meantime, I’m going to maybe, maybe I could start something here, and uh, it’s that first phrase. [Sahaptin]. ‘I don’t remember’.

24:12 – That’s what that says. [Sahaptin]

24:45 – [Sahaptin], ‘where we camp’.

25:03 – Now that isn’t very long, just about as long as the one here. I don’t remember the name of the place where we camped.

classroom mumbling

30:25 – Look at your material. No I mean the hand out, look at it. Read it! Read it!

classroom mumbling

34:42 – [Sahaptin] At night. [Sahaptin]

classroom mumbling/working

43:52 – [Sahaptin] I keep pu– (tape cuts off)

classroom mumbling until end