‘The coyote path’: Vancouver’s Tanna Engdahl is spiritual leader of the tested, triumphant Cowlitz Indian Tribe

COWLITZ INDIAN RESERVATION — Some people’s lives move along a predictable and tidy timeline.

Cowlitz tribal elder Tanna Engdahl views her personal path as the sort of zigzagging, indirect course followed by coyotes, whether they’re patrolling familiar territory or exploring far beyond it, as Engdahl has always done.

“The coyote path, it goes this way and then it goes that way,” said Engdahl, the spiritual leader of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. “There are lot of switchbacks. Each time, there’s a lesson to be learned. The spiritual path I’m on is like that.”

The same can be said of the tribal community that provided Engdahl a reason to persist. Nearly two centuries ago, she said, the Cowlitz gently but firmly refused to be moved to a reservation far from their traditional lands.

“They kept pushing us. They said you don’t belong here,” she said. “But the Cowlitz were not pliable. We were unmanageable. We didn’t fight, but we never gave up either. We were like the willow, not the oak. We’d bend, but we’d never break.”

Blissful

When settlers started spreading across the continent, “we were blissfully unaware,” Engdahl said.

That changed in benevolent fashion at first, as tribes befriended, traded with and married white settlers. French-Canadian fur trappers found local women irresistible, Engdahl said with a grin: “Why wouldn’t they?”

Engdahl’s own roots trace directly back to that historic moment. She is a descendant of the first white fur trapper known to meet the Cowlitz: Simon Plamondon, originally of Quebec, who journeyed in 1818 from Astoria upriver to the traditional Cowlitz Prairie area (near today’s town of Toledo) where he was captured. Plamondon was eventually embraced by the local chief and married his daughter, Thas-e-muth. They farmed and raised children at Cowlitz Prairie.

“They were my great-great-great grandparents,” Engdahl said.

Death sweeps

Waves of arriving settlers ultimately brought waves of tragedy to local tribes.

First came a fever that arrived on an American ship, sparking what Engdahl called “the death sweep of the 1830s.” Local peoples had no natural resistance to the new European disease, which killed them quickly. Observers reported horrific scenes of scattered bodies and deserted villages, many of which were burned (destroying much historical record) to eliminate the danger, Engdahl said.

“We succumbed in numbers that were unbelievable,” she said. “We may have had 30,000 to 50,000 in … Cowlitz country and we lost about 98 percent. Every Cowlitz member alive today is alive because some ancestor survived. We’re all descendants of survivors of a pandemic.”

What also died was the interlocking village system that had provided vital connections between different Cowlitz peoples. The rare survivors of disease became isolated from one another, Engdahl said.

Next came a different challenge: manifest destiny, that early American faith that the whole continent was meant for white settlement.

“Get that corridor cleared” was the agenda of Isaac Stevens, the Washington territorial governor, who used intimidation, trickery and force in the 1850s to get local tribes to sign reservation treaties. The Cowlitz might have been amenable, but refused to move away from traditional territory to the coast, she said.

“We are not ocean people,” Engdahl said.

Tribal history since then has been a complicated, painful journey along the coyote path, she said. Like the neighboring Chinook, another uncooperative tribal nonsignatory, the Cowlitz were denied federal recognition and the resources that come with it. The tribe pursued reorganizations, applications and lawsuits.

Along the way, they even refused a “per capita” distribution of cash compensation for its lost lands, preferring to wait for formal recognition and an appropriate reservation site, which in the end they had to purchase.

“We dipped and dived and ducked to remain on our own land,” Engdahl said. Meanwhile, the Cowlitz way of life changed from seasonal migration and dependence upon nature to the white man’s way: agriculture, labor and paychecks.

“They were hard times that shredded the soul, but we didn’t give up,” she said. “That is the personality of the Cowlitz.”

Wild start

Tanna Engdahl (born Tanna Warren) was grounded in her tribe, yet deprived of anything like a stable start in life.

“My mother was caught between worlds and her comfort was alcohol,” Engdahl said. “She was a powerful negative role model for me.”

Engdahl’s earliest childhood was spent in the Kelso area, until her mother began an odyssey through hardscrabble lumber camps, mill towns and waterfronts of Oregon and northern California.

“She dragged me up and down the western coastline,” Engdahl recalled in a personal column in the Lakota Times newspaper. “She was a wildcat when aroused. She was aroused when she drank. She drank all the time.”

The young Engdahl was a survivor, according to a letter her future husband, Lynn, wrote to extended family.

“She learned to sleep in hallways, under chairs, sometimes even in bathtubs,” Lynn Engdahl wrote. “While her mother was in bars, Tanna foraged for food.

“Her mother and the ‘stepfather’ of the moment took off, usually at night, to escape their rent bills, bar tabs and other debts,” he wrote. “Tanna would wake up on an entirely different couch than the one she fell asleep on. She would have to repeat the search for a school and the agony of yet another classroom full of strange faces.”

The self-motivated Engdahl attended 22 different schools, she said. But much of her education came from her beloved grandmother, Mary (Plamondon) Wilson, whose spiritual identity was a blend of Cowlitz and Catholic. Engdahl absorbed all of that, she said.

“My grandmother was the stabilizer,” she said. “She poured as much cultural history into my head as possible. Most I didn’t understand at the time.”

“She was multilingual,” Engdahl wrote in Lakota Times. “She spoke French, Cowlitz, Chinook and, in her words, one foreign language: English. She was a mixture of two centuries. She knew more of the 19th than the 20th.”

Mary Wilson died when Engdahl was 13, but to this day she remains a vital presence.

“I still talk to her all the time,” Engdahl said. That’s an essential part of Cowlitz spirituality, she said: an ongoing, personal connection with ancestors.

But Engdahl parted ways with her itinerant mother at age 16.

“I couch surfed. I lived on the streets of Seattle. I learned to budget. I subsisted on soup,” she said.

Eventually she was taken into protective state custody, then placed in foster care with the family of her best friend in Kelso. Engdahl’s junior and senior years at Kelso High School were the first time she lived in the same place for two consecutive years, she said.

After she graduated in 1962, Engdahl attended community college as she could afford it. She worked for the Small Tribes Organization of Western Washington and the Intertribal Council of California. She said at one point she served as vice-president of the Cowlitz tribe when she was really too young for the job.