Until July 20, riding in a Karuk-built canoe, or páah, in their ancestral homelands was a distant memory for many of today’s Tribal members.
On the warm summer morning, three generations of Karuk Tribal members gathered along both sides of the Klamath River and watched from the Orleans Bridge the first Karuk canoe in their ancestral waters in over a half-century.
Tyler Conrad, a carver, sat at the front, singing and beating a drum while the canoe paraded around the open water. Tribal members, including elders and children, took turns riding in the boat.
Adrian Gilkison was one of the first to ride in the canoe. She said she lives five miles down the road at the mouth of Red Cap Creek, and said her grandfather lived there too, “way back when.” His canoe was the last one she knew of in Karuk country.
“You didn’t just run into town and buy yourself a little motorboat,” Gilkison said. “You’ve got to build yourself a canoe and use it. And it’s bringing a lot back. A lot of these kids around here are my great grand-nephews and nieces.”
In 1964, unusually heavy rainfall caused many Northern California rivers to overflow into nearby communities. During the flood, all the Karuk Tribe’s canoes were flushed away, according to Amber Shelton, who works for Nature Rights Council. The group worked with the Tribe and the United States Forest Service to secure the logs for the canoe.
In the decades after, the Tribe faced both environmental and political difficulties bringing canoes back to the Klamath River.
“You can’t just go find old growth sugar pine trees anymore because most of them have been logged,” Shelton said. “Because the Tribe does not have a reservation, most of those trees are on Forest Service land and people can’t just go out and harvest one like they would have done traditionally.”
From time to time, the Tribe borrowed canoes from the nearby Yurok and Hoopa Valley Tribes for different parades and ceremonies.
Tribal member and community organizer Grant Gilkison, Adrian’s son, decided to champion efforts to get a Tribal dugout canoe made. His vision of bringing canoes back to Karuk country began with securing funding for sugar pine logs to build three boats in 2019.
He submitted a proposal with the help of the Nature Rights Council in 2020. Unfortunately, Gilkison passed away later that year.
“He was at my house one day talking about it and it surprised me,” said Crispin McAllister, a lead carver and close friend of Gilkison. “It just surprised me, like, ‘he wants to build a canoe?’ I said I’ll help however I can help you, and he got it done. He was really excited about it. I would’ve loved to have taken him out on one.”
The Native Cultures Fund, a Humboldt County-based organization, issued a $10,000 grant which kickstarted the project and allowed the Tribe to pursue Gilkison’s dream. This was followed by additional funding from the Karuk Tribal TANF Program for tools, workshops and labor.
“He had a vision to have Karuk canoes built in and brought back to Karuk country,” McAllister said. “We feel like we’re keeping his legacy alive. That’s his boat.”
After Gilkison got the grant money, his death, the pandemic and sourcing the sugar pine logs all created challenges for building the canoe.
Finally, in the summer of 2023, the Tribe sent a letter to the Forest Service asking to use logs which were roadside hazard trees from the nearby McCash Fire in Klamath National Forest. The Forest Service provided them to the Tribe at no cost, Shelton said.
A group of organizations including Nature Rights Council, Ancestral Guard, Seventh Generation Fund, Native Cultures Fund, Save California Salmon and Karuk Tribal TANF Program all helped the Tribe locate the logs and build the canoes.
The first canoe was completed over three workshops in May.
“There are three canoes being built,” McAllister said. “One for Orleans, that’s this boat, and then there’s one up in Happy Camp that we’ve already started working on, and one more in Yreka. And they are all from the same sugar pine.”
McAllister said he’s already been asked to bring the finished boat, which will remain in Orleans, to several ceremonies in the near future to ferry medicine men across the river. He said this hasn’t been done in decades.
Right now, the Tribe is pursuing additional funding to complete the carving of the other two canoes.
In Karuk culture, canoes have been historically understood as part of the family, providing transportation through waterways which were once the main mode of travel. According to McAllister, being a canoe maker was a big responsibility because it meant taking care of the people around them in the community.
“Our deceased folks, we would put them in the boats and paddle them to their gravesites,” McAllister said. “We would have boats for ceremonial purposes, like for our World Renewal Ceremonies that we practice. For the Boat Dance, there’s a dance that takes place in the boat, those were bigger boats, and we’re hoping to actually get one of those built pretty soon.”
Gilkison’s son, Te-geen Lee Albers-Gilkison, helped with the carving. He said his role was mostly learning how to build a canoe for future generations.
“It feels amazing,” he said, when asked about the events of that day. “I’m on the edge of crying right now because it’s so beautiful.”
Charles Houston works for Seventh Generation Fund, which helped to provide instruction for building the boats. He said he was taught that the canoes or “páah” are relatives.
“It’s a living being. It has body parts inside of it. There’s kidneys identified, there’s a heart identified, there’s lungs identified,” Houston said.
Now, after years of trying to get just one boat made, the Tribe is looking to continue the tradition of building dugout canoes for different ceremonial and educational purposes.
“We’re restoring something that has been stolen,” Houston said. “We’re not stopping with just this one. We have plans to build more. We’re going to be getting trees to build Port Orford cedar canoes and more sugar pine canoes, and we might even do redwood. We have the manpower and the drive to bring these relatives back to our water.”
