ON THE COVER
‘Given These Songs’ Native singers gather to thank Brian Tripp; he thanks them back By Malcolm Terence • Photos by Thomas Dunklin newsroom@northcoastjournal.com
B
rian Tripp, the storied Karuk poet, artist and ceremonial singer, is in hospice, receiving care provided for people who doctors think are in last months of life with an incurable disease. In many cases, hospice care is cause for abject sadness from the patient and their family. For Brian, it was reason to invite some of the best tribal singers around for a ceremony ministering to the sick. On a recent fog-shrouded Saturday, they all gathered at Sumeg Village in Patrick’s Point State Park just north of Trinidad. The event was as well attended as an outdoor event can be in this nearly-post pandemic time. And Brian, as he often does, shared the spotlight with the wider community. Journalistic ethics require that I disclose that Brian, or BDT as he is called, is a close
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friend to me and my family. Stepping further from ordinary ethics, I can’t promise to be objective. No one who attended the event could, as we all seemed swept away. Brian was raised on the coast where his father worked as a logger, even though his parents come from the old Karuk village Ka’tim’îin, near the present town of Somes Bar, along State Route 96, where the Salmon River spills into the much larger Klamath. (The spelling of Ka’tim’îin is drawn from the Karuk Dictionary as authored by William Bright, the revered linguist going back to the 1950s, and Susan Gehr, the contemporary researcher, who was among the guests at the Sumeg event.) The village was long a site of many ceremonies, from the coming of age ceremonies and healing ceremony known
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, June 17, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
as the Brush Dance to the world renewal ceremonies, such as the Jump Dance and the White Deerskin Dance held in early fall. “When I was growing up, the dances had gotten a little rowdy — a lot of drinking, a few fights,” Brian said in conversations after the event. “The last Brush Dance happened in 1955 but my family brought it back to Ka’tim’îin. We’d attend Brush Dances still held in Klamath on the coast and others still held in Hoopa.” Brian and his brothers helped restore the Brush Dance to Somes Bar. “This younger generation has made it a whole different scene,” he said. “The dance families won’t put up with alcohol abuse. All our songs are prayers and you wanted to make sure you had the best singers. The term was, ‘We hired them out,’ maybe a jar of salmon or a load of
firewood or a nice necklace.” In our conversation, Brian seemed to enjoy recalling the early days. “I grew up in Klamath,” he said. “I knew the Yurok and the Karuk and some of the Hupa dancers. I wish I could think of them. I remember a few — Frank Douglas and Jimmy George and Merkie Oliver. Old Man Sam Jones. Some of these guys who just came to Sumeg are grandkids of those old time people. Grant Pilgrim. Grant was the one who sang that song when I went to the army. It was a Brush Dance song. “ Brian served for two years, with four months in Vietnam, and came home with boils on his face from exposure to the herbicides called Agent Orange. He took jobs as a choker setter and then signed up as an art student at Humboldt State University. Along the way he married a
