Yurok Salmon Festival attracts many including Fortuna seniors

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Beacon Correspondent

The 46th annual Yurok Salmon Festival at Klamath thronged with visitors last Sunday, Aug. 17, as more than 80 venders and information booths provided seemingly endless Native American art, crafts, food and information.

This year's festival theme was “Un-dam the Klamath” with contests, music and events all day. The morning sported a Veterans' breakfast, selection of the Festival Queen and King, and a softball tournament. There was a parade, music, horse shoe contests, a raffle for a boat, dancing, the traditional stick game, and, for children - even an inflated gym to bounce and slide on.

Humboldt State University's Marching Lumberjacks' green and gold spirited the festival with ever energetic rhythms, and the stage band Merv George of Hoopa Valley repeatedly drew enthusiastic dancers with grounds-filling music ranging from rock to so-called lounge tunes. At one point, the band even burst out with the Mexican Hat Dance and at another, sang a folk-telling song of Hoopa.

Beautifully traditionally dressed contenders for the title Queen strolled the festival and gladly answered questions and posed for photographers.

Third-year-in-a-row festival queen Jamyelynn Norris, a 16 year-old Yurok, Hupa, and Oregon Klamath Chiloquin from Crescent City, wore traditional Yurok regalia she made herself.

Norris noted that family members including her brother, mother and cousins gifted materials for her regalia. A bear hide was donated by her brother, she said. Shells were gathered at the beach, and, for her 16th birthday, an elder gifted her mink.

Norris pointed out that she does not call her regalia a costume, and that her regalia has significant spiritual meaning. She notes that she presents prayers throughout the making of her regalia and added that no part of it would include coyote or dog. The coyote, she explained, represents something mischievous or evil and never would be used.

Norris also noted a belief that her regalia is sad when not dancing. “It's unhappy and crying,” she said. As festival queen, Norris wore a crown but said she would wear a traditional Yurok hat when performing the native Brush Dance. Norris said it took two years to make her necklace overlay and that she is still working on the bear grass portion of her regalia.

Venders provided a wealth of material for Native American regalia. Admirers tried on traditional bowl hats that ranged in price from $800 to $1,400 for sale by Sundance, a Redding business. According to Sundance venders Betti Comas and Barbara Murphy, the hats for sale were made as early as the 1800s and as late as the 1970s with varying quality reflected in material, weave and design.

Hats like these are used in ceremony. Murphy and Comas noted that children might be gifted these hats by their families. Hats with especially intricate design could even go as high as $2,000, they said.

With its multitude of colorful and diverse wares, activities, music and pageantry, people expressed great joy this year with the Yurok Salmon Festival.