 There's history here. And here. There's history there. History is everywhere. That is the sound of the four-hulled elderberry flute, which is common to the tribes of Northern California. My name's Steve Berman. I have a long time interest in this flute and its music, but I'm not an expert. I'm not an anthropologist or an ethnologist. I'm a local folk musician, and my relationship with the flute itself has been sporadic, although over many years. I'm enchanted by the sound and the spirit of the instrument itself, and I love to bring it with me when I hike in the hills up on the mountain or by a lake. It helps me feel part of the place, feel a little bit less separate, less lonely, and part of things. So I'm here today to talk about the flute itself, how it's made, what it's made from, and a little bit about its lore, the stories, because it figures in the mythologies and folk tales of a number of tribes, and the stories about it are quite marvelous. So let me play one more tune first, and then we'll get more into the flute itself. Because there's no recorded historical versions of the flute being played that I've been able to find. Probably I've made up my own tunes, but I've also found tunes that come from other places that work on the flute. It's a pentatonic scale, basically, a five note scale like the black keys on the piano. And a lot of the world's folk music from Ireland to South America to China and Japan is based on that scale. So I've been able to play tunes, even North American tunes, songs like I'm Just a Poor Way Faring Stranger that Berlives made famous many years ago, work on a pentatonic system. But I'd like to start with something closer to home, so I'm going to ask my wife Carol to accompany me on this one song. And this is not exactly the same as, but based on a Shasta wind tune healing chant. And so it goes like this. First of all, Carol's going to be playing a simple drum. Hei no hei na, hei no hei na, hei no hei na, hei no hei na, hei no hei na, hei no hei na. Carol. Yeah. So that takes us closer to home, the flute. My interest in the elderberry flute came about because in the late 60s, early 70s, the music of the Andean villages, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, northern Argentina, were being recorded and produced. And I became aware of the beautiful flute music from that part of the world, indigenous based music, what we call mestizo music, because it involved elements of the European scales and harmonies, but also based on Native American traditions. The flutes were pan pipes and canas. I fell in love with that and I formed a group to perform that music. And for about 10 years, we performed from, oh, the Bay Area, Berkeley, all the way up to Alaska, including here in Oregon at the University of Oregon in Eugene. And we made several recordings. And at some point we were doing school programs and teaching about the music. And I thought, well, it's all very exotic and far away. Maybe there's a connection that will make it feel less like a foreign element and coming into our culture and more like something that has some continuity with what was here. And so I began looking around and I discovered this flute that had been part of the culture of northern California. And it was in some way a connection also with the south because the flute is played, as you can see, blowing across an open hole at the end of the flute. It's just a simple tube, in this case, a strip of elderberry that's cut between the nodes. The pith, which is in the center, can be pushed out with another stick or a dowel. And the holes burned. Later we'll talk about why four holes and not more. Well, it turns out that this same style of flute is found in other parts of the world, this way of blowing across at about a 45-degree angle. You can just take a piece of PVC pipe and blow across it like that and get the tone. It's played that way in the Middle East, in Turkey, and in the former Turkish provinces that have become the countries of Bulgaria and Macedonia, where it's called a kaval, or in Turkey a ney. But it's the same style of flute playing. But it's also found in our own American Southwest. The Pueblo and the Hopi tribes had flute societies, and there the flutes were played ceremonially. It was understood that when you were planting corn you should play the flute because the corn seeds would listen and they would grow up to be healthier plants. And so there were groups of flute players who belonged to flute societies in those Southwestern tribes. And it's quite likely, it's certainly possible and quite likely I think that there's a connection between those flutes of the Native American Southwest and the flute that came up into California as far as the state of Jefferson, where we live. And so I made flutes and showed the Native people of the Hupa and Yurok Karuk tribes along the Klamath River and the Trinity River these elements of what had been their own culture and had largely been lost because the lore of the flute was little known at that time. In fact I think still only a little known among the Native tribes, but it's I think returning and coming back and I had the good fortune to meet a young man, a student at Chico State University from the Maidu people. The Maidu live in the Sierra Foothills around Mount Lassen and then down in the valley in the Chico area and I made a flute for him and years later he wrote a piece about this moment in his life. He said when I finally learned to make a sound on the flute that this humbled state professor had sent me, actually I wasn't a professor but I was a teaching at the college at the time, he said when I finally could make a sound on my uncle looked over at me and he said, hmm, just like your great grandfather. And I thought wow, that is a precious moment in my life as well as his and partly because of that I like to think this young man Ben Cunningham eventually became a Native American interpreter with a job working in Yosemite in the park explaining Native American ways, Native California ways and playing the elderberry flute for people and you can even find him now on the internet if you look Ben Cunningham flute player you'll see him, he's made a recording. So the elderberry flute, when I went looking for it, the first place I found it was in paintings painted by a woman named Grace Hudson and her family had moved when she was a young girl from the Midwest I think from Kansas to the Yukaya area in Mendocino County and there's now a Grace Hudson museum which displays her art and she has several paintings of young pomo children, young men also playing the elderberry flute. So I started reading in the pomo myths that had been recorded, the pomo folklore from a hundred years ago and more and then sure enough there were stories of Coyote playing the flute and participating in the creation of the world through his flute playing. Oh, people will be coming after a while and they will need things to eat and so he would play his elderberry flute the same melody four times and poof we would say, we Europeans. Magically the first salmon would appear in the river. So the flute had a magical power to create in the world and later I'll read a poem from a book called the elderberry flute song by a native man Peter Blue Cloud and where he describes the creation of the world through Coyote's flute playing. But now let me play you another song on the flute. So I was doing music from the Andean villages in South America and their music too works well on the elderberry flute as a pentatonic instrument and here's a tune I learned from a teacher that I studied with in Ecuador, a song in the Kichua language, the pre-Columbian language of the Inca people. So the song describes, it's a young woman she says, if you're really who you say you are and you belong to the people from the village of Peguche, a famous village, then we can get married. But if you're lying to me my brothers will come and beat you up. That was the song, Peguche Tiu. So if you went to the town of Peguche near Otavalo a couple of hours from Quito in Ecuador and you played that tune people would sing with you, they would recognize it. Yeah, kind of a boasting song about the town of Peguche. So how do you make these flutes? Well, the trick is really to find the right piece of wood making the flute isn't so hard. Finding the right stick so to speak is the difficult part and I've had some success going up to Pilot Rock and looking in that vicinity of Pilot Rock here off of Mount Ashland. You need to find a good size elderberry tree that's putting up green shoots in the spring. They grow up almost like bamboo with nodes and when they first come up they're green and soft and wet and useless for flute making. And gradually the shoots harden and they become filled with a white pith that gets drier and at a certain point the proportion of the wood surrounding the pith to the pith itself is just about right and you can push the pith out without breaking the wood around it. The flutes that I've been making here, this one and others that I've made are based on one that I investigated in the museum, it's called the Lakeport Courthouse Museum. It's on Clear Lake in Mendocino County and it was donated to the museum by a man named Yanti Boone, a pomo man who was active and donated this flute sometime in the 1950s and the museum director let me take it out of its case and measure it and study it a bit. It had so much smaller holes than these but otherwise you see he tapered the ends a little bit, took the bark away to make it easier to blow across but he left the bark on the length of the flute except where the holes were burned through. They used to use a coal from the fire to burn the holes. I found I could heat up a good sized nail or bolt in a flame on a gas stove for example and burn through the wood pretty easily to make these holes, that's why they're black around the edges. You could also drill I suppose, so a typical flute might have been like this about a foot long or a little bit longer, 14 inches. Not easy to find a good piece between two nodes that's that length and straight so that's the trick to find that and then to ask the tree if it's willing to donate its branch or its chute for that purpose and so far I think the trees have been happy to have an afterlife as a flute so to speak so but when you do find the piece you're looking at looking for you still need to give it time to dry you cut it and then you let it dry out because there's always a danger of cracking if you work with the wood while it's still wet. I'm mentioning all this because my own interest in the flute although somewhat historical somewhat having to do with the native peoples and native cultures really has more to do with my own interest in seeing this unique sound come back into the world and so I encourage anyone who thinks they might have some interest and some potential for exploring that sound. I think all the native instruments and there were hundreds of kinds of flutes and whistles rattles and drums that were part of the Americas before the European arrival. A very rich collection of instruments shared as many of the stories were shared all the way from Alaska down to Argentina and Chile in South America. The Americas were truly the long road of the Indians we might say of the native peoples and so there weren't these walls and borders separating Anglo speakers and Spanish speakers for example. It was to some extent a shared culture and even the folk tales can be found in a wide ranging distribution geographically. So the music this music connects me with myself in a way as I go out into the mountains to the lakes and as I said it helps me feel a little more a part of things. The stories you can find if you look into the lore of the Karuk, the Yurok, those of the Klamath River, the tribes around Mount Shasta, the Maidu, the Pomo whose range was all the way from Clear Lake and Mendocino County out to the coast. These people shared certain features of their cultures and music and dance and the stories sometimes it's not coyote but for example the Yurok and Hoopa people along the Trinity River had more personified human trickster figures and creator spirits. One of them the Yurok Wopakumeo there's a wonderful image of him in one of the Yurok myths where he's imagining how humans will be arriving sometime in the future and he's feeling sorry for them because he knows that human existence has a tragic aspect to it and so he sits in front of his sweat house playing his elderberry flute and feeling sorry for us even though we haven't even arrived yet. There's a Hoopa story where the trickster figure Imantui Nyai comes up the river, up the Klamath to where it meets the Trinity and into the Trinity River and at this time the salmon and steelhead have not been found in the rivers and so there's no fish food for the humans who again are yet to arrive a lot of these myths are about getting ready for human arrival. Some people would say we're still trying to arrive right so he's told his nephew Mink to put some madrone berries in his pouch along with the elderberry flute because madrone berries look a lot like salmon eggs and he knows that there's this old woman a sort of a witch who's keeping all the fish for herself in her backyard pool and so when he gets there she welcomes him in she realizes he's a powerful spirit and she better not offend him or he might do her harm so she prepares a meal for him of acorn soup with deer meat in it but it as he sits down to eat he pulls out these madrone berries and he says hmm these salmon eggs really taste good and she thinks oh he knows about salmon I can't fool him I better go cook some salmon for him so then he retires to the sweat lodge and he tells the flute just to keep playing on its own and the flute plays all by itself while he steals out and watches how she catches the salmon in her pond how she prepares it fillets it and cooks it because he's going to teach people how to do all these things when they come and meanwhile she thinks everything's fine because the flute is playing so he must be playing the flute she doesn't realize that the flute is playing magically on its own so by morning he has managed to dig a canal a ditch from her pond out to the trinity river so the fish can all escape and she comes out and starts haranguing him when she realize what's happened and he says oh you wicked woman because of this you will now become this little bird that follows the salmon up and down the river the bird that we call the yellow breasted not hatch so that's one more story of the flute but there are many stories there's one in which mouse uses the flute and this is in the Maidu mythology and you can find it in this wonderful book of Maidu myths and stories recorded in bilingual edition in 1904 over a well over a hundred years ago and recently retranslated by a more contemporary linguist William Shipley who taught at UC Santa Cruz you can see on the cover here's Coyote playing his flute and so there are several tales in which Coyote and the flutes are involved Coyote's jealous of Earthmaker because he has two Earthmaker has two wives and Coyote hasn't managed to attract a single wife so Earthmaker gives him two of these elderberry flutes and says if you can just sleep with them overnight and not touch them they will turn into beautiful young women and you'll have your wives but Coyote being Coyote he can't wait till morning as soon as the flutes begin to show the features of young women he wants to caress them and kiss them and so they turn back into flutes and he loses that opportunity yeah so those are the kinds of stories you can find and finally I wanted to show one more book here this one is actually called elderberry flute song the author is a mohawk not from the west but who lived in California and wrote about native traditions and in this book he creates his own contemporary Coyote tales as well as telling some traditional and he's a poet so I'd like to read his final poem called the elderberry flute song I'll read from it the beginning in the end and then I'll end with a final tune on the flute this is Peter Blue Cloud elderberry flute song and he's talking about Coyote he was sitting there on a stone at world's end all was calm and creation was very beautiful there was a harmony and a wholeness in dreaming and peace was a warming breeze given by the sun the sea rose and fell in the rhythm of his mind and the stars were points of thought which led to reason the universe turned in the vastness of space like a dream a dream given once and carried forever as a memory he raised the flute to lips sweetened by springtime then note followed note in the melody which wove the fabric of first life the sun gave warmth to waiting seedlings and thus were born the vast multitudes from the song of a flute thank you very much for your attention