THE STORY OF ABALONE WOMAN

as told by Lyn Risling

(Karuk/Yurok/Hupa)

The Abalone Woman and Dentalium Man is a story that s told mainly by the Wiyot and the Yurok peoples Panther and His Wives is a Karuk story. The main river that runs through Yurok and Karuk territories is the Klamath River. The Mad River and Eel River run through the Wiyot homelands. The story of Abalone Woman and Dentalium Man takes place on the coast of the Yurok and Wiyot territories.

The dentalium is a very special shell that our tribes used traditionally as our main currency for many different things. It is still worn as necklaces in our ceremonies and also displayed on our regalia used in our ceremonies so it is important. Abalone is another shell that is used on much of our regalia for ceremonies. So both of these are very important to our culture. This story speaks about Abalone Woman and Dentalium Man.

A young woman lived in Wiyot territory on the coast, and every day she would go out to the beach and she would look north and see up in the sky this brilliant light that was so bright. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It attracted her so deeply that she thought there must be a man, a beautiful man, that lived way up north, who was projecting this beautiful, bright shiny light. It was a brilliant white. She would see this every day and so she fell in love with this man that she had never really seen in person, but who she knew in her heart lived north of her.

And so she finally thought, "I'm just going to go up there and I’m going to become this man’s wife.” So, she packed up her pack basket with her cooking utensils and things that she would need to be a young wife, and she started traveling north. Up north, this young man, sure enough, he lived there. He was Dentalium Man, and when he looked to the south, up in the sky, he saw beautiful brilliant iridescent colors of light, and he knew in his heart that a beautiful woman lived south. He would go out there every night, and look up in the sky, and see the beautiful colors. He fell in love with this woman that he had never seen in person, and he hoped that one day she would come.

And finally, the young woman did arrive. She came with her pack basket, with her things that she had gathered up, and coming out to greet her were the young man's mother and father. They welcomed her with open arms. They knew of their son's love, because he talked about every day, and they knew it must be her that had arrived, so they welcomed her into their home.

And there she stayed, and she would help his mother cook and prepare acorns every day and do all the things that a young woman was expected to do. But the young man would not look at her. He would ignore her. This went on for a while, probably about a month or so, and every day he would go out and look up into the sky, hoping to see the beautiful shiny colors, but they were not there anymore. Still, he was not convinced that this young woman who had arrived was his beautiful Abalone Woman that he had fallen in love with.

Finally, one evening the young woman went to the sweathouse where the young man was, and she had decided that she would plead with him one more time to convince him that she was the young woman that he had fallen in love with. But he would not believe her. So she finally said, "Okay, then I must go."

So the next morning, she started out early. She gathered her pack basket with her things, and she started off along the beach. She headed back towards her home. When the young man realized that she had left, he finally thought, "Well, maybe she really is that woman." So, he started going after her and he finally almost caught up with her. She kept running, trying to run faster and faster, but he got closer and closer. And he had brought with him a flint knife. And as he finally got up close to her, he started to beat her on her back with the flint knife, and she began to bleed.

And at that moment, she started going towards the ocean, towards the water. Tears began falling down her cheeks. And as the tears touched the water, the water began to turn all these beautiful colors, and all these shells appeared, and she herself transformed. The young woman transformed into the abalone, and so she became our beautiful abalone shell that we use today for our regalia.

There are a lot of lessons in this story. One of the things is that if you were to look at an abalone shell in the raw, like when you first get an abalone shell, oftentimes it'll have a lot of red on the outside of the shell, and that represents the blood of abalone that was on her back when she was abused by this man. And inside is this shell with all these beautiful iridescent colors, and that's where her beauty lies, on the inside, and that is how we see our women.

Oftentimes, people-mostly men-look at the outside beauty of women more than what is on the inside, and that is one of the lessons. The inside is where our real beauty lies, and so that is one of the lessons of this story.

And now we have issues of historical trauma and the things that happened to our people-and not just our tribes, but many tribes across the country-the genocide, its impact, and the disruption of culture and how that has affected our people today. When you take away the culture, that disrupts things like how we socialize, how we communicate, how we treat each other. The boarding schools also took away children from our families: children grew up not having the family social skills or interactions in being-or knowing how to be-spouses and parents, how to be loving, affectionate and respectful. People experienced violence and abuse in the boarding schools, and that impacted their relationships with their families.

And also, in our communities, when somebody did something wrong to someone else or to their family, in our traditions we used things like abalone and dentalium shells as a means of payment for these transgressions against other people. There was a mediator that would go between families to negotiate what payment should be given for this abuse or whatever happened in that family, and then once the payment was made, sometimes there was even a particular ceremony that we call the War Dance that was done to help resolve and take care of the problems.

Once the payment was agreed upon by both families and made, then the issue was gone. You no longer dwelled on it. It was done; it was finished. It was like a clean slate, and so you were able to move on and heal from it.

Once those systems broke down, we didn't have that means of resolving some of those issues in the way we had, and some of them continue on, and some of the grudges continue on through families, through generations. And so there was a lot of breakdown of values and disruption and loss of culture that have impacted our families.

And of course, we feel the loss of language and values that are part of that language, and the knowledge-the traditional knowledge-that comes with the language, that holds the values, that teaches the values.

There has been a lot of different people that have made efforts to bring back these stories because we realize the value of these stories to our communities today. They still have lessons that hold true to our people today, and so I think it's real valuable to reintroduce these stories in different ways into our community.

Source: Risling, Lyn. News from Native California; Berkeley Vol. 27, Iss. 4, (Summer 2014): 12-17,19-21,4