Ancient Rock Images Succumbing to Modern Enthusiasm

For hundreds of years, the eerily grinning visage of Tsagiglalal has kept watch over the Columbia River.

She is a Northwest mystery. No one is certain who painted her or why.

Yet she is a powerful force, even in modern times, evidenced by the thousands who come to gaze upon her rust-red image and perhaps also by those who stay away, considering her too sacred to look upon.

According to tribal legend, she was once chief of the Wishram Indians, who lived at the time in a village at the Long Narrows of the Columbia River, near Goldendale and what is now the Washington-Oregon border.

But Coyote the trickster apparently didn’t think much of female chiefs, and when she refused to abandon her people, he turned her into a pillar of rock with the command that she watch over the Wishram forever.

Her name means She Who Watches.

Limited Access Crucial

Tsagiglalal is the best known of the Northwest rock art images, but there are more than 1,000 such sites on the Columbia Plateau, which extends from the Cascade Range to the Rocky Mountains and includes parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia, says James D. Keyser, regional archeologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, Ore.

In an effort to protect the site, She Who Watches is accessible only by guided tour, a short walk west from its starting point at Horsethief Lake State Park.

“As access to a rock art site increases . . . the preservation of a site decreases to the point where you’ve either got to control access or the site pretty much goes away,” Keyser says.

The threat to rock art comes from more than just vandals with spray paint or bullets. There have been cases where people varnished rock art in a misguided preservation effort, or unintentionally defaced the images by making rubbings with crayons or charcoal.

As is so often the case with cultural and natural resources, modern fascination with the region’s petroglyphs (rock carvings) and pictographs (rock paintings) can mean their destruction.

Even the human touch or the scrape of a backpack buckle takes its toll by abrading the surface and changing the microclimate of the rock, allowing lichen to grow.

“In a perfect world, people would leave them alone and they would last for literally millennia,” Keyser says.

A Sensitive Issue

In some cases, they already have.

The region’s rock art ranges in age from 150 years to over 8,000 years, and Keyser says the images here typically had one of four functions--as mortuary art; for hunting magic; for shamanism; and to help remember one’s spirit helper after a vision quest marking the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.

In his book, “Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau,” Keyser says She Who Watches and images like hers are believed to be associated with death. Tsagiglalal likely represented a death-guardian spirit, he says.

He quotes a Wishram shaman as saying: “People grin like that when they’re sick. . . . When people look at you like that, you get sick.”

The Wishram, a small band now affiliated with the Yakama Nation, are known to have suffered two major smallpox epidemics along with other European diseases.

The origin and meaning of rock art is a culturally sensitive issue here and in other parts of the West. The Hopi, for example, have objected to the term rock art, contending it diminishes the significance of the images.

Nor do archeologists and historians agree on how far their studies should take them.

“I can record the sites in detail, and I can attempt to make some scientific observations. I can document the sites as best as I am able,” says Keo Boreson, an archeologist for Archeology and Historical Services at Eastern Washington University in Cheney.

“It’s my opinion that contemporary people should not be trying to interpret these sites.

“I do not have the religious background to do this or even the social background. I haven’t grown up in the culture that produced that form of rock art. I view it as something that’s a remnant of a past culture--a very powerful one in many cases. I am of the opinion that we don’t know what they mean or what their function was.”

There also are concerns about commercialization of the images. Images of many Columbia Plateau pictographs and petroglyphs can be found on everything from rubber stamps to coffee cups to business logos.

In the June issue of Horizon Air’s magazine, Clifford Washines of the Yakama Nation is quoted as saying: “We don’t like people taking pictures and commercializing them, like making T-shirts. They’re not for commercial use.”

Washines and another representative of the Yakama Nation, which has rock art on its reservation, declined to be interviewed on this subject by the Associated Press.

Destructive Dams

Julie Davis, a volunteer tour guide at Horsethief Lake State Park, where there are about 100 pictographs, says some tribal elders consider the site too sacred to visit.

She says the age of She Who Watches is estimated at about 300 years, but very little sampling has been done in the region.

“Native Americans say they’ve been here since the beginning of time,” Davis says. “This area is as sacred to them as the Holy Land is to Christendom.”

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled through the Columbia River Gorge nearly 200 years ago, the river was about one-quarter of a mile wide. She Who Watches looks over the river at a spot that had been a regional trading center, seven miles east of Celilo Falls.

Today, after a half-century of dam-building, the river is about a mile wide at that point. Celilo Falls is gone, and with it scores of rock art sites--flooded by the dams, many lost forever.

In some cases, huge chunks of rock were blasted out when the dams were built, and the picture-bearing boulders were moved to other locations for display.

“A very important part of rock art is the context. Removing these boulders to another location destroys the integrity of that location,” Boreson says.

At The Dalles Dam, an array of images can be viewed, including the Spedis owl, a simple, heart-shape figure with fringed wings, stick legs and dots for eyes. At Rocky Reach Dam, north of Wenatchee, a curated exhibit at the museum offers other examples of rock art.

At Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park near Vantage, large blocks of decorated basalt have been placed just outside the petrified wood museum, overlooking the Columbia River.

“Many of the dam-building agencies, in an effort to do what they thought might have been the right thing, frequently blasted away the best pictures . . . and didn’t do anything good to the sites left behind,” Keyser says.

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A Tour of Rock Art

Columbia Plateau sites include:

In Washington:

* Horsethief Lake State Park on the Columbia River. There are 100 pictographs here, including Tsagiglalal, or She Who Watches. Guided tours are conducted at 10 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, April through October.

* Indian Painted Rocks, just west of Yakima. Pale red- and white-rayed arc images on a basalt cliff a short stair climb up from Powerhouse Road.

* Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, off Interstate 90 at Vantage. Animals, hunters and a set of twins are on display.

In Oregon:

* The Dalles Dam, The Dalles, Ore. Visitors take a short tourist train ride to a collection of panels featuring the Spedis owl design, a water devil and other images.

Associated Press