By Ron Karten
Smoke Signals staff writer

“It is totally amazing to me that 500 years ago, somebody figured out how to build a house, and how to make the tools to do that,” says Tribal Elder Don Day.
Today, the Tribe’s latest Master of Arts holder knows how his ancestors did that. When he picks up a chunk of oak or yew to adze into a wedge, he knows ahead what that house and even that wedge is going to look like.
With his 53-page master’s thesis and an 8-by-10-foot model plankhouse on permanent display at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Day received final approval on Friday, Feb. 19, for a multi-disciplinary degree, reaching across the fields of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and geology.
“I sometimes say he’s a force of nature,” says Day’s longtime academic adviser, Jon Erlandson, University of Oregon professor of Anthropology and director of the university’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
“He’s not a traditional student. When he first came here, I felt like there was nothing that was going to stop him and nothing that was going to stand in his way of getting both a bachelor’s and master’s.
“His project, the plank splitting project, started in my Traditional Technology class, where we started splitting little shakes of cedar. I never dreamed that a student would take that small demonstration and end up in the woods splitting huge logs.
“It took a huge amount of imagination and tremendously hard work to pull this all off. I was honored to have him as a student.”
Seven years in process, this most recent part of Day’s education twice took him to the Haida people of western Canada.
“When you step onto their island, you are stepping back in history 500 years,” Day says.
But the things he learned.
“My guide asked his granddaughter (aged about 10) to tell me her name and her history. She gave her oral history as it was traditionally done in the past. Fifteen minutes later she said, ‘That’s all I can remember.’ ”
The Haida are world famous for their structures, Day learned through his research, but even they could not believe that he could accurately split giant logs with his wedges and wooden mallets.
Day’s studies also took him countless times into ancient areas of the Willamette National Forest where he searched for wood suitable for building ancient-style houses today.
With the help of Tribal volunteers, Day found cedar trees blown down by the wind, some seven or so years gone, and split them on the mountainside on the spot into slabs 20 feet long, 2 feet across and one-to-four inches thick. And together, they hauled the wood out for use on projects up and down the Northwest.
“How do I carry the message to Tribal youth?” he muses on the occasion of his latest educational success. “We have a need to compete. Hopefully, we can defend ourselves at the ‘round table,’ but in order to do that, we need an education.
“It’s a gift this education, but it’s a gift I can’t keep. I have to give it back.”
And he has been giving it back all along, whether at the Grand Ronde Tribe, where he split logs for the Tribal plankhouse, or among the Coquille or Coos or Cow Creek Tribes where he has taught the ancient crafts to Tribal youth.
An inside wall of the Coquille Tribe’s new hotel is made of cedar split by Day and his Coquille students. Day also is hard at work on the Honor Room of the Lane Community College longhouse.
Until Day came along, splitting logs into planks useable for homes had been a lost art, but with diligence and patience, by learning to read cedar logs by trial and error, he is bringing the art back.
“He basically, single-handedly recreated a lost art,” Erlandson says. “Traditional plank splitting was a hugely important art and skill in ancient societies here in the Northwest. It’s an amazing project that he has done.”
And starting in the days when he was earning his bachelor’s degree, Day also has become an expert flint knapper who today makes points in the old ways. His efforts have made him an authority on many ancient Tribal practices.
Today, people run artifacts of all sorts by him for his expert opinion. Maggie Zane, 94, of Eugene recently gave him some points for the Grand Ronde Tribal collection. He estimates they could be 8,000 to 10,000 years old.
For a kid who “grew up in the back alleys of Salem,” who never graduated from high school -- he earned his GED -- Day was walking “a little above the ground” in the days after he heard that he’d successfully completed his master’s project.
He remembers it all starting during construction of a Safeway parking lot. They were digging the ground up and came across an ancient stone bowl.
“How cool would it be to be able to identify that?” he thought. Today, as an archaeologist, he can.
Day will receive his Master of Arts degree during the University of Oregon’s June commencement ceremony.

Photo by Michelle Alaimo