The New Asians

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
Before taking care of business, I want to introduce you to Betty Blade. Betty lives somewhere in Gotham and keeps tab on the cultural geography of her city through her camera. That should be credit enough, but Betty busies herself by filling in the gaps and rounding out the corners of most of my Flickr entries. She adds all the tags I should be adding but don’t, thanks to incurable laziness (you can laugh, but it’s a deadly disease). More importantly, she often adds tidbits of information or excerpts from poems or song, etc., that speak to whatever photo she is amending. Her far-ranging intellect pulls gems from all over the cultural canon, and without her, my site would be much the poorer. I have no idea for how many people she provides this service, but her efforts on my behalf are prodigious. I jokingly call her my “Boswell,” but she’s nothing of the sort. She’s not chronicling me, she’s augmenting the collection. I owe her big time.

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
It was Betty who sent me the link to The Buddhist Channel with the story about Oregon’s first Vietnamese Buddhist cemetery, complete with a new statue of a Buddha (which doesn’t, I warn you, look like our traditional vision of a rotund Buddha). That I should first hear of a Portland cemetery story via New York City amazes me, but I thank her for it, nonetheless.

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
The Buddhist cemetery is not, strictly speaking, an independent cemetery; it is a designated section of a commercial cemetery operation: Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden (one of several different tags it hangs upon itself). Across the road from Sunnyside is Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery which supports a SE Asian section of its own.

Being a cemetery within a cemetery is not uncommon here in Portland; besides these examples of SE Asians, there are Jewish cemeteries within two of Metro’s fourteen pioneer cemeteries. (Metro is a local government agency which handles a lot of our civic housekeeping duties.) The Portland Japanese Cemetery is surrounded by Rose City Cemetery, but in that case the two cemeteries are independent of each other.

While its significance may be lost on the rest of the continent, we in the Pacific Northwest pride ourselves on being the doorway to America. Without a doubt, if not the first, then the ample majority of the early immigrants to North and South America came through the Fraser and Columbia River valleys after slinking down the coast from Alaska. That there should be a continuing steady influx here of immigrants from Asia should not be surprising. And the silver lining of our disastrous military foray into SE Asia has been a healthy wave of newcomers from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Once again, their loss is our gain, and consequently we have better restaurants than we ever had. (Me, I’m all for invading Italy. Preëmptive strike against the Mafia. Think of the gastronomic gains!)

Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
The colored hand-etched stone face from Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery has no inscription of any kind and is not a part of its SE Asian section, though it clearly has SE Asian elements in its design. The racial composition of the vast crowd is intriguing. This upright is the only upright in the cemetery, though they are being allowed in the Buddhist venture across the road. Almost all the stones in the Catholic cemetery have laser-etched portraits or photoceramic cameos. The Buddhist cemetery is too new to have a track record, but it looks like it will be dominated by portraits, as well.

Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
On the secular side, the largest Asian “cemeteries” are parts of Lincoln Memorial Park, an old “rural” cemetery on Portland’s East Side, which contains a traditional Chinese cemetery; another Vietnamese Catholic section; a new upright section used, not exclusively but heavily, by Asians; and an even newer pagoda cemetery with preset, identical headstones. I’ve seen a similar arrangement being constructed in a Seattle cemetery and presume it’s following an existing Asian pattern, but that’s merely a guess. The Lincoln Park burial spaces far outnumber the combined totals for Gethsemani and Sunnyside.

Lincoln Memorial Park

Cowlitz Mission

Stevenson Cemetery

I am by intellectual temperament a fatalist. In my world serendipity rules the roost. I’m not convinced of the probability of random behavior or of choice. That I happened to be driving past Saint Francis Xavier Mission on the Jackson Highway was not simply a matter of chance. The universe has been conspiring for 14 billion years to get me there. That sounds pretty awesome until you realize that the universe has also been conspiring for 14 billion years to get me into a 7-11 yesterday to buy a Pepsi. Having your life written out ahead of time doesn’t mean that it’s all glamor.

But enough about me. I’d just come from the Toledo Cemetery, which wasn’t on “the map” either. “The map” is that supplied by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) names project GNIS, and as used by ePodunk. The USGS, for reasons known only to itself, routinely ignores significant, and often old, cemeteries and they list none for Toledo, Washington; but while driving through town I said to myself that this place has to have a cemetery and that, if I looked closely, I might even see it. And I did. Cemetery District No. 7, says the sign, and I found graves going back to 1886, but there are probably earlier ones; I didn’t look that closely.

It was shortly after leaving Toledo and was wending my way northwards towards Seattle that I passed the complex of buildings for St. Francis X., as they are wont to call him. Another sign announced the presence of Cowlitz, WA, though there are no other buildings and the highway doesn’t slow down there; but once more I found myself talking to myself saying, missions always have cemeteries, and I wheeled around and headed back to the church. The cemetery is just past the church on Jensen Rd., which intersects with the highway.

St. Francis Xavier Cemetery

Now, anyone who knows anything about early Oregon history knows that Lewis and Clark was a cozy little expedition but that the real heavy lifting, after and probably before them, was done by the Métis from Red River. Métis are another Canadian shibboleth like zed, eh, that distinguishes Cannuks from Los Americanos. If you know who the Métis are, you’re probably Canadian. Or know something about Oregon history. The Métis were the folks who introduced farming to the Willamette Valley. They came in as trappers and, more importantly, haulers with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Company saw the Willamette Valley as the place where they could grow the food for their entire northern operation and hence began early investment in farming in the region. They didn’t encourage their trappers to settle down in the valley, but they didn’t prevent them and in the end provided much necessary support. There’s a lot of history here, much too much for this blog, but suffice it to say that the Métis, who are a tribe of half-primarily-French and half-Native-American stock, were the backbone of the foundation of modern Oregon.

St. Francis Cemetery

The Métis were Catholic and their religion in the form of missions came along with them. The next mission north of Fort Vancouver on the route to Red River was the Cowlitz, now the Saint Frank, Mission. The Company was forever trying to talk the Métis into farming at Cowlitz and Nisqually instead of the Willamette, but the Métis were no fools and knew good land when they saw it. It was not until forced by the Americans out of French Prairie, their Willamette home, did some of them turn to the Cowlitz before retreating further east to Idaho or back to Red River. The displacement of the Métis signaled the end of phase I of the conquering of Oregon by the Euro-Americans, and with it the raison d’être of the Cowlitz Mission came to an end as well.

Regardless, the mission is still there and so is the cemetery, though it doesn’t have many recognizably Native-American or Métis names. A white cross embellished with engraved morning glory leaves and flowers for Josie Wahawa (1885-1893) probably marks a Native-American grave, and Leon Chevalier (1863-1887) sounds Métis, and I’m sure there are more, but it’s nothing like the agency cemeteries of Pendleton, say. The one claimed Métis grave I have in my collection is for Albert Doney (1936-2000). He has a Red River cart and the words “Chippewa Métis” carved into his stone at Stevenson Cemetery in Stevenson, WA. Surely he never rode in a Red River cart, but presumably an ancestor did.

St. Louis Cemetery

The French-named towns of the Willamette Valley have their origins in the Métis, as well, but only one cemetery there retains anything of the feel of what it was like a hundred-and-fifty years ago, Saint Louis. It’s still out in the country surrounded by fields and next to a traditional, white-steepled church. It’s an unusual cemetery in that many of the stones are set at right angles to the others, for no apparent reason. It has at least one Charboneau grave, and Charboneau was a Métis scout who accompanied Lewis and Clark and took Sacajawea as his wife. You might want to wonder why Lewis and Clark took a Métis with them, and what did they know about the Métis that we’ve forgotten? Besides that they existed?

Like knowing the way, for instance.

None of this, of course, takes the Cowlitz Indians into consideration, and they were a powerful tribe in their own right and their own day and reason enough to put a mission into their homeland. The Cowlitz, for example, would occasionally come downriver and spank the Chinook, who were just as likely to head upriver and do the same to the Cowlitz. In any event, the mission represents an important locus in the birth of modern Cascadia and deserves protection and recognition as such. It maybe even deserves pilgrimage. At least, if you love it here.