Oregon: Ellen Waterston

Episode 39 of The Laureate Project—on Judas horses, pitbulls, and a once and future wilderness.

Dec 05, 2025

“We keep the language species alive, and then that means the culture itself alive.”

Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston set out West a while back and has held on since. In this segment of the country entangled in visions of expansive spaces and vast escapes, she’s come to see language as its own sort of wilderness: messy, mingled, and meandering. Like wilderness, filled with patches to explore. Like wilderness, dappled with mysteries to respect and revive.

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I’ve Been Lonesome for You

Rewilding a River with Words

Hoopa, Klamath, Karuk, Shasta and Yurok youths make a boisterous
circle of kayaks in the calm crescent of the river’s oxbow, then fall
silent as a tribal elder’s hawk-feather fan blesses each young voyager
with the sacred smoke from a smoldering bundle of wild celery root.

Then, with a whoop, they all begin the 300-mile paddle from the headwaters
near Spencer Creek to the mouth on California’s northern coast. This, after weeks
of together learning the language of the rollicking, rejoicing waters of the rewilded
Klamath River, a language their elders refused to forget.

ambo goge nepuy tlamatl

It’s said if any living thing or place goes unspoken for too long it becomes
faceless, unknown, prone to reckless use…or forgotten forever. The words
that are the nouns of, the actions of, the descriptions of all things have to be
uttered for the thing itself to live on in heart, in mind, in fact, in real time.

hishqi”i kittfin is’iish a’ama

Believe with me…the five river tribes’ orisons about river, rapids and salmon, their fierce
loyalty to prayer, pledge and story, is what eroded the sullen concrete resolve of Copco One
and Two, of Iron Gate and Boyle. Eleven days after the last of those dams fell and for the first time in more than one hundred years, salmon returned to spawn in their natal waters.

On that eleventh day a woman walked out into Spencer Creek. A Chinook salmon
swam up right next to her feet. So overcome, they say she cried for a week.

Aiy-ye-kwee! Aiy-ye-kwee! I’ve been lonesome for you.

Courtesy of Ellen Waterston.

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