All Species Day Prime Rib All Day
a collaboration between Camille Casemier and Selena Kearney
live performance, 30 minutes, 2025, Chicago Cluster Project
This performative essay explores the symbolic role of the raven, tracing its representation on the Fall City Totem Pole through our personal experiences shaped by our respective heritages. This exploration intersects with broader research into themes of cultural appropriation and assimilation, addressed in our works responding to the Rod Slemmons’ archive. The performance puts to use darkness, spoken text, call-and-response, gifts, and a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
The performance concluded with Selena’s cover of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man (last slide), as Camille gifted a collection of photographs to the audience (below). Like a raven’s shiny trove, these images, gathered over the last year from her day job at a resale shop, were donated from different families, connected in that each image was partially obscured by flash. The images depict homes, weddings, dinners, and prized posessions of what seem to be midwestern American upper middle class families.
Performed Essays
The following texts were read aloud:
ALL SPECIES DAY (Camille Casemier)
The first image I pulled from Rod Slemmons’ archive was taken in 1934 of Hugh Hinds, a white man carving a totem pole in Fall City, Washington.
It was erected that same year in the center of Fall City in honor of Julia Harshman who started the town telephone company. A raven sits at the top of the pole.
Totem poles did not arrive in Washington until the early 1900s, when one was stolen from the Tlingit tribe in Alaska and erected in Seattle as a tourist attraction.
At the time the Fall City pole was raised, the Snoqualmie Tribe, whose largest village was once in Fall City, had been forced not only from their homes, but also the spaces where they hunted and fished. Although, they had been promised a reservation by the federal government in 1855, by the 1930s they still did not have one.
The pole was carved from a 60 foot cedar tree extracted from the woods of Fall City, the story carved into it–of the raven returning the moon to the sky–was extracted from the Haida tribe some 1200 miles to the northwest.
The Fall City Totem Pole stood in the center of town until the 1960s when it fell over in a windstorm due to rot. The Snoqualmie Tribe had lost their federal recognition status in the 1950s due to loss of land.
Fall City commissioned Herman Williams of the Tulalip tribe to carve a replica of the Fall City Totem Pole, erected in 1982, while the “original” was moved into storage in a barn.
In 1999, the Snoqualmie Tribe finally received a reservation and regained their federal status–and simultaneously a troop of Boy Scouts embarked on efforts to restore the “original fall city totem” –replacing the replica in the center of town in 2001. A sign was placed beside the pole detailing the story of the pole alone and concluded:
THE 43-FOOT SYMBOL OF FALL CITY’S COMMUNITY SPIRIT AND THE MEMORY OF JULIA HARSHMAN PIERCED THE SKY ONCE MORE.
In 2023 the pole was removed as the town came to reckon with its cultural inappropriateness. Many were upset by this and insisted on its display on private property.
The raven now overlooks the parking lot at Baxter Barn, one of the first plots of fall city, home to gold rushing midwesterners armed with the concept of property, the pole now strapped to a tree beside other americana sculptures who appear on floats in the fall city days parade each year.
There was a raven in my hometown too, she was a middle aged white woman who each year donned the costume for the ALL SPECIES DAY festival- a procession that lead us through town to the state house steps, where under the watchful eyes of Ceres atop the dome, the goddess of spring wed the stag king and the raven blessed the union.
As a kid I wanted to grow up to don the costume of the raven, to perform the role for my town, I thought that was something noble I could belong to.
As a teenager I saw a sign in the general store for a moon group. I thought these must be the experts, so I joined their studies. I found myself in another group of middle aged white women who met once a month to read their lunar charts—but it didn’t give me a better sense of the moon or my relation to place.
I believe Americana to be evidence of our cultural confusion around this sensation of belonging–an overcompensation to produce things to belong to–things that remind us of ourselves that we can own and shelve and so see ourselves. I spend my days tending to this collective impulse working at a resale shop sorting our expired belongings.
My belonging might be to the shipwreck of the Angel Gabriel that washed my ancestors to shore in 1635 off the isle of shoals. Today the person beside me at this cafe is 90 cents away from free shipping.
My ancestors would proceed to settle a town in what would be called Vermont, an hour from where I grew up, they would be part of the settlement of many towns progressing westward, and in 1884 purchase land in Fall City, the descendant Simon Bailey who went by the name of ‘Time’.
These stories of their arrival to this continent and settlement are documented in accounts, gathered into a Bailey family record, that is read aloud in part in banquet halls at regional family reunions where a giant family tree is unfurled and everyone gathers to marvel at the spread.
The accounts are introduced by a prologue written in 1920 that reads
OUT OF THE PAST COME THE THRILLING EXPERIENCES OF OUR FOREFATHERS, WHO WITH THE BLOW OF THE AXE, TWANG OF THE BOW AND TURN OF THE FURROW, GAVE AID IN LAYING FOUNDATIONS OF A CEASELESS INDUSTRY AND MIGHTY ROAR OF A GREAT NATIONAL LIFE.
Ceaseless is a hard thing to belong to.
These words remind me of the images I poured over in studying the Fall City Totem Pole, an object and an image not allowed to die. I heard this insistence in the indignation of the owner of Baxter Barn.
I think of the characters on the Fall City Totem Pole who have not been allowed to rot, whose insides may be rotted but their eyes epoxied wide open to look back at those who insisted on their image, armed with carving tools, paint brushes, chisels and files - I wonder if their preservation made a document out of them, not of those to which they belong, but a document of those who insisted on their right to them, rendering the moon child more like the americana alien, the kingfisher like a smiley face.
I’ve tried to imagine a conversation between the quote original Fall City Totem Pole and the replica produced by a Tulalip carver, I imagine the conversation might also deal with questions of belonging–
“who made me? Are you more real than me?” What would the moon child carved by Hugh Hinds say to the Moon Child carved by Herman Williams, would they recognize one another, would they find a sense of belonging in one another in their displaced circumstances, far away from Haida territory, their images borrowed in the memory of a white woman who started a telephone company?
Would they despise one another like step siblings forced into family maybe later to learn they had both been adopted and that their parents missed them?
I think of the moon childs alien eyes looking at me as I stood in front of the pole and spoke to Cory who owns Baxter Barn. Seeing the pole filled me with a deep sadness, its garishness laid so bare as a roadside spectacle accompanied by americana yard sculptures of big foot, a rooster, and a bucking horse, the words rodeo and farm submitted to matching wooden cursive.
As the moon child looked at me wide eyed and indeed alien, unable to recognize itself in its appearance or its surroundings, Cory looked at me only from the side, his body never quite facing me. I understood, I was a stranger in a rental car with no apparent relation to Fall City–other than a familiar inherited ceaselessness.
With his side eyes, he grasped for the word appropriation and mistook it for appreciation several times, describing his frustration with the Snoqualmie tribe that they couldn’t understand how this pole had nothing to do with them. He overlooked how precisely that was the problem.
I returned to the rental car and cried on a stretch of dirt road that looked like home. I remembered my grandfather’s stories of working as a logger in Washington, the special shoes with the cleats he wore to run down the logs and get the lines in place before the winches started pulling, when one day something snapped and cables started whipping through the trees all around him.
When I told him about the Fall City Totem Pole he said “we had no business in those woods”
Ceaseless is a hard thing to belong to.
PRIME RIB ALL DAY (Selena Kearney)
The Tribe’s community center has lots of parking. It’s a large corporate building built in a field of trees on the Rez. I go to culture group on Tuesdays at 6:00, a sewing club where we are constructing a coat made from Pendleton Blankets. The Pendleton Blankets Company is a non-Native business whose blankets have come to mark ceremonial time for us with brightly colored adjacent patterns recognizable as Native but not at all as our Coast Salish style. The group was formed after Joyleen, our cultural director, found a black and white photograph from 1910 of a sewing group, started, likely after missionaries and boarding schools insisted on the skill for Native women’s survival. Joyleen wears a gold cross around her neck, has long black hair, and does not believe in the old ways. She believes in Jesus but will not read the bible. Pendleton blankets and their patterns have slipped through her scrutiny. We come together to blur the lines, laugh, and gossip.
William, who used to be Bill but now goes by William, sits in on our sewing group. Our Chehalis language is dead. The cultural department hired William because of his unique scholarly background, and he’s made it a priority to do the hard work of reviving The language. Mostly, we laugh and tease William but would never put down his honorable effort to bring The Chehalis language back to the people.
He pulls up a chair to speak at us after we all get our supplies organized at our tables. The bright fluorescent lights high above give William a green cast. He wears a woven cedar hat formed to look like a fedora.
Eye tit sK’tah Chee
(Good Evening)
Eeneem Chalsh
(We are Chehalis)
Sshaam AhlahQw-Ten tut Ma-Thl-ee Chachi
(Together we are survivors)
William lets his words linger in the room as he looks just above our heads with hopeful eyes and quietly says, “our ancestors can hear us when we speak to them in their language.”
Joyleen lets William indulge in the moment for a while before she tells him to employ the ancestor’s help in getting our dinner prepared in the kitchen. After he leaves with the ancestors we are free from history and get on with catching up. Last week, my cousin Lydia had broke the news that her son got his girlfriend pregnant and I’m anxious to hear her update. The last I had heard was that Junior was going to move in with his girlfriend’s parents on the Yakima Rez and she was pretty tore up about him moving out during his senior year.
At the end of the twelve weeks we work a long session to put the finishing touches on our coats. I do the final pressing on mine and don the finished brightly patterned blue, coral, and white coat. Everyone claps and cheers as I turn in a circle. We all wear our coats as we clean up with many compliments to our good looks and success.
I wore my new coat the next day to the grocery store. I could see the colors at the edges of my periphery vision and its reverberation off of the glistening food packaging at IGA. Later I go see my Kiya and bring her some of her favorite canned salmon.
She compliments my new coat and wants me to take it off so she can appreciate the craftsmanship running her hands on the seams along the inside.
“Sure looks warm” she says as she drapes it carefully over her couch.
“I love your coat, but remember you are a Raven.”
The Raven is a trickster and a thief; they stole the moon from the master’s house to create our human world. My family are Ravens.
PRIME RIB ALL DAY
In the city, in the flatlands, you can eat prime rib all day. I like to eat alone but I don’t want to be alone. I do not like eating across the table from someone. When they look into my eyes and eat I feel l ike I’m being consumed.
Sitting side by side is not sustainable.
I traverse connection. Transgression.
In they city, in the flatlands, there are no crows, no ravens. Pigeons. They huddle up in the cold and not one of them will recognize me. The pattern on their feathers seems to spread out across grey cement and into the crisp air.
The white and grey mottling emerges everywhere and I am terrified to become a pigeon. I decide I might meet The Raven again in my dreams, so before I go to bed I dress entirely in black, including my socks.
Four days goes by and I start to think that The Raven might be visiting me in my dreams, but they do not know I’m there. We do not connect for many nights for many months. I still wear black to bed.
One morning after a restless night I go back to sleep and Raven approaches me. Raven is entirely black, beak, talons, eyes, and feathers are deep and dense. Beautiful Raven approaches me and tips their head to one side.
I speak into my interior space, “Eye tit sK’tah Chee”