The Oregonian, Portland, OR., May 20, 1933, page 4

THE MEMALOOSE

     For centuries - back to times that are not even reached by legend - it was the practice of the mid-Colombia Indians to lay their dead away on the memaloose islands - "islands of the dead." It was the custom, handed down from antiquity, to build a little hut on four posts stuck into the ground for each new member of the tribe who departed forever from the fishing rocks. If the dead were a chief, or a mighty warrior, or the child of a chief, perhaps a slave was tied in the dark interior and left to starve, so that the dead man might have attendance into the land of the spirit. And over the centuries the memaloose became sacred and forbidden places, given over to the ancestors.
     Now the white men have been on the Columbia for more than a century. During that time the memalooses have been visited constantly. Until extreme steps were taken to stop it, the pioneers carried away arrow heads, stone weapons and even the bones. The islands were much depleted.
     However, some relics remain. The mid-Colombia tribesmen, who are working this week with Coroner Calloway of Wasco County, to remove the remaining bones to a burial place near Wishram on the north shore, estimates that the skeletons or partial skeletons of 250 Indians are still on the memaloose near Big Eddy. These are to be buried after the white man's fashion - to which the living tribesmen have become accustomed.
     It is well. In past ages when there were no alien hands to touch the weapons or the bones of the dead, and no alien eyes to look over them curiously, the open burials of the memaloose were as good as any. There existed no need for the land, and the Indians liked to think of themselves, when gone, as lying in the free sweep of the river, where the winds swept up and down the gorge. It must have then of this picture that Bryant was thinking when he wrote:

Take the wings

Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings - yet the dead are there!

     But we presume that the present Indians, having become used to the white man's burial, find it unseemly that the remains of their fore-fathers should continue to lie where the curious can gaze upon them and pick them up. And rightly so. The wilderness is gone. The free winds of yesterday sweep now over wheat fields and cities. Let the idle no longer gaze upon what is left of the one-time brave warrior. There is a new order, and a new people who do not know the respect due to the memaloose.

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer