[The following thoughts were prepared as a public statement for a hearing to judge the eligibility of Camp Nor'wester at Sperry Peninsula to be listed in the register of historic places. We, won. That is, the camp grounds were voted to be eligible not only for the Washington State Registry, but also the United States Registery. -Carter]

The ancient Celtic tribes that inhabited Ireland entrusted their history, their tribal memory, to Bards. The Bards tools were poetry, music and song. I have no song, nor epic poem today. But let this be my debut as modern day bard, as I come to describe to you my tribe, how we represent the recent history of Sperry Peninsula and the way in which our memory is held in the landscape.

I will call my tribe the Nor'wester tribe, but could also be called the Henderson tribe, or the Tribe of Sperry Peninsula. The Nor'wester tribe is a unique manifistation in modern culture. It is a tribe of childhood memories. It is a seasonal tribe, coming together for a summers of community. It is a tribe that permeates modern culture. It is a tribe that, through the practice of Kwakutl art, music and dance, blends with cultures of the past, and remembers times long gone. It is a tribe that is it's own unique culture. A culture of place. A culture rooted in the landscape.

Sperry Peninsula is our living memory. Every tree, rock, beach, plateau holds the story of our passing. The paths are worn by the memory of thousands of footsteps. Thousands of my own footsteps. Walking down the paths, I am both the young child I was and the old man I am yet to be. Floating on timelessness. Down these paths have skipped and danced four generations of humans listening to the trees, finding the songs of the landscape, continuing the rituals of the season, practicing a culture of place, and forming a participatory sculpture of motion on the landscape.

The ground is the Receiver of our Memory. As are the Trees. The Cedar, Fir and Madronna Trees. Madronna Trees. Those trees. All my life I'd been admiring trees such as these. Trees that grow grey hairs. Trees that crack and curl and dance with time. The year my mother spent a summer as a child eating in the lodge that looks out on the Olympic Mountains siloutted on a burning sky, you could have seen the Kwakult longhouse from my favorite Madronna tree. The same tree that Bill Holm first slept under when he visited Sperry Peninsula for the first time. My own Buddha tree. It won't be enough that we can go visit other Madronna Trees. These are the Madronnas we have watched grow. That we have listened to. They are our Giving Trees. They are our elders.

They have watched and shared with us as we gather on the beach in our season to bake salmon, standing among the broken clam shells that are the memory of our predecessors, the original native americans of the area, who feasted as well on the calm waters that surround Cactus Rock. When we eat our salmon and welcome the war canoe, and listen to the songs inviting us to our sacred dances in the longhouse, we connect many times and cultures in a swirl of memory. And it is the landscape that receives and resonates with these many stories.

The culture of the Nor'wester tribe is like a young, yet mature redwood tree. Like a redwood tree, which will intangle its roots with the trees around it to give it support and strength, the Nor'wester culture intermingles its recent stories with the stories of the Kwakult, the Samish, the Gourlies, the homesteaders, even old Man Sperry himself. This culture is rooted in place. And as you can't just pick up a redwood tree and transplant it, the same is true for the Nor'wester culture.

One cannot just move the landscape to a new place to preserve the historical value of Sperry Peninsula. You can't recreate the glacial cut Basalt grooves that form our sacred plateaus and rock formations. One cannot just imagine into being the moss that inclubates the pinecones of the Fir trees that now block the view of the Indian House from that favorite Madronna tree of mine. One cannot preserve the history of the Nor'wester tribe without preserving the landscape that carries our stories. They are rooted in the place.