Patricia Whereat Phillips (Coos Bay), a Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw traditional storyteller and language keeper, is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. Phillips, a 2015 Master Artist with the Oregon Folklife Network Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, learned Tribal history and traditions from her father and other Tribal elders. Stories are key to sharing the indigenous culture, heritage, and its relationship to the land.
Bio
Patricia Whereat Phillips, a Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw traditional storyteller and language keeper, is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. Born in Coos Bay, on Oregon's southwest coast, Phillips explains that she learned stories from her “father, Don Whereat, and some of my cousins like Ida Wages Helms, Grace Brainard, and Ray Willard. Much I learned through studying elders who had died before I was born, in their words recorded by linguists such as Leo Frachtenberg, Melville Jacobs, and J.P. Harrington.” As she notes, “core to indigenous culture and heritage is a relationship to the land, and much of that is contained within the stories and names.… It is important that this work takes place within ancestral areas, because the world view of our ancestors is inseparably tied to land.” Phillips’s passion about her cultural heritage inspired her to earn a master's degree in Linguistics at the University of Oregon (1996). Her thesis on Hanis Coos grammar resulted in further work on a Hanis Coos dictionary. She has also authored a book on ethnobotany, Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians (Oregon State University Press, 2016) and is expanding her work to other tribal languages from her home by building wordlists of the Miluk Coos and Siuslaw languages. Phillips is deeply committed to recovering, telling, and passing on traditional stories, including their performance context. As she explains, “The Trickster Cycle of stories were traditionally told only in winter. Other stories might be told any time, especially when people were camping for fishing or berrying, and telling stories about morals for fishing … or stories associated with the place the people were staying.” Such knowledge is increasingly rare; “Very few people today know very many of the traditional Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw legends, and fewer still know the traditional place names and their meanings associated with many of these stories. It is important to pass the knowledge of both stories and place names down to younger generations.”
