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Photo by Jim Craven Gray Eagle comes out of a replica of a traditional Takelma Indian pit house that he and others are building out of Port Orford cedar at the Kerbyville Museum. The house, a cultural testimony to another era, will serve as a backdrop for storytelling by Agness Pilgrim, the oldest known Takelma and daughter of the last Takelma chief. Artists build Indian `pit house' in Kerby By MARK FREEMAN KERBY -- With hammers, chisels, a few wooden dowels and the occasional hum of an electric saw, artists Gray Eagle and Bart Cross are recreating a piece of very early Oregon history. The pair of woodcarvers are building a replica of an original Takelma Indian "pit house," the sunken dwelling where the Takelma women worked, slept and ruled the roost. Dug into the ground and walled with Port Orford cedar planks, the pit house is now under construction outside the Kerbyville Museum, where it will serve as a testimony to the culture of the area's earliest inhabitants. The carvers are working off crude drawings and raw historical descriptions of the small and portable houses that were the Takelma women's version of the male sweat lodges. "We're using a few power tools, but we're mostly using carving tools," says Eagle, a woodcarving artist who lives outside Takilma. "Traditionally, they split their planks," Eagle says. "But in today's day and age, trying to get the wood for that would be very difficult. We were lucky to get the cut cedar trees we did." When finished next month, the 12-by-14-foot house also will serve as a backdrop for Agness Pilgrim, the oldest known Takelma and daughter of the last Takelma chief, to tell folklore and inform the area's new residents of the natives' ways. The work is being financed through $12,000 in grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Southern Oregon Economic Development Council. The council's president, George Fence, sees the project as providing a visible, tangible place for today's Rogue Valley residents to appreciate the lifestyle and contributions of one of many cultural and ethnic groups that once populated the area. "Clearly, there is a shortage of visible tools to help tell some of these stories of the cultural contributions of people who were here," says Fence. "We're hoping this is one step in that direction, and I think it's appropriate to honor the native people first." The Takelmas, who were called the Rogue Indians by settlers, lived in the Rogue and Illinois river basins, perhaps as far back as 10,000 years ago. They lived in small family units, with women and young girls staying primarily in the pit houses and the men in the sweat lodges, says Eva Emery, the Kerbyville Museum's art director and historian who has researched the houses. "The men, generally, would reside in the sweat houses, unless they were lonely, or had a reason to visit the women," Emery says. The structures used larger timbers to form a basic frame, which were all double-notched and fit together like Lincoln Logs. The centers were dug 3 feet deep into the ground, so the base of the house was warm in winter and cool in summer. The pit was then surrounded by a 2-foot-deep trench around the pit to form a shelf. The house's walls, made of split cedar or sugar pine, were slipped into the trench for holding in place. As a defense system, the entrance was a circular door devised so people had to climb in backwards, Emery says. When done, it will form a stage for Pilgrim's storytelling as well as anchor what Emery hopes will become a multiple-dwelling recreation of a Takelma settlement. "We just wanted to build something representative of how they lived," Emery says. Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA