Just before Thanksgiving, we held another Paint and Sip at the Morgan Arts Center in Toledo and learned to paint pink, blue, purple and white hydrangeas under the tutelage of Centralia artist Sue Wachter.
Believe me, I have no delusions regarding my artistic skills; they haven’t improved much since kindergarten. But it’s fun to gather with family and friends and tap into the creative side, especially enjoyable when Wachter told us to paint with our fingers.
My lack of skill may be why I admire gifted artists like Charlie Funk, of Chehalis. I sat down with him earlier this month to learn more about his life, his art and his work as an elder with the Chinook Tribe. He’s admirable at 85, running every day and pursuing publication of a book he wrote and illustrated.
Funk grew up in South Bend, Washington, where he graduated from high school in 1955. He attended junior college for a year before going to a small art school in Portland. His instructors there recommended he attend the Art Center in Los Angeles, where he was accepted but felt overwhelmed in a large city with students from fancy universities with much more training in the basics of art. He returned to the Northwest and graduated from Central Washington University with a degree in education. Through the years, he’s earned his living as a tree planter, teacher, conservative editorial cartoonist, ad salesman and substitute teacher. He’s worked at Weyerhaeuser, Green Hill, The Chronicle, Yard Birds, Wayne’s Photofinishing and schools throughout the region.
But he’s always been an artist.
“One time I decided to quit, and the next thing I knew, I had a pencil in my hand,” he said.
Most of his paintings of landscapes or Native American culture are oil and watercolor. He also carves wood, including canoe paddles with concave tips identifying them as Chinook.
He’s from a family of loggers. His grandfather Charles Funk logged in the early 1900s, but it was through his grandmother, Florence (McBride) Funk, that he descends from the Chinook and Chehalis tribes. She was born in May 1891 to Caroline and Joseph McBride. His great-great-grandparents were Alex and Maria Milne, the parents of Caroline and her sister, Kate. Maria’s mother was Celestum, a Chinook woman from Wa-Hoot-San, a Chinook village on Shoalwater Bay at the site of what became Bruceport. (Bruceport served as the county seat for Chehalis County, which was later named Grays Harbor County, from 1854 to 1860.)
Funk grew up hearing family stories, such as about the time his grandmother fell asleep on a log and floated out on the tide, only to be rescued by her father in his oyster sloop, the Bluejacket. And how in June 1898 his hard-drinking great-grandfather Joseph McBride was jailed in South Bend and set fire to his cell, suffocating to death from the smoke before the blaze was extinguished, leaving behind his wife and seven children.
Despite their deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, with even the trade language used by all the tribes and early white settlers called the Chinook Jargon, the Chinooks have yet to obtain federal recognition. They received it briefly in 2000, when the Cowlitz tribe was recognized, but the George W. Bush administration rescinded the recognition 18 months later, saying in essence that the tribe’s sovereignty no longer exists in the eyes of the government.
In an April 29 op-ed to The Seattle Times, Carmen Rojas and Jesse Beason advocated for reinstatement of federal recognition of the “oppressed” Chinook Indian Nation, describing the lack of recognition as “one of the country’s most profound injustices.” White settlers took away their lands, forced them out of their villages, and sent their children to boarding schools — losses for which they were never compensated.
“Every tribe that participated in the Chehalis River Treaty negotiations, the 1855 negotiations asking tribal representatives to leave their land, is recognized by the federal government today. All except the Chinook,” Rojas and Beason wrote.
It does seem far past time to recognize the Chinook tribe.
As a tribal elder, Funk has advocated for federal recognition and the preservation of Chinook burial grounds, artifacts, and culture. He served about seven years on the Chinook Tribal Council.
He has participated in canoe journeys along the Columbia and other local rivers. For a time, he worked on redesigning the Kalama Chinook’s logo, Charlie Chinook, which was a caricature of a Native American with buck teeth and a large nose who wore a loin cloth and carried a tomahawk. Today the logo features a salmon. He also has served as an archaeological consultant on construction projects on the traditional tribal lands.
His grandfather, Charles Funk, ran away from Portsmouth, Ohio, at the age of 12 and married his grandmother in Portland. They moved to Arkansas for a time but returned to the Northwest and settled in Grays Harbor County, where he operated Bay Logging until dying in a logging accident about 1940. At the camp Charlie’s father, who went by Ernest, had a pet bear raised from a cub. They also had a pet deer. After his grandfather’s death, his grandmother, a former camp cook, operated restaurants in South Bend and Raymond.
Growing up, Charlie lived in a “float house” built on strapped-together spruce logs. It could be towed along the river from one job to another, and eventually it and other float houses were moved to land near a boat-building shop in South Bend, yet their privy hung over the river, so their flush toilets sent waste into the river to float downstream.
“You got off the toilet, flush it, because it was cold,” Funk said.
His father, Charles “Ernest” Funk, was a high climber and a loader in the woods. His mother, Mildred Smith, was from a large Cherokee family. Charlie, who was an only child, can trace his family’s roots to Germans who settled in the colonies before the Revolutionary War.
Charlie was working in the woods one summer near Lake Quinault when he met his future wife, Mary Driver, who was born in Vancouver but graduated from Hoquiam High School in 1956. They were married in 1958 and raised six daughters together. Mary operated a preschool in their home on Alfred Street in Chehalis, where they’ve lived for 55 years, and later worked for the schools.
Many of his paintings feature the landscape of the Northwest, and more recently, that of the Southwest because he and Mary spend four months of the year in Arizona. He crafts paddles out of Oregon ash but carves using yellow cedar or black walnut. Only the Chinook paddles have the concave tip with points on either end, which were described in Lewis and Clark’s journals. They used the points to push off in shallow water. His artwork is displayed at Bold Gallery in Long Beach, and he sells cards depicting Chinook artwork and legends at the Market Street Bakery in Chehalis.
Charlie and Mary, who have been retired for 19 years, attend Grace Church in Chehalis. They have 19 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. They spend winters in Cave Creek, Arizona, with a daughter and return to the Northwest around Easter.
And in February, they’ll celebrate their 65th anniversary. What’s the secret to their long marriage?
“It’s our faith in Christ,” said Mary. “That is really the secret.”
“She’s so beautiful,” Charlie added. “That’s it.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
