Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: My rappel!

MAN: Oh, my gosh, it's beautiful.

MAN: Good morning, everybody.

Woo!

Let's do it again!

MAN: Nicely done!

MAN: Oh, yeah!

Fourteen and a half.

Yes, that was awesome!

[ people cheering ] There you go, up, up... ED JAHN: Tonight on Oregon Field Guide: There is myth and mystery lurking in the glimmer of Oregon's state gemstone.

WOMAN: Just right out of the ground.

Gemstones are one of those things that, you know, every kid, that's kind of how you get interested in geology.

Then, take a moment along the shores of the Wilson River.

But first, we bring you a story from the heart of Umatilla tribal country.

This first story for Oregon Field Guide is like a mini-documentary in style in that it really lets you in on someone's life.

It's about a woman who producer Aaron Scott met in eastern Oregon.

Her name is Acosia Red Elk.

She's a well-known world champion powwow jingle dancer.

But that's just a part of her story.

ACOSIA: We are here on the Umatilla homelands.

All right, let's go.

The Umatilla, the Cayuse, and the Walla Walla people, we are the Plateau people of the Pacific Northwest.

Native people are doing everything today modern.

We're not just doing traditional things.

We are doctors and lawyers, we are artists.

Whoo!

I love to snowboard, I love to longboard, I love house music.

That was a fast ride.

[ sighs deeply ] We are living in all worlds, and we can show up in our indigenousness to anything as well.

My name is Acosia Red Elk.

I'm a jingle dancer and a yoga teacher.

[ rattling ] When I look back, I wanted to be a dancer so bad, but the reality that I was in, I never thought it would happen.

I went on to win a lot of competitions.

One year I won 42 powwows in a row.

That was interesting for me, because I had to learn how to start accepting myself, too.

Like, who am I to win this?

And that was something I learned along the way, to start loving myself and believing in myself, because I never did before.

This is "patishuay," it is white fir.

Before I like to really start handling my regalia, I always like to smudge.

I like to smudge my feet.

When I was young, we weren't really a powwow family.

My mom and dad owned an auto-body business, and they worked every day in the shop.

My mom is Scottish, Dutch, French, and Norwegian, with a little bit of Seneca and Mi'kmaq in her.

So she was this white woman that married this Native man.

When I was 6 years old, I caught on fire and burnt the backside of my body.

I spent three months in the Burn Concern Center in Portland, and that was really traumatic for my family.

My father started drinking again, and, um, he wasn't able to quit, and he died on my 9th birthday.

You know, it just sent me and my siblings into a downward spiral.

That just gives me a little more support.

And so when I'd go to the powwow, I would watch them dance, and I was so...

I was just in awe of how brave they were and how proud they were.

Fast-forward like two years, my sister got a dress made for me, and when I opened the Christmas present, I was super excited.

I was like, "Oh, my gosh!"

But then I realized that I was going to have to dance that night at the Christmas powwow, and I was so scared.

I just remember, like, stepping my first few steps out onto the dance floor, and I started crying.

I had been pitying my legs for the scars and what happened to me.

I was just pitying my life.

And then this was the body and the legs that were carrying me out onto the dance floor.

So it was just a really special moment, and it changed me.

I got the powwow fever, and we just hit the powwow trail.

My name's Paris Leighton.

This is my family.

This is my wife, Acosia.

Here's me putting on-- getting half dressed.

ACOSIA: And I learned a lot from my kids' dad.

He taught me how to make regalia, he taught me how to be a better dancer.

PARIS: Here's my lady.

She's completely dressed now.

Not all the way.

PARIS: Well, she's still got to put her feathers and beadwork in her hair.

My hair braids.

PARIS: We're ready to go into the powwow.

Granted, she starts at 1:00.

ACOSIA: Every dance has their origin story.

The men's traditional dance, you've got the feathers on their back, they're the warriors, they tell the story of their battle.

The women's jingle dress dance comes from a dream about 1915, 1920, during the Spanish flu pandemic, and a young girl was really ill and her father was a medicine man, so he went to seek vision.

And in that vision, he was brought into the sky by the Northern Lights people, and they sent him home with a gift that would heal the people and heal his daughter, and that gift was actually a sound.

And the people got well when they heard the sound.

And so they brought this dress to surrounding communities, and it grew and grew in numbers.

And then our dances were taken away from us, and it was outlawed to even practice your culture in that way, especially doing dances.

When we were allowed to be able to start practicing our culture again, they started having what they called a powwow.

People were coming from different tribes, and it was a celebration of song and dance.

And if you wanted to compete for prize money, you could.

And so it kind of became like a sport.

PARIS: It's pretty crowded in here, but as you can see, we make do.

This is the way we live every weekend.

ACOSIA: For a lot of people and for my husband and I for a long time, we didn't have work outside of powwow.

We just lived on the powwow trail and took part in our culture.

And there was years that we did 50 powwows in a year.

[ crowd cheering and drums beating ] But the Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, it's the biggest powwow in the world, and basically if you win at that powwow, you're world champion for a year.

ANNOUNCER: Final two... [ crowd cheering ] ACOSIA: The first time I got first place at that one was like the biggest win I had ever had.

I was 24 years old, and I don't think anybody had won a contest there from my tribe.

It's interesting to think about growing up as a half-breed and sometimes feeling like, where do I belong?

ANNOUNCER: Your champion, right out here, spotlight time!

ACOSIA: You know, I had to learn how to start trusting my voice as a leader and gaining that confidence, knowing that I was carrying the name of my tribe with me and representing them, too.

Okay, so you guys are all just going to be looking up this way, and we're just going to start out with some basic steps, and we're going to find the beat.

And then we're just going to start moving through the different dance styles.

And with that came a lot of girls from our home wanting to become dancers.

So we're not just... loosely dancing, right?

That's how the guys dance.

They get really loose.

But the women dance like this.

They're proud-- look at my chin.

They keep their head up.

And if they look down, they look down and then look back up.

And they stay proud.

[ music plays on phone ] A little bit faster.

[ drum beating on phone ] Okay, ready?

Let's go, forward.

Try to be light as a feather.

This is where it starts.

They learn the steps, because those first steps are really hard to learn.

There's a lot of footwork and stuff involved, and all of that is good for the brain.

It's good for your joy, for your happiness, for your heart.

So crossing your feet.

And it ripples outward into the whole family.

You know, it's like that sound of the jingle dress.

It's the sound of the bells, the sound that the regalia makes.

It ripples outward and people feel it.

See how it has that sound?

Powwow dancing has just been a special gift for everybody.

[ exclaims ] Get it, girl!

Get it!

All right, now let's kick forward.

Now you guys, step backwards...

So we're just going to start out by just kind of arriving.

We already know where we are, and these are our homelands.

We're connected in every way to these lands.

And we've never got to practice in this park together like this, in this area.

This is part of the old July grounds, and our people used to camp here and have celebrations here in this area.

When I started yoga, my dancing became so much better.

I went to my first yoga class about eight years ago.

And then we're going to bring our hands to our heart.

Keep holding this.

In class, she said, "Take a deep breath... and let it go."

And I just started crying.

And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't realize that yoga..." I just didn't know.

Inhale, arms up...

In my mind, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I have to get certified as soon as possible, because I want to travel around and share this practice with as many Native people as I can so that we can start healing faster."

Because we have a lot of trauma to heal from, and yoga can help us to do that.

Scoop up that earth energy and smudge yourself.

Let's just keep going, a couple more times.

This is the alarm-clock generation.

We've been hitting snooze for a long time, and people are starting to get up and wipe their eyes and look out of those foggy lenses.

People are using their voice and being brave.

[ Supaman's "Why" playing ] Everybody is looking to be a part of something special, something bigger.

And as indigenous people, art is a part of healing.

I got to do a collaboration with Supaman, he is a hip-hop influencer, and that was about six year ago, and that really opened the doors for a lot more modern collaborations, contemporary collaborations that I've been a part of.

♪ Who's gonna stop me ♪ ♪ When there's no one there To stop me... ♪ I got to do a really neat music video with Portugal the Man and "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Thank you so much for having us here.

We're so honored.

[ crowd cheering ] I am a part of Indigenous Enterprise, which is a Native American dance troupe.

We got to open a show in New York City for Indigenous People's Day.

They had built this circle in the middle, and nobody even knew we were coming out.

[ crowd cheering ] It was a lot of younger generation, and a lot of them had never seen that type of dancing before.

And so it was really neat to be able to know that they were exposed to modern-day Natives sharing the beauty of our pizzazz in today's world.

So we're coming back to ourselves, we're using our culture to be more strong today and sharing it with people so that we can build bridges.

[ Supaman's "Why" playing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Oh, yeah, look at that.

That one is like the size of my fist.

We're in south central Oregon, and it's pretty remote.

But this is the only place in the world where you can find our state gemstone.

And that's not the only thing that's mysterious about sunstones.

MAN: Sunstone is the Oregon state gemstone.

Makes nice pendants and earrings and things like that.

And it just loves to be shiny.

WOMAN: The thing that I absolutely love about sunstones is that each one is completely different.

MAN: It's a unique gemstone.

High-end designers and cutters have won awards using Oregon sunstone.

[ gasps ] Oh!

This is just unbelievable.

MAN: We still get a thrill every time we find a crystal.

[ ♪♪♪ ] JULE GILFILLAN: These brilliant coppery gems are only found in the state of Oregon.

They're also at the center of mystery, myth, and some misinformation.

You can see one right there.

Oh, that's nice.

And for Emily Cahoon, the fascination goes even deeper.

I'm a geochemist, volcanologist, but not like Spock, and igneous petrologist.

Emily studies the Picture Gorge Basalt, which is one of the Columbia River Flood Basalts.

These vast outpourings of lava from some 16 million year ago shaped much of the landscape we see today all over the Northwest, but they also contain a mystery that sent Emily's research into a completely unexpected direction.

It was in 2016 when I stumbled out to the Ponderosa Mine and I saw these sunstones.

I was like, "This is so cool!"

And usually if it's cool, somebody's looked at it.

And I remember going back and digging through some literature and was shocked to figure out we don't know how they form at the most basic level.

Before we get to those mysteries, let's start with what we do know.

Sunstone is a type of mineral, labradorite, that has a little bit of copper in it.

And it can have a variety of different colors, from clear to yellow to green, red, pink, and then depending on if you can really see those inclusions of copper, and they have almost a shimmer.

They call that schiller.

John Woodmark and Bruce Moore have been mining sunstones here at the Ponderosa Mine since the early 2000s.

It started off as a hobby, and then we bought this mine, and it became a business.

[ chuckles ] John laughs because today, the Ponderosa produces more sunstones than any other mine by a lot, and you don't have to dig very deep to find them.

MAN: When we dug this out, you can see sunstones from the dig, all these white marks.

Yeah, there you go.

There's a lot here.

There's just.. a lot.

Erik Tucker would know.

He touches every single stone.

After the earth is dug out, Erik runs it through a dry trammel to remove most of the dirt and concentrate the stones.

Next comes a wet trammel to clean them up a little bit more.

The rough stones are then spread out on a screen so Erik can pick out the stuff that looks good.

It's like fishing.

You never know what you're going to get.

This one has a window, which just pops like that.

Once the stones are sorted, Erik runs them through a cement mixer... just to scrub them up a little more.

Then the stones are graded for quality and color.

That's a terrific red.

That kind of stone will bring a lot of money per carat.

The copper inside this stone gives it a value of around $2,000.

But what Emily wants to know is how did it get there in the first place?

The interesting thing with sunstones is that we don't know if the copper went in when that crystal was forming or if maybe that copper got into the crystal at some later period.

JOHN: What's interesting about this stone is you'll see copper on this side, but if you turn it on the edge, it's clear.

EMILY: Wow.

This stone is pretty cool, because if the copper was diffusing after the crystal formed, we wouldn't expect that color to be concentrated in the center.

We'd expect it around the rim.

So maybe the copper's in there when the crystal's actually forming.

At this stage, we actually don't know.

It's a mystery.

Okay, let's tackle some of the misinformation.

When you hear that sunstones are only found in Oregon, that's mostly true.

I say "mostly true" because there are other flood basalt provinces around the world, and many of them have these labradorite crystals, but the point is that they don't have copper inside them, and it's the copper that makes Oregon sunstone really unique.

Oregon sunstones are also filled with mythic significance.

They're said to possess the power of the sun, endowing those who find them with prosperity, fearlessness, and wisdom.

In this remote part of south central Oregon, sunstones are also part of an ancient story.

I've heard a wounded warrior on his way back home to his family, his blood fell on the stones, and that's how they became red.

John Aldrich's ancestors come from the Bear River people of northern California.

He and his wife Debbie have been mining sunstones here at the Double Eagle since 2007.

You want to do some geology in the pit?

EMILY: Geologizing?

JOHN: This is BLM land.

We possess the mineral rights.

I've always had a curiosity about the geology, and I'm doing everything I can to help her with samples and stuff, so hopefully she can get some of the answers to questions I have myself.

EMILY: We're trying to understand how the copper actually got into those crystals... Oh, yeah!

but also when it happened.

This is potentially a sort of tuff.

And the minerals in this are different than the sunstones, and there's different dating methods we can use.

Something that we're working on right now is not only dating the lava flows that contain the sunstones, but we can actually date the sunstones themselves.

And ages that we're getting for the sunstones are younger than the lava flows, and that doesn't really make sense.

It's kind of funny that they're coming out younger than the flow.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

Conventional wisdom says chocolate chips are already in the dough before the cookies are baked.

If so, then the chips-- or in this case, the sunstones-- would need to be older than the lava flow.

And right now, that's backwards.

EMILY: You know how the crystals are so fractured?

Our best working hypothesis is that when the crystals were fractured, they're actually releasing some of the gas that we use to date, and it's giving us these younger ages.

We don't have a lot of dates, so this is very much sort of preliminary work, but one thing we'd really like to figure out is why those ages don't make sense.

Along with when and how copper gets into sunstones, Emily's also grappling with the question of why.

Copper shouldn't want to go into the mineral labradorite.

It's not something that we see really happening anywhere else in the world.

There's really no geologic environment where a metal like copper would, on its own, want to go into labradorite.

Can you see the small pockets in there?

Puzzling out sunstones' many mysteries will take Emily, well, who knows how long.

In fact, there's one right there.

EMILY: Yeah, look at that!

But she's not discouraged.

That one is like the size of my fist!

JOHN: Go ahead, just wiggle it.

They're usually like teeth.

EMILY: Just right out of the ground.

Gemstones are one of those things that, you know, every kid, that's kind of how you get interested in geology.

Look at that!

JOHN: Every now and then, we get lucky like this.

EMILY: To also be able to do that as part of research is pretty cool.

Oh, there it goes.

JOHN: Now you can see the rest of that pocket.

Got copper schiller in it.

You can take that one if you want.

I got a bunch more for you.

EMILY: Am I going to pass the weight limit getting out of here?

JOHN: Nah, you just won't bounce as much on the road going out.

That's fair, okay.

Okay.

[ John chuckles ] EMILY: There's so much to learn still.

So trying to understand how sunstones fit into the volcanic history of Oregon and the Columbia River Basalts and also just being basically on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how a gemstone forms is incredible and just a lot of fun.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The Wilson River is a beautiful waterway that runs through the Tillamook State Forest.

It's always been one of my favorites to go kayak and relax by, and photographer Brandon Swanson captures its moods perfectly.

[ birds chirping ] [ ♪♪♪ ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.

And to be part of the conversation about the outdoors and environment here in the Northwest, join us on Facebook.

[ birds chirping ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... And the following... and the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.