Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim receives Honorary President’s Medal, at at the Thaden Pavilion in Ashland on August 14, 2019. It was a beautiful day!
“Grandma Aggie became the 2019 recipient of the President’s Medal – SOU’s most prestigious tribute for service to the university and community, and for demonstrating compassion, integrity, and courage. It’s an award that was established in 1984, and whose previous recipients are a who’s who of our region’s civic leadership: devoted community advocates such as Bill Thorndike, Jr., Paul Nicholson, Wanda and Sherm Olsrud, Florence and William Schneider, Sen. Mark Hatfield and last year’s posthumous awardee, longtime Jefferson Public Radio volunteer Steve Nelson.
Grandma Aggie has earned her spot among those previous President’s Medal recipients by tirelessly advocating for causes at the heart of her personal, cultural and spiritual beliefs.
She has been a champion of the environment – particularly these lands where her people have walked for centuries – as a founding member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers and longtime member of the Cultural Heritage and Sacred Lands Committee of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz.” read more at https://sou.edu/president/grandma-aggie-today-is-our-gift/
Grandma Aggie speaks on “Today is our gift”
There will be a community celebration for Grandmother Agnes’s 95th Birthday on September 11th at Ti’lomikh Falls, to honor her with songs, stories, and tributes. Donations are requested for the Grandmother’s Empowerment Project, a local noprofit that helps pay Grandmother Agnes’s living expenses. For more information, email to julie@julienorman.com.
“I am a voice for the voiceless. We are all speaking to an unseen world, speaking for our Mother Earth, trying to stop our spiritual blindness. We speak for the the animal kingdom, for those in the waters, for the four-leggeds and the one leggeds (the trees), the Bengal tiger, the camel, the elephant and the creepy-crawlers. I pray that our Creator hear us. The creatures have a right to be.”
Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim has made a powerful world-wide imprint as a spiritual leader. At 95 years of age, she has been honored as a Living Treasure by the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz and as a Living Cultural Legend by the Oregon Council of the Arts. She provides a profound connection to the ancient peoples that have lived in Southern Oregon. There are six Chieftans in her lineage. While living now in Grants Pass, she serves as a Spiritual Elder to the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, based outside of Newport, Oregon.
Grandmother Agnes is the daughter of Chief George Harney, the first elected Chief of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz and the Takelma Indians that lived in the Table Rock and Rogue River for twenty-two thousand years. In her native language, she is Taowywee, which means Morning Star, and Naibigwan, meaning Dragonfly or “Transformer”. Grandmother Agnes’ spiritual journey began at the age of forty-five, when she was dying of cancer. She prayed to be allowed to live, and serve her family. Yet, she felt unqualified to embrace the spiritual path she was being called to, recalling that it was done, after much resistance, “by dying to self.”
Taowywee carries the legacy of her people, which has includes the sorrow of massacres during the invasion of Takelma territories in Southern Oregon, destroying a culture that had survived for thousands of years. Miners disturbed riparian zones with debris that choked Oregon rivers and the abundant freshwater fish, with disregard for the land and all living things. The miners unraveled nature’s ways and disrespected native tribal practices that had been in place for thousands of years.
Known as the Keeper of the Salmon, Grandmother Agnes and her late husband began to visit and encourage creation of the ancient Salmon Ceremony of their people in 1982, after it had been lost for 140 years. Since that time, the salmon runs in the Rogue Valley have increased dramatically, as if the ancestors are watching and listening to the ceremonial prayers. National Geographic and Martha Stewart have given profile to the significance of the Salmon Ceremony.
Grandmother Agnes says: “I am trying to teach reciprocity. Ritual and ceremony create the energy of reciprocity.”
At the age of fifty, Grandmother Agnes, co-founded Konanway Nika Tillicum (All My Relations) Youth Academy, a summer program of protocol, study and theater that teaches confidence and as well as providing understanding of Native culture. She is still a mentor in that program.
In 2004, Grandmother Agnes was chosen to chair the International Council of the Thirteen Grandmothers: a circle of Native women representing various parts of the world. She has travelled internationally for many years and has been on stage with the Dalai Lama twice when he has visited the United States and once in Nepal. She has travelled to the East Coast, Australia, Katmandu, Washington, Spain, the Mediterranean, to Asia, New Zealand, and the Amazon, connecting with Indigenous communities and spreading a message of peace, balance and respect for Mother Earth and all her creatures.
She speaks passionately about the sacredness of water in our lives, as well as spiritual blindness. She represents world-wide concerns about the guardianship and preservation of water quality and access as human rights and about care for the environment through water protection. We especially see the struggle for respect of water in North Dakota today.
Grandmother Agnes is the mother of six children, eighteen grandchildren, twenty –eight grandchildren and fourteen fifth generation grandchildren. Her role has been that of an educator, a keeper of traditional ways and a strong force in tribal leadership. Her audio book with Blackstone Press is called “Wake Up the World!” as is a book of transcribed interviews by the same name. Her strong voice will draw you in and inspire you to dig deep for the Sacred within.
See:
“Grandma Says: ‘Wake Up World!’ The Wisdom, Wit, Advice, and Stories of Grandma Aggie” By: Agnes Baker Pilgrim; Executive producer: Jason R. Couch. Paperback
Available at: www.downpour.com and www.blackstonelibrary.com
Grandmothers Counsel the World by Carol Schaefer; Forward by Winona LaDuke, Trumpeter Books, Shambala Publications, 2006
http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/who-we-are/grandmother-agnes-baker-pilgrim
http://www.agnesbakerpilgrim.org
“Aggie Pilgrim, 13 Indigenous Grandmothers”, 3:10 min., 673 views as of 5/15/09
June 20, 2008
“Talks about growing up in Oregon, cooking, fishing preparing foods. www.slowfoodwaltz.blogspot.com Grandma speaks at the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration workshop”
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“13 Indigenous Grandmothers: Aggie Pilgrim, Takelma Elder”, 3:51 min., 323 views as of 5/15/09
June 20, 2008
“Grandma speaks at the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration workshop”
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“Grandma Aggie and the Water,” 5:52 min., by templedoor
speaking at the Peace Village at Jackson Wellsprings, 2008, video by LB Johnson
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“Agnes Pilgrim”, 9:47 min., 493 views by 5/15/09
Interview on September 11, 2008 by Scott Walter, Focus on Table Rocks, with Leah Schrodt.
“Agnes Baker-Pilgrim is a member of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. Grandma Aggie, as many know her, lives in southern Oregon and is the eldest living Takelma. This interview was conducted in April of 2006. Later that same year, Scott Walter was allowed to visit with his camera during the Sacred Salmon Ceremony held on the Applegate River. Agnes
Baker-Pilgrim along with the other Grandmothers are doing much needed work on the Planet. There is a best-selling book… GRANDMOTHERS COUNSEL THE WORLD that details the efforts of the Women Elders. There is a documentary feature film in progress that tells the story of the 13 Grandmothers and their work titled FOR THE NEXT 7 GENERATIONS.
The Council was formed by Jeanne Prevatt, Ph.D., who serves as Director of the Center for Sacred Studies in California. The Grandmothers first met in Upstate New York 2004 at the Global Women’s Gathering.
More info… www.agnesbakerpilgrim.org”
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“Agnes Baker-Pilgrim”, 9:07 min., 260 views as of 5/19/09
Interviewed on August 11, 2007 by Scott Walter, submitted by Fred Jenning Rogers.
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“Mt Ashland Blessing 0001”, 6:42 min., 49 views as of 5/15/09
Blessing Mount Ashland, April 16, 2008
“A beautiful day on Mt. Ashland,OR. One of Mother Earth’s 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, Agnes Baker Pilgrim giving a prayer for the waters of the earth. Flute music by Gentle Thunder (Cree). January 16, 2009”
