ABOUT
Cumann Curaí na gCumar | The Currach Community of the Confluences is a community of watercraft and language enthusiasts seeking to re-establish Irish cultural practices tied to outdoor spaces through engagement with the currach. Historically, before the so-called famine of the mid-19th century, many of our traditions were practiced outdoors at fairs and market days and during events, including booly, crossroad dances, pattern days, and meitheal. The famine did much to devastate and disrupt these events and their innate connections to seasons, cycles, and landscapes. At the same time, subsequent emigration severed our intrinsic relationship with our home island. This disconnect persists in the diaspora and has had devastating consequences for Indigenous communities and the environment worldwide in a larger settler-colonial context.
Accordingly, the Currach Community of the Confluences desires to re-establish connections to the land, water, and people of Ireland while building grounded relationships with the land, water, and people of the Portland region. This is vital to our vision of honoring our forebearers and their wisdom while encouraging people to develop deeper personal relationships with the earth. Through this engagement, we seek to acknowledge and heal the not-so-faded scars of colonization that utilized ecocide, land clearance and plantation, penal laws, and, not least, violence to achieve the displacement and subjugation of Ireland and its people for centuries. We also acknowledge and grieve that these same tactics were taken up by many of our forebears and used against Indigenous communities here in North America.
Therefore, we seek to learn the skills necessary to build, maintain, repair, and navigate curach while cultivating a greater command of the Irish language related to the curach and the environment in order to establish a practice that reveals more profound traditional knowledge through embodiment. We seek to develop further relationships with the many bodies of water in the Portland area, including the Columbia, Willamette, Clackamas, and Tualatin rivers, and the Indigenous people through whose lands these rivers flow in order to understand how best to support them. This relationship-building also extends to the nations of animals and plants that inhabit these waterways. In so doing, we aim to further draw attention to the work Indigenous communities and local organizations are engaged in to protect water quality and access to these waterways and to aid the systems of mutual support and solidarity already present concerning the sacred nature of water.
What is a currach? The curach (often anglicized currach or curragh) is a light watercraft indigenous to the island of Ireland with similar forms utilized around the island of Britain, likely from as far back as the Bronze Age. This versatile vessel consists of a hand-made wooden frame of oak or ash, covered in canvas that is hardened and water-proofed with oil-based paint. Older curacha were covered in hide and tarred. Each coastal region of Ireland has its own style, depending on its intended use, the body of water on which it traverses, and the weather conditions of its particular locale. This flat-bottomed vessel has no keel and sits very high on the water, and as such, it can manage open waters just as quickly as it can skim up shallow rivers. The oars of a curach are about 10 feet long and distinctively blade-less, which increases stability and water surface contact to more efficiently propel the boat.