I hope everyone saw President Biden’s passionate apology to Native people for the awful, almost 100-year, practice of boarding schools. They were another misguided attempt to deal with what became known as “the Indian problem.” Which might be translated as removing the original peoples from their lands. It couldn’t be solved with diseases, displacement, treaties and wars, so legislation and forced assimilation became the answer. And breaking the generational chain of passing language and culture from grandparents to parents to children to grandchildren was the boarding schools’ weapon.
Biden’s speech was terrific, but an Indian friend at the longhouse meal in Wallowa on Sunday reminded me that Deb Haaland is the architect of this and many other Biden era actions in Indian Country. Her steady hand has guided government appointments and government actions with Tribes. She hasn’t won every time, but, with her able advice, Biden can claim more Indian appointments, and more appointments at the highest levels, than any of his predecessors
There was a lot of real and collateral damage in the decades of boarding schools, and Native America is still living it. But the healing has begun. The Canadian boarding school scandal a few years ago—the discovery of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada—shocked and horrified Canadians and Americans across the border. Haaland immediately called for an examination of our boarding schools and locations of gravesites. She gave her investigators a year, and then went on a tour of the 53 sites identified. She wanted to meet survivors personally, and, importantly, the descendants of survivors.
Biden’s apology comes on the heels of news of salmon return to Oregon via the Klamath River. Four Klamath River dams were removed over the last few years, the latest this year, and salmon are “swimming freely” in the Klamath on the California side of the boarder, and at least one fish has already made its way into Oregon waters.
The California Yuroks, who have a contract to reseed hundreds of miles of land exposed by the free-flowing river, have also released giant California Condors—I think four of them—in their homeland. The Nez Perce Tribe has an ongoing study about the feasibility of condor release in Snake River country. My understanding is that the habitat looks fine; the worry is lead shot and lead fishing gear, which works the way up the food chain to scavenger condors. Thus far Oregon, unlike its California neighbor, has declined to ban lead. Lead shot is banned federally for water foul hunting. Maybe replacing lead will gain popularity, and we’ll see condors in Joseph Canyon (which, by the way, carried the Nez Perce name for condor).
Locally, Nez Perce fisheries is working on salmon and lamprey recovery. The Wallowa Land Trust is arranging and promoting spring root digging on public and private Wallowa lands. Our government and non-profit groups are including Nez Perce and other Plateau peoples in programs, on advisory committees and boards; and our small piece of Indian country is blessed with an increasing presence of Indians in our midst.
This weekend the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland sponsored a panel on language and culture, with language program specialist Jiselle Halfmoon from Umatilla, Milton “Jewie” Davis, a longtime language teacher and now Sahaptin traditional lands coordinator from the Joseph Band at Colville, and Jacy Sohappy, who works with traditional arts at Crow’s Shadow on the Umatilla Rez, and works also as a community coordinator at Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland.
Sometimes age is a blessing. I have lived long enough, and lived here long enough, to recognized a huge change in attitudes towards Native people. And what a treat that longhouse service was—the drumming and singing; more traditional foods, from Salmon to chokecherries, than I have ever seen at longhouse meals; and the dress of the drummers, dancers, and servers! There were beautiful ribbon shirts, embroidered dresses, basket hats and beaded moccasins and carrying bags. The voices were loud, the prayers in Nez Perce and English, and the smiles on Indian faces in this beautiful new longhouse on these ancient lands said good news in our corner of Indian Country.
# # #