by Rich Wandschneider | Jan 6, 2021 | David McCullough, Ibram X. Kendi, Indian Horse, James Baldwin, Jill Lepore, Kent Nerburn, Louise Erdrich. Turtle Mountain Reservation, Nez Perce, Night Watchman, Richard Wagamese, These Truths
Turning the page is a common metaphor for beginning a new year—often implying that we are leaving what was unpleasant in the last year behind. There was plenty of unpleasant in 2020, but some good things happened too, sometimes in spite of or even as a result of the...
by Rich Wandschneider | Dec 21, 2020 | assimilation, Deb Haaland, Department of Interior, Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Momaday, Philip Deloria, Poet laureate, Silko, termination policy
Deb Haaland, President-elect Biden’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of the Interior, is a 35th generation New Mexican who is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna. She will be the first enrolled member of an American Indian Nation to serve as a Cabinet...
by Rich Wandschneider | Nov 30, 2020 | epidemic disease, First thanksgiving, Nez Perce, Robin Kimmerer, Salmon people, Shannon Wheeler, smallpox, Snake River dams, Sweetgrass
Several people forwarded me a link to “Salmon People: A tribe’s decades-long fight to take down the Lower Snake River dams and restore a way of life,” a fine article on the lower Snake River dams by Linda Mapes, published in the Seattle Times on Sunday, November 29....
by Rich Wandschneider | Nov 21, 2020 | 1855 Great, 1863 treaty, Chief Joseph, General Howard, Grace Bartlett, Nez Perce, Nez Perce treaty, President Grant, Wallowa
I have been fascinated by President Grant’s proposed “Reservation for the Roaming Nez Perce Indians of the Wallowa Valley” since I saw the map of it in Grace Bartlett’s Wallowa Country: 1867-1877 years ago. I thought that if those Nez Perce had just had the...
by Rich Wandschneider | Nov 9, 2020 | assimilation, Geronimo, Indian wars, Indians in unexpected places, modernism, Philip Deloria, primitivism
I’ve just finished reading Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, an encyclopedic look at Indians and sports, technology, music, and the movies in the early years of the twentieth century. It was a time, Deloria says, of “paradox and opportunity,” when Indians...
