Author: Rich Wandschneider

An American Indian solution in Palestine?

When I am talking with non-Native audiences, and even when talking with Tribal friends, I sometimes say that I feel like I am body-surfing on a wave of pro-Indian sentiment in the country. I say that a big part of this is based on recognition of non-Native—read mostly white male—failures in dealing with the natural world. We haven’t been so smart about fire, fish, and water, and grope now, trying to play catch up with preemptive burns and reintroduction of beaver and bison.Read Rich’s Post →

The Three Sisters: Buffalo, Beaver, Salmon

The new Ken Burns documentary, the American Buffalo, follows the Euro-Americans across the continent as they kill buffalo, kill them mostly for profit—meat for the railroad workers; tongues which fetched high prices as culinary delicacies in the East; buffalo robes and hides that became important strong leather for the Industrial Revolution; and, finally, the remnant hooves that were gathered for glue and bones that were ground up for fertilizer. They also killed buffalo for sport and to impoverish Native tribes that depended on them.Read Rich’s Post →

The Nez Perce and Condors–and Alvin

On Friday night, Angela Sodenaa, Precious Lands Coordinator for the Nez Perce Tribe, gave a stirring talk at Wallowology in Joseph, “The Nimiipuu and the qúˀnes: Condor Recovery in Hells Canyon.” She recapped condor demise and recovery across the West, and the Tribe’s work in establishing the feasibility of condor return to the Snake River and tributaries, and advocacy work on behalf of that return.Read Rich’s Post →

A Brief List of Books on Nez Perce History and Culture

I’ve put together lists of books on the Nez Perce several times over the years, but new books keep coming out, sometimes new books with “old” information not covered in previous books. Two wonderful examples in the current list are those edited by Dennis Baird, Diane Mallickan, and W.R. Swagerty, Encounters with the People, and the Nez Perce Nation Divided. Both deal with original written and oral accounts of the people in crucial years leading up to the 1863 “Liar’s Treaty.”

I won’t pretend to be exhaustive, to do a serious and complete bibliography of books on the Nez Perce. We have a dozen more on our library shelves and/or in the sales shop downstairs! Maybe someday.Read Rich’s Post →

Edward S. Curtiss at Josephy!

The Josephy Library has been gifted an amazing set of books, Edward S. Curtiss’ THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN: THE COMPLETE REFERENCE EDITION.

This is a reprint of the original work done over 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century by the famous photographer. The publisher, CHRISTOPHER CARDOZO FINE ART, says it is “An affordable re-creation of Edward Curtis’ original masterpiece, the Complete Reference Edition is finished with a hardcover and printed on archival, acid-free Finch Opaque paper.”Read Rich’s Post →

“Conversations with the Sioux”

One of the pleasures of working in this Josephy Library is coming across material that is relevant today, and that might have been hidden from view for years or decades. So, on and off since Alvin Josephy’s death—almost 20 years ago!—I have poked at a story he told me about a project he had undertaken that did not result in a book.

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Indigenous Peoples’ Day

I and my peers grew up with Columbus Day, not a big holiday, unless you lived in an Italian neighborhood, but a middle of the run holiday that meant bank closures and a day off from school. There was little thinking about it—beyond hackneyed stereotypes of Columbus landing in the
“new world,” and thus “discovering” America.Read Rich’s Post →

Anti-Catholicism and American History

I’m not a Catholic, and not an anti-Catholic. And I won’t whitewash the many heinous crimes of boarding schools and deviant priests. But, given that, I see a strong bent of anti-Catholicism in our history. The result of a strong current of Anglo-American Protestant triumphalism.Read Rich’s Post →

Anne Richardson and General Howard

My friend Anne Richardson passed away a few years ago. Her husband, Dennis Nyback, brought a box of her books and notebooks to the Josephy Library about a year ago, and then he passed away.

I didn’t write a eulogy for Anne at the time of her passing, although I have told bits of her fascinating life story to a few people—the little bits that I know. Now I feel remiss at not having written something sooner, maybe written something before her passing, because of all the people I know, Anne Richardson knew more about General O.O. Howard than anyone else. Hers might have been a valuable voice to anyone trying to untangle the story of Howard and his role in the Nez Perce War.Read Rich’s Post →

Community Forest on the East Moraine

On Saturday, I made the hike up the west-side trail on the East Moraine of Wallowa Lake. This is a piece of land that the Wallowa Land Trust has worked very hard over many years to keep away from developers. Slowly—over the years, and with the support of the County Commissioners, the Oregon State Park, and Wallowa Resources, Land Trust director Kathleen Ackley and her staff have pulled together easements and ownership to get this marvelous piece of geological, geographical, and tribal heritage land into a “community partnership” of owners and minders.

It’s called the “East Moraine Community Forest,” and the development of its management plan, shepherded by the Land Trust, includes the Nez Perce Tribe. On Saturday, Nakia Williamson, Cultural Resources Program Director for the Tribe, accompanied about 20 of us on the moraine hike. Read Rich’s Post →

Nez Perce Teaching Boxes

A few years ago I tried to put a batch of books, photos, and maps into a package for local school teachers. It was an effort to get some information on Nez Perce history and culture into the curriculum, and into the minds of local students.

A few teachers used what I began to call “teaching boxes,” but the materials were all over the grade levels, a bit academic, and clunky. As it turns out, in recent years Oregon—and Washington—schools are required to teach Native American history and culture, and in our state it is all directed at fourth grade teachers and students.Read Rich’s Post →

Lillian Bounds Disney–Lapwai, Idaho

I recently had a fascinating discussion with Steven Branting, Institutional Historian at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. As a result, he sent this wonderful photo of Lillian Bounds Disney as a member of the Ft. Lapwai Rural High School basketball team. He says the following:

“Date: 1916-1917 is listed in some credits, but the ball seems to say “1914, when Lillian was a sophomore. Two other girls in the photo graduated in the class of 1917 with Lillian, who is standing on the far left.”Read Rich’s Post →

more on co-management with tribes

I received a response to my blog post about Deb Haaland and cooperative management of government lands. The writer was Roger Amerman, currently “USFS Native American Outreach and Recruitment Specialist” on the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests.

Roger is enrolled Choctaw, but married to a Nez Perce woman and living on the Nez Perce Reservation. He tells me that in his (Choctaw) culture, children are raised in the culture of the mother. Roger is dutifully raising their son a Nez Perce man.Read Rich’s Post →

The Biden-Haaland Power Duo

The Joe Biden and Deb Haaland team have done remarkable things in Indian Country. There have been the boarding schools investigation, the appointments of tribal figures to key government posts, the saving of Bears Ears, and then the Grand Canyon National Monument this week!

And–as we live tight against ancient Nez Perce lands, many managed by the US Forest Service, I thought I would reach back and remind you of this effort at joint management. Maybe it will come our way someday soon!Read Rich’s Post →

RFK and Tamkaliks

Yesterday, a few lines from Robert F. Kennedy’s March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas were broadcast on NPR. I immediately looked it up and read the entire speech. It’s a campaign speech, laced with some of RFK’s soft humor—”I was sick last year and I received a message from the Senate of the United States which said: ‘We hope you recover,’ and the vote was forty-two to forty.”Read Rich’s Post →

Water has its way

Tulare Lake in California was once America’s largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. Over decades, it had been completely drained and turned into extensive farmland, the waters that once fed it diverted in other directions for irrigation and city drinking.

Then California saw years of drought and over-tapping of groundwaters. Farmers drilled beneath old lake beds to capture ancient water. Scientists and ordinary Californians wondered about lands that were literally sinking, and at how the suffering Colorado River with its dams and lakes was going to be divided up to serve states and tribes.Read Rich’s Post →

Artists, teachers, and tribal elders

A couple of weeks ago I went with friends to an art opening for Judd Koehn at the Pendleton Arts Center. Judd is a retired art professor who taught for many years at Eastern Oregon University. Once, a long time ago, when we bought the building that became the Bookloft in Enterprise (and still is!), we donated all of the old heavy heating radiators to Judd and Eastern to be turned into molten metal and student art projects.Read Rich’s Post →

Changing the mascot name

In the late 1990s. a ruckus arose over the mascot at the Enterprise school They were called “savages,” and for years a copy of the old caricatured Cleveland Indian was painted at the center of the basketball court. Art teacher Gary Wishart had tried to dignify things with a painting of a regal looking Indian with headdress, but change was in the wind nationally. and there were enough local proponents of change to press the issue here.
One of the change proponents was Sam Miller, and Sam kept track of everything. Some time back he brought a box of materials into the library. It was a bit of a jumble, with duplicates of letters and letters to the editors, some outrageous posters distributed at the time, and even a ball cap with the old buck toothed Cleveland logo.
Over the past couple of weeks, Ella Coughlan has gone through the material, pulled aside duplicates, and indexed most things by date. There is some but not complete annotation, and none of the items have been scanned for digital distribution. But we thought we would send out this preliminary index to let you know what we are about, and to ask for suggestions for next steps.
Are there still schools out there in the throes of change?
Is anyone compiling a history of the whole renaming movement who could use this material?
We will appreciate your thoughts as you take a look at the spreadsheet linked below.
Thanks!

Indians and the Fourth of July

Maybe every holiday has its double. Christmas falls on or near the Winter Solstice, when Scandinavian pagans burned a yule log to symbolize the return of the sun, and pre-Christian Romans celebrated the sun’s return with a holiday honoring the God Saturn. That festival took place sometime between December 17th and 24th. Christians, who often had a hard time talking new converts into dropping old customs, appropriated the date of December 25 to celebrate the Nativity—the appropriation coming over 300 years after the birth of Jesus.Read Rich’s Post →