Longtime National Public Radio correspondent Nina Totenberg has a new book, Dinners with Ruth, about her long friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, she was introduced as one of three “founding mothers” of Public Radio. The others were Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer.
Read Rich’s Post →
Friends texted and emailed me this yesterday to tell me that Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik
Alaskan Native, had won election in her state for the short remainder of a congressional term. She’ll run again for a full term in the fall. Even the short term marks a win for the Democrats, for women, and for Natives. And I will add her name to the celebratory list of Native achievements and achievers that I seem to be assembling—Chuck Sams, head of the National Park Service; Jaime Pinkham at the Defense Department; Shelly Lowe at the National Endowment for the Humanities; Marilynn Malerba, Treasurer of the United States; and Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior.Read Rich’s Post →
A few years ago, I put together a few books, laminated some maps and photos, called it a “Nez Perce Teaching Box,” and offered it to local teachers. A few teachers—Jennifer Gibbs in Wallowa most prominently—used the materials in their classrooms, but there was no wave of support for my project.
But times are changing. Tamkaliks grows, tribal root gatherers come to the Wallowa, Nez Perce Fisheries returns Coho to the Lostine, and Native Deb Haaland takes the Department of the Interior where no one has taken it before.
From yesterday’s New York Times: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who was booed onstage at the Oscars in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando.”Read Rich’s Post →
“HARBOR SPRINGS, Mich. — The second stop on the Road to Healing tour by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) will visit the lands of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians in the northern part of the Michigan’s Lower Peninsula on Saturday, August 13, 2022.
“The Road to Healing is a year-long tour across the United States to provide survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system and their descendants an opportunity to share their experiences. The Road to Healing tour began at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla. on July 9, 2022.”
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I was in Portland a couple of weeks ago for a mini family reunion. My brother lives in Portland now, and my sister drove up from Sacramento. We were celebrating a granddaughter/niece going to Japan on a student exchange, and other, younger, grandchildren just for being who they are.
My siblings are all retired, but I am still working. Having worked in non-profits most of my life, with a 12-year hiatus running a bookstore that didn’t bring much profit, I work because I have to. But I also work because I want to, because I learn something new every day, and because my work with Native Americans is amazingly rewarding.Read Rich’s Post →
Years ago, when I knew much less of the Indian story in the Pacific Northwest, I had an informal Nez Perce history class here at the Josephy Center. A dozen of us were on the balcony one day when Tamastslikt director Bobbie Conner and her mother came in the door. I shouted down that we were talking about the Stephens Treaties of 1855. Bobbie shouted back that any discussion of Indian treaties had to begin with the Doctrine of Discovery.Read Rich’s Post →
The Canadian boarding school disclosures brought up old stories that had been neglected by governments and church hierarchies for decades. The stories are remembered well by the targets of religious coercion and victims of sexual and physical abuse who are with us still. The Pope came to Canada to apologize to them.
How does an apology compensate for decades—almost 200 years—of forced conversions, physical and sexual abuse, and loss of languages, cultures, and lives that Catholicism brought to Native North America? (And if we consider South America, make that 500 years!)Read Rich’s Post →
I’m old enough to start measuring time in decades—Tamkaliks, the annual powwow and celebration on the Nez Perce Homeland grounds out of the town of Wallowa, just completed its third.
It was, in a word, stunning. There were over 150 dancers, and their regalia seemed bolder and sometimes more extravagant this year. There were 15 drums! My recollections are 10 drums, maybe 12. Even the number of drummers on a given drum seemed larger—six and seven drummers young and old reaching to get their sticks on the drum. The dance floor at the arbor was thick with old and young; it took long songs to get everyone onto and off the floor.Read Rich’s Post →
In the new Smithsonian Magazine: “South to the Promised Land,” the “other” Underground Railroad, the one that went overland and across the Rio Grande to Mexico.
Mexico won its independence in 1821. And, fatefully, soon opened its doors to Anglo-American settlers in the northern frontier state of Texas. Some mixed American families—Whites who had freed and sometimes married their slaves—came to the remote lands to ranch, and became stops on that railroad. But most of the new settlers brought slaves, which resulted in confrontations with the Mexican government. In 1824, Mexico banned the importation of slaves. Anglo settlers called for a revolution, and in 1836 won independence from Mexico and wrote slavery into its constitution. The Alamo wasn’t all about freedom, especially for slaves and former slaves.Read Rich’s Post →
My senior year of college I had a roommate, a graduate student in physics, who belonged to a small Christian denomination that held that musical instruments should not be played in church. No guitars or tambourines, no pianos or organs. These things were not mentioned in the New Testament.Read Rich’s Post →
As President Biden adds to his growing list of significant Native American appointments across the Cabinet and in Executive Branch positions, Deb Haaland, his first major Indian appointment, as Secretary of Interior, looms large and iconic as the head of the team. And its cheerleader extraordinaire. Two weeks ago she was at Dworshak Dam in Idaho, lauding a deal to give control of a steelhead and salmon hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe. Yesterday she posted on Instagram, noting the transfer of 1,000 acres of ancestral homeland in the Tully Valley in Central New York returned to the Onondaga Nation.
Haaland leads the band of Native leaders appointed by President Biden. This week’s blockbuster appointment was Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba, who is chief of the Mohegan Tribe, as Treasurer of the United States. Chief Malerba is the first ever Native American to hold this position. The Treasurer directly oversees the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and Fort Knox. And her signature will soon be on the country’s currency!
Out in the countryside, like places in rural Idaho and Oregon, Tribal leaders are contributing to federal, state and local policy and programs. Here we see it in land acquisitions, water policy, and revived cultural practices. The Nez Perce Tribe has made purchases and received donated lands in Wallowa County, and the 320 acre Wallowa Nez Perce Homeland site near the town of Wallowa boasts a wildlife and fish enhancing “side channel” designed and built under the auspices of Nez Perce Tribal Fisheries.
On the other side of the Cascades, the Fish and Wildlife Commission recently agreed to a “framework agreement” with the Coquille Indian Tribe, giving it more power in fish and wildlife management throughout a five-county area of Southwest Oregon. In Northern California, the Yuroks are acquiring land in huge chunks in the Klamath watershed, managing it for wildlife, fish, vegetation and education.
These things—and Haaland’s leading, cheerleading, and her immediate huge steps to investigate the terrible Indian Boarding School chapter in our history—all warm my heart, and, as far as I can tell, are applauded by a wide swath of Americans of different political affiliations.
Closer to me personally, I was lucky to see an old high school friend this weekend and learn a little of his Indian story. Our Oceanside, California class of 1960 missed the 60th reunion due to Covid, so someone decided to throw a combined 80th birthday party (we’ve mostly turned 80 or are about to). One of our number, a fine high school athlete we all thought part Indian, showed up for the party—he’d missed the 50th so I had not had a chance to talk with him since my own work became heavily focused on Indian affairs. And he talked—telling us that an aunt was digging into ancestral Native roots, that his ties included Native cousins among our classmates we thought “Mexican,” and that his Native family passed down one of the street names in our town. Thoughts that had remained hidden for most of his 80 years.
I told him that when I went back to the fiftieth reunion, I had met Gordon Johnson, enrolled on the Pala Reservation and the author of a collection of newspaper essays called Fast Cars and Fry Bread: Reports from the Rez. A California friend had sent me the book, which intertwines Mexican and Indian stories and peoples in Southern California. I asked Gordon what it was like growing up Indian in the 40s and 50s. “If you were light,” he said, “you passed as ‘white’; if you were dark, you said you were Mexican. Indians were at the bottom of the heap.”
It would have been nice to know that history and the culture and stories of our Native classmates and the many Indian tribes scattered across Southern California when we were in school. Would we have applauded it? Or were we caught in the embrace of a country still trying to get rid of its Native population one way and another, mostly through “assimilation” and the “termination” of Tribes in those Eisenhower years?
Indians today, Natives, Indigenous Americans are speaking up—and the rest of us are listening. To Deb Haaland and National Parks Chief Chuck Sams, to National Endowment for the Arts Director, Shelly Lowe, and we are listening to old friends and classmates who can finally tell their own stories with pride.
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Things are moving so quickly in Indian Country that it is hard to keep up. But I thought that anyone interested in this blog will be especially interested in Interior Secretary Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, and Jaime Pinkham of the Nez Perce Tribe, came together at Dworshak Dam to celebrate the transferral of the fish hatchery, which was constructed in 1969, and has been co-managed by the tribe for the past 18 years, to the Nez Perce Tribe.Read Rich’s Post →
In today’s paper I read that President Biden reversed Trump yet again, effectively returning to a 2014 policy that forbade the use of antipersonnel landmines in all but the defense of South Korea. It seems that a lot of what Biden does reverses previous government policy. And nowhere as much—or as effectively—as with Indian affairs, where the reversals overturn decades and even centuries of American government policies.Read Rich’s Post →
With all of the “stuff” going on in the world—war in Ukraine, famine in Somalia, floods, heat waves, climate change and inflation everywhere—it’s easy to overlook the work at the US Department of the Interior. And to overlook its director, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland.Read Rich’s Post →
When I was young in a small town in northern Minnesota, hobos stayed in the stockyard by the railway tracks not far from our house. We—a small group of 6-and-7-year-old urchins, would throw rocks on the tin roofs of the stockyard sheds, and, seeing or not seeing a face peer around a corner, we would run, with just enough titillating fear to bring us back another day.Read Rich’s Post →
“Sports is a refuge but not a hiding place from the world of violence.”
Golden State Warriors basketball coach Steve Kerr said that in an impassioned press conference right after the Uvalde shootings. Or someone retrieved an old quote to go along with his new press conference tirade about gun violence and Congressional inaction.
It doesn’t matter when he said it. The knowledge that Steve Kerr’s father, who in 1984 was the President of the American University in Beirut, was killed by a gunman, gives him creds beyond his basketball celebrity.Read Rich’s Post →
Men! And, yes mostly white men of Anglo descent, the ones who took Indian lands away with treaties and wars, lies, legislation, disease, and depleting food stocks, who brought the slaves and wrote the Constitution and engaged in a Civil War over Black men and women as property—commodities to be bought and sold.
These white men manned the pulpits and kept women quiet and hung some of them as witches. (No wonder some women and girls “captured’ by Indians refused negotiated releases.) They set our nation on its course.Read Rich’s Post →
Three years ago, we had a summer exhibit featuring Nez Perce music, from drummers and dancers of long ago to the “Nezpercians” and “Lollypop Six” jazz and dance bands of the early and mid-twentieth century. We gave a nod in that exhibit to a young Nez Perce jazz singer named Julia Keefe.
Julia wasn’t done with music and with her Native past. With a grant in hand, Keefe and co-leader, Delbert Anderson of the Dine Tribe of the Navajo Nation, set out to build an all-indigenous big band. They worried that they could find enough talent and interest among indigenous musicians, but, in the end, according to Tom Bance of NPR’s Northwest News Network”:
“Keefe and Anderson said they could have assembled two all-Native big bands with the talent that came out of the woodwork. The selected participants had connections to Native peoples across the Americas, including Alaska, Hawaii, eastern Canada, the U.S. Southwest, the Great Plains and Caribbean.”Read Rich’s Post →
What do we make of it, the long and sickening stories of abuse of Indian children in boarding schools in Canada and our own country? How can men—mostly men, but some women too—have done these things to children?
My friends raised in California Catholic schools laugh now about a nun who liked to rap knuckles with a yardstick, but even that, the hitting of small children by a grown woman pledged to teach them, seems to reflect more on her perverse personality or the crazy institution that had aligned with it than it does on the children.
Sure, there were and are trouble-making children, kids who bring sad stories from sad homes to school with them every day, and work out their home problems by being nasty to other students or contentious with teacher nuns—or any teachers. And there are kids with “just mean” in them that we struggle to understand. But—as we often say—who and where is the adult?
These men—and some women—worked (work?) for the government and for churches. We hear about the Catholics, but other churches ran schools on and near reservations. In fact, in what my mentor, the historian Alvin Josephy, says is the largest breech of the separation of church and state in US history, President Grant set out to remove corrupt Indian agents, who supervised reservations, and “replace them with Christian missionaries, whom he deemed morally superior.” In his “Peace Policy” of 1868, he took administration of the reservations from the War Department and gave it to the churches.
The missionaries proved no more moral as a group than had the government officials they replaced. Or than decades of adult Boy Scout leaders have proven to be. On November 16, 2020, the National BSA disclosed in their bankruptcy filings that over 92,000 former Scouts had reported sexual abuse by members of the organization. Recent stories from the Southern Baptist Convention admit similar sins among their clergy.
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Large groups of children in physical and/or social isolation attract do-gooders—and attract those, consciously or unconsciously intent on cruelty. Some, probably tied to their own violent pasts, or carrying mental problems of one sort and another, and others, in the worst cases, intentionally engaging in the school or church or youth group in order to groom children for their sexual pleasure.
What’s the lesson in this? One is that silence aids and abets, another that sins are reiterated in generations. Silence is more nuanced than one word. Silence is lack of sound, lack of voice, but it is also the willful and fear-induced snuffing out of voices and messages. It can also be banal, like the good German burghers who did not smell the crematoriums, like the child that I was who did not notice the lack of Indians from the nearby White Earth Reservation in my Minnesota school.
We talk now of generational PTSD. Generational misbehavior is the other side of PTSD, the perpetrating rather than suffering side of it—although they are undoubtedly side by side in the real world. The lessons are that violence can beget violence, and that sexual abuse can pass through generations.
The first step in resolution is to know the subject. And we should have known! Books and stories of these boarding school tragedies have been here all along. Years ago, the late Canadian Ojibwe writer, Richard Wagamese, told the Canadian boarding school story in the heart-wrenching novel, Indian Horse. They even made a well-received movie with the same title.
Walter Littlemoon was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1942, the same year I was born in nearby Minnesota. He was taken from his parents into a boarding school when he was five, and, after a life of suffering, told the story in a video, “The Thick Dark Fog.” He’d lived that fog of remembrance for almost 60 years when he began to unburden himself. When I showed the video trailer to college students six or eight years ago, they were outraged. (Google it; it’s still there.)
The “evidence” has been there for us to see and read for years. It took time—and graves found with “new” technology revealing Canada’s sins, to lay open these old sins. New technology sometimes excites us, and makes things more real. But the rising consciousness over the past 20 or 30 years of and by Native Americans—Wagamese and Littlemoon are of course part of this—is probably more critical.
And Deb Haaland, our first Native Secretary of the Interior, is rising to the occasion like a phoenix, appointing study groups, giving press conferences, and visiting the sites of child boarding school graves in America.
Bright lights are the best antidote to secret and nefarious deeds. Now we, the people, must make sure that they stay bright and focused. We need contrition, humility, and, when possible, reparations. We need justice for perpetrators. Counselling, mental health, and compassion yes, but we need the words from those still with us, the secret reports from churches and scout troops. Victims and descendants of victims need healing—and so do the perpetrators and the institutions which enabled them.
(Photo: Chemawa Indian School, 1887)