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Indian Removal Act–and “Survival”

I highly recommend a free subscription to “Native News Online”—and a donation as well. Today’s juicy reminder, the anniversary of the Indian Removal Act. In 1830, the burgeoning United States sought to put all Native Americans east of the Mississippi River out of their traditional homes and into the Oklahoma Territory—on the other side of the famous river. (Remember too that the Oklahoma Territory was home to the Nez Perce of the Wallowa Valley for a few years, after a war that might have extinguished them. Remember that there were war survivors, and survivors too of Oklahoma, what the Indians called “the Hot Country.”)Read Rich’s Post →

The long Nez Perce road to Nespelem

Last weekend four of us from Wallowa County made the long highway drive to Nespelem, Washington for the annual Nez Perce root feast. After a service of drumming, singing and testimony, we sat for a huge feast of “first foods.” Wild foods from water and salmon through roots and plants to serviceberries and huckleberries was prepared by the women of the walwa ma, or Joseph Band of the Nez Perce Indians, and laid on tables until there was little room for our plates. Then we tasted each in turn, as they appeared in time and importance in indigenous lives for millennia.Read Rich’s Post →

Bloodlines: Nez Perce Art

ta ‘c halalaxp (Good Afternoon)

A special note to my blog friends that we have a very good and important Nez Perce Art Show opening next week.

“Bloodlines: Nez Perce Art”–refers to the continuity of Native culture. The artwork ranges from traditional weaving and beading to contemporary painting–and a new table-sized bronze from Doug Hyde. Phil Cash Cash, who recently curated the Indigenous Sasquatch show at the High Desert Museum in Bend, has original paintings. And ten additional artists from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lapwai, Idaho and the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon are booked for the show.

The exhibit is up until June 6, but get here early–the opening if you can make it–to purchase some fine Native art!

Saturday, April 26, noon–4:00 p.m.

“Bloodlines: Nez Perce Art,” opening reception. Smoked salmon will be served!

see you here!

We Will Always Have Been Against This

When tourists look at our wall display at the Josephy Center that tells a very brief story of the walwa ma, or Joseph, Band of the Nez. Perce Indians, they often shake their heads and say something like “It’s terrible what we did to Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.” Those who say this are mostly in their forties and older, and mostly white, and have read something of the Nez Perce War. Many go on to say that the boarding schools were terrible. Some continue, decrying the attitudes and actions of our government against Native Americans in detail. They’ve read about the killings of the Osage women, the stories of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, and Captain Jack and the Modoc War. Read Rich’s Post →

Tariffs—Native America forgotten again

Before passage of the sixteenth amendment and the establishment of the income tax in 1913, federal government funding came from tariffs. That is the narrative of the day. But, once again, we seem to have forgotten the place of Native America in our Euro-American history. How did Native America finance the US?Read Rich’s Post →

Greenland—We’ve wanted you for a long time!

Yesterday, Friday, March 28, President Trump reiterated his plan to “get” Greenland, “one way or another.” Vice President Vance, visiting a US base in Greenland—plans for a bigger, cultural visit with his wife were aborted after negative remarks by Greenlanders—reinforced the boss’s message, telling Denmark, Greenland’s mother country since an 1814 Treaty:

“Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. Read Rich’s Post →

VA Removes 22 Arizona Tribal Nation Flags from Its Hospital in Phoenix

I will not add, or take away, a word from this piece in “Native News Online” this morning by Neely Bardwell

On March 18, the flags of Arizona’s 22 tribal nations were removed from the Carl. T. Hayden VA Medical Center in central Phoenix and returned back to the Salt River-Pima Maricopa Indian Community. This has sparked outrage among the Tribes in Arizona.Read Rich’s Post →

Borders

The current border moving initiative in Oregon is only the latest in the historic record of border clashes, changes, and controversies. It has no real chance of success, but the issue has people talking—about land use planning, abortion, health care in general, sales tax, minimum wages, and more. When Mark Simmons, our former Oregon State Rep and onetime Speaker of the Oregon House, came to Wallowa County in the early days of the border moving movement, people talked about the traffic and sprawl on I-84 from the border to Boise, and asked about the flight of physicians, especially gynecologists, from the state. I don’t remember what he said about health care, but do remember him saying that we could maybe grandfather in some of Oregon’s land use laws.Read Rich’s Post →

Indians and Psychedelia

I got news of the new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum from two friends. The show is “Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s,” and, knowing my work with Indians and relationship to the late Alvin Josephy, they sent images of an exhibit text around a book he edited in 1961, The American Heritage Book of Indians. The book had images that were used by psychedelic artists of the 1960s; the text, according to exhibit curators, was “paternalistic” towards tribes and tribal people.

I’ll get to a small defense of Josephy in a minute, but first let me dwell in the 60s. I graduated high school in 1960, college in 1964. I was just early enough to skate by the Vietnam War, and early enough to discover and love early rock’n’roll and folk music before louder bands and music came on the scene. I remember the hubbub when Dylan went electric; I was probably one of those he upset.Read Rich’s Post →

Wisdom of Elders

I have been a little overwhelmed this week. First, remembering Alvin Josephy. His voice from Iwo Jima, 1945, on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition lit up my computer and cell phone screens with messages from across the country. I listened, played it for others, sent a notice out to blog followers… and then dipped back to my own memories of my times and my learnings from the man I still call my friend and mentor.Read Rich’s Post →

Alvin at Iwo

This morning a friend texted to say that Alvin Josephy was on public radio at 6:15 this morning, and that I might catch him at the 8:00 hour. It was a two-minute segment on Morning Edition, commemorating—“bringing to life”—the WW II battle for Iwo Jima.

I’m having a hard time moving past it. It was wonderful to hear Alvin’s voice again—still with a bit of a New York accent—and to hear the PBS commentator call it “keeping cool” in a time of “mortal danger.” Read Rich’s Post →

Gaza and Umatilla

My friend, Diane Josephy Peavey, has made several trips to Palestine over the last 20 years. She had it in mind years ago to write a book comparing the plight of the Palestinian Arabs (her hosts were most often Christian Arabs) to that of American Indians. It would have been a way to bring her father’s work on Native American history and culture together with her own. Alvin Josephy was of course my mentor and the namesake of the Josephy Center where I still work.Read Rich’s Post →

Palestinians and American Indians

Alvin Josephy’s been gone for twenty years now, but his words are still with us, many still ringing in my head. Alvin said in many ways that the Reservation System, and how it evolved with land takeovers in broken and revised treaties and with the Allotment Act, was brutal and unjust. But—he said—it allowed at least some Indian tribes to stay attached to some ancestral lands. In fact, I think he would be pleasantly surprised by tribal pushbacks on land and land usage in the last 20 years. He’d like the story of the Yuroks in California, using California law to extend land holdings, advocating for fish, plants, and condors. (Alvin wrote about Condors, but that’s another story.)

Today’s story is the news videos from Gaza, the pictures of seas of people on the road to their homeland in North Gaza, some in cars and pickups piled high, others with donkey pulled carts, still others pushing prams and pulling wagons while walking. Most are walking, one a small boy carrying a full-grown cat! We’re told that the sea of people might be 400,000, not all, to be sure, of the million and a half who once called North Gaza home, but a sizable chunk of them.Read Rich’s Post →

Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975—Richard Nixon and Alvin Josephy

For all his faults, and the sputtering end to his tenure as President, Joe Biden, with the help of his strong Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, has been a big and positive presence in Indian Country. In the last flurry of pardons and commutations, Biden sent Leonard Peltier home to serve out his days in home confinement, after over 50 years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. Peltier was convicted in the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1965. He admitted to being a member of AIM, the American Indian Movement, and to being present at the confrontation, but has always denied he did the shooting. Tribal and world leaders have long called for Peltier’s release; Biden did it.

The question now is how much of the work that Biden and Haaland have done in Indian Country will stand up—and how much of past legislation involving Tribal issues will survive.Read Rich’s Post →

Martin Luther King Day

In a brief essay in Sunday’s (January 19) Washington Post, Jonathan Eig, author of “King: A Life,” winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography, writes:

“We can begin by remembering that, until his death in 1968, King had never gained the approval of most White Americans. In 1966, even after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, a Gallup survey showed that 63 percent of Americans viewed him negatively. Read Rich’s Post →

The Serviceberry

A friend handed me a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s slight new book, The Serviceberry. I’d been meaning to get the book, but it had been backordered over Christmas, so I accepted the gift gladly, and asked how she’d liked it. “Nice, but unrealistic,” she said.

I read the book—maybe with this in mind. Copies arrived at the bookstore, and I gifted a copy to a friend, who thought it “delightful,” although she also said it was “depressing”—if we think about all of the ways we’ve “messed” with the world’s natural processes.Read Rich’s Post →