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Alvin Josephy, Custer, the Indian Story—and Vietnam

On Thursday night we watched a “rough cut” version of a documentary chronicling Alvin Josephy’s career as a historian of and advocate for Indians. Sean Cassidy, retired from Lewis-Clark State College, introduced the film, which he and fellow LC professor Patricia Keith put together in the early 2000s.

The late Robert Utley, a historian who had his disagreements with Alvin, is one of the featured interviews. Utley grudgingly acknowledges Josephy’s contributions to the field of Indian History in America—in Utley’s eyes, Josephy gradually moves from being a journalist to a real historian—and says that Alvin’s 1971 piece on Custer in Life Magazine was more political than historical.

And it was—political and historical. It was political in the best sense of that word. First, it appeared in Life Magazine, founded, along with Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, by Henry Luce. Luce had been Alvin’s boss at Time for a decade, and the editor of this 1971 edition of Life Read The Article

Indigenous Continent: The Big Picture and small mistakes

I just finished reading Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. I’d previously read Lakota America, and have his book on the Comanche Empire on my shelf. In Lakota America, he argues that in 1776 there were two emerging nations in North America: The Lakota were moving out of the Great Lakes region and advancing towards the Plains, where they would become dominant. The new American nation was scrambling to secure the eastern seaboard, fight off British, French, Spanish, and Native contenders, and move at its own pace across the continent. Read The Article

Vanishing Indians and Wounded Knee

There’s a new history book that is rattling across the best seller lists. It’s a collection of essays called Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past. There are 20 chapters on everything from “American Exceptionalism” to the “New Deal” and the “Southern Strategy.” The third chapter is “Vanishing Indians.” Read The Article

Senator Abourezk, Arabs, and American Indians

We just lost a good man who is probably now unknown to most Americans—although the nation’s news frequently talks about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which he was instrumental in steering into law in 1978. The New York Times announced his passing:

“James Abourezk, who was elected by South Dakotans as the first Arab American senator, and who used his prominence to support the causes of Palestinians and Native Americans while also pushing for friendlier relations with Cuba and Iran, died on Friday, his 92nd birthday, at his home in Sioux Falls, S.D.” Read The Article

Trains and Natives

There was a short interview on NPR this morning about a new book about Black women and trains. I didn’t catch much of it, but the book was written by a scholar, and she talked about the importance of trains as both a part of and a symbol of the country’s Westward movement. She had stories of African-Americans moving north and west with the Great Migration, and reminded that women were part of it all. They put up with racism, with various measures of sexism added on. Sometimes they masqueraded as men to get jobs on the railroads. Read The Article

The Relentless Pursuit of Umatilla Lands

In 1855, at the treaty negotiations in Walla Walla, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples were left a reservation of 245,699 acres, and the ability to hunt, fish, and gather in “usual and accustomed places” off the reservation lands. Over a century of relentless pressure by white settlers and the United States Government reduced the reservation to 85,322 acres. With some restorations, it is now 172,000 acres, but nearly half of the land is white-owned! Read The Article

The Game

Last night I went to two ball games in La Grande. The Eastern Oregon women’s and men’s teams handily beat the teams from Corban University in Salem, Oregon.

I went because I love to watch games, not the professional contests of huge and brilliant athletes, but the games of high school and college students playing to win, playing to feel the flush of a 3-pointer going down, an intercepted pass, a single to right in the bottom of the ninth. And, maybe, with a small shred of a dream that it will continue, that I can take what I’m experiencing now to a next level—that I can do this forever. Read The Article

Earthquakes and Refugees

One. Earthquakes:
Monday’s giant earthquake in Turkey has me thinking back to the time when I was in Turkey. And to a six-week stint building “houses”—4×5 meter A-frame buildings without electricity or plumbing, in villages without electricity or plumbing—in the wake of a 1966 earthquake well to the north and east of the current quakes. It was rougher, less populated, and distinctly rural country. I can still see the terror in the village women’s eyes as they ran from makeshift covered kitchens when a small after-tremor hit. I was a 23-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer on the greatest adventure of my life. Read The Article

1871 in Northeast Oregon

That’s the year of the first white settlers—and the year that tiwi ‘ teqis (Chief Old Joseph) passed away. A few years before that, tiwi’teqis had seen the surveyors’ monuments on the Oregon-Washington line, and had put up his own monuments to show white settlers a demarcation line. “Joseph’s Deadline,” it was called. His son, Young Joseph, had warned A.C. Smith not to build his toll bridge across the Minam River—a bridge that would allow settlers an easier approach to the Wallowa Country as it crossed his father’s deadline. Read The Article

Martin Luther King Day and Indigenous America

Tomorrow, Monday, is Martin Luther King Day, and I’ve just begun reading Pekka Hamalainen’s new book, Indigenous Continent. It strikes me already that King’s dreams and the Indigenous philosophy as described by Hamalainen share underlying themes: unity, harmony, responsibility, and reciprocity.

The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote yesterday, not of the famous 1963 “I have a dream” speech, but of “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” delivered on Christmas Eve, 1967, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King served as co-pastor. Read The Article

Native Languages

President Biden continued his strong support for Native American causes and cultures this week when he signed two bills into law supporting language revitalization and education. The bills were authored by Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who, as chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, listens closely to the Indigenous community in Hawaii. (We on the mainland sometimes forget that Native Hawaiians too were pushed aside by invading Euro-Americans, but a friend in Hawaii regularly sends me word of actions and programs by Natives there that mirror the concerns of our Plateau Tribal neighbors here.) Read The Article

December 2022

How could my 80th year have been so good when the world went reeling with craziness and self-destruction? Do I need to list the events? The famines, droughts, floods, fires– volcanoes! And then, in the words of that old Kingston Trio song from the 50s, the human-caused tragedies.

“They’re rioting in Africa, there’s strife in Iran/ What nature doesn’t do to us/ Will be done by our fellow man.”  Read The Article

Women of Iran 2

I have great memories of stern-looking, uniformed women guiding traffic at the center of Tehran’s busiest intersections on my month-long visit in 1968—they were human traffic signals. And fond memories too of beautiful, scantily clad Iranian women with their handsome and strikingly dressed young paramours in the bowling alley next to Tehran’s Hilton Hotel. Read The Article

Native Revival

Yesterday I wrote about the land we live on and with, about a recent journey to Portland from home, and the home-ground itself. I used “spectacular” and might have used “stunning” to describe the Nez Perce Homeland I am privileged to live on. Today it’s a gray sky, and yesterday’s skiff of new snow is evaporating and freezing, as snow does. But the mountains are still there, beyond the gray, wispy with their white snow and yellow-orange larch trees hidden—but there nonetheless. Read The Article

Spectacular!

It was—and is—spectacular

On Wednesday before Thanksgiving I rode with friends from Joseph to Portland. I sat in the back seat and spent time just looking. Leaving the Wallowa Valley along the Wallowa River is always a treat; the canyon always changes with weather and seasons. And then emerging out of it and into the Grande Ronde Valley, with rolling fields and patches of timber. Up into the Blue Mountains on the Tollgate road, where a big winter snowpack is promised by the Highway Department’s high orange stakes that will soon be keeping snowplows on the road. Read The Article

New old news on treaties

It’s holiday time, Thanksgiving and I am in Oregon City at my son’s place, reading the morning news on my computer. The house is quiet with people sleeping off yesterday’s meal and working from home on their computers. I got up early and read for an hour in a book that hurts while I read it, The Oppermanns, a novel by a refugee German Jew published in 1934. The New York Times suggested in its review at the time that the world should be reading this fictional account of what happened in Germany in the years 1930-33. “Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.” Read The Article

Indians’ turn

There is much worrying and gnashing of teeth at today’s election. I am tired of the daily solicitations for money from my liberal allies—it seems that once you have given to one political person or cause the money seekers from that edge of politics find you and torment you with requests for more. I am sure my conservative friends get the same treatment. Yet, the amounts of money raised by all sides in the current election cycle means that it works, no matter how offensive many of us at our far ends of the money-raising lines find it. Read The Article

Who is Elouise Cobell?

My friend Betsy Marston of “Writers on the Range” just wrote a wonderful tribute to Elouise Cobell.

Elouise Cobell was, I am ashamed to say, a new name to me. Maybe I had heard it—I was vaguely aware of the lawsuit that consumed her working life. But I had not remembered it. And now Betsy tells us that Montana will celebrate “Elouise Cobell Day” on November 5. Read The Article