The move to strip Native Americans of their birthright citizenship has become quiet as the administration carries on campaigns to punish black and brown people of other places in other ways. The Indian issue seems to have gone away or never been—as Trump and Musk move on quickly to other people of color in myriad ways:Read Rich’s Post →
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 →
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.
I remember exactly where I was when I got the news of John F. Kennedy’s death, riding my bike onto campus as Dr. Dennis Strong, my sometime Western Civilization prof, cried into the air that “they’ve killed the president, they’ve killed the president.” At least two people from our campus—UC, Riverside—dropped out of school to join the Peace Corps. That, they said, was all that they could think of doing to deal with the President’s death; Kennedy had created the Peace Corps.
I hung on in Riverside, getting in one more rugby season and gaining admission to graduate school at Northwestern University in that spring of 1964. I marched in the graduation line, house sat for a professor that summer, and took my first ever airplane ride that fall to Chicago, and then a bus to Evanston, Illinois and the Northwestern campus.
It didn’t fit me. Academia seemed stifling, and Vietnam was poking its head into American lives. Add to that my best friend from high school had spent Freedom Summer registering voters in Mississippi and was already off teaching in East Africa. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant didn’t seem relevant, and I joined the Peace Corps and spent most of the time between 1965 and 1970 in Turkey. A year in the middle of that stretch was with the Peace Corps office in Washington, D.C., where I was when Martin Luther King was killed and the city erupted in riot, where I was a few months later when Robert F. Kennedy was killed.
So, I missed most of the psychodelia, learned Turkish and the music of Turkey’s pop star, Zeki Muren, instead. Hung on to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchel, early Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, which I played in my Ankara apartment when I was on Peace Corps staff. I didn’t have TV during the Washington tenure or while in Turkey, so missed the Smothers Brothers too.
Later, settled in with the back-to-the-landers in Wallowa County in the 1970s, I bought cowboy boots and felt uncomfortable in tie dye. Opened a bookstore in 1976, and along came Alvin Josephy to introduce me to American Indians. Alvin passed away in 2005, but I tell people he keeps getting smarter as I thread my own way through American history and Native American affairs.
And this is what I can say about Alvin’s evolution as a historian of and advocate for American Indians. The American Heritage Book of Indians was Alvin’s first book on Indians. He did not write the narrative, but was the chief editor from American Heritage when it was published in 1961. My recollection is that his major contribution was combing museums and archives for early photos, drawings, and artwork related to Native America. He was especially proud of finding the earliest European drawing—not a very good one—of people in the Caribbean. A drawing too of heathen Indians burning in hell. And a story of the friars who were mistakenly told that the Caribs were cannibals and especially sought Catholic friars.
He had written a story about Chief Joseph for American Heritage Magazine before he left Time Magazine to go to AH himself. And while the AH Indian book was his first assignment there, he had been invited to do a book of essays about Indian leaders, and in that same year, 1961, Viking Books published The Patriot Chiefs. a Chronicle of American Indian Leadership. Alvin said that there had been many great American Indian leaders; many tried to lead their people and weave their ways through explorer and settler colonials. He wanted to write about those who resisted. That book, chosen for an everyone reads at a meeting of Native Students at Western Washington in 1969, is still in print!
Alvin of course went on to publish his big Nez Perce book and several others on Indians. He was guest speaker at an early National Congress of American Indians meeting, and became the founding board chair of the National Museum of the American Indian, where he asked that Natives of North and South America tell their own stories.
Maybe most importantly, his last book, which he edited but did not write, was Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, We’ve heard enough, Alvin said, about Lewis and Clark from the white point of view. And he gathered Native writers and let them have their say.
I can imagine going to that Psychedelia exhibit with Alvin and asking some of our Indian friends what THEY think about wannabe Indians and the 1960s. That could make a book.
# # #
A woman with strong ties to Pine Ridge told me this week that young people from that reservation have been detained by ICE. And I know that the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) sent out word to tribal people across the country to carry enrollment cards and other forms of official identification.Read Rich’s Post →
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.
This all distracted me from writing about a fine weekend of readings and discussions at Winter Fishtrap that asked “What is the West?” Where is the West? And Who owns it? Works and lives in it? Etc. It all ended with a conversation among three strong Native women about the “Indigenous West”: Debra Earling, the fine writer from Montana and the Salish and Kootenai tribes (she gave us Lewis and Clark through Sacajawea’s eyes in The Lost Journals of Sacajawea); Bobbie Conner, director of Tamastslkt on the Umatilla Reservation, who is Nez Perce-Cayuse; and Jacy Sohappy, also enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and also carrying Nez Perce Cayuse roots (Jacy works for Crow’s Shadow on the Rez, and for the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland here).
The three women all had stories of ties to land, language, and ancestry. It’s not always been easy being Indian, but life is held together by these ancient ties. The rest of us trace to countries and languages in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but when called on to find anchor here, in North America, rely on flimsier ties.
Fifty-three years ago, when I came to the Wallowa, people at Grange potlucks warned me that I could not be an “old-timer” here unless I could go back four generations (five now, I would calculate). A smart-ass young man of 28, I said that I had just come from Washington D.C. and in the East you are not an old-time unless you can trace to the Mayflower; and before that I was in Turkey, where no one talked about it, but being old meant ties to dirt. (Recent Turkish refugees from between-the-wars Bulgaria and Greece in my village were “immigrants,” though they shared language and religion with Turkish neighbors. Language and religion are more portable than land-ties, but maybe not as strong.)
Young and brash, I imagined that the only old-timers here would be Nez Perce—though at the time I knew almost nothing about that tribe or Native American history and culture in general. But I do know that the chord I’d struck rung, in the minds of many of my new neighbors, and in my own mind.
Alvin Josephy, my mentor, would say that the Indians in America had been beaten and starved, subjected to foreign diseases, wars, and sleezy land deals and treaties written in foreign tongues. But, especially with Western Tribes, they had emerged with postage-stamp sized remnants of ancestral lands, and that tie to land had sustained them, and does to this day. Alvin lived—and you and I live—to see the Nez Perce who had been forced out of the Wallowa in 1877 begin to return openly and with general acceptance of non-Indian residents. (On more than one occasion, Bobbie Conner has reminded us that we live here; it is our “home,” but it is her and her peoples’ “homeland.”)
Alvin appreciated and applauded Bobby Conner—he was friends with her grandfather as he learned Nez Perce and Indian ways—and he would have applauded the three indigenous panelists at Winter Fishtrap.
The audience too seemed ready to accept and learn more about this tri-partite relationship of land, language, and ancestry, but in the question period someone wanted to know whether the new regime, and the loss of Deb Haaland at the Department of the Interior, might make for a new dark time for Native America.
Bobbie had a beautiful answer to the question: “You can’t ‘unsee’ things.” Haaland’s uncovering of the Boarding School scandals, her strengthening of grants and programs with Tribes in fisheries and natural resources, and her callout to Native Americans across the country to make themselves heard and known cannot be “unseen.”
Indian survival and Indian resilience are widely acknowledged and appreciated. Their ties to lands, and to specific animals, fishes, and plants are gaining a non-Indian audience. Their forestry and fisheries practices are now seen as healthy returns after the failures of non-Indian policies. And, maybe most importantly, living generations of Indigenous Americans know who they are, where they are, and the importance of those ancient ties. They will not easily be cowed again. And, because they are willing to share story and land and language, we many non-Indians will have their backs against any new government or private assaults on Indigenous land and wisdom.
# # #
photo by Jennifer Hobbs at Fishtrap. From left: Fishtrap director Shannon McNerney; Debra Earling, Bobbie Conner, Jacy Sohappy.
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 →
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 →
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.
When interviewed, they allowed as how their homes are probably no more, reduced to rubble, but the place is still home. They greeted each other, relatives and friends they hadn’t seen for a year, with tears and hugs, and more than one told the camera that this is “home.”
President Trump didn’t understand that when he suggested that Gazans be moved to Jordan and Egypt; the Israelis who think that this whole bloody war will result in the takeover of Gaza with new Jewish settlements don’t understand. People who marvel at the continuing presence of Hamas don’t understand. My guess is that American Indians do.
It’s ironic and tragic that early Zionists looked to the Euro-American takeover of Tribal lands as a model for their ambitions in Palestine. It’s tragic that lines drawn on a map by conquering European powers at the end of the World War I and the resulting British mandate and occupation played out so unfairly for the Arab Christians, Druze, and Muslims who lived there. They had lived for centuries as separate but neighbor nations under Ottoman rule that was called “Millet.” Millet means “people,” and each people governing itself in most matters was the way of the Ottoman Turks when they ruled well.
Oliver McTernan, Catholic priest-turned-conflict negotiator, appeared on Amanpour and Company to say that Gazans wanted their land, no matter what the condition, and held out hope that groups like his could facilitate return and rebuilding, including rebuilding relationships among minority groups and political facations within Gaza.
It’s a dream, but a good dream. And Israelis are key. It is key that Israelis who have all along promoted peace and cohabitation or two states step up. It is important that Israelis recognize that their own founding as a nation owed to the work of a “terrorist” organization, Irgun, and that they were able to absorb Irgun into the body politic. And Israelis must realize that they have now become a pariah nation in the eyes of many. Any peace built on the power they exerted—with massive American aid—and that they are still exercising in Lebanon and now the West Bank, will be a fragile peace, doubted by the world. And it invites the quiet rebuilding of another terrorist force that their actions over the last year have visibly grown.
My friend Steve Kliewer of the Lostine Presbyterian Church in Lostine, visited the West Bank in December. Alvin’s daughter and my good friend, Diane Josephy Peavey, traveled to the Holy Land numerous times, and had it in her mind to write something about the parallels between American Indians and Palestinians. She traveled with Christian Arab guides, but saw the conditions for all Palestinians and lamented them in many conversations over the years. Write them down now, I want to tell her.
And tell me when, Steve and Diane. I am not up to much physical work, but I feel almost compelled to be a witness to this huge global event that will play out among peoples and nations for decades to come.
# # #
phot from Al Jazeera
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 →
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 →
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.
The book begins with the serviceberry and its bounty: species and names—serviceberry, juneberry, saskatoon, etc.; then picking bucket, pies, neighbors, birds, etc. But soon moves on to economics. Kemmerer describes the classical capitalist economy of “scarcity” and its creation of individual and corporate profit, and contrasts it with the natural world’s economy of “abundance,“ of sharing and interdependence. “Mutualism,” she calls it.
She finds an entire new group of ethnobotanists who are exploring the ways in which the natural world grows with interdependence and recreates itself, even through catastrophe. Kemmerer briefly criticizes evolutionists’ emphasis on competition in nature, saying that alongside competition in the natural world there is exploration of niches and growth of specialization and interdependencies. Burned out forests blossom with explosive growth of dense, monolithic species, return nutrients to the ground, and then make room for more long-growing and sustainable species. Birds and bees develop special niche relations with plants, etc.
The Serviceberries in her title are bound to the neighbors who planted them and invited her and others to pick their abundance. Birds too come to the party, overeat, process seeds in their digestive tracks, replant them in new places. The gift of the bush brings pies, neighborly conversations, birdsong, and renewal.
It is easy to get caught up in the smallness of this, the naivete, the David of it in the face of the Goliath of capitalist economics. And, indeed, when we look around us and see the successes of superrich entrepreneurs in high tech and the size of baseball stars’ contracts, even the lesser wealth created with college athletes selling their images and online influencers counting their followers, the economy of the Serviceberry in one small new England town seems almost quaint.
Oligarchs have been around since the dialogs of Plato, and wealth and ecclesiastical and military power have moved the world forever. Yet… botany and biology, the workings of the natural world, have also been continual players in the story of human evolution and development. And, current fires in California remind us that wealth is not a guarantee of survival and success; rich and poor watch their houses, and their ways of life go up in smoke in California. Historically, the eruption at Pompei, the scourges of the Plague, smallpox, polio, and covid took the lives of the famous, royalty, the saints and the wealthy along with those of sinners, commoners, and the indigent.
Kemmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member, a Phd botanist, bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and recently named MacArthur Fellow, reminds us that the power of plants and natural processes has always been with us, and can continue to serve as an example and catalyst for an economy based on sharing, on mutualism and sustainability. Not that we will soon—or maybe ever—do away with an economy based on scarcity, competition and private gain created through real and contrived scarcities. But that the two have existed side by side for a very long time, and that for our own happiness as individuals and as societies, we should embrace the serviceberry.
Watching the California fires on television is a lesson in humility and humanity. There is tragedy of course—the loss of lives and property, the climactic disruption of all that is normal in a place that seemed solid and safe. Safe with schools and swimming pools—and yogurt shops mentioned by many survivors as places they’ll miss. Tragedy in the name-calling and blaming of and among federal, state, and local governments. Tragedy in the looters dressed as firemen, in the strange odd person caught trying to start a fire.
Alongside the tragedy is humanity, the outpouring of goods and services by food preparers and ordinary citizens driving miles to drop off clothing and food, blankets and simple furniture. Firefighters working long shifts and saving individual houses and lives, neighbors checking on neighbors and helping them flee.
We see the same local heroes helping and sharing in hurricane and war—I am struck by Palestinian soup kitchens in the midst of bombings; by Syrian “white helmets” digging through bombed out cities.
It’s no surprise that Robin Kemmerer is Native. And that all I have learned in the last decades of my blessedly long life about Native American culture and values celebrates the gifts and interrelationships of our natural world.
Will Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos get to Mars? Their competition seems trite next to the Los Angeles firefighter or the Serviceberry’s service to an ongoing world of birds and humans.
# # #
These blog posts usually address Native American and local history; I try especially to trace the pre-contact history and culture, and the early and continuing relationships of Indians and non-Indians in the Wallowa Country. But I also try to keep blog followers aware of new work in Native American history generally; I want people to know that the pope repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, and to know what that Doctrine is and how it entered into American Indian Law, and how its impact can be followed right down to Nez Perce treaties.
We know about the Indian Boarding schools now, but it took Canadian school graves and our first Native American Secretary of the Interior to bring them to the attention of Americans. And we now know something of their immediate impact on Native Americans from the 1870s forward, and we can discuss the lingering generational impacts on families—and individuals—of these schools. Many of our Nez Perce friends have family stories that involve boarding schools and their consequences. Etc.Read Rich’s Post →
As new people take over in Washington, wealth is much in the news. I don’t know how many times I have heard that Elon Musk is the “world’s richest man,” and that he and another billionaire will take on a semi-governmental role in trimming national expenditures. The same news reports often include listing incoming president Donald Trump as another billionaire.
Big money talk is not new in Washington, but the dollar signs and the numbers of zeros seem to be getting greater—in politics, as well as in accounts of hightech sector earnings and professional baseball contracts. Read Rich’s Post →
A friend texted me to say that she “got whooping cough for Christmas.” I’m 82 and don’t remember knowing anyone with whooping cough. Maybe it was around when I was young, but my own disease related memories are chicken pox—mom taking me to the neighbor’s house to become exposed so I could have it and get over it; measles, which she did not give to me intentionally, but I apparently caught from that same neighbor; and mumps, which I contracted somehow as a young adult—before 1967, when the vaccine was licensed in. I remember itching with the chicken pox, and I remember being shut up in my parents’ bedroom (on the first floor of our tiny house), with the curtains pulled shut tight against damage to my eyes from measles.
Measles is what killed the missionary Whitmans in Walla Walla. Read Rich’s Post →
Last week I wrote admiringly about Ta Hanesi Coates’ new book, The Message. I chronicled his comparisons of Israeli’s state treatment of Arabs to the historical system of chattel slavery in America, and to European dispossession of Indigenous Americans in settler colonialism.Read Rich’s Post →
Writing this blog is one of my favorite parts of working at the Josephy Center. Who gets to shout out about new things learned, old injustices exposed; about the resilience of the Native American people!
And do you know that a 2021 blog post called “How much is a beaver pelt worth” has had over 2600 hits! The next most seen post is “Nez Perce Music” with 1650, and then “Nez Perce Treaties” with 1350.
In America today there is a great curiosity about the Nez Perce, and about Indians in general, and I have the privilege of reading, writing, and living some of this curiosity. This year Kolle (my library colleagure) and I went on Snake River with Nez Perce elders, visited a tool-making site with elders and an archeologist, and I look forward to hosting an exhibit of Nez Perce artists in spring.
Right now our exhibit, “Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return,” is up at the university in La Grande, will go to the community college in Pendleton after the first, and eventually make its way to the State Capitol.
Old blog posts, past exhibits, talks about sockeye and Alvin Josephy’s broadcast from the WW II Marine Corps landing at Guam are all on our webpage: https://library.josephy.org/. Go explore. And to help Kolle and me continue our work with more exhibits, host more elder visits, and send out my blog posts, click on https://josephy.org/donate/general-fund-donation/ and make your donation.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for friendship and support. And have a great holiday.
In his new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates visits three places: Dakar in Senegal, West Africa, which has become a place of pilgrimage for African-Americans tracing slave ancestry; to Columbia, South Carolina, where a previous book of his has been banned, and where a woman born in the South rises to teach and defend her teaching of the book; and to Palestine.
Coates, a MacArthur Fellow and the author of a famous Atlantic Magazine piece arguing for financial reparations for descendants of American slaves, is bamboozled by Palestine. Read Rich’s Post →
I thought I should follow up the last blog post, a musing—and hope—that there will be Natives sprinkled across government no matter the new regime. And I should have added that the sprinkling will be in local and state as well as the national government, and that the watering of Native knowledge and values will continue to go beyond government.
Why?
The fine work of the Biden appointees in high positions will leave a mark. Many Natives they brought into government and programs they started and fostered will still be here. Read Rich’s Post →
President Biden, with Secretary of the Interior’s Deb Haaland at his side, has been, in the words of Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation), the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online, the “best American President” for Native America and Native Americans.Read Rich’s Post →
That is the name of the play by Beth Piatote now playing in Los Angeles! This, from “People’s World”:
“LOS ANGELES — Theatergoers are in for a very special occasion—a revelation, it’s not too excessive to say—if they will expand their horizons a bit and embrace a Native American perspective on view now.
“Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary season, Native Voices presents the world premiere of Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni at the historic Southwest Campus of the Autry Museum of the American West, formerly known as the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, deemed the oldest museum in Los Angeles. According to DeLanna Studi, Native Voices Artistic Director, the work ‘developed during our 2020 Festival of New Plays,’ and it ‘perfectly embodies our spirit and mission.’Read Rich’s Post →