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Grace Bartlett, the Nez Perce, and the Wallowa Country

This summer we have been doing Friday conversations on local and Nez Perce history. This Friday was the last session for 2024. We focused on Grace Bartlett and her book, The Wallowa Country, 1866-76. I hadn’t read the book in years, remembering always that it was a day-by-day account of the first ten years of white tenure in the Wallowas—and the last ten years of Native, Nez Perce tenure. I’ve always thought the book a unique contribution to local and Nez Perce history, but had not remembered details and some of the book’s signature elements. I skimmed it on Thursday night, and was even more appreciative of Grace’s work.

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The Equestrian Revolution

I’ve written before about Ned Blackhawk’s outstanding book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Here’s more.

The title itself is revolutionary—“rediscovering” echoing and countering the decades of homage to Columbus for “discovering” America. And “unmaking history” indicating that we have that part wrong too. That the history we—our government offices, popular presses, and academic and popular historians—have made, is wrong.Read Rich’s Post →

Biden and the Indians

I have mentioned Deb Haaland and her heroic work on behalf of US Tribes and Tribal people on a few blog posts—not enough praise, I’m sure, but I try. But now, as President Biden leaves the stage and the world begins to assess his impact on US history and politics, and, indeed, on world affairs, I think it is a good time to acknowledge what he has done for Tribes and Tribal people.

I have not been a fan of all Biden policies and appointments, but on this one I am sure. Biden has been good for Indians. I get Native support in this from “Native News Online,” a wonderful chronicle of what is happening in Indian country (free to subscribe; just google it). Editor-publisher Levi Rickert lists a number of Biden appointments, judicial nominations, and policy statements, and declares Biden “the best president for Native Americans in history.” That’s powerful words, and especially powerful Native words.Read Rich’s Post →

Ethnogeology

Roger Amerman is enrolled Choctaw, but grew up in Pendleton and is married to a Nez Perce woman and lives now on the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. A few years ago, before the pandemic, Roger taught a beading workshop at the Josephy Center. It was a good one, and, when he was done, he fished for something more. He’d majored in geology—and had worked as a cultural interpreter for National Parks and the Forest Service. Roger suggested we do an ethnogeology workshop on a bus. We would start people in Pendleton and bus them to Wallowa Lake, stopping along the way to explore geological features and Native stories. He knew some elders who would love to do it.

And then came Covid!

But the idea didn’t die. “We have,” Roger said, “ethnobotany and ethnobiology. Why can’t we have ethnogeology and look at our Native landscape through the eyes of geologists and Tribal elders?” I introduced Roger to geologist Ellen Morris Bishop, and we were off.

We brought Nez Perce elder Allen Pinkham Sr. into the project, and made a short video with the three of them talking at Wallowa Lake. We wrote grants and visited Nez Perce village and fishing sites in Wallowa County with Tribal elders and the two geologists. USDA Nez Perce Historic Trail saw and liked what we were doing, and with their help we mounted a big program to get our two principles and several elders up the Snake River, and to Tolo Lake, where the Nez Perce stopped after being forced from the Wallowa Valley. We would also go to Cooper’s Ferry, where Oregon State geologist Loren Davis had documented human habitation for over 16,000 years! We found a videographer and two young Nez Perce photographers to document the journey.

And here we are with an exhibit we call “Heads and Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes.”

We had a grand opening on July 18; over 90 visitors went through pounds of Nez Perce smoked salmon, read the panels, looked at the photos and maps, and watched Nez Perce storytellers on looped videos tell the stories themselves. The exhibit, and the videos, will be here at the Josephy Center until September 13, but we made a book of it too, so you can follow the ethnogeology story more closely from home. Or you can watch a virtual exhibit too, at https://josephy.org/event/heads-and-hearts/.

But the best is to come in to the Center and see the big photos and maps—and also see the fine artwork of three Native artists from Oregon, Joe Cantrall, Lillian Pitt, and James Lavadour. We have two framed prints from each on lone from Crow’s Shadow’s permanent collection, and unframed limited edition prints for sale. The prints are not in the catalog, but I think one of Jim Lavadour’s landscapes would make a fine advertisement for the show–and for ethnogeolgoy, “Seeing landscape through Native Eyes.”

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Image is of Spring 2023, a limited edition lithograph by James Lavadour

Riding a wave

I’m privileged, I tell visitors to the Josephy Center, to be at this place in this time, riding a wave of good feelings and sympathies for Native Americans. We see the Yuroks buying and rehabbing land in Northern California, managing for wild flora and fauna and education, reintroducing giant condors, contracting to revegetate the lands left in the wake of dam removal on the Klamath River. I listen to Nez Perce Tribal leaders negotiate with US officials over dam removal on the Snake River. We read books of indigenous history and culture by Indian professors at Yale and Harvard—places and subject matter deemed important in those illustrious history departments only recently. We watch Lilly Gladstone, the Blackfoot-Nez Perce actress, playing a starring role in a historical drama about the insane and greedy plots and the killings of Osage women to steal their oil inheritances in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” We marvel at Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in history, as she seeds the Department of the Interior with Native talent—and, importantly, brings the disgraceful practices of the Indian Boarding Schools to national attention.Read Rich’s Post →

Indians right again!

My friend Mark, a retired woodwind player—sax and bassoon—dropped a book off for me that he said I had to read. The book is Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, and the author is James Nestor.

Nestor was a middle-aged man with a number of respiratory maladies who’d just recovered from a bout of pneumonia and still coughed and wheezed enough so that his doctor recommended a breathing class. The class, held in a small, dusty, four-flights up room, featured a staticky recording of a man in an East Indian accent guiding breathing. After a few minutes, Nestor was ready to quit, but his doctor had suggested—and the class was free; after 30 minutes, he actually felt better.Read Rich’s Post →

Indians and Indians

This blog post is dedicated to my new friends from India: Ritesh and Yojana Jindel; Biswajit and Anjali Pati; Raj Dubey, Siddharth Varvandkar; Anjana Miatra; and Sidhu Kuljit. They are from Rourkela in Odisha State and Raipur, the capital city in Chhattisgarh State in central India. They were here briefly this week on a Rotary Friendship Exchange with clubs in Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. Four men, four women, ages from forties to seventies, from states and cities populated by millions in a country with 1.4 billion people, almost one-fifth of the world’s population!Read Rich’s Post →

George Washington and the Indians

There are new revelations on every page in Ned Blackhawk’s ambitious The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In putting Indians back into the history of the country, rather than treating the trials and tribulations of Indian peoples as a separate discipline, he changes the way we understand the past. Indians, he says, had “agency,” were party to the actions and decisions that shaped the country. His is a different understanding of early founders Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and especially George Washington.Read Rich’s Post →

Caitlin Clark, Rez Ball, and the Pros

Caitlin Clark will play her first pro basketball game tonight for the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association. In her four years at the University of Iowa she had already broken records and helped create a storm of interest in the women’s game. And she already has endorsements—now legal for college player—which make her a millionaire, but her starting salary as a WNBA rookie number one draft pick is set at $76,000.

This—and the millions of dollars that the men receive as rookies, and the hundreds of millions they receive as stars—is cause for conversation in the world of women’s sports. So too is the fact that Caitlin Clark is white in a game of African-American stars. The press is comparing this to the coming of Larry Bird—another white Midwesterner—into men’s professional basketball more than four decades ago. Bird and his rivalry and friendship with Magic Johnson vaulted professional basketball into the mainstream of men’s professional sports. Until then the NBA was an afterthought to major league baseball and football. Some see Caitlin Clark doing the same for the women’s game.Read Rich’s Post →

Julia Keefe’s Indigenous Big Band

ta ‘c meeywi folks (good Morning)

The Joseph Center was fortunate to have Julia Keefe’s quartet perform here in February. For those who have not followed this Nez Perce musical thread, here is a press release about Julia’s Indigenous Big Band’s upcoming performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

This press release captures many things that we have worked on at the Center, first and foremost our “Nez Perce Music” exhibit, which traces the use of music in assimilating Indians, and Native peoples’ use of music and the tools of music to resist. That exhibit–which features photos of the Carlisle Boarding school band and an 1890 Nez Perce musician there to Julia Keefe today, photos of an 1800s Spalding Nez Perce hymnal and of Nez Perce drumming and dancing on the Colville Reservation in the early 1900s–just came black from display at Eastern Oregon University, and is available for display elsewhere. Call or email us!

Here’s the link to Julia’s press release:

https://www.juliakeefe.com/so/bcOyxB8d4?languageTag=en&cid=9d221399-b4b1-43c9-a348-807f7d32f0f8

Ned Blackhawk: a New History of America

I’m only 107 pages into Ned Blackhawks new book, The Rediscovery of America, and am already taken with an entirely new approach to American history. I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, and found it fact-filled, well written, and engaging, but, in the end, I found it limited, a kind of “Jeffersonian history.” In large part, Lepore takes the opening words of the Declaration, “We the people,” and sees the march of American history as the gradual expansion of “we.” It starts with male property owners, then embraces all (white) males, and gradually adds freed slaves, women, and, finally, in 1924, American Indians.Read Rich’s Post →

Replacement theory and American Indians

“Replacement theory” comes to my mind often; it has since I first heard the idea that at some point in the near future, white people are going to be a “majority minority” in America. In other words, we white folks will no longer be 50 percent of the total population, but we will be the biggest of the several rainbow groups that are “replacing” us. The fact that white now includes people of southern and eastern European extraction, Italian Catholics and Greek Orthodox—folks who a few generations ago, roughly before WW II, were not the Northern European, Scotch and English who had dominated the first century or two of white settlement—is not discussed.Read Rich’s Post →

Measles

The recent upsurge in measles cases in Florida and the US in general has doctors and public health officials scratching heads. Apparently, there is a big difference in infection rates when the percentage of children who receive the MMR—Measles, Mumps, Rubella—vaccinations drops from 95 % to 91%; transmission among the unvaccinated spreads more rapidly, and a few—stats say 3 %–of the vaccinated still get a mild case of the disease. That, in my understanding is in a nutshell what is happening in Florida and threatening elsewhere as measles cases in 2024 rise.Read Rich’s Post →

Native Gains: Deb Haaland, Joe Biden, and Harry Slickpoo

It’s hard to get a handle on it. So much has happened in and for Indian Country since Biden took office and appointed Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) Secretary of the Interior. Haaland had held tribal offices, headed the New Mexico State Democratic party, and had served in the US House of Representatives before she became the first Native American to be a US Cabinet secretary. She knew the ropes, and she hit the ground running.Read Rich’s Post →

Julia Keefe and Native American Jazz

What a treat! What a performance! On Saturday, wrapping up what looks like it will become an annual “Josephy Fest,” Julia Keefe, the Nez Perce jazz singer, brought her quartet to the Josephy Center, and closed the show. She and her New York drummer, Adam Benham, U of Idaho piano player, Kate Skinner, and Mali Obomsawin, an Abenaki First Nations bass player who also plays in the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, were stunning.Read Rich’s Post →

Political parties, armies, and nations change

Segregationist Southern Democrats had a grip on the party—and in some cases the country—for years. Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Civil Rights legislation alienated Southern Democrats, and chased them into the Republican Party—which had been the party of Lincoln and abolition!

Germany’s radical Nazi government gained power in fewer than twenty years, was defeated, and went from genocidal rampage to conversion to Western democracy in a few years; Japan’s Imperial aggression transformed itself into a Western leaning and anti-militaristic state.Read Rich’s Post →

Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” Read Rich’s Post →

Blessed are the peacemakers

This history blog of mine usually focuses on Nez Perce, Native American, and American history and history telling. I like to find the missing pieces of our history—my current obsession is the under-told story of the beaver’s place in the US economy and Euro-American Westward expansion. I highlight the places where historians have found new links and chinks in old stories—in my student days, the role of disease in depopulating Indigenous America was not taught, the roles of the plague and the Little Ice Age in European expansion and emigration not seriously treated. Today they are routinely credited with major impacts on US history and world events.Read Rich’s Post →

Elders

The Kiowa writer Scott Momaday passed this week. He was 89. I met him once, when he came to Wallowa County to make the presentation of a horse by the Wood family to the walʔwá ma, or Joseph Band Nez Perce. He’d come across the story of the horse that Chief Joseph told Erskine Wood he’d like when the 14-year-old boy stayed with him at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Erskine’s father, C.E.S. Wood, who had served under General Howard in the Nez Perce War and become a friend of and advocate for Joseph after the war, told the boy to ask the Chief what he might do for him in gratitude for hosting his son. Joseph said he’d like a good pony; the boy thought that his father was a powerful man, and that the Chief should have asked for something more glamorous than a horse, so did not pass the message on to his father. He told the story, and published a diary of his Days with Chief Joseph, years later.Read Rich’s Post →