Blog

Carter, the Hostages, and the Shah

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 →

It’s the Land

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 →

Thoughts on diseases and vaccinations

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 →

A few words to my blog friends

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.

Book review: re Palestine and Indigenous America

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 →

What’s next in Indian Country #2

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 →

Antikoni

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 →

Updates November 1, 2024

Two things today. First, we had a great presentation on sockeye salmon on Tuesday. Sarah Barnes, the new Nez Perce Fisheries biologist on their sockeye team, gave us the history and biology of Wallowa Lake sockeye. She was backed up by other staff from NP Fisheries who had information on past programs, even lamprey! Her talk is worth the listen:
https://youtu.be/w2EiddagKiM

Second item: Brian Oliver, who built the fine exhibit structure, Kolle Riggs, who made the exhibit more interesting with additional photos and design, and I took the “Nez Perce in Oregon” exhibit from the Wallowa History Center to Loso Hall on the Eastern Oregon University campus. It is in the lobby in front of the theater entrance–a fine place for it, i think. Pepper Huxoll, the new Native American, Indigenous, and Rural Programs Coordinator at the college, is responsible for getting the exhibit to Eastern. Interestingly enough, she quickly found her great grandfather in a photo of the 1890 Carlise boarding school band that is part of the exhibit. Pepper who is of Mandan-Hidatsa heritage, went school at Eastern when the late Jackie Grant had her position. I think Jackie would be proud.

Good news in Indian Country

I hope everyone saw President Biden’s passionate apology to Native people for the awful, almost 100-year, practice of boarding schools. They were another misguided attempt to deal with what became known as “the Indian problem.” Which might be translated as removing the original peoples from their lands. It couldn’t be solved with diseases, displacement, treaties and wars, so legislation and forced assimilation became the answer. And breaking the generational chain of passing language and culture from grandparents to parents to children to grandchildren was the boarding schools’ weapon.Read Rich’s Post →

Coyote’s granddaughters

Years ago, I reviewed a book by Ursula Pike, an enrolled Karuk Tribal member who grew up in Oregon and California and went into the Peace Corps. The book was An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir. One can imagine the quandaries and perplexities of a young Native American who has experienced discrimination in this country going to another country with Tribal populations and languages different from her own, with non-American Indian Peace Corps cohorts, and the normal adjustments to foods, roads, and habits of a new place. Her new place was Bolivia.Read Rich’s Post →

Indigenous Peoples Day

Once, years ago, we had a Nez Perce history discussion going on at the Josephy Center. Bobbie Conner, then and now director of Tamastslikt on the Umatilla Reservation, came in the door on another task. I greeted her from the balcony discussion group and announced that we were talking about Nez Perce Treaties. Bobbie walked up the stairs and told us that if we were talking about treaties we’d better start with the Doctrine of Discovery, and learn how it crept into American Indian Law.Read Rich’s Post →

Dr. June Lorenzo and the Doctrine of Discovery

This past Monday the Josephy Center was privileged to host Peacemaker Dr. June Lorenzo for a talk on Community Peace and Justice.

Dr. Lorenzo, a member of the Laguna Pueblo and Diné (Navajo Nation), is an attorney and human rights advocate who holds both a JD and a PhD. She practices law in New Mexico and has advocated for the rights of Indigenous People before the United Nations and the Organization of American States. She is a member and clerk of session at Laguna United Presbyterian Church (Pueblo of Laguna), the only Native American congregation in the Presbytery of Santa Fe. June is also engaged in advocacy on uranium legacy issues, which are related to the protection of sacred areas.Read Rich’s Post →

The Legacy of Jefferson

In the July-August 2024 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, in an article on “Mapping the Mississippi,” Boyce Uphold writes of Thomas Jefferson:

“Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. It would fuel the creation of an ‘empire for liberty.’…

Read Rich’s Post →

Hawaii

Several years ago, I talked with a group of “Road Scholars” visiting the Wallowas. Road Scholar was the heir to “Elderhostlel,” and remains a program that targets retirees who want to travel and learn. At that time, I did my brief presentation on Nez Perce removal and tried to be encouraging about Native peoples’ return here and in many places across the country.

One of the visitors was from Hawaii, and he and I have been exchanging emails over the affairs of Native Americans on the Mainland and in Hawaii ever since. His name is Noel Kent…

Read Rich’s Post →

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.

Read Rich’s Post →

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 →