Category: Alvin Josephy

Civil Rights, Treaty Rights

Alvin Josephy told me once that liberals just didn’t get it with Indians.  In the sixties, after legislative victories on voting and discrimination issues, some liberals, according to Alvin, were ready to “move on to Indians.” But when they took their good intentions into Indian country, they were told that Indians weren’t so concerned with Civil Rights; Indians were interested in Treaty Rights.

I think the story tells us something about the confusing and sporadic nature of liberal support for Indian issues. We don’t really get this stuff about treaties. Look at Standing Rock, which was a great liberal rallying cry only months ago, but is now on the back burner again—do you remember seeing anything recently in the New York Times or other bastions of the liberal establishment press about the situation in the Dakotas? Indians are still there. The pipeline is under the river, and there are, I believe, cases pending. But a quick Google search of Standing Rock updates brings up stories from February and April. Standing Rock is about treaty rights and their long and continuing abrogation and dismissal by the establishment. Too confusing for liberals looking for simple wrongs to right.

Standing Rock is also, of course, about what we humans are doing to the environment. But Indians reminding us of environmental disasters is also confusing and sometimes uneasy. So once again liberals pick up on it for a while before moving on to “cap and trade” or plastics at McDonalds or another middle class crusade that hits us in the places we live, work, and send our kids to school or offers to save the planet.

Water and oil in South Dakota or the extraction of oil from Canadian tar pits—which the Nez Perce in Idaho protested by blocking the Lolo Highway when they tried to move huge equipment necessary for tar sands oil extraction to Canada—is not so close, and not as big a planet-wide deal as the Paris Accords or Al Gore. We liberals want to save the school our children go to or save the planet. And we’ll do it with a quick protest or a tax-deductible check.

Many liberals applaud Indians for salmon recovery and stands against dams—which seems to me a nice confluence of interests, rather than true listening to all that Indians have to say about fish, health, and the environment. Yes, white liberals, including actor Marlon Brando, appeared in the Northwest Fish Wars that led to the Boldt Decision, but how many of us know what that decision was or does now? And how many proponents of dam removal know about “first foods,” know about the complicated ecosystems around any moving body of water? Why are the Nez Perce interested now in lamprey recovery? Do we even know where that fits in the scheme of river health? Maybe not exactly, said a biologist I know, but the Nez Perce know it was part of what was once a huge river of life for millennia. The elders thought lamprey important, so we’ll bring them back—eventually.

More than anything, how many of us non-Indians understand that it is treaty rights that American Indians lean on in environmental battles over fish and water and land? Treaty rights that are old and sacred, passed down from generation to generation of American Indians; treaty rights that also are written in Euro-American law books, and on occasion come to the attention of a judicial system that is obligated to pay them some attention.

From President Jackson forward, treaties have been ignored or abrogated as often as not—but they, like the Indians, are still with us.

# # #

The Josephy Library at the Josephy Center

Many of you in this blog-land get other information about the Josephy Center and our programs through newsletters, press releases and letters—including fundraising letters. Thanks to those of you who have made donations, attended exhibits and workshops, and brought children to Josephy Center classes. Thanks to all of you who read the blog posts—and sometimes even comment on them.

What follows is a brief account of what the Josephy Library does beyond the blog—and a specific appeal for Library support.

First and most importantly, we live the legacy of Alvin Josephy. Every day we tell people that American Indians are still with us; that Indians have always been agents and actors, and not wooden standbys in American History; that the history re Indians we’ve been fed in school texts is incomplete at best and often wrong; that Indian treaty rights are real and legal; and that Indians continue to contribute to the common good with activism and hard work, especially in the fields of natural resources, but increasingly in healthcare, politics, and other fields.

Blog posts are a small part of these messages. At the Josephy Center we bring in Indian artists and historians—a current exhibit uses historic photos from the Nez Perce National Park and the University of Idaho to imagine the Indian past. Some of it will be used in a small permanent exhibit aimed at showing visitors, local school children and citizens “who lived here and how they lived.” Brown Bag lunches next week will feature Nez Perce Fisheries on Lamprey restoration, and Cece Whitewolf on the cradleboard. A college intern has just begun bibliographic work on Nez Perce materials—why does that story resonate in book after book published today?

And then the Big Dream Project—we’ve passed the first round in a grant competition—to invite a Plateau Indian artist to create a three-dimensional work on our property or the adjoining street with his or her vision of what we should know about this place. It is weird at best that the large, bronze statue of Chief Joseph on Main Street in Joseph was created by a white artist from another place imagining a Nez Perce Indian in this place. It seems to us that some corrective is needed.

Friends told me before this Josephy Library became a reality that “libraries don’t make money.” That is painfully true—but it is also true that libraries promote knowledge and understanding, that we help ignite interest and passion in young people and nurture professional writers and lay readers in their work and avocations.

Our Library budget is roughly $50,000 of a $290,000 budget. We get some grants, but bibliographies and talking Western and Indian history to visitors from Idaho and Israel isn’t grant-flashy, isn’t a “new” program every year (although it is new conversations every day).

About 400 of you get notices of these blog posts. If half of you could find $20 or $30 to further our work; if those of you who make it to the occasional Brown Bag could drop in a $10 bill in the offering plate; if a dozen of you came to the Center for a basketry or beading workshop this month; and if a few of you who share these passions could send us $500 or $1,000—if, if, if… we might raise half of that $50,000 and make the grant writing and overall fundraising for the Josephy Center a walk on a new Main Street with Indian artists helping to tell the story of Indians, salmon, game, agriculture and culture in this wonderful Wallowa place some of us are privileged to call home.

To make a donation now, go to https://josephy.org/support-the-josephy-center-for-arts-and-culture/

Indian Art is American Art

A recent piece in the New York Times described a large collection of “modern” and American Indian art being donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The headline is telling: “Native American Treasures Head to the Met, This Time as American Art.”

Alvin Josephy talking in my ear again: “Indians don’t have biography or history; they have anthropology and archeology.” To that we can add “art.”

Peter Rindisbacher Circa 1822

Alvin scoured the country for art by and related to Indians, finding, for the first Indian book he edited, The American Heritage Book of Indians, the earliest European depictions of Native Americans. He wrote a book about Peter Rindisbacher, the European artist who introduced the world to Plains Indians in the early 1800s with drawings and paintings that were taken back to Europe by Hudson’s Bay people, engraved and sold across the continent. In 500 Nations, Josephy easily mixed the art of John White, George Catlin, and other early Europeans who drew and painted Indians with ancient Mayan and Mississippian art objects and photos and artwork of contemporary Indians.

I digress. If we remember anything of “Indian Art” from schools and popular culture, it is probably the totems and masks of the Kwaikutl and related Pacific Northwest tribes. Or the basketry and clay of Indians from the Southwest. But, in our own minds, we—and certainly most American textbooks and museums—are more likely to consider it the stuff of religion and function, artifacts and everyday living tools, rather than art. As Randy Kennedy points out in the Times piece, it is most often found “in the galleries for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.”

I wonder if Alvin and Betty ever met Charles and Valerie Diker, who are making the donation to the Met? According to Kennedy, they “live in an apartment brimful of Native American pieces and American modernist painting just a few blocks from the museum, the Met’s curatorial decision is nothing less than a groundbreaking affirmation of the way they have thought about their collection for more than 40 years.”

20th century New Mexican Tewa potters
Maria and Julian Martinez

“We always felt that what we were collecting was American art,” Mr. Diker said in a recent interview with the couple in their apartment. “And we always felt very strongly that it should be shown in that context.”

What a revelation! Indians make art, and they have for thousands of years, and Indian art, like that of European cave painters, the Impressionists, and Pablo Picasso, is art. In this case, it falls into the stream of American Art collected by a couple who always saw it as such, and are allowing the most famous American art museum to make the case for it.

And here is the rest of the Diker story:

The Great White Father

The Dakota Access Pipeline says they have drilled under the water and have just a bit of work to do before oil begins to flow. Earth Justice has filed an appeal on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux, and other tribes have filed other suits, but there is no word that the courts will step in and halt this threat to water and affront to Indian sovereignty.  

This after: years of deceptive practices by the oil companies in obtaining clearances for the pipeline; years after another route, one above the town of mostly-white Bismarck, was rejected; months after Obama’s executive order to halt construction and the Army Corps of Engineers’ agreement to do a full environmental impact study (rather than the cursory, expedited one they did in the first place) halted construction; and weeks after President Trump erased that effort with another Presidential executive order contravening the previous one and demanding a speed-up of the whole affair. And this drilling and flowing despite months of vigorous protest by water protectors from some 300 tribes across the Americas and allied environmental and veteran groups from across the nation.

Where have they all gone? The protectors? The veterans? The environmental action groups? The Press?

I am sure that many of the tribal people went home to confront like issues on their own reservations.  Home might be Oklahoma, where there is a Pawnee lawsuit against oil companies over the earthquakes that are disrupting their lives. The earthquakes that are conclusively tied to the fracking perpetrated by the oil companies. Some of the Indians maybe went home to Navajo land, where there are uranium tainted water troubles. Or to any number of other tribal places where water and fish and game are still important to tribal members.

And maybe the veterans, the environmental activists, and the press have gone on to other important causes not related to the Pawnee or other Indian tribes. Maybe they are busy with the women’s day protest this Wednesday. Maybe they are fighting the Republican answer to the Affordable Care Act. Or worrying about the new anti-EPA appointments in the EPA office.

But from my perch in the Josephy Library, with Alvin looking over my shoulder, and with a new novel of the Nez Perce and their tragic history my current reading, another idea comes to mind. It’s not an idea I like much, or one white Americans can be proud of, but Alvin’s words, and the Lewis and Clark scenes in David Osborne’s novel, The Coming, remind me that from the beginning and for generations, white America greeted tribes with a story of the Great White Father in Washington who had their best interests—as well as those of the missionaries, the settlers, the oil and uranium and coal companies—at heart.

Lewis and Clark brought Peace Medals, and encouraged the tribes to get along with each other and the white newcomers. The fur trade brought pots and pans, potatoes and trade cloth—and guns—and encouraged the tribes to trap and participate in the new economy. Missionaries brought seeds and plowshares, and The Book, with stories of sin and redemption, divine intervention in this world and burning or exalting in the next. (They of course brought their messages in different versions—Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, etc.—and, to the consternation of tribal peoples, fought over them.) Settlers and developers have brought “progress” always.

The way Alvin put it, a predominant white view of Indians from the beginning was that they were like children, and we—the white interveners—would, with education, religion, seeds and plows, grow them up to be like us. It strikes me on this gray day when Indians are losing their pipeline fight, and waging lonely fights to keep land, water, game, and fish in places across the country, attitudes haven’t changed much.

They—tribal peoples—are quaint and parochial, still needing education and training in the ways of the civilized world. We—the white majority and the leaders in politics, business, and environmental activism; the Governor of North Dakota and the Great White Father in Washington himself—know how the world works and what is best for All Americans.

# # #

Two World War II Heroes

Gwen Coffin with Senator Bob Packwood

February 19 marked the 75th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military then defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. And although race or ethnicity were not mentioned in the order, the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast—citizens or no—were targeted for removal.

In the middle of a “just war” against Fascism and Imperial Japanese expansion over peoples across the Pacific, Gwen Coffin, the editor of the Wallowa County Chieftain, rose to challenge President Roosevelt and Executive Order 9066. From his far outpost in Wallowa County he spoke to remind people of who we are and why we were fighting. It was a brave thing to do. I remember him saying once, with a chuckle, that the barber would not cut his hair; I am sure there were more serious threats.

In the troubled times in which we live, when religion and national origin are again topics of the day, and again related to real battles with real bullets, it is worth carefully reading Gwen Coffin’s courageous words of April 8, 1943:

“Much of the resentment on the West Coast toward the Japanese was not the outgrowth of the war but arose during peacetime as the Japanese achieved some success and prominence in their pursuit of agriculture and trade. Many employers preferred to see the Japanese remain in the ranks of the low paid wage earners. Others were resentful at the sight of Japanese prospering….

“It is foreign to our conceptions of democracy, however, to distinguish between peoples on the basis of color or nationality. There should be only one test for the right to share in the opportunities which this country provides, and that is the test of belief in our democratic ideals and government, and a willingness to work with other Americans to further those ideals and to support this government.”

This anniversary reminded me that we addressed WW II in 1994, at the seventh annual Summer Fishtrap Gathering at Wallowa Lake. My vivid memories of that July meeting involve three people: Jean Wakatsuki Houston, Richard White, and Alvin Josephy. Houston had grown up during the War in a Japanese Internment camp in California, and written a book about it, Farewell to Manzanar. Manzanar is most widely known as the site of one of ten camps in the United States of America to which over 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly moved and then held under Order 9066 during World War II.

And I remember historian Richard White telling us that the Japanese in America were not a threat—any with dangerous ties to the Japanese government were known to our government, and if Americans of Japanese ancestry were serious threats, those on Hawaii should also have been rounded up and incarcerated. They were not, because the Japanese there were crucial to the economy and our war effort.

The internment, White said, was done out of war hysteria for purposes of propaganda.

As it turned out of course, many Japanese-Americans served with great distinction in the European theater, no Japanese Americans were prosecuted for spying, and, in 1988, President Reagan apologized and awarded $20,000 to each of over 100,000 camp detainees still alive at the time.

Finally, I remember Alvin Josephy playing his recording of the Marine landing at Guam. Alvin, a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent, had walked the last quarter mile with a microphone covered by a condom against the seawater, tethered to the recording machine in the belly of a halftrack by a 40-foot cord. He said later that he became numb as he talked his way to shore, passing bodies of comrades—over 20 of the 32 on his boat were hit in that quarter mile. On the day in 1994, tears in his eyes as he and we listened to a recording of shouts and cries, gunfire and engine noise, he rose and said that “some of us felt guilty about coming home alive.”

He stepped down from the stage, where Jean Wakatsuki Houston stood to give him a hug, tears in her eyes too.

I replayed all of this in my mind as I listened to news reports on Sunday, February 19, the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. World War II was a dangerous juncture in our nation’s history. Thousands of Americans and millions of Germans, Russians, French, English, Japanese and others died in that War.

There were heroes in the War, as in any war. Alvin Josephy would not have called himself a hero, but in my mind he was, putting his own life on the line to write about his fellow Marines, and to remind them and the American public of how and what they were fighting for. Gwen Coffin was a hero too, reminding us of our better selves in a time when it was not easy or popular to do so.

# # #

Continuing outrage over Standing Rock

(submitted, but not printed, as Op-ed to New York Times)

Recent decisions regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline deserve outrage. How is it that the Army Corps of Engineers, having recently agreed to a full environmental impact statement and search for an alternate pipeline route, can, in two weeks of Trump Time, decide that they have enough information to allow the digging to begin on what NYT writer Jill Turkewitz labeled that “disputed patch of land”? Anyone who has half-followed the events at Standing Rock over the last year knows that an alternate route, which would have put the line closer to mostly white Bismarck, N.D., was scrubbed early in the process. And knows that news of “water protectors” representing over 200 North American tribes and indigenous people from Hawaii and the other Americas being shot with rubber bullets and hosed with water cannons in freezing weather has brought veterans groups, churches, and ordinary Joes and Josies to join the protest. I expect the outrage to continue, and the protests, including a March 10 event in Washington, to swell.

But there is room for broader outrage at a national press that has to be dragged into Indian affairs, that only briefly covers Indian stories, finds room for a few pictures of headdresses and feathers, and then moves on, reluctant or not knowing how to deal with the nation’s long bad history with Indians. It doesn’t have to be that way!

I’d like to take you back to March 18, 1973, when the confrontation between the FBI and tribal members on the Pine Ridge Reservation—near neighbors to Standing Rock—had devolved into violence. Because of that violence, because of prior events at Alcatraz and the BIA offices in Washington D.C., because of general unrest over failures in Vietnam, the country was on edge. But the New York Times and Alvin M. Josephy Jr. stepped up with a long, Sunday Magazine piece, “Wounded Knee and All That—What the Indians Want.”

In stinging prose and pictures, Josephy chronicled the Nixon White House attempts to reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a pro-Indian fashion, and the reform’s failure because of Congressional and Administration inaction and fear. By Josephy’s reasoning, the road to Wounded Knee seemed almost inevitable. But he didn’t stop there. He told us about a century of outrageous treatment of the Sioux by Americans and our government including the “first” Wounded Knee, in 1890. Times editors included an eerie 1890 photo of US troops atop a mass grave of Indians massacred by Gatling guns.

If Alvin Josephy, noted historian and founding board chair of the National Museum of the American Indian, were alive today, he would have an op-ed in the New York Times. He would be visiting Standing Rock, and pointing out that the “disputed patch of land” that investors, the State of North Dakota, and President Trump want for their oil pipeline is sacred, yes, is important for the water that flows through it, yes. But is finally, once again “stolen ground,” with a long history of broken treaties, and government dissembling, cheating, and war-making on the Indians who have lived their forever.

# # #

Before Alvin wrote about Indians–Denig’s Demons

Denig awards Alvin Bronze Star

Before he met the Nez Perce, before he wrote about American Indians, Alvin Josephy was a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent in the Pacific in World War II. He traveled with a typewriter and a wire recorder, wrote thousands of dispatches to local newspapers from the front lines, and the Library of Congress lists over 90 recordings made on Guam, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima. A 15-minute version of the Guam landing recording played nationwide on all three radio networks.

Alvin’s boss was BGen Robert L. Denig, and the troop of journalists, photographers, and artists he assembled to get the Marine Corps story back home was called “Denig’s Demons.” It’s my thought that Alvin’s war-time experience was crucial in his quick absorption in Indian history and adoption of Indian causes. He was less than a decade out of the Pacific when he found the Nez Perce story—and the first thing he wanted to know was “where is the Indian side of things?” In the War, he was in the foxholes with fellow marines, not on ship or shore with the generals.

Alvin was always a Marine. He told me once about being at Pine Ridge when things were still testy among Indian factions and between the Indians and government agencies. In the course of his travels, he saw a Marine Corps insignia at a front door, and stopped to make a friend. They were both Marines.

Here’s a link to a Leatherneck Magazine story on “Denig’s Demons.” Alvin’s in it, but the important thing is the story, the vision of Denig and, I think, how it then played out in Alvin’s long career as writer and advocate.

Here’s the story:  http://josephy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/leatherneck2007.pdf

Standing Rock Outrage!

November- Reuters News

In a brief story in the New York Times this morning, reporter Julie Turkewitz tells us that the Army has approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It took Robert Speer, the acting secretary of the Army, two weeks—from the time of President Trump’s announcement that he was going to expedite the building of pipelines—to announce his decision to Congress. Speer said he didn’t need the entire environmental impact statement and news of other potential sites that President Obama had ordered, that he knew enough and is ready to offer the pipeline’s owner a 30-year easement on this  “disputed patch of land.”

I glance at the NYT headline stories daily, then go to the opinion pages for the Times editorials, the regular columnists, and op-eds that relate to the day’s news. Standing Rock is missing this morning. Not one editorial writer or columnist chose to weigh in; not one piece of writing from an outraged Indian at Standing Rock or anywhere else in this country got space.

Indians, once again, are back page news.

According to Turkewitz, “the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, Dave Archambault II, responded to the decision by vowing to fight it in court. ‘As native peoples, we have been knocked down again,’ he said in statement. ‘But we will get back up, we will rise above the greed and corruption that has plagued our peoples since first contact.’”

Didn’t I just write about Indian Resilience? Didn’t I believe that months of protests by members of over 300 North American Tribes and Natives from Hawaii and Central America, by environmental organizations and dedicated individuals from across the nation had convinced a country and its government that the planning for this pipeline was flawed, that the Army had once again short-circuited Indians, and that the proposed pipeline might endanger the water, the most critical of our natural resources?

Every day I learn something from Alvin Jospehy. Today I learned that Indians still don’t count for much in this country of ours. They are, as Alvin said, a sideshow in our history, or they are impediments in the way of progress. We’ll put them in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and watch cowboys take the West, We’ll glean spiritual knowledge from their commercial potions and sweats—the old traveling Medicine Shows often featured Indian cures, and hippies in the 70s favored feathers. We’ll celebrate them in pictures with Edward Sheriff Curtis, and picture them when it serves a purpose. Alvin liked to point out the State Department’s use of a mistakenly idealized American Indian—horse-mounted, feather bedecked Sioux of the Plains—in their “visit America” literature.

For over 40 years, Alvin wrote painstakingly about America’s curious and tragic historical omission of Indians. He paid special attention to broken treaties, and to the Sioux. In 1971, when he consulted on the movie, “Little Big Man,” he went to the Custer Battlefield with Indian friends and wrote about the “real Custer” in Life Magazine. In 1973, weeks after the FBI-Indian confrontation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he wrote “What the Indians Really Want,” a description of government misdeeds going back to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

If Alvin were alive today he would have an op-ed in today’s New York Times. He would be visiting Standing Rock, and pointing out that the “disputed patch of land” that investors, the State of North Dakota, and President Trump want for their oil pipeline is sacred, yes, is important for the water that flows through it, yes. But is finally, once again “stolen ground,” with a long history of broken treaties, and government dissembling, cheating, and war-making on the Indians who have lived their forever.

# # #

Standing Rock slips away

There’s no word from Standing Rock in the New York Times or on CNN today. Indians slip into the national news on occasion—and then, on most occasions, slip out as quickly.

Both CNN and MSNBC did report yesterday about an oil spill from another pipeline just three hours from Standing Rock. The spill happened more than a week ago, on December 5. According to CNN,

“State officials estimate 4,200 barrels of crude oil, or 176,000 gallons, have leaked from the Belle Fourche Pipeline in Billings County. Of that amount, 130,000 gallons of oil has flowed into Ash Coulee Creek, while the rest leaked onto a hillside, said Bill Suess, spill investigation program manager at the North Dakota Department of Health.”

Had it been in New York or Pennsylvania, the Times would have had someone on it, and it would not have slipped away from its reporters in just a day. In North Dakota and elsewhere in Indian Country, such national attention is fleeting.

The most recent reports I find in national news from Standing Rock give the government forces a chance to explain their actions. North Dakota’s Congressman Kevin Cramer has taken every opportunity, including an op-ed space in the Wall Street Journal, to criticize the protestors for disrespecting “private property rights,” and the Obama Administration for ignoring the “rule of law” for “political expediency.”

Indians, and especially the Sioux, could school the Congressman on the rule of law and political expediency! Here’s a brief statement from the National Archives:

Wounded Knee – 1890

“The Black Hills of Dakota are sacred to the Sioux Indians. In the 1868 treaty, signed at Fort Laramie and other military posts in Sioux country, the United States recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for exclusive use by the Sioux people. In 1874, however, General George A. Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills accompanied by miners who were seeking gold. Once gold was found in the Black Hills, miners were soon moving into the Sioux hunting grounds and demanding protection from the United States Army. Soon, the Army was ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range in accordance with their treaty rights. In 1876, Custer, leading an army detachment, encountered the encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River. Custer’s detachment was annihilated, but the United States would continue its battle against the Sioux in the Black Hills until the government confiscated the land in 1877. To this day, ownership of the Black Hills remains the subject of a legal dispute between the U.S. government and the Sioux.”

I get a glimpse today of what Alvin Josephy must have felt like time and again as he tried to bring the Indian Story to the American public. Looking for his own books in bookstores, he often found them with the “dinosaurs and the insects.” “Indians don’t have history and biography,” he would say. “They have anthropology and ‘natural’ history.”

Which did not stop him from using all the tools at his disposal—his editorial perch at American Heritage; his relations with Knopf Publishing; his standing as an award winning Marine Corps journalist in the Pacific in WW 2—to bring real Indian history and biography, real Indian voices, to the American Public.

I realize that in many ways, now that I sit in my own perch at the Josephy Library, the Sioux were often involved in his truth telling. A long article he prepared for National Geographic did not, due to editorial changes, get published. And I am still looking for a book-length Sioux manuscript he once told me was still publishable. Nevertheless, how he followed events in Sioux Country and what he did publish is substantial:

There was the “Custer Myth” in Life Magazine in 1971, the story of a visit to the Little Big Hole Battlefield with some Indian friends during the time that Alvin served as a technical advisor for the film, “Little Big Man.” In 1971, Josephy pointed out, government interpreters at the National Park site were still calling Custer a hero and the Indians savages!

In 1973, just two years later, and only weeks after the Indian-FBI confrontation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Alvin published “Wounded Knee and All That: What the Indians Really Want,” in the New York Times. He included a grizzly burial photo of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee of over 300 Sioux—many, including women and children, were killed in their tipis by Hotchkiss machine gun fire.

And then, in 1990, on the 100th anniversary of the first Wounded Knee, he wrote its historical account for a book published by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center: Wounded Knee: Lest We Forget. I’d suggest that Congressman Kramer, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple, other government and pipeline officials, and especially environmental activists concerned about water and Indian treaty rights, read this brief account of how the Indians standing at Standing Rock came to be there.

Email me to get a pdf of this essay.

rich.wandschneider@gmail.com

 

American Indians, water, and the public good

Later, alternate title: “First Lessons From Standing Rock”

The late historian and activist on behalf of American Indians Alvin Josephy believed that Indians in America would solve the drug problem before others figured it out. “Indians,” he said “are still capable of ‘group think,’ of thinking for the tribe rather than focusing on the individual.” Josephy also believed that Indians still had things to tell, especially about the land, because they had lived on and with it for millennia.

from Huffington Post

Standing Rock is Group Think in capital letters. It has  attracted tribal members from Indian Nations across the country, white environmentalists, and veterans of all colors, who are now joining the water protectors in force in uniform. These veterans, schooled in tribal thinking (as illustrated in Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging), and realizing that Indians have and do serve in the American military in greater numbers than any other sector of American society, are there to support their comrades in the next foxhole and throw their weight against wrongs that have festered from the beginnings of nationhood.

White and black Americans who have always talked about their Cherokee grandmother or some other distant relative tied to the original immigrants—immigrants scientists now tell us came from Asia well over 14,000 years ago, probably not on the “land bridge” that we learned about if we learned anything of First Americans, but on water, along the Pacific Shoreline, hopscotching their ways to South America while settling the lands along the way—are joining the Dakota chorus. Whatever wrongs they have suffered and seen in their own lives are coming into this focus on government mistreatment of Indians and disregard for water, the principle of all life.

The environmental community, gloomy with election defeat and their own experiences—or stories they’ve heard—of contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon and other urban and seemingly safe places, gradually realizing that the Indians’ fight for water and fair treatment is their fight, have awoken to and in North Dakota.

Maybe there is also guilt over the lack of support of tribes in the 1950s, when the Corps of Engineers bulldozed the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, and built the Garrison Dam on this very same Missouri River and flooded over 90 % of the then prosperous Indians’ agricultural lands. Or in the 60s, when the Corps abrogated the our oldest treaty, the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed in 1794 by George Washington, that established land boundaries and declared “peace and friendship” between the United States of America and the tribes of the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga and Tuscarora, to build the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania. Environmentalists are on board at Standing Rock.

The mainstream media that has been castigated for not covering Indian concerns is there and reporting. To be fair, we—the general public—have never expressed much interest in current Indian affairs, preferring our Indian stories to be about deeds and misdeeds in the past, before the nation was formed and the West was won. Representatives of the New York Times and television news were actually at Standing Rock in August. The few stories they slipped past editors concentrating on the Presidential campaign and the constant drumbeats of Native media outlets helped raise national awareness. It is now national news, with daily stories from large and small media outlets, social media, and continuing Indian country media. Some days it even cracks the New York Times top ten “trending” list.

It is ironic and fitting that the tools that government used to assimilate Indians—especially the boarding schools, which began in the late nineteenth century and survive in modified from to this day, and the termination and relocation policies of the 1950s, have served to introduce tribal peoples one to another across the entire country. These tools led to AIM in the 70s, and now help bring people from 300 Indian nations in North America and indigenous people from Hawaii and Central America to Standing Rock.

And it is fitting that this attention to water and sustainability come from the first immigrants. Yes, there were tribal mistakes—did the Mississippi Mound peoples disappear because of over use of resources and exaltation of the rich and powerful? How did climate change and wars over resources play out in the Southwest 600 and 700 years ago? But in general the Indians of North America pre-contact lived lighter on the land, acknowledged the need for constant renewal, and eschewed the privatization and exploitation of lands and rersources.

They, like growing numbers of all Americans, realized that water is the key to all life, and that there are times and places when putting private goods over the public good jeopardizes everything. Standing Rock is a symbol—and maybe a beginning.

# # #

Indians and Environmentalists

This before election results are in, knowing that one candidate thinks climate change is a hoax, and that neither candidate has acknowledged Indian efforts at stopping the Dakota Access pipeline—or, for that matter, having talked at all to Indians or about Indian issues and concerns.

There are three pieces in today’s New York Times that reflect advances and show the need to continue Alvin Josephy’s long-ago efforts at bringing the environmental community and Indian communities together.

The first of course is about the environmental community backing the Indians at Standing Rock in their fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline by targeting big banks that are financing the project (perfect roles for such groups). The second and third articles—and a closer look might have revealed more—were about the smog in Delhi, India, which is literally choking the population with industrial overload, and another about oil companies, that, to varying degrees and seeking to serve their own best economic self interests, are exploring alternative energies. Good for them.

In ancient days, when David Brower was the head of the Sierra Club, Alvin said that his and other environmental organizations paid no attention and lent not a helping hand as a high-minded hell-bent-for-development Army Corps of Engineers

“built the Garrison Dam, the largest rolled-earth am in the world, across the Missouri River in North Dakota, ignoring the protests of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians and chopping up and flooding sacred sites and large parts of their reservation. Repeating their high-handedness, the Corps then broke the American government’s oldest existing treaty, made in 1794 with the Seneca Indians of New York State, to build the Kinzua Dam, which flooded the center of the Senecas’ reservation and the burial ground of their famous revolutionary-era chief, Cornplanter, and again forced a heartbreaking relocation of most of the Indians.” (Walk Toward Oregon, pp 275-76)

Weed, California

There were other disagreements, and other cases where environmental groups disregarded issues in Grand Canyon and in Alaska, but Josephy insisted that the two sides should be talking, wrote an op-ed about it in the Times, and actually arranged a New York meeting between Brower, Alan Gassow, and others from Friends of the Earth with tribal leaders. Ultimately, he wrote several articles for Audubon Magazine and a book, Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, which gathered essays and arguments on many of these issues. They are as fresh today as when he wrote them in the 70s and 80s–Kinzua’s still there; the Indians are ahead at Pyramid Lake and on the Columbia, and controversy swirls in the Dakotas.

I told my OSU class in La Grande yesterday about canaries in coal-mines, and how Indian concerns over natural resource issues, especially over water issues, might be seen in the same way. Dakota Access is not the only water issue out there today. Look to see what is happening on the Navajo Reservation with drought and pollution, and the efforts of Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead to tap Indian water in other places.

There is plenty of work to do—from Standing Rock to Delhi—but good environmentally conscious citizens might look close to home for the Indian tribes and their canaries and see where they are pointing.

# # # 

Standing Rock and Malheur

Like many, I am distressed about recent events in North Dakota and Malheur. I agree with Bill McKibben that the pipeline’s original route, above Bismarck, N.D. was changed to a route away from the white power structure and to one that might endanger tribal people and others downstream who just maybe would not pay attention–or at least do not have the power that Bismarck, the oil companies, and the labor unions have.

I agree with those who wonder what the FBI was doing with the Malheur prosecution. Why the conspiracy charges, difficult to prove, when the plain view infractions–trespassing, destruction of federal property and destruction and desecration of Indian sites–were many?

I agree with those who say that white privilege prevails, and that the Indians are being used and abused once again.

I reread what I had written about Malheur and “ownership” of the land in January. Ownership of and responsibility for the land, the water, and all that lives on and is dependent on it–is at the heart of Pipeline and Refuge. Everything I wrote then is true now for both.

http://josephylibrary.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-land-owns-paiutes.html

I think that we might embrace the Bundys’ calls for return of Federal Lands–TO THE INDIANS, TO WHOM IT WAS ALLOTTED BY THE GOVERNMENT, AND FROM WHOM IT WAS TAKEN.

Sebastian Junger, PTSD, and 500 Nations

I liked the argument in Sebastian Junger’s new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, but cringed throughout the first chapters as he lumped all American Indians together and made them stone-age hunter-gatherers, “a native population that had barely changed, technologically, in 15,000 years,” ignoring the diversity of economies and cultures, the growth and spread of agriculture, and the rise and fall of civilizations over millennia.

Alvin Josephy would say that this is yet another gross misunderstanding of American Indian history and its intertwined relationship with all American history, that the “standard narrative” once again sees all Indians as hunter gatherers with headdresses.

Sebastian Junger gained fame with a book about the sea, The Perfect Storm, and, after being embedded for five months with troops in Afghanistan, produced a well-regarded documentary film, “Restrepo,” and book, War, based on that experience.

In the new book, he argues that “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern Society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” His experiences with soldiers and vets, and his own brief encounter with PTSD—which he at first did not recognize as such—sent him on and exploration of PTSD that led him to the concept of “tribe.”

He’d quickly learned that most of the military veterans claiming PTSD now have not been involved in combat—only 10 percent of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have experienced combat, while almost 50 percent claim PTSD. He thinks that most of what is diagnosed as PTSD is really a readjustment problem. Humans have evolved over eons in small interdependent groups—tribes—and need to be needed and need community in order to thrive. Soldiers leaving a situation that mimics ancient tribal culture and reentering a highly competitive, individualistic America have trouble. In the Peace Corps, which Junger gives a nod, it is called “reverse culture shock.”

Tribe is the book’s title and the answer to PTSD. His historical exploration begins with America’s founders and first relations with Indians. There are stories from Benjamin Franklin and other Founders about white men donning leggings and living like and with Indians on the frontier, and about women and children captured by Indians who did not want to be rescued. A Frenchman, Hector de Crevecoueur, lamented that “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European.”

For women, Indian life might have been hard, but the dominance of husbands was not so absolute. For Junger, the important notion is that tribal life offered the mutual support, egalitarianism, and community values that contemporary European society did not. And today in America, vastness and radical individualism are at odds with our tribal natures.

It’s no accident that Josephy’s book and the Kevin Costner TV series were named “500 Nations of North America,” an upfront declaration that there was great diversity in the Americas before the Europeans came. And in the National Book Award nominated Indian Heritage of America Josephy uses linguists’ work to show two continents evolving into groups or tribes that spoke some 2500 mutually unintelligible languages.

There were, among these “nations,” vast differences in economies, cultures, life-styles, wealth, governance, etc. etc. There were the imperial peoples of South and Central America—Incas and Mayans and Aztecs; the wealthy, class-bound, matriarchal, and extremely artistic cultures of the northern Pacific Coast; and the treaty and governance pioneering Haudenosaunee Confederacy of northeastern North America.

Nations—no civilizations—had risen and fallen: Inca, Mayan, Aztec, Cahokian. The Mayans’ intricate irrigation-based society might have fallen to global warming. Incans’ penchant for revering dead leaders might have sapped their economies. The mound-builders that summited at Cahokia near present-day St. Louis might have fallen to overcrowding, or drought, or disease. And the agriculture! Who tamed and developed corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, rubber, manioc, squash and all the rest? And how did they do it?

No, Mr. Junger, none of this touches your basic argument about humans evolving over hundreds of thousands of years to best function in small groups—groups of about 50, he estimates—and to value and practice mutual support and co
operative working and living. And the history of early North American interactions among “the English” and tribal peoples is enlightening and important.

But painting all American Indians with the same brush (caveat—later in the book there is some minimal admission of tribal differences) is robbing two continents of histories that are as rich, complex and tragic as anything Europe and Asia have to offer.

# # #

Geneticists, Linguists, and American Indians

There’s an interesting piece in today’s NYT about genetic testing African Americans. The researchers covered in the article calculate that “the ancestors of the average African-American today were 82.1 percent African, 16.7 percent European and 1.2 percent Native American.”

More interesting than that, by examining the length of matching DNA strands, they claim that the Native American genes got into the African American mix very early, as slaves were first brought from Africa, and that the European genes got into the mix later—primarily during the time just preceding the Civil War.

Furthermore, by tracing X and Y chromosomes—Xs come only from mothers; fathers can pass on Xs or Ys—and the fact that the X chromosome of contemporary African-Americans shows more African ancestry than do the Y, leads them to the conclusion that the 16.7 percent European ancestry is primarily due to white slave owners fathering the children of their black slaves.

Here is a link to the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/science/african-american-dna.html?emc=edit_th_20160528&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66175474

This is all very interesting, but haven’t historians been telling us most of this for a long time—if we were listening? Linguists too, and folklorists have traced languages and cultural patterns, and thus the movements of peoples across time and geography.

* * *

I always introduce Library visitors to Alvin Josephy’s Indian Heritage of America (published in 1968) by pointing out that he begins with languages. Although scarcely 50 years ago, this was a time before the “human genome.” But common sense and Josephy tell us that we can trace people’s movements, and to some extent the development of their cultures, through language. Josephy found early that one of the gifts left by missionaries, furmen, and adventurers is a chronicle of Indian languages.

Speaking of gifts, a donor recently left the Josephy Library a copy of John Wesley Powell’s 1891 report to the Smithsonian. This Powell—the same who floated the Colorado—sent a team of a half dozen researches across the country gathering language information for two years. He then analyzed and classified the Indian language information they brought back in his annual report. Powell broke them into 46 major language groups—I believe this was the first classification of North American Indian languages.

Josephy had later research to work with. But it has always struck me as a mark of his genius that he began a book intending to paint a broad picture of the Indian heritage of North and South America by talking with linguists. And it occurs to me that his advantage in being a journalist was that he was not discipline-bound—he reached out to linguists, archeologists, anthropologists, and others who were, often quietly and for an audience limited to their own field, building pictures of the past.

There are a dozen ways to go with this: genetics is incredibly interesting, but let’s not forget the human stories of slavery, the “Great Migration” of African Americans out of the south, and, always, the Indian presence in all subsequent “American” history. How do we make sure the human stories don’t get lost in the science?

Or, we can celebrate the new emphasis on tribal languages across the country. One of my early Peace Corps language memories is a Turkish saying that where there is “one language, one man; two languages, two men.” Taking away the gender issue, the point is that language is intricately tied to culture, and the loss of language is a loss of culture and history. So good for the tribal language programs and linking tribal peoples to history and culture.

We’ll continue to get stories from geneticists, but let’s also remember and thank those missionaries and adventurers for their roles in preserving languages. And let’s remember the stories that language, oral history, and culture tell us about the past as we keep them alive in the present.

# # #

Life on Joseph Creek

Joseph Canyon USFS photo

Alvin Josephy talked about Indians’ relationship to land, and how, from the get-go, Europeans did not understand it. Europeans saw land as an economic resource, not just a “home” place to live on and live with.  In fact, the Book of Genesis in pocket and mind, Christian Europeans thought themselves lords and masters of the land, with Biblically ordained dominion over it and all of its non-human inhabitants.

After a long slog through feudalism, during which most Europeans worked the land to the benefit of a ruling class, Euro-Americans saw opportunities to be their own lords and masters. A few years of indentured servitude and then Indian lands theirs for the taking. Thomas Jefferson legitimized it, promoting the idea of a nation of self-sustaining small landholders, free men who would forward humanity’s march towards democracy.

No one paid much attention to Indians’ relationships to land—except to take it. Well, Europeans did pick up the many crops Indians had developed over millennia in the “new” world, and shipped potatoes, corn, chocolate, tomatoes, manioc and dozens more around the globe. They also shipped gold—enough of it to change world economies, and tobacco, enough to start a new European rage. And they enslaved Indians and brought in African slaves to dig the gold and farm the tobacco.  Etc.

The world changed, continents “exchanged,” as Charles Mann recounts so well in his two books on the subject, 1491 and 1493.

But not all of America changed immediately, and the Indians in many parts of the country, after suffering diseases and wars, losing buffalo and land, being chased or “removed” from one place to another, held onto little pieces of earth, where many of them still live. These “reservations” (lands “reserved” from much larger areas of life and influence) are cruel reminders of how much land was taken from Indians, but their existence has also been a bulwark against total assimilation. That is what Alvin said—reservations, however small and humble, have allowed some Indians to maintain tradition and culture that is intrinsically tied to land.

The “better” lands—most not reserved for Indians—were generally lands most suitable to agricultural production. And, although it is another strand in this long story of land and lost lands, the notion that “ownership” of land should somehow be tied to its “improvement” is a recurrent theme in the homesteading tradition and the takeover of Indian lands.  God, said settling pioneers and their preachers, had ordained men to make the best use of the land; God, retorted Plateau tribesmen, did not want mother earth scarred with a plow.

* * *

The land on Joseph Creek in the Wallowa Country was homesteaded late in the 19th century. The Tippetts arrived there in 1916 or 17.  Thirty years ago Biden Tippett, who grew up there and went to country school there, took Alvin Josephy and a tape recorder on a tour of the area. Biden told me about this “lost” tape a year or more ago, and a month ago Ann Hayes brought in a box of cassette tapes, one marked  “Alvin Josephy—Biden Tippett 1986.” We had it digitized, and I listened my way to Portland with it on Saturday.

There is nothing earth-shattering, nothing that is going to change the reading of local history, but it is another chunk in my own understanding of the difference between improving land and living with land, owning land and being part of it, European and Northwest Plateau Tribal notions of relationship to land.

The Tippetts of course are of European stock, but something drove them from the Midwest to Heppner, Oregon, and then to the Chesnimnus Country in Wallowa County, and then took one of them, Jidge Tippett, to Joseph Creek, deep in the canyons of Snake River Country.

His son, Biden, born in 1926, said there were three or four other families on Joseph Creek at the time, enough to make the school and to help each other through calving, haying, and hard times.

What comes out of the interview is how self-sufficient the canyon dwellers were. They were good neighbors, and they all grew a little food, had their beef and wild berries, and traded for most everything else. Cows for a pig, and, Biden remembers, hides—wild and domestic—that the kids collected and traded to the Indians for gloves and moccasins.

Trading was one of the things that American Indians excelled at, and one of the most underreported in standard histories. The Nez Perce dried salmon and traded it in buffalo country. The Tippetts traded for gloves and bacon, and, like the Indians, ate the salmon and steelhead, game and berries. Like the Indians, they gaffed steelhead at the “narrows” on the Grand Ronde River.

Like the Indians, they traveled with seasons, wintering along Joseph Creek, summering in the high country, and moving cattle through the breaks in spring and fall. At one point on the tape, Alvin says “you lived like Indians.”  And Biden pretty much agrees, though he says that ranchers today (meaning 1986) make use of some modern conveniences. But he describes the way he sees wild animals—as “part of the habitat,” the way he travels horseback on narrow trails, the way he visualizes a day’s work and travel, reads sign, and lives with and loves the land, as the probable ways of its the old inhabitants.

Alvin asked him if he’d ever been lost in the canyons. “No,” Biden says, but he did get lost one time in Spokane.

# # #

Another painting/statue/book of Chief Joseph?

Fouch photo of Joseph in Bismarck 1877

This week a sculptor who is having bronze work done at the local foundry came into the library looking for pictures of Chief Joseph. He has it in mind to do a bronze of a young Chief Joseph on a horse. He’d seen a picture of a Nez Perce—not Joseph—on a horse that had inspired him, and had seen photos of Joseph as an older man. He wanted pictures of hairstyles and clothing that might help him portray a younger Joseph.

We found his horse photo online, and when he mentioned the Nez Perce and Appaloosas, I pointed out the lack of spots on this photo. And sent him away with the Harry and Grace Bartlett and Alvin Josephy material from the New York Brand Book magazine of 1967. I also suggested a couple of books he might read.

We have two statues of Young Chief Joseph in Wallowa County, both done by non-Indian artists, and there are hundreds of Joseph likenesses standing big and small across the whole country. Add to that a huge number of drawings and paintings of the famous Nez Perce Indian…  and of course the books—new ones appear regularly as a new person, more than likely a white Euro-American, finds and is smitten by the Nez Perce story, or maybe only by a few words from the surrender speech: “I will fight no more forever…”

From my perch in the Josephy Library I see some of these people, and sometimes am asked, as I was this week, to help with research so that the artist or writer can get on with the dream novel, biography, painting or bronze likeness. Each person has a different starting point— a book they have read, owning an Appaloosa horse, meeting a Nez Perce person, crossing the Nez Perce Trail someplace between the Wallowas and the Bears Paw, seeing a movie or a picture fly by on Facebook, a general and often romantic notion of cowboys and Indians, maybe even feelings of guilt about the way Indians have been treated, astonishment at the story of the Nez Perce fighting retreat and near escape to Canada—and I generally try to gauge that place and see what I can add, or how I might push the artist or writer a little this way or that.

But it is uncomfortable territory. What should I tell or emphasize? More basically, should I encourage or discourage? What right or duty do these mostly white Euro-Americans have to tell a Nez Perce story in words or images?

The issue recently came up between states, as Idaho Governor Butch Otter wrote to Oregon Governor Kate Brown that his state has more claim to Chief Joseph than does ours, and that Oregon should not have a statue of Joseph as one of two Oregonians in its niche in the Hall of Statutory in the United States Capitol because of this Idaho connection. Otter obviously did not know his Nez Perce history. Actually, he did not know his American history! There is a Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho, and Joseph and his band were trying to get there when the Nez Perce War broke out, but Joseph’s time in Idaho was always passing through from his Wallowa homeland.

It’s easy to get confused by history. Chief Joseph was early—while the Nez Perce War was going on—dubbed by writers of Eastern newspapers the “Red Napoleon,” and one of the early books on the War was called War Chief Joseph. Later editions of the same book became The Saga of Chief Joseph. The mistaken notion that Joseph was a war leader was overtaken finally by evidence that others led warriors; Joseph was the one who led the people of his small band of Nez Perce before the War, and who, during the war when many bands were involved, deferred to others on military decisions and managed the affairs of camp.

In my readings, Joseph comes of real prominence as the talented leader during captivity and after, the diplomat who held people together during a very difficult exile, and with deft and creative effort on both national and local fronts, gained their return from Indian Territory—what Nez Perce call the “hot place”—to the Northwest. And of course tried unsuccessfully through the rest of his life to return to the Wallowas.

The earliest photos of Chief Joseph were apparently taken in Bismarck in 1877; there are three images taken by two photographers, John Fouch and Jay Haynes. One Fouch photo has him in a fancy shirt that some say was not Nez Perce, possibly Sioux. But that “war shirt” sold at auction recently to William Koch for $877,500!

And the Appaloosa horse story has been used in one way and another by artists and writers from the foundation of the Appaloosa Horse Club in the 1930s. Bartlett and Josephy stepped into a bee’s nest with their comments and research in the 1960s, which showed that the Nez Perce, who did selectively breed horses for speed and endurance, did not collectively breed for spots. But Alvin often said that this is another historical inaccuracy that might well become “fact” with the years.

In other words, the real story of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce is a very complicated one, and anyone non-Indian who wants to work with it in art or words should, I think, do so with humility and clear and good intentions as well as curiosity.

Some questions to ask yourself:

Why Chief Joseph and not some other Nez Perce Indian; or why Indians at all?

You can read Yellow Wolf’s account of the War and find other remarkable Nez Perce men and women. Yes, Joseph in his photos is handsome and very expressive, and Joseph is of course a name we can pronounce and relate to. And the Nez Perce story and Joseph’s role in it are tragic and captivating. But there are hundreds, thousands of Indian stories that are tragic and heroic. Look at Josephy’s Patriot Chiefs. Think about why you are choosing this story and this man.

What is your own relationship to the Nez Perce? And what story do you feel compelled to tell? 

I think of Alvin Josephy finding the story. He was immediately captivated by it—he was a journalist, had just returned from war in the Pacific, and immediately saw it as a great AMERICAN epic—but then found that the Indian side of things had not been adequately told. He set out to find that, and found it first in Yellow Wolf, and then with survivors of the War, and with visits to Colville with people from Joseph’s own band. He thought that the non-Indian world and the Indians themselves deserved a telling that was more than the words of white missionaries who had worked among the Nez Perce in early days, and white military men who had fought them in the War. It took over 600 pages and scores of footnotes for him to do that work. If you have a mind to do something with Joseph and/or the Nez Perce, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest is a good place to start. And then ask yourself about your own talents and your relationship to the Nez Perce story. That might be the story in itself, and an easier one for you to paint or tell.

Have you talked about this with tribal people? 

You will of course get different answers, but tribal people have feelings about non-Indians using their stories. There are even laws about it. You can talk with people from cultural resources departments at all three of the reservations where Nez Perce people now live: Lapwai in Idaho, Umatilla in Oregon, and the Colville in Washington State. Or talk with resource people on other Indian reservations across the country to get information about non-Indians doing research among Indians. It can be tricky territory, but also can be rewarding and will help you make decisions about your own work.

Listen to their stories/ideas/suggestions.

I guess what follows on talking with Indians is listening to them. A non-Indian friend came to me with a Nez Perce story he was pursuing. He had begun to feel uncomfortable about it. I suggested that he talk to an elder that he knew. He did and on the elder’s advice dropped his research.

There is something consistent in the way Indians talk about Alvin Josephy. “He listened,” they almost always say. Cliff Trafzer, who holds a chair in Indian Studies at UC Riverside, says that in the 1950s, Alvin took the “unusual step” among historians of listening to Indians. Which reminds of a story Alvin told about going to a Western History Association meeting after publishing Patriot Chiefs in 1961. “Why are you writing about Indians,” one historian asked him. “No one cares about Indians.” Ten years later the same man asked Alvin how he knew to write about Indians at the time. I guess the lesson here is to not be a slave to the fashions of the day in pursuing your work with Indians.

Artists and writers I know often have trusted readers or artist friends who they consult before publishing (making public). I suggest that in dealing with Indian stories this is true in a special way. You might have to add some tribal people to the list of your trusted advisors.

Approaching your own work.

No one can stop you from painting or writing what comes out of your own experience and imagination. I would hope that these few words will not discourage anyone completely—I take that back; there are some who should be discouraged from taking on this painting or book of Indians, and might go on to subject matter more suitable to their talents and personalities—but I do hope that whatever comes of your work will be stronger for asking yourself these questions at the outset.

# # #

First Foods

The water in Flint

As I read headlines about Flint, Michigan’s water over the past months, and of water contaminated by chemical runoff in the farm belts of the Midwest and on irrigated ground closer to home, the notion that the relationship between humans and the land is mutual and more complicated than science and technology have proffered sends me again to Alvin Josephy and the Indians. Recent accounts of the loss of pollinators, which some say threatens global food supplies, leads to the same place.

Josephy told us that by denigrating the values and practices of Indian peoples, by seeing “human” and “natural world” as two domains, the one to be dominated by the other, by a “Eurocentrism” that saw everything from that point of view and all things Indian as “primitive,” we have denied ourselves valuable information and, possibly, tools to heal contemporary problems such as those mentioned above.

Our friends on the nearby Umatilla Reservation give us an easy and, I think, profound way of looking at and attending to such resource problems. They call it the “First Foods” program. It was developed—is still being developed—by Eric Quaempts and the Natural Resource Department at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Simply put, it argues that if we take care of things in the order in which they are served in a Longhouse celebration, we will be taking care of ourselves and the lands and waters we live with and on.

The first of the First Foods is actually water, and at any gathering of Plateau Indians that I have attended, a drink of water, the Creator’s first and most important gift, starts it off. After water it is salmon, and then in succession, deer, roots, and berries.

For the rest of creation—including we of the two-legged variety—water is fundamental, so taking care of the water is fundamental to a healthy environment for the salmon and other fish and creatures that live in it, for the deer (and other animals that we eat, or that contribute to the chain of creation in other ways), and for the roots and berries that require it for survival and growth, and the bees and other pollinators that service the plants. Our fundamental responsibility as humans and stewards of the earth is to take care of the water. The engineers in Flint and the farmers in Iowa seem to have forgotten that in their rush to save and make money.

Salmon require clean, cool water. They also require resting and nesting places as they make their journeys to the sea and back again. Their maintenance as species and food for humans also requires a continued presence—asks that humans leave some as they as take some from their river homes. The “first salmon” is returned to the water to take that news to his brothers and sisters.

Deer, elk, bear, and the other four-leggeds require clean water, healthy grass, brush, and other foods. And the roots must not all be harvested at one time from one place for them to continue. The berries must be treated with the same care and respect. The bees and other pollinators are all in this chain of life as well. I am told that, traditionally, Indians move collecting grounds, leave and even spread “seed crops.” In fact, what is often called a “seasonal round” of migration across a landscape—the Plateau Indians were part of large landscapes that they traveled over in seasonal patterns from year to year to year—is captured in the First Foods concept. Notice that it is also a matter of elevations—in the case of many tribes from fishing spots along the Columbia to berry patches in the Blue Mountains.

The corollaries to this marvelous system are that the land and waters stay healthy when we attend to them in this way, and that we humans stay healthy by drinking clean water and eating healthy foods.

In the elevation of science over experience, European over indigenous, and the rush to “more”—acres of corn, head of livestock, tax savings and individual profits—we neglect these fundamental principles developed over thousands of years by our Tribal neighbors.

# # #

The land owns the Paiutes

Yesterday, amid the blur of news stories from Burns and John Day about the confrontation between occupiers and law enforcement in this latest chapter of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation, there was an NPR story from Nevada. A reporter and a Paiute tribal member were traveling the BLM ground once leased to Cliven Bundy but now, and for several years, not leased but still grazed by Bundy’s cattle. (Cliven’s sons were leaders in the Malheur occupation and among those arrested.)

The story from Nevada was one of fear and garbage—rangeland and fences left untended, BLM employees absent, and, in other places in Nevada, traveling in pairs with safety concerns. The thing that struck me hardest was when the radio team visited an ancient pictograph shattered by bullets from someone who did not care that they were ancient and sacred to Indians. In Oregon, Ammon Bundy was expressing similar distain for the past, saying that the grazing value on the Malheur Refuges is more important than Burns Paiute archeological and tribal values.

Where do you go from here? I turned to Alvin Josephy, and to The Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968, almost a half century ago. In the first chapter Alvin talks about the cultural misunderstandings that began in 1492, when “differing concepts concerning individual and group use of land and the private ownership of land were at the heart of numerous struggles…”

This relationship to the land is absolutely essential to understanding the cross-cultural divide that started with Columbus and continues at Malheur. For over fifty years, Alvin wrote and preached that Indians from across the Americas thought—and think—of themselves as part of the land, partners with four-leggeds and two-leggeds, birds in the air and fish in the water. Didn’t salmon strike the deal with the Nez Perce that he would provide sustenance? And the first salmon gets put back each year to tell the others that the deal is on, there are still humans to feed and the humans will do their part to make sure there are always salmon.

This view is radically different from viewing the rest of nature as separate from us and put here for our pleasure—the view expressed in the Book of Genesis, where man is to hold “dominion” over the birds and fishes.  The corollary to that is that nature is somehow inexhaustible—or that there is always another place or another product of nature that will be discovered or come along and save the day. So the beaver are trapped out of Europe, but there is America. The canneries take fish from the Columbia in the millions, but there is another river. When oil is gone there is shale, and when dams are done there is wind.

The European view was that land was another commodity that could be bought and sold, used for one purpose and then for another, by one person and then another, grazed today, tilled tomorrow, home to houses and towns the next.

I taught a class on NW tribes in La Grande this fall. I asked students how far they could go back in place and lineage. How many of them lived in the same place, on the same farm, as had a parent, a grandparent, great-grandparent? And how many of them knew or could name grandparents and great-grandparents? The multi-generational farm, ranch, or business is rare, and knowing and naming three generations back rarer. What they knew was that one generation bought and sold what was passed to them, accumulated or lost property, moved from one place to another, another town, county, or state.

In contrast, I remember watching an old Nez Perce woman from Nespelem weep on her first trip into the Wallowas. It—this place where I live—carries the bones of her ancestors and the stories that her aunties told her about these mountains, rivers, and valleys in the time before removal, the time before the Nez Perce War of 1877. It was, for her, yesterday.

When the West was so big that the white fathers in the East could not fathom it being filled, Indians were “removed” and pushed west as the country moved west. As whites moved west, Indians were crowded onto reservations in the West, and then reservations were redrawn on smaller maps.

The Nez Perce Reservation agreed to in the 1855 Treaty was reduced by 80 percent or more in an 1863 Treaty. The Burns-Paiute, out of the way of a proposed railroad route envisioned by Governor Isaac Stevens, were “skipped” in early treaty rounds, but eventually the Euro-American West caught up with them too. In 1868, after bitter fighting, the Paiute and “all bands of Indians ‘wandering’ in eastern Oregon,” were assigned “a reservation of 1,778,560 acres, which included Castle Rock, Strawberry Butte, the Silvies River, Malheur Lake and the North and South Forks of the Malheur River within its boundaries.” (see www.burnspaiute-nsn.gov )

By 1876, under pressure from settlers, President Grant “opened” much of the country to “settlement.” That 1868 Treaty, agreed to by the Indians, was never “ratified” by the Senate, a process I’m sure they did not much understand.

But here is the miracle. The Indians are still here; the Burns-Paiute are still in Malheur country. They’ve worked for whites, maintained hunting and gathering, worked with the BLM and with the Malheur Refuge to maintain a millennial relationship to that particular piece of land. So it is a land that owns them even though they might not own it.

Alvin Josephy was convinced that this relationship to the land is the reason that Indians are still here; that wars, diseases, boarding schools, the Dawes Act and other attempts at assimilation have encountered an attachment so deep and so strong that land and Indians—not all land and not all Indians, but enough, are still together. And, maybe, as growing numbers realize that this special relationship is a hope not only for Indians, but for all who look to a future that includes land and the four-leggeds, birds and air, water and fish, and even the two-leggeds.

# # #

It’s Martin Luther King Day

So take courage!

Friends here in Northeast Oregon are upset with the goings on in neighboring Burns. One group “occupied” a local Oregon Wildlife Refuge one evening with binoculars and beer. Most of “my” friends would like to see the government stand up and oust the anti-government gaggle; they’d like the Paiutes to have the biggest say in their ancestral lands. But I understand that some of my neighbors are sending food to the occupiers as well.

In America today, divisiveness is everywhere and hate sells. I needn’t list the shootings and the rancor over guns, the suspicion and hate over color, language and faith; the police conflicts, border walls, the hate speeches of Donald Trump, and the hatred of government that brings wronged ranchers, anti-Semites, anti-Islamists, and other antis swaggering with guns to a bird refuge in Oregon to state their cases and causes.

Many things are discouraging today. In the Middle East, where I lived and worked 50 years ago, I watch cities and places I love fall into chaos—Aleppo, Syria, one of the world’s oldest and grandest cities, is in shambles; Diyarbakir, Turkey, where I went to market and walked the city’s ancient walls, is a place of “urban warfare,” with the Turkish Army fighting Kurdish factions and civilians dying in the middle.

The Kurds, Turks, Arabs; Sunnis, Shiites, believers of one strain and another of Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, people who lived side by side when I was there, are now killing each other in Iraq and Syria. And millions are fleeing war, trying to find asylum in Germany and Sweden. So Europe swells with immigrants, and fear follows them and divides societies as good people seek to help.

***

And then—and then, Iran makes nice, releases US troops whose boats have strayed and releases prisoners they’ve held for years, destroys nuclear centrifuges and asks to join the world again. Cuba too is off the bad list, and someone is cleaning up Old Man and the Sea writer Ernest Hemingway’s house for visitors.

It’s Martin Luther King Day,

And I am reminded that I was in Washington D.C. in 1967 and 68, when thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese were being killed and maimed in a faraway land and our country was in turmoil. I marched on the Pentagon as helicopters flew over protesters and men with guns and binoculars walked atop high buildings keeping track. I was there when King was murdered in Memphis and D.C. exploded in riots and fire. And when Bobbie Kennedy, running for the Presidency that saw his brother killed, was murdered too.

In 1969, American Indians, emboldened by the Civil Rights Movement, seized Alcatraz, and they would soon occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, and face off with the FBI at Pine Ridge. Alvin Josephy documented these events and stood by the Indians in a wonderful NYT piece in 1973, in the heat of it all (and before I knew him and his Indian mission).

America is not a calm place now, nor was it a calm place in 1967 and 1968 and 1973. It wasn’t calm in 1929, when the Depression robbed peoples’ savings and sent them off to join the Communists and the anarchists, the fascists and the religious fanatics. Not calm when Roosevelt closed the banks and told the people the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

So the bad water in Flint, Michigan and the tuberculosis in Alabama are real; some ranchers have real gripes with government agencies; some police forces are racist or running scared; and our country’s military misadventures, which didn’t start in Iraq—or even Vietnam—go on.

And almost a century of mistrust in Iran, going back to the 1953 CIA overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh, the 1979 revolution and taking of American hostages, and its war with a US supported Iraq, will not go away in a day. There will be bumps in the Cuban road as well.

But on this Martin Luther King Day, it is important to remember that good people with strong will make differences. The New York Times sends its readers today to the contemporary obituaries of MLK, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and many more who have done so.

And although I, like many, have been frustrated with our first Black President on several counts, I applaud him today for Iran, for Cuba, for coming close on health care, coming close on Guantanamo, for fighting against gun violence and for very quietly strengthening tribal courts, autonomy, and education, and thus being the best President for Indian country since Nixon!

And, on MLK Day, I remember Alvin too, one of the good guys who stood up with and for Indians when the country didn’t much care.

Remember friends, and take courage!

# # #

 

This is not the year!

2016 will not be the year that the population of the United States of America tilts from white—the year when adding up all the browns and blacks and anyone the U.S. Census counts as not-white becomes a bigger number than the number of those who check a box or are in one way or another counted as “white.” In fact, a quick Google search tells me that this cataclysmic change in demographics is about 30 years away, and if you count Hispanics as white, more than that!

Distribution of U.S. Population by Race/Ethnicity, 2010 and 2050

You wouldn’t know it by the talk of it. It permeates, is everywhere in politics and the media. The talk sets up the fear of it on the one side, and the reasoning of it on the other. Donald Trump stands and harps about Mexicans and Moslems and anyone else not white and (at least in a recent Iowa talk) not evangelical. More broadly, fear of it seems to fuel speeches and votes advocating bigger walls and tighter immigration procedures in state and national legislatures, and even city halls.

On the other side of it, academics, novelists, filmmakers, and people of more liberal persuasion (one has to be careful, as lines are not always clear and congruent on this and other liberal-conservative issues) are producing analyses. How did we come to this turn? If we had handled things—slavery, Indian treaty making, exclusionary laws—differently earlier in our history, would things be different now? And of course, how are things now?

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the Great Migration of African Americans north and west, out of the South from 1910-1970. The “movement” Black Lives Matter focuses on police-black citizen relations today, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ award winning Between the World and Me examines American history and the black of it.

It seems that Indian immigrants—east Indians—are the new kids on the American literary block. The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur is a “must read” on a list of books by Indian authors, many of whom, with great wit and candor, describe the cultural gaps between two very different worlds. And there are of course Iranian-American, Vietnamese-American, Nigerian-American, Latino-American and other hyphenated American writers seeking to do the same. Luis Urrea, my favorite author of the southern border, follows history and families from the heart of Mexico into the American heartland in non-fiction (The Devil’s Highway) and fiction (Hummingbird’s Daughter; Into the Beautiful North).

And then there are the Indians, the indigenous people who had lived in the Americas for 30,000 or maybe 50,000 years, and were suddenly invaded by Europeans a little over 500 years ago, and then watched and watch still later invasions by other Europeans, and Africans and Asians—many not of their own free will—over the course of that 500 years and continuing to this day.

Booksellers’ shelves teem with books on the subject. The most ambitious might be William T. Vollman’s “Seven Dreams” series of novels about the “collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers.” The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War, is the Fifth Dream in the series, which is not being written sequentially. It is over 1350 pages with footnotes! It stares at me unread from my desk—I will read it this year.

And if I make it through that tome, I might try another in the series—Maybe Fathers and Crows, about the Jesuits in Canada. And then I’ll read more of Peter Bowen’s Gabriel Du Pré Montana mystery novels featuring Du Pre the Metis—the mixed bloods melded of several Indian tribes, French fur traders and a few Scotsmen into a distinct people and culture. Or maybe I will go south and read The Son, Philipp Meyer’s acclaimed novel about a multigenerational—and sometimes mixed blood—family that weaves in and out of Commanche lands.

I will actually read Warmth of Other Sons, and if I have the stomach for it, I’ll watch “The Revenant,” the fictional movie account of mountain man Hugh Glass and his experiences in Plains Indian Country in the early 1800s.

And I’ll keep on poking away at Alvin Josephy, who gets smarter every day as I think about his descriptions of the displacement and marginalization of, and on occasion the genocidal movements against, American Indians. Much of it was written and thought over a half-century ago, but Alvin was always out front. I can hear him now, lambasting the historians who thought and wrote into the 1980s that the Americas were “empty of civilization” before the Europeans arrived. He’d have something pithy to say about this tilt from white–like what about the tilts and jolts that reduced the percentage of Indians, among the 2 percent of “others” in 2010, from 100 percent in 1491!

# # #