Julia Keefe and Native American Jazz

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

The Fest is the brainchild of pianist and Josephy Center tech wizard Seth Kinzie, and in this second year, he did not disappoint. Two days of movement—yoga and dance—and music. The music, from Native cowboy country to “Afrisonics,” a Boise blend of Nigerian and world music styles. It was all good. People practiced their yoga moves, danced and sang along, stretching minds as well as bodies around the wide range of genres and sounds.

But Julia Keefe and her quartet stopped the show as they ended it on Saturday night. We applauded the riffs of the drummer and bass player; practiced pianists goggled at Ms. Skinner’s hands on the keyboard; and Julia sang beautifully and summed it up with a solo, traditional Nez Perce funereal song she learned from and for her mother.

Afterwards, I snuck up for a few words with Julia, reminded and thanked her for her help in putting together our “Nez Perce Music” exhibit a few years ago. Told her that my goal in the show was to see music as white America tried to use it to assimilate Indians, and then show how Tribal people had found ways—always—to use it in protest. And jazz was a big part of that protest.

Julia nodded, said that she had not imagined how she could find enough Native musicians for an all-indigenous big band, then had gathered talents from across the country, and learned that they each had stories from their own tribes about historic and contemporary jazz players and ensembles. The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band has more than a dozen players from tribes across the country and into Hawaii. They’ve played in Seattle and New York thus far, to rave reviews. One of her big band players, who is also enrolled Nez Perce, has an instrument passed on from the era of the Nez Percians and Lollypop Six on the Lapwai Reservation.

Those bands, and the Natives and jazz phenomenon in general dates to Boarding School days, when Indian children were taken from homes and families, stripped of hair, traditional clothing, and language, and put in band uniforms and handed trumpets and trombones. At Carlisle Indian School they marched to John Philip Sousa in New York parades. Many learned to play those instruments well—musical sounds were not new to people who had grown up with traditional drums and flutes and the natural sounds of water, wind, and the animal and bird worlds—and when they came home to the reservations, they brought their instruments, but not the uniforms and the Sousa. They’d caught some of pop, some of Black jazz. Sticking a figure to the eye of their oppressors, they donned their headdresses and moccasins, and called themselves “Nez Percians” and “Chief White and His Five Redskins.”

The Nez Percians played in the early years of Chief Joseph Days—I have a photo of them in the 1948 CJD parade. Years ago, when I first learned about them and wrote a blog post, someone sent me back a picture of the 1919 Mohave Indian Band from California: headdresses, moccasins, saxophones, and trumpets.

That day is done, that fight won, as Native languages, cultures, and natural resources are being revived. “Reservation Dogs” is a popular TV show, and Lilly Gladstone, of Piegan, Blackfeet, and European descent, is up for an Oscar for a movie about an atrocity played on the Osage Indians 100 years ago called “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

And Julia Keefe is reacquainting us to the historic place and current possibilities of Indigenous Americans in the most American of music genres, Jazz.

Google Julia Keefe; google Julia Keefe’s Indigenous Big Band, or catch her performance at the Josephy Center in Joseph, Oregon on Saturday night, February 17, 2024:

Julia Keefe–Josephy Center

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photo KNKX Public Radio

more on co-management with tribes

I received a response to my blog post about Deb Haaland and cooperative management of government lands. The writer was Roger Amerman, currently “USFS Native American Outreach and Recruitment Specialist” on the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests.

Roger is enrolled Choctaw, but married to a Nez Perce woman and living on the Nez Perce Reservation. He tells me that in his (Choctaw) culture, children are raised in the culture of the mother. Roger is dutifully raising their son a Nez Perce man.Read Rich’s Post →

Lower Snake River Dams

On Thursday, May 22, new Nez Perce Executive Committee Chair Shannon Wheeler addressed a lively Josephy Center audience on the current status of the Lower Snake River Dams. Kyle Smith of American Rivers, who has the newly created role of “Snake River Director” for American Rivers, gave an introductory slide tour of the current state of affairs, but Chairman Wheeler carried the load.

He started with salmon’s role in the Nez Perce creation story, moved on to Native loss of land and habitat, and quickly covered Idaho Representative Mike Simpson’s Columbia Basin Initiative. Shannon Wheeler is obviously a smart and aware negotiator, dealing easily with political and agency people from Idaho, Washington, and Oregon to the White House. But the thing in his presentation that stood out in my mind is that his people know what it is like to be on the losing end of water/land transactions, and want to make sure that players other than salmon and the Indian people are not similarly harmed in current negotiations.

Check out the entire presentation here–and let us know what you think;

Good news and Bad News in Indian Country

Friends texted and emailed me this yesterday to tell me that Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik
Alaskan Native, had won election in her state for the short remainder of a congressional term. She’ll run again for a full term in the fall. Even the short term marks a win for the Democrats, for women, and for Natives. And I will add her name to the celebratory list of Native achievements and achievers that I seem to be assembling—Chuck Sams, head of the National Park Service; Jaime Pinkham at the Defense Department; Shelly Lowe at the National Endowment for the Humanities; Marilynn Malerba, Treasurer of the United States; and Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior.Read Rich’s Post →

Nez Perce teaching boxes

A few years ago, I put together a few books, laminated some maps and photos, called it a “Nez Perce Teaching Box,” and offered it to local teachers. A few teachers—Jennifer Gibbs in Wallowa most prominently—used the materials in their classrooms, but there was no wave of support for my project.

But times are changing. Tamkaliks grows, tribal root gatherers come to the Wallowa, Nez Perce Fisheries returns Coho to the Lostine, and Native Deb Haaland takes the Department of the Interior where no one has taken it before.

Read Rich’s Post →

Nez Perce Music–Three Years Later

Three years ago, we had a summer exhibit featuring Nez Perce music, from drummers and dancers of long ago to the “Nezpercians” and “Lollypop Six” jazz and dance bands of the early and mid-twentieth century. We gave a nod in that exhibit to a young Nez Perce jazz singer named Julia Keefe.

Julia wasn’t done with music and with her Native past. With a grant in hand, Keefe and co-leader, Delbert Anderson of the Dine Tribe of the Navajo Nation, set out to build an all-indigenous big band. They worried that they could find enough talent and interest among indigenous musicians, but, in the end, according to Tom Bance of NPR’s Northwest News Network”:

“Keefe and Anderson said they could have assembled two all-Native big bands with the talent that came out of the woodwork. The selected participants had connections to Native peoples across the Americas, including Alaska, Hawaii, eastern Canada, the U.S. Southwest, the Great Plains and Caribbean.”Read Rich’s Post →

“Like Grasshoppers”

It’s grasshopper season, which in my time and place means mild annoyance at the invading insects and watching the cat play with and eat them. I’ve never seen a real grasshopper devastation, what is called a “plague of locusts,” what God told Moses to deliver to the Egyptians:

“God told Moses to stretch out his hand over the land of Egypt to bring a plague of locusts. The locusts covered the face of the land and swallowed up every crop and all the fruits of the trees. Afterwards there was nothing green in the trees, and all the crops in the fields had been destroyed.”Read Rich’s Post →

Living on Stolen Ground

Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Ground is Bette Lynch Husted’s memoir of growing up on a dirt-poor, white, family farm in Nez Perce Indian country in Idaho. Their meagre plot had once—and long—been Indian country. Nez Perce Reservation lands were reduced by 90 percent from those promised in an 1855 Treaty in an 1863 Treaty. The Allotment Act, which sought to put individual Indians on Individual parcels of land, declared “surplus lands” open to white homesteaders. Whites gobbled up 90 million more acres of Indian land, That, as I recall, was the origin of the Lynch farm.

Read Rich’s Post →

The “Roaming Nez Perce” on a level playing field

Our national founding documents talk about all men being created “equal,” and many see the history of the country as a gradual expansion of “all men” to include black men—14th Amendment, 1868; women—19th Amendment, 1920; and, in 1924, when they were finally given citizenship in the country that had swallowed up their native lands, Indians.

Read Rich’s Post →

The Fourth of July—a difficult dance for Indians

Thinking about this national holiday…

This article was published in the July 3, 1904, edition of the Lewiston Tribune—and reprinted in today’s edition of the same paper.

“Sub-Chief Philip McFarland of the Nez Perce tribe, was in the city yesterday accompanied by his interpreter, Peter Malick. Chief McFarland was here on matters relative to the big celebration to be held at Lapwai and Spalding July 4th and states that extensive preparations are now being completed for the celebration.

“Through his interpreter yesterday Chief McFarland said: ‘The annual celebration of our tribe has been observed on July 4th since the first visit of the explorers to the Weippe plains nearly a hundred years ago. Previous to that time our war dance and parade was celebrated just before[we were] to engage in battle and during times of peace the celebrations were held several times during the year in memory of the battles of the tribe.

“’With the coming of the white people the tribe was taught the meaning of the Fourth of July and it soon became the custom to hold but one celebration each year and that was on July 4…

“’It is with the spirit of peace that the Indian enters the celebrations of the present time. All of the visitors are invited to eat at the campfire of the Indians after the parade.’”

The Nez Perce, and Indians across the country, were, in 1904, laboring under the demands of the “Indian Religious Crimes Code,” which had been enacted in 1883. The Code banned Indian ceremonies, disrupted religious practices, and destroyed or confiscated sacred objects. It was aimed at plural marriages and other practices deemed “un-Christian.” Consequences were imprisonment and/or the withholding of treaty rations. Indian superintendents and agents implemented the code until the mid-1930s.

But, the Fourth of July was a national holiday, with fireworks, dancing and celebration occurring across the nation. Some Indians saw in the holiday and its commemoration of American independence a small opening through which they could publicly continue their own important ceremonies—and maybe, in a subtle way, express a sense of loss and desire for their own independence.

On the other side, Indian reservation superintendents and agents justified allowing reservations to conduct ceremonies on the 4th of July as a way for Indians to learn patriotism and celebrate American ideals. Indians could take their regalia out of hiding, pound their drums—and dance.

One can imagine the Fourth of July emotions in 1904–and even today in Indian Country, where many tribes across the country still observe this national holiday with drumming and dancing. Indian dancing.

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Nez Perce Return

Few Indians live in the Wallowa Country now, but Indians come here every year—maybe, even through war and exile, some few have always made their ways here to hunt and gather foods and be in this place. Now, they come to run Nez Perce Fisheries, to manage a small piece of Precious Land in the canyons, and in the summer for dances and parades. And there is a 320-acre place we call the Nez Perce Homeland Project near the town of Wallowa.

Tamkaliks, Nez Perce Homeland, 2016

Last Sunday, Nez Perce peoples from Colville, Umatilla, and Lapwai—Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—drummed, sang, and danced in the new Long House at that Nez Perce Homeland grounds. Most were descendants of the Joseph, or Wallowa, band of Nez Perce who made this country home for thousands of years before being forcibly removed in 1877.

The drumming and singing seemed louder and the dancing more spirited than I remember from past years, when services were held in the dance arbor; some of that heightening might have been my own emotions. There were smiles and tears among the bell ringers, drummer-singers, and dancers. Words too. Words of homecoming and thanks to the Creator and to all who have gone before and all who came together to build this Long House and make this homecoming possible.

I stood with Indian and non-Indian men on the north side of the Long House, facing the women on the south side with the sacred earthen floor, the wash, on which the dancers moved between us. Dancers were boys and girls, women and men, young and old; the drummers all men, included elders and sons of elders I have watched and listened to in the past.

Indians honor age and wisdom in ways that we in the majority culture seem less capable of. They mentor the young as well, passing on names and ceremony and regalia. Restrictions on these things, and on language and the length of hair, were pervasive a century ago; that these cultural artifacts and practices are alive today is a miracle.

No—it is fortitude and resilience, belief in land and place and people. When Europeans came to this continent, Indians died by the millions. They died in wars, but more of them of diseases that crept eerily among them before most Indians ever saw white men and women. In the northeast, diseases came ashore with fishermen who supplemented their fish-takes with furs and sometimes slaves for the old world. This before the Puritans landed in the early 17th century. On the north Pacific coast they came ashore with English and Russian and Spanish ships seeking otter and looking for rivers from the interior in the late 18th century. Inland, they preceded and followed free fur traders and Hudson’s Bay Company men as they made their ways from the East.

Lewis and Clark estimated 5,000 Nez Perce; an Indian friend thinks there might have been 20,000 before smallpox and measles and other European diseases.

Pieces of the Nez Perce story are carried from generation to generation in Indian country, and are told in books and carried too among whites. Last week a Marine pilot—announced by his cap—of Vietnam era told me that Marines still study the Nez Perce fighting retreat of 1877.

The story is carried in the hearts of tribal families whose ancestors endured exile and injustice. In 1877 these prayer songs sustained families struggling through the 1,400 mile-long retreat that we call the Nez Perce War, then bolstered them on the trains headed to Oklahoma after the surrender at Bears Paw and through years of exile, and carried them on the return train trip to the Northwest in 1884.

In order to bring us to Sunday, here is the briefest recap: Nez Perce (Niimíipu) and related Plateau people of what is now the Northwestern United States lived here for millennia. In the 1730s they got horses from the Southwest, probably through the Shoshone. In 1805 they befriended Lewis and Clark; in the 1830s allowed missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding to put up a church in what is now Spalding, Idaho. In 1855 most bands of Nez Perce signed a treaty in Walla Walla negotiated by Isaac Stevens, allowing them to retain a huge chunk of territory stretching from present-day Wallowa County, Oregon to northern Idaho and northeast Washington.

In 1861 gold was discovered along the Clearwater, and in 1862, 18,000 illegal white miners flooded the reserved lands. In 1863 some bands signed a new treaty, which reduced the reservation by over 80 percent. This divided the Nez Perce into treaty and non-treaty bands. Joseph didn’t sign, but went home to the Wallowas, where no gold had been found. In 1877, crunched and dislocated by post-Civil War settlers, harassed by government troops smarting from Little Big Horn, Joseph and his people crossed the Snake River and headed for the reduced reservation in Idaho.

There were killings, and there was a war. Almost 1400 miles and six months later, Joseph surrendered, just 40 miles short of Canada at the Bears Paw, Montana. They were promised a return to the Northwest, but spent seven years in exile in Kansas and Indian Territory. The Nez Perce called it “the hot place.”

The Nez Perce did return to the Northwest, but were scattered on three reservations: those close to Joseph were sent to the Colville Reservation in Washington; some of the old and young were allowed to go to Lapwai, Idaho. Some who had escaped to Canada or elsewhere returned to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon. Joseph himself was rebuffed when he tried to buy land in the Wallowas in 1900. He died in Colville in 1904.

On Sunday the Nez Perce returned to the Wallowas with singing and dancing and Nez Perce prayers. They shouted and banged, and after all of this they thanked the white people of this place who are trying to take care of the land now. And the Indian elders invited ministers of other faiths to use the new Indian church for their own prayers.

And then we all ate salmon and buffalo and elk. And we non-Indians watched the Indian dancers, and, invited, danced ourselves. They were proud in regalia passed down, maybe since the time of War, maybe hidden for decades, and maybe augmented by aunties last week.  Proud in the language long suppressed in boarding schools. And all of us—maybe 600 Indians, whites and blacks—listened and looked out the east ends of the Long House and the dance arbor and knew this was a homecoming of special people to a special land.

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For photos and words from Bobbie Conner and the Sunday, July 24 Longhouse celebration, go to my share on Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/rich.wandschneider.1?fref=ts