Last weekend four of us from Wallowa County made the long highway drive to Nespelem, Washington for the annual Nez Perce root feast. After a service of drumming, singing and testimony, we sat for a huge feast of “first foods.” Wild foods from water and salmon through roots and plants to serviceberries and huckleberries was prepared by the women of the walwa ma, or Joseph Band of the Nez Perce Indians, and laid on tables until there was little room for our plates. Then we tasted each in turn, as they appeared in time and importance in indigenous lives for millennia.
But, first we had to get from the Wallowa Valley in Oregon—now beginning to green up with spring, but still showing heavy snow on the mountains and shedding yellow needles on the western larch that all here call “tamarack,” to Nespelem. It is about a six-hour drive on modern roads with a good car. Pavement all the way, over Tollgate and skirting Walla Walla, meeting the Columbia briefly at Wallula, north through Moses Lake country, meeting and following the Columbia again all the way to the Grand Coulee Dam.
Spring is not greening everywhere, and there is a lot of sagebrush between here and there. I kept thinking about Chief Joseph and his people, who had lived in the Wallowa Country for thousands of years, drank and gathered fish from her many streams, ate her roots and huckleberries, watched her larch trees green up in spring and turn brilliant yellow in fall.
Yes, there is sagebrush in the Wallowa, even cactus along the lower Imnaha and Snake rivers. In fact, because the elevation goes from under 2000 feet to over 9000, the Wallowa encompasses many climates and earth systems. I know now that Indians were here as Wallowa Lake’s glacier was finishing its work, that “seasonal rounds” of gathering the foods we ate in Nespelem and that I have eaten at the longhouse in Wallowa would have been made long before the horse, made within a few miles of wide fishing spots along the Minam River.
The walwa ma found familiar foods on the Colville Reservation—one of the arguments for sending them there after the Nez Perce War and the exile in Oklahoma Indian Territory was that there would be pine forests, familiar foods on the land, and salmon in the rivers—but my guess is that they had to travel further than they ever did at home to complete a seasonal round of gathering foods.
And on the Colville Reservation they had to and have to still share the land with eleven other tribes and bands. “The Colville Confederated Tribes are comprised of 12 bands which include, the Moses-Columbia, San poil, Nespelem, Methow, Entiat, Colville, Lakes, Wenatchee (Wenatchi), Chief Joseph’s Band of Nez Perce, Palus, Southern Okanogan, and Chelan.”
The path out of the Wallowa was long and torturous. Many know the entire Nez Perce nation by its war and what is now The Nez Perce Trail. There are maps and books that follow that trail from the Wallowa Valley, across the Snake River crossing and recrossing the Salmon River, on through Yellowstone—and ending forty miles short of the Canadian border at the Bear’s Paw Mountains in Montana
That was only the first five months and 1200-1400 miles of the trail that the non-treaty Nez Perce of Joseph’s and other “non-treaty” bands traveled. It went from Montana to North Dakota by horse and boat as captives of the US Army, then by train to Ft Leavenworth in Kansas. There were eight years in exile in Kansas and in Oklahoma Indian Territory, before the remaining war survivors were allowed to come West again. But not to Oregon. On the train again, near where Wallula Junction in Washington now is, the survivors were separated. Some went to the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho, but Joseph and his close followers were not welcome in Oregon or Idaho, and went first to Spokane, and finally to Nespelem, a small place on the large Colville Reservation.
Volumes have been written about the first 1200 miles of that journey, and a few books deal with the years of exile, always mentioning Joseph’s trips to Washington D. C. to plead for a return that had been promised the Indians at Bear’s Paw. At least one recent book centers on the few who escaped to Canada from Montana.
Now, having just made the trip from the Wallowa Valley to Nespelem, I want to know more about that last leg of the 1885 journey of Joseph and his people, from Wallula to Nespelem. How they traveled over harsh land from Wallula to Spokane. The negotiations with the tribes already at Colville, and the final journey there.
We know that a house was built for Joseph, but he lived in a tipi nearby. We know that he came to the Wallowa twice to plead for a small piece of land, but was rebuffed, and we know that he is buried in a humble Nespelem cemetery, that his people told the people of the Wallowa Valley who have wanted him back over the years that they hadn’t wanted him alive.
More and more Nez Perce people and non-Indians from the Wallowa Valley are making that long trek now, and Indians are coming the other way to celebrate at Tamkaliks, to dig roots, and to worship in the Wallowa Longhouse. But it seems to me important that we go there as well, go to see the people in the place of their 148-year exile—as elder Soy Redthunder says, the trip is as many miles one way as it is the other—and imagine the last difficult legs of that long ago journey away from the Homeland.
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