Category: Nez Perce

Fire–and arrogance

We’re engulfed in smoke in the Wallowa Valley, more smoke than I can remember in my forty plus years living here. I think there have been bigger fires—Freezeout and the Canal Fire come to mind, but there seem to be fires on all sides of us now: fires in the Imnaha country, up Hurricane Creek and the Minam, and some further west and north. Smoke made the super moon more beautiful last night—and the mountains were just a fuzzy outline over gray. This morning we awoke to smoke.
At the fair this week I heard someone say that they should have been able to put out the Hurricane Creek fire when it was five acres, what with helicopters and hand crews. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know the particulars of that fire, but I have been up Hurricane Creek enough to know how convoluted and wild the place is. Have climbed over sprawling debris left by wind and snow driven avalanches, seen streams change their course. The place seems aptly named.
But the remark stays with me. I think about the Fishtrap session we did on fire some 20 years ago. Stephen J. Pyne told the history of the world in fire, then explained how fire policy in America changed after WW I, when we “made war on fire.” We thought we’d found a moral equivalent of the real war we’d just endured and vowed to put everything out by 10 a.m. the morning after a fire was spotted.
And I think about the University of Washington foresters (sorry I don’t have their names at hand, but can find if someone wants to follow up on this) who have pieced together a history of fire in the Wallowa country that goes back thousands of years. They work with tree rings and cored lake deposits; I recall them discovering 15-year fire cycles in at least part of the country.
We know that the Nez Perce—and most Plateau tribes and many tribes across the continent—burned regularly. They managed an open forest that facilitated growth of roots and berries and game, and later, horses. Nils Christoffersen and Larry Nall at Wallowa Resources are examining the earliest white reports of local forest conditions, trying to decipher those Nez Perce practices with an eye to species and spacing and rebuilding a resilient forest that will serve human needs and accommodate the swings of natural forces.
What was so different about Indian land use practices might not have been the details, but the attitude, theirs being one of accommodation rather than dominion, nudging the spirits and forces that bring rain and snow, wind and fire, wet and dry. As Alvin Josephy and others have said, the most destructive attitude of the Europeans on confronting the Americas was the idea of dominance, that Biblical notion that the rest of everything was put here for the benefit of and at the disposal of good humans.
It seems that scientists were not—are not—immune to that Biblical notion of dominance. The 10 o’clock policy didn’t work, but there is some kind of ingrown belief that trickles down from forestry schools through the general population, that someone, someplace, has a key to make fire policy “correct”—and to put out that five-acre flare-up on Hurricane Creek.
One might even strike a larger note—I love to generalize!—and say that our big cultural failing, our tragic flaw, is the notion that everything has AN answer, as if the world, natural and human and personal, is not one of ambiguity and constant change.

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The Civil War and Nez Perce Treaties


Yesterday in line at the grocery store, a new young clerk was telling someone how interested he was in the Civil War, and how he really wanted to go east and visit Antietam.  I piped up to suggest that he think about the civil war in the west. Had he ever wondered how Union County got its name, and why there is a Sumter close by? And did he know about the impact of the Civil War on Indian tribes, and specifically on the Nez Perce treaties?
I’m teaching a short, non-credit class on the Nez Perce and the Wallowas, and plan to devote one of five sessions to the treaties. Thinking about the grocery store clerk and about the upcoming class, it occurred to me that Alvin Josephy’s treatment of the treaties—in his books and in a long article for American Heritage on the 1855 Treaty—might have been different had he done the Civil War in the West book first. 
Briefly, here’s the chronology: 1855 is the Stevens treaty talks in Walla Walla. As a lawyer friend points out, the Nez Perce negotiated a pretty good treaty. They were the only ones to get their own reservation—the initial Stevens goal was to put them together with others on a confederated reservation. And they ceded very small amounts of their traditional village and migratory grounds.
Then, in 1861, gold was discovered on the Nez Perce Reservation. In 1862, directly contravening the provisions of the treaty, 18,000 white miners flooded the reservation. Remember, the Civil War is underway. There is no way that the federal government can remove 18,000 miners from the reservation. And the Union wants the gold!
I remember as a child that Civil War currency—like Weimar marks—was available for cereal box tops (well, I don’t remember any specific box top offers, but it seemed that there were; kids had Confederate dollars). Lincoln and the Union wanted the trails West open for many reasons, but one of them was to retrieve the gold which made Union currency hard currency. Currency that could buy arms and goods from other countries. What would have happened had the Confederacy controlled roads west? Why was the first road West the trail in the Southwest? Prior to the Civil War, none of the central or northern routes for rails or trails was agreeable to Southern Senators (including the Northern rail route surveyed by Stevens).
So the series of Indian treaties and broken treaties, the Minnesota uprising and the Mankato hangings, the Sand Creek and Bear River massacres, all owed to keeping Western trails open and retrieving Western gold. Yes, there were other factors, including fights over votes leading up to the War, recruitment of volunteers, etc. But, as Alvin points out in Civil War in the American West, the decimation of Indian tribes that goes on during the War and that continues after the War is all intricately tied to the great War that most Americans associate with Antietam and Gettysburg.
At War’s end, with the Nez Perce situation still unsettled and President Grant trying to deal with the “Indian problem” with his 1868 Peace Policy—giving reservation administration to the churches, with military commanders having their own solutions to the Indian problem, with Custer and Black Hills gold strikes and a War-time legacy of making and breaking treaties, everything that happens to the Nez Perce is in the shadow of that War.
Which all makes me wonder whether Alvin would have written those treaty chapters differently had he pulled all of the Civil War in the West material together first. It is one of many questions I failed to ask him when he was with us.
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History counts


It’s an old saw—you learn by teaching. This fall I am teaching a class for the Oregon State University Ag program on the Eastern Oregon U campus in La Grande. The class is “Ecosystems and Pacific Northwest Tribes.”  We looked briefly at the pre-Columbian Americas and the impacts of contact—the “Columbian Exchange”—and then moved on to the pre-contact Northwest (realizing that such a designation is loaded with post-contact geography), the impacts of the fur trade, missionaries, treaties, and settlers, and finally now, are looking at how the region’s ecosystems are working today.
We read a few chapters of Charles Mann’s 1491, a wonderful essay, “People of the Salmon,” by Richard Daugherty in Josephy’s America in 1492, and bits and pieces on the fur trade, treaties, missionaries, and Oregon tribes. This week our reading was the Klamath chapter from First Oregonians, and our guest speaker was Jeff Oveson, long-time executive director of Grande Ronde Model Watershed.  
As I re-read the short version of the Klamath-Modoc story and thought about a recent rebroadcast of the “Oregon Experience” program on the Modoc War (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv3NSN-8b3o) it struck me that the Klamath and associated tribes (Modoc and Yahooskin are joined on the reservation) experience of white contact had hit the nadirs of government Indian policy in case after case—loss of land and resources, treaty, war, and assimilation through schools, allotment, termination, and urbanization. Controversy and strife haunt the region still, and Indian-white, Indian-government, and white-government relations are tenuous and controversial.
The Nez Perce story, also a sad one, also follows the patterns and hazards of contact—disease, loss of land, settlement, allotment. But the Nez Perce—I now speak of families dispersed on three reservations in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—were spared termination. And going back further, the Nez Perce came out of the 1855 treaty negotiations with heads held highest of all inland tribes. They retained most of their ancestral lands and were the only people to emerge with a reservation of their own—one not shared with other, confederated, tribes.
Yes, land was taken away in the “Liars Treaty” of 1863, and negotiations with President Grant, promising to rescind part of that treaty and give back some Wallowa land, failed. Yes, there was a war that drove Nez Perce from the Wallowa and from other ancestral lands. And yes, lands were allotted and much tribal land was lost with the Dawes Act.
But the Nez Perce, known in Governor Stevens time as a strong tribe with skilled negotiator chiefs, acknowledged and often celebrated for their arduous and skillfully managed fighting retreat toward Canada in the Nez Perce War, and successful, with Chief Joseph’s skilled diplomacy, in returning from Indian Territory to the Northwest less than a decade after the 1877 War, as much as any tribal people, always saw themselves as peers in relationships with whites and white governments.
J.T. Willizams, Nez Perce Fisheries
I see this today in the faces and actions of Nez Perce tribal leaders, Nez Perce Fisheries personnel, and in those of their cousins on the Umatilla. I ask Jeff about working with tribal fisheries—Nez Perce and Umatilla—and he concurs. Tribal workers in our part of the country are confident, skilled, and see themselves as and are seen as partners in working with the region’s natural resources.
History counts.

Early photos of Chief Joseph


Goff photo used by Bartlett

Ann Hayes, the late Grace Bartlett’s daughter, came by with a folder full of photos and clippings from her mother’s papers (which are being cataloged by Shannon Maslach). We were looking for originals –or at least good prints—of photos used in Grace’s small booklet on the Wallowas.  Ann wants to reprint, and we want to improve the quality of the photos.

Among the material was information on some of the early photos of Chief Joseph. The one Grace used in her booklet, which she reproduced “courtesy of Mrs. L.R. Hamblen of Spokane,” is in fact one of the earliest photos of Joseph, and although there was for some time controversy about the photographer, there seems to be general agreement now that it was Orlando Goff.
But there was another bit of information in Grace’s files about another photographer, John Fouch, who had set up a photo shop at Fort Keogh MT shortly before the arrival of the Nez Perce prisoners. Two photos of Chief Joseph and reference to an article in American Heritage popped up on the internet. The American Heritage article, from November of 1992, was written by a collector named James Brust, who had found a stereoscopic photo of the Custer Battlefield, tracked it to Fouch, then tracked Fouch to living relatives, and turned up a set of photos of Indians taken in the late 1870s. 
Fouch photo on Nerburn book

I had seen one of the photos before, on the cover of the paperback edition of Kent Nerburn’s book, Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce. It’s a haunting photo, Joseph with sad but still strong eyes, fur wrapped around his braids, a shirt that is identified elsewhere as Crow—either a previous gift or one loaned to him for the photo, and hair brushed up in traditional Nez Perce style, showing white in the photo. Was it colored? Or is this a trick of the photo?

Interestingly, there is no attribution of the photo in the book. Was this an oversight—or done intentionally? It appears on the Smithsonian web site that Brust holds a copy—maybe the only copy—of the original, but has sent copies of the Fouch photos he found to the Smithsonian. 
I am not about to chase after the details regarding theses early photos of Joseph. For me it is important to note that they are probably the first photos of him, and that they were taken soon after the surrender, when he was still in his thirties. The more common photos of Joseph were taken much later—E.S. Curtis in 1900 I believe—after he had fought and grieved for the Wallowa Homeland for almost a quarter century. 

Fouch photo

Nez Perce farmers, missionary squabbles, and the Canadian Border


“Before leaving the southern portion of the Asotin County some mention should be made of the
Indian gardens located on the north side of the Grande Ronde River about half a miles below
the mouth of the Rattlesnake Creek and on other favored spots extending on down the Grande
Ronde to the mouth of Shoemaker Creek, on low benches along the river.
“It appears that Nez Perce Indians maintained gardens in these places before white men came
to the country, and made use of irrigation in growing corn and other vegetables.
“As there appears to be no record or tradition of the growing of vegetables by the Nez Perce
Indians prior to the coming of missionary Spalding, it is safe to assume that the Indians who
maintained these gardens in the early days learned their lessons in agriculture and irrigation
from Rev. Spalding.”
I found this quote from Historic Glimpses of Asotin County, by Judge E. V. Kuykendall, in a Forest Service manuscript, “History of the Northern Blue Mountains,” written by ranger Gerald Tucker in 1940. I have not seen Kuykendall’s book—but am longing to get a copy in my hands! And there is much more to say about Gerald “Tuck” Tucker, a prolific writer as well as a Forest Service ranger on the Umatilla and Wallowa National Forests. (His one published book, The Story of Hells Canyon, 1977)
But for now I want to hone in on this agricultural business—and especially Kuykendall’s conclusion that the Wallowa Nez Perce got their start in vegetable growing from missionary Spalding.
We do know that Spalding came into the Wallowa country in 1838, that he tried to name the lake (Wallowa Lake) after himself, and that he “converted” Old Joseph either here or at Lapwai. There is no record that he stayed in the country for any extended time, and there is no record that I know of that he brought seeds or agricultural tools—although he would have had such at Lapwai and the Indians could have brought them home from there. But Kuykendall’s quote makes it sound as though there is a well-established gardening program on the Grand Ronde River very early. And in another spot in his Asotin County account, also quoted by Tucker, he maintains that there was a Hudson’s Bay Trading Post on Lost Prairie.
I have not found other references to this one, but the information provided by Kuykendall convinces that there was some kind of trading post—whether Hudson’s Bay or not—at Lost Prairie very early. Which takes me back to the entire missionary business—and to Spokane Garry.
David Thompson of the British-Canadian North West Company established the fur trading post, Spokan—or Spokane—House in 1810. A Spokane Indian named Slough-Keetchawas born somewhere in the vicinity about 1811. The Hudson’s Bay Company took over the territory and moved forts and posts around about 1821, and they brought a bit of Anglican religion with them. Hudson’s Bay routinely brought Catholic priests in on behalf of their French-Canadian and French mixed-breed families, but we hear little about the Church of England.
Spokane Garry
At any rate, two young Indians, one of them Slough-Keetcha, are sent from Spokane to the Red River boarding school at Fort Garry in Rupert’s Land in 1825. Slough-Keetcha comes back as Spokane Garry in 1829, and begins preaching and teaching, including teaching agriculture. We also know that the Nez Perce supplied horses to the fur traders at Spokane, so commerce and religion were moving between Spokane and the Nez Perce well before Spalding’s arrival at Lapwai in 1836. Which makes it highly probable in my mind that the Nez Perce were aware of and probably growing corn and other vegetables before Spalding.
In some ways, it is no big deal—a year or two one way or another; Spalding or Spokane Garry. But what this highlights for me is the divisions and rifts among the early missionaries, and our USA centric history, which routinely omits events that happened on the other side of what became the US-Canadian border.
The missionary history of the Pacific Northwest will tell you about the Methodists and the Presbyterian-Congregationalists, and with some digging you can find spats between them—the Methodists did not recognize “mixed” marriages between white trappers and Indian women. You can learn about early Catholics—the Oblate missionaries, Father DeSmet and the Jesuits, Father Blanchet and early missions and dioceses in Oregon and later Washington territories. And we have the Spalding’s testament in the form of a visual aid to teaching Christianity that the Pope and Catholics were headed for hell.
But I find very little about the Anglicans. There was a Christian boarding school for Indians at Fort Garry (now Winnipeg, Manitoba) in 1825! Spokane Garry was preaching some version of Anglicanism in the region before the arrival of Catholics, Methodists or Presbyterian-Congregationalists! Any student of Indian history knows that ideas and goods traveled rapidly from band to band, tribe to tribe across the West. I think that the focus on places, people, and events that years later ended up on this side of a border—much of which was surveyed by the same David Thompson mentioned above—robs us of much of our own history.
Here is a link to the Gerald Tucker Northern Blue Mountains mss:

A Day in the Josephy Library


Tuesday Brown Bag lunches at the Library are gaining traction—bigger and more diverse audiences each week—and one never knows who will show up or what the conversation will be. 
This week the theme was the “Nez Perce Homeland Project” in Wallowa. New staffer Mary Hawkins came with brochures and powwow raffle tickets, and Homeland board members Joe McCormack, Ralph Swinehart, and I chipped in with some history of the project.
The project is a 320 acre site just east of the city of Wallowa. We started forming a non-profit about 1990, bought the first 160 acre chunk in 1995 with monies from the Oregon Trail license plates issued on the 150th anniversary celebration of that event and an additional 160 a few years later. Joe and Ralph and I pieced together bits of the story as we went: A powwow and friendship feast at Chief Joseph Days that began in the late 80s—for maybe the first time, Indians from all of the major Nez Perce places, the Colville, Umatilla, and Nez Perce reservations, had been asked how they would like to participate in the event named after their most famous leader; a powwow in Wallowa spearheaded by Umatilla tribal member Taz Conner, who carried strong Nez Perce heritage, and Wallowa school teacher Terry Crenshaw; the expansion of the Nez Perce National Historical Park to sites in Oregon and Washington; the appointment of Paul Henderson  as the Park Ranger for non-Idaho sites, and his attendance at Oregon Trail commemoration meetings. Joe remembered Paul telling the Oregon Trail folks that the Nez Perce Trail was the only one that took people “out” of Oregon. Ralph remembered Paul having meetings in Enterprise, Joseph, and Wallowa, and the folks in Wallowa being the ones who stepped up to embrace the idea of commemorating the local Nez Perce presence—and their leaving.
We all remembered hunting for land for an interpretive site—and finding one rancher who was ready to sell until his neighbors heckled him; and then looking seriously at an old sawmill site full of chemicals and concrete that would have been hell to work with. And then Norman and Mimi McCrae stepped forward with an offer to sell us 160 acres. We didn’t remember how that happened—but we should. Their action—and the later sale of an additional 160 acres—made the project happen.
Now there is a powwow each summer in a wonderful dance arbor, a longhouse kitchen and the infrastructure for the longhouse is built, and we have about $50,000 towards the longhouse. There is also a trail to the top of Tick Hill, from which the original burial site of Old Chief Joseph is visible, and horse corrals go in this month. And a handful of tribal members have chosen to be buried in their old homeland.  This has all been done largely with volunteer labor and a non-profit board consisting of local people and tribal members from Umatilla, Lapwai, and Colville.
In addition to Homeland project history, the Tuesday discussion touched on Indian—white majority relations in general, from treaty period through wars, Dawes Act and other efforts at assimilation, and the Indian reorganization act of 1934 through the second siege of Wounded Knee and more recent instances of Indian empowerment. In 1900, the locals in Wallowa County would not “sell” a piece of land to a returning Chief Joseph with government money in his pocket, and he went back to Colville, Washington to “die of a broken heart.”  A hundred years later there are attempts at reconciliation.
We were joined on Tuesday by a handful of students from an Indian Studies class at Willamette University on a “listening project.” They are looking at 12 school communities in Oregon who must give up Indian related mascots and names, and were in nearby Enterprise interviewing faculty members, current and former students, and community members about Enterprise school’s giving up the name and image of “Savage” a few years ago. How did that go? What were the issues then, and what lingers? They participated in our discussion and stayed on to interview several Brown Baggers for their project.
Our Josephy Library is not just a place for old books and documents; the library—and the Indian peoples and western themes on its shelves and pages, are still much alive in current conversation and the issues of the day.
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The most famous Indian in America


Note: We just completed a four week examination of the “Wallowa Country: 1855-1900” at the Josephy Center. Teaching is new to me, but four high school juniors and a fine group of eighteen older history buffs, curious newcomers to the Wallowa, and serious students of Indian affairs led me to learn and organize what I am learning as I try to follow Alvin Josephy’s intellectual and emotional  life journey in Indian America. Much has been written about the Nez Perce War and about Chief Joseph; less about his attempts to return to the Wallowa Homeland at War’s end.


There was a time when Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was the most famous and (mostly) admired Indian in the land.
At the surrender at Bear’s Paw, after the siege and forty miles short of the Canadian border and Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph and his remnant band of Nez Perce and allies from other bands and tribes who had joined in the Nez Perce War were told by General Miles that they would be taken to Fort Keogh, 500 miles away. They were told that they would winter at Keogh, and then be allowed to return to their homeland.
Joseph’s brother, Ollokot, and most of the young warriors were dead. Women and children were hungry and cold. White Bird and a few others actually would make it to Canada, and Joseph and the other able-bodied could have done so, but they would have had to leave women, children, and the wounded behind. Joseph would not do that.
And that, I think, is the point at which his fame—and the story of Joseph as the leader of the Nez Perce people—begins to grow.
At War’s the generals needed the story of a brilliant opponent to make their own war efforts worthy. The Indian survivors were truly hungry and cold and distraught over the loss of people and land. And if not the military genius that the generals and a growing public made of him—the “Red Napoleon”—Joseph soon proved himself brilliant as a speaker and leader of his people in exile.
On the 500 mile ride to Fort Keogh, Joseph and Miles became closer, and Miles promised again to help Joseph return to his homeland. Of course the next chapter in the story is the next in the litany of broken promises: the Nez Perce are not to winter at Fort Keogh, but to be moved to Bismarck in Dakota Territory, where there is a railhead and it will be easier to keep them supplied. And then it is Leavenworth and Baxter Springs and Indian Territory (further removed from Sitting Bull and White Bird in Canada, though this is not what they told Joseph). No hanging—which Miles had also promised—but no return to his homeland either.
In Bismarck Joseph and Miles were both greeted as heroes and feted with dinners (the Bismarckians seemed interested in being part of a drama that was being covered by the national press rather than supporters of either of its combatant factions). And Joseph learned about the press—and the telegraph, and he began to tell the story of broken promises.
He would tell that story at Fort Leavenworth and Baxter Springs and in Washington D.C. He would tell it to commissioners and Congressmen and Presidents. He would gain sympathy of Presbyterian ministers and congregations, ally even with Christian Nez Perce—old adversaries sent from Lapwai to convert the non-treaty and traditional religionist Joseph Band while they were in exile. His words would appear in the leading magazines of the day, Harpers and North American Review.
And eventually, after almost eight years in exile, Joseph and the remaining Indians—many died in captivity—would be allowed to return to the Northwest. But not to the Wallowa—118 would go to live among the mostly Christian and mostly treaty Nez Perce at Lapwai in Idaho; Joseph and 150 followers to Colville, to live among Indians of other tribes and languages. Joseph continued his efforts at return to the Wallowa.
But East and West are different, and the country was changing rapidly. In 1885, Western landholders were still at odds with Indians, still homesteading on land recently held by Indians. And stories of the Nez Perce War and even Custer’s defeat were not distant. The newspapers and politicians ranted against Nez Perce return. And Indian accommodations—bands and tribes thrown together with no notion of historical relationships—were hard. It was not easy for the Nez Perce at Colville.
Joseph made two trips east, continuing his audiences with Congressmen, bureaucrats, and Presidents. From War’s end through exile and the move to Colville, Joseph was the most famous, respected Indian in the land. In the first years at Colville, the eastern press, intellectuals, and the churches continued to lament his treatment and promote his cause. But in two trips to the Wallowas, the last in 1900, he was told that no land would be given him, no land sold to him.
By 1900 the West was overrun by white settlers, the Indians tucked away in mostly hard places. The “hostiles” had been killed or put away: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were dead; Geronimo had surrendered and appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.  Even Joseph took his turn with Buffalo Bill, accompanying him to the parade in New York City at the dedication of Grant’s Tomb.
On his last trip to the Wallowa, in 1900, an Indian commissioner came along—and reported back against Joseph’s return. The country, he said, was fully inhabited and being well used by whites. The local paper reported that “considerable sport was made of the man” when he said he wanted some land by his father’s grave near Wallowa, at the Lake, and in the Imnaha country. The homeland dream was no longer a cause célèbre of eastern intellectuals, no longer a fear of Western settlers. Joseph’s star and his hopes had risen and been buoyed by an enthusiastic nation, but that nation had passed him by.
On September 24, 1904, Joseph made a last New York appearance:  the New York Sun said that “With the death of Chief Joseph, the famous leader of the Nez Perces, the United States has lost its most celebrated Indian.”
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Afterword:  Although I have picked up pieces of information about the years of exile and attempts at return in other places—Joseph’s famous and widely published speech on his 1879 visit to Washington D.C.; Steve Evans’ excellent Voice of the Old Wolf, which tells the story of Nez Perce friend and chronicler Lucullus McWhorter; local newspaper files, etc.—the last 120 pages of Kent Nerburn’s Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perceis the best synopsis of the post-war years that I have found.

A puzzle re the Treaty of 1863


In 1863 the Joseph or Wallowa Band Nez Perce lived quietly in the Wallowa Country, isolated by mountains on three sides and the Snake River Canyon to the east. There were no white settlers—though a couple of French trappers married to Nez Perce women had lived among them from time to time—just a few hundred Indians who gathered summers in the Wallowa valley and at the Lake to hunt and socialize and catch and dry fish, and then spread out in family groups along the tributaries of the Snake River in colder times. 
In 1863, to the north, over high timbered country and across what is now called the Grande Ronde River and then more high country and then about at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, white men made new lines on maps drawn at Walla Walla in 1855 that had promised the Wallowa Country and a total of almost 8,000,000 acres total to the Nez Perce people forever. The new lines would exclude the Wallowas and whittle the Nez Perce Reservation down to fewer than 800,000 acres.  
Nez Perce arrive at Walla Walla in 1855
The reservation lines of 1855 had been made impossible by the discovery of gold and the intrusion of 18,000 white miners on the Reservation and a Civil War in the East that needed the gold and left no time or desire on the part of the federal government to understand and protect Indians from the economies and the greed of its white citizens. 
I had wondered why the new lines needed to omit the Wallowa Country. The Wallowa Nez Perce were not engaged in all that was going on in the outer world—the mission churches, the alcohol, the gold commerce that was growing like cancer to the north. Old Joseph, who had once invited the Reverend Spalding in, had given up his Bible after the doings in Walla Walla, no gold had been found, and there were no white settlers demanding land in the Wallowas. 
If the 1863 treaty had allowed the Nez Perce to keep the Wallowa country, I reasoned, the War of 1877 might not have happened. What were Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Washington Territory Calvin Hale and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the new state of Oregon, W.H. Rector, and their white colleagues thinking? And Lawyer and the other Indian treaty signers?
In the end, after carefully reading the Josephy chapters in the big Nez Perce book and related chapters in his Civil War in the West book and looking at a map, I realize that I was the simple thinker. Joseph and his small band and the Wallowa Country were an island in a growing sea of whites and rapidly changing economies and religious activities that were transforming the region
.
The Nez Perce, who had escaped with ceding only small portions of their territories in the 1855 Treaty, were awash in white miners, missionaries, and, maybe most importantly, changing attitudes towards land. At Walla Walla, Indian chiefs argued that the land was their mother and could not be divided and sold. But others had started talking about the sale of land, and, in essence, agreed to compensation for ceded lands. Some tried to hold both ideas in their heads simultaneously. 
In 1861 gold was discovered on Nez Perce lands, and soon the Nez Perce, some of whom now spoke and wrote in English, many who called themselves Christians, met and traded with the hoards of white miners. They operated ferries and sold them meat, and took their gold. Of course whites didn’t wait for the Nez Perce to build their cities and overrun their land, and 3,000 Indians had little overall power over 18,600 whites who had bounded onto reservation lands by 1862. The Indians were divided, and increasingly powerless, people.
And the white miners weren’t only on the Clearwater to the north, but also east, across the Snake River, where the city of Florence boasted 9,000 whites. To the south, there were gold strikes in Powder River country—not Nez Perce land, but land bordering the Wallowas. 
To the west, in the Grande Ronde Valley, settlers were growing crops, building towns, raising cattle, and looking for more grazing ground over the mountains. Joseph and the others had been told at Walla Walla that the whites would come like grasshoppers—and they were. 
Old Joseph did not sign the new treaty in 1863, but left Lapwai and came back to the Wallowas. He lived until 1871 or 72, long enough for the Civil War in the East to end, for the surveyors to come into the valley, long enough to see the first grasshoppers, but not to see the War that would drive his people away. His sons, Young Joseph and Ollicot, would have to deal with the swarms and the armies—released now from that other War—who would come to take the Wallowa country from them.
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Happy Thanksgiving

I watched a film on PBS last night, “The Thick Dark Fog.” It is the story of a Lakota man named Walter Littlemoon and his struggle to reclaim his humanity, stolen from him at a boarding school as a five year old on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The man’s a poet—a simple and eloquent speaker, and I will now order his book, They Called Me Uncivilized. 
And while I wait for the book, I will puzzle over two things. First, as we recovered from the horror of the Holocaust in Europe and watched another again with a sideways glance at Cambodia, cultural genocide was going on under our noses in our own country. Oh, by the mid-sixties, as I came of age, we were probably no longer kidnapping Indian children, cutting their hair, and beating the Indian out of them so that we could make them men and women, but the products of our years of doing so were serving in Vietnam and stumbling around Los Angeles and Portland and other American cities after Eisenhower era “termination” policy do-gooders had put them on Greyhound buses and dropped them off with a few bucks and a charge to join the mainstream. 
Why didn’t we—good white college students at state universities and the best private colleges, Civil Rights workers risking harm registering black voters, Peace Corps Volunteers standing up for and with poor people in over 100 other countries—know what was really going on in our own? Some few of us did, I guess, but mostly we were only half-educated, knew that Indians were mistreated but wanted them to get what black people were getting, their civil rights. Not many of us were talking about getting Indians the rights to lands and resources stolen from them and the rights treaties had supposedly granted them as Indians, as pre-white inhabitants of the country.
Now I live next to a couple of reservations in the traditional homeland of Nez Perce people, and I am learning—slowly—their stories and the stories of Indian peoples across the continents, the New World. “Thick Dark Fog” is not the first documentary on Indians I have watched. I’ve seen “Smokin’ Fish,” a Tlingit story, and know Sandra Osawa and her films, “Pepper’s Powwow,” about the great Indian jazz musician, Jim Pepper, and “Maria Tallchief,” the story of the Osage prima ballerina that Sandy did with help from Maria’s daughter, the poet Elise Paschen. And of course I have seen “Smoke Signals” more than once.
After watching the film tonight, I went to nativetelecom.org and found logs of radio and TV broadcasts, notice of Native radio stations, filmmakers, producers, etc. And it occurred to me that we still live in two parallel worlds. That yes, Indian stories creep across the lines, and some of us go to powwows and tribal and national museums and read books by Sherman Alexie and James Welch, Scott Momaday and Debra Earling, but that for the most part our schools still omit Indians and their 500 year history of dealing with the “nation of immigrants” that have and continue to descend on the Americas.
That’s the other puzzle. Custer and the Big Horn are, as the late novelist James Welch claimed, subjects of more books and movies than just about anything in American history. There are statues of the “Red Napoleon,” Chief Young Joseph, across the land. But the real stories of Crazy Horse and Joseph are still locked away from the mainstream of American history and affairs. And the Sierra Club doesn’t much ask Indians how they were able to live in this land for 20,000 or 30,000 or more years before Europeans arrived.
There are breeches, tears in the wall and points of connection between the Nation of Immigrants story and the Indian story, and I guess it is our job at the Josephy Library to keep finding them.
Which gets me back to Thanksgiving. How many of us were taught how or even puzzled over how the Indians got the corn and squash and beans that they supposedly fed the Pilgrims in the cold northeast all the way from their origins in warm  Mesoamerica? One world to another?
# # #

The assimilationists

 


I’m again reading a book I read years ago—and again finding new meaning. Caroline Wasson Thomason was born in 1887 somewhere else, but grew up “Between the Sheeps” in Wallowa County. She married a teacher and lived for years in New York, where she wrote children’s plays and stories.  And she wrote a couple of novels, one that dealt with American blacks and civil rights, and one historical novel: In the Wallowas.  

My recollection was of a syrupy story involving settlers and their teenage children, but with accurate accounts of Chief Joseph’s last visit to the Wallowas and a famous runaway horse incident. I also vaguely remembered a love story that crossed racial lines, and the purple prose. I was right on that: “’My princess! My beautiful flower!’ Imna knelt beside the bed and took her in his arms. A spasm of pain flushed her lovely face, and he held her more closely.” 

The action begins in 1899, and includes Joseph’s visit that year as well as his last visit in 1900, final attempts to find a small piece of the homeland for his exiled band. Although the scenes were not as dramatic as I remembered, the message rang true. Even sympathetic whites, who acknowledged that Joseph and the Indians had been dealt a bad hand, knew that the people of the Wallowas were not going to agree to their return, and let them have the day. Joseph returned to the Colville Reservation in Washington and “died of a broken heart” there in 1904.

The “morg” at the Wallowa County Chieftain had the 1899 papers, which meshed with the novel’s account. Joseph came with a promise of Washington D.C. money in hand to purchase property, but the proposition was not treated seriously. The newspapers treated it with disdain and even some contempt—the Asotin paper wanted to extend the ban to keep Indians from coming back to hunt and gather.

Back to the novel. This time around, armed with months of reading Josephy and Charles Mann and others about treatment of the tribes, I was more interested in the portrayal of Indians generally. The author is sympathetic, but her Indian heroes are assimilated and “modern.” They drive cars and go to law school, and have wheat ranches in the Umatilla country. They speak highly of the Whitmans and the Spaldings, are good Presbyterians. They honor the old leaders and the old ways, love the fine bead work, the drumming and dancing, but these things are of the past; good Indians get on with white education, white laws, building big houses and even intermarrying with whites.

The other important thing that I noticed this time around was the publication date, 1954. This is the Eisenhower administration and “termination” time. Termination, by whatever name it has been called over the years—e.g. The Dawes Act—has always had curious mixed sponsorship: those who hated Indians, wanted their land, or just scoffed at their old superstitions and thought they should join the majority culture (Alvin said that Henry Luce at Time Magazine thought them “phonies” and just wanted them to get on with it), and those who sympathized with Indians but thought that the only way they could survive was to join the dominant culture. Alvin called this the “vanishing Indian” view of Edward Sheriff Curtis and others. The old Indians and their ways were to be put in museums and admired for their grandeur and maybe a little for previous contributions—maize and potatoes? –but they had to become assimilated, become white.

The idea that tribes and tribal values have had active roles in American history, and might have things to contribute still, has been held by few—and hammered at by Alvin Josephy over a 60 year career as historian and advocate.

# # #

Another Indian statue

We have a new statue of Chief Young Joseph, or Young Chief Joseph as he is now mostly called, on Main Street in our town of Joseph—the town is named after him of course. It’s all irony, as he was of course hounded out of here in the War of 1877, and not allowed to return when he and his band came back from Indian Territory in 1895. He and most of them ended up in Nespelem, Washington, among Indians of other languages and cultures. He is said to have died there of a “broken heart” in 1904.  

But his picture is on the masthead of our local newspaper, and, in addition to the town, the annual rodeo celebration and a day camp for local children are named after Chief Joseph.  (Another irony is that Joseph probably gave up that Christian name along with the religion it represented as his people went to war with the United States. He would have been Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, a less likely name for a town.)

On the plus side, Nez Perce Tribal Fisheries out of Idaho is now active here in restoring salmon and steelhead runs. For several years the annual Chief Joseph Days rodeo has hosted an encampment with Nez Perce and related Plateau tribes from Lapwai in Idaho, Colville in Washington, and the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon. And the Nez Perce Homeland Project near the town of Wallowa welcomes Nez Perce and other Indians home for the annual Tamkaliks celebration and is building a longhouse on the 360 acre grounds. The site is envisioned as a living interpretive center, a place for powwows, namings, celebrations of foods and cultures, and even burials.  

The new statue in Joseph is the work of Medford, Oregon artist Georgia Bunn. It was cast at Valley Bronze Foundry in Joseph, and funded, I understand, by Walmart heiress Christy Walton. The money was given to the city, and then went to artist, foundry, and the local technicians who installed the statue.

I don’t know the artist—or Christy Walton, for that matter. I don’t know whether the artist found the funder or the funder found the artist. I don’t know who “found” the Nez Perce story and Chief Joseph. I don’t know whether any Native artists were considered or whether Indians were consulted.  But the statue now joins dozens of images of Joseph in paintings, photos, and statues here in Wallowa County, in other Oregon places, and on public display throughout the country. Try googling “Chief Joseph Statues” for a quick look at the range of images and places. (Here is the connection for a look at the new statue here: http://wallowa.com/free/bronze-of-chief-joseph-dedicated-in-joseph/article_52c7f4a8-d841-11e1-9e7f-001a4bcf887a.html)

As I move on with Alvin Josephy’s work, trying to find ways to put Indians back into American history, reminding Americans that Indians and their cultures have survived and have things to teach us still, I am constantly reminded of the many ways in which Americans memorialize Indians. And how all too often the statues, books, and images seem ways of remembering and capturing a faded past—like Curtiss pictures of Indians climbing out of poverty blankets and putting on old regalia from better times—rather than celebrating and joining with remarkable tribal people who have survived disease, war, broken treaties, and assimilation to live and work in the Americas of today.

# # #

Small pieces of history

Mike Page and his wife have been coming from their Whidbey Island home to Tamkaliks, the annual powwow at the Nez Perce Homeland project in Wallowa, for the past three years. This year someone told Mike to look me up and ask about the Josephy Library. We spent a pleasant hour looking at books and journal articles, he told me about tracing back his Indian heritage, I made him copies of a couple of things, and we exchanged contact information and went our ways. I saw Mike and his wife across the grounds while serving at the Friendship Feast again on Sunday, and then we had a chance to talk on Monday night in La Grande at my Josephy and the Indians library talk.  

Mike is 75. His grandfather didn’t talk about Indian things, though there was always family knowledge of a Walla Walla –Nez Perce woman and a mountain man named Joseph Gale. His father, in later years, reversed grandfather policy and urged Mike to look to the past—and for the past 20 years or so he has been doing just that. He even got involved with a big Indian fish-in in Idaho in the early 80s. This whole story—Indian fishing, the Walla Walla woman, Joseph Gale, the grandfather who wouldn’t talk and the father who felt safe enough to ask for more—reminded me that history is a complex network of people and events. And that most of us are not historians and poets, but curious people who want to know more about our own stories, about how we came to be in the times and places we find ourselves. We chase down pictures and genealogies, jot down family stories, find old movies and tape recordings and newspaper articles that have pieces that reach back to explain, but rarely do we put the material together into a book or movie or poem of our own.

But other people come along. And we don’t know when what kind of writer will pick up the story pieces that we have assembled and turn them into narrative histories, novels, and even poems. I think often of Alvin finding the Sohon drawings of the 1855 treaty talks in the Washington Historical Society archives—did others know they were there and just not accord them importance? Were they reprinted in books before Alvin came along? I don’t know, but I do know they are common now, and Alvin brought them to that state.

And I know that he loved the small stories and books of local history as much as the big ones. That he found them and sometimes wove them into his published work. And what he didn’t use directly became part of the big iceberg below the surface that supported his vast understanding of the West.

My last post was about the archivists who came to town and started us working on Grace Bartlett’s papers. Grace was the first curator of the Wallowa County Museum, and wrote journal articles and a couple of small books of her own. She, her husband Harry Bartlett, and Alvin worked together on straightening out the Appaloosa story. Two local women are now cataloging her papers, and they are continually flush with new discovery. There’s a Masters thesis from 1901 with an interview with Chief Joseph, and stories from Harry, her Nez Perce husband. The books Grace did not write are waiting for others to come along and sew—with quilt pieces from Mike Page and maybe you and me—into their own stories and poems of the West.

Or maybe you are the quilter.

The Archivists come to town

Last winter I sat in Doug Erickson’s lair at Lewis and Clark College in Portland talking library work. Doug is special collections librarian there, and his office is also the home of the William Stafford Collection. In a corner sits an odd Plexiglas contraption that looks like a space module from a Buck Rogers film. In fact it is some kind of medical unit Doug picked up on EBay and refitted as a small sound studio. He uses it for the Oregon Poetic Voices project, but also puts non-poets he wants to capture into the machine.

I don’t remember whether the finger pointed at my chest was real or figurative, but I remember Doug’s admonition that archival work is “activist work,” not arcane activity conducted passively by withering librarians hiding papers on shelves for future generations. “Rich people get their stories told,” Erickson reminded. “I want your grandmother’s poems and stories.” And as incentive, he added that Lewis and Clark has the Wood Family Papers, which relate to the Nez Perce story and so to Wallowa County and the Josephy Library. He might have students interesting in coming here to work with us.

I thought a lot about that this winter. My reading of Josephy material over the last couple of years fits Erickson’s thesis well. Alvin was a meticulous researcher who wanted stories from the past that help show us truly how we got where we are and where we might be going. He loved amateur historians—the archivists who don’t know they are but keep diaries and notebooks. And he worked hard at advocacy, crafting arguments for current policy based on the sins, omissions, and good work of those in the past.

So one thing led to another, and with a few hundred dollars from the local Cultural Trust and the Soroptimists Club, we brought in two archivists from the University of Idaho last week. It was all done through the Friends of the Wallowa County Museum, but other local groups—Wallowa History Center, Maxville Heritage Center, Nez Perce Homeland Project, and our Josephy Library were all involved.

U Idaho Librarians Garth Reese and Devin Becker made an afternoon presentation in Wallowa, an evening presentation in Joseph, and met with a few of us to look at Grace Bartlett’s papers on Friday morning. The public presentations showed in outline form the hows and whys of organizing collections of personal, public, corporate, and business records so that they can be accessed and used by students and researchers. The session with four file drawers of historian Grace Bartlett papers was exciting. There’s a foot of folders on the Appaloosa horse controversy, letter exchanges with historians and Indian elders, and papers and pamphlets that Grace wrestled out of national archives—all with her own extensive notes.

The chains of events from Alvin’s finding of the Nez Perce story and coming to the Wallowas, of his meeting Grace and her writing her own book, of their collaboration on the Appaloosa writings, and, on the other side, Grace’s own coming to the Wallowas in the early 30s, meeting Horner the historian, eventually marrying Harry Bartlett, the Nez Perce horseman, and shepherding the Wallowa County Museum into existence intertwine and help make the Wallowa Country a living textbook.

And principal actors in the text are still, despite broken treaties, war, and attempts at assimilation, the Nez Perce. Almost miraculously, the Indians have been here all along, leaving with the Nez Perce War but not leaving, coming back to fish and gather, to work white farmers’ fields, to build the walls around the Joseph Cemetery at Wallowa Lake, to celebrate at Chief Joseph days and dance at Tamkaliks, and to shepherd the salmon and steelhead home.

Thanks to Alvin and Grace, Nez Perce story tellers, fishers, root-diggers, and dancers, and to the archival instincts of many, our Wallowa Country is a living history museum threaded to past and future in an increasingly seamless cloth.

# # #

The Nez Perce Story—again

Alvin Josephy found the story in 1952 or 53—and things changed. Over the next dozen years he would become engulfed in the Nez Perce story and the American Indian story. He would find old drawings tucked away in museums, chase fur trade records to London, sweat with veterans of the Nez Perce War, and put the big of it and the detail of it into a huge American epic called The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest.

His was not the first attempt, and certainly not the last. The Nez Perce story is told and retold in poems and novels and histories again and again. There are new books every year that explore aspects of the story in detail, and/or shout their author’s own astonishment at finding the story and desire to get the rest of us to know it. Almost always they pay tribute to the Josephy text and to the Nez Perce people and specific elders who keep the story alive.

On Sunday I was privileged to watch and listen to another telling of the story in the Lapwai, Idaho High School gym. It was a world premier, a special performance for Nez Perce people of a work commissioned and performed by the Caritas Chorale of the Wood River Valley in Idaho. Artistic director Dick Brown brought some 60 singers from his chorale and 30 string and percussion players from the Boise Symphony to play the work composed by Idahoans David Alan Earnest (music), and Diane Josephy Peavey (libretto).  

Brown, who grew up in Mississippi, told the audience that he was familiar with prejudice and issues of social justice. He didn’t tell us how he had first commissioned a work on Lewis and Clark in Idaho with the same composition team, and that Diane Peavey brought the Nez Perce chapter of Lewis and Clark into that piece. It was performed to fine reviews, and Brown dug deeper into the Nez Perce story himself, and then found the funds to commission a new work and take the group of musicians to Lapwai to boldly test it with the Indian people.

I remember talking with Diane when she first got the charge. It was daunting, because of her father’s identification with Nez Perce history, and because she knew enough of the story and knew many Nez Perce people and wondered how she could tell their story.

But with their help, she told the Nez Perce story as a tribute to them and a lesson to the rest of us, the non-Indians who now share land and waters we took from them.

When Alvin found the story, he was driven to precedents, to trace the history of tribes and European immigrants to the Northwest. Eventually it led to studies and books about the whole of it—“The Indian Heritage of America” and “500 Nations,” massive dioramas of two continents and 30,000 or more years of human habitation. He studied archeology and linguistics, mythology and contemporary Indian cultures in making his pictures, and he came away knowing that Indians had survived against all odds and had things to teach us still.

A choral work does not allow for great detail; the work of it is in the selection of the scenes and then telling, with few words and accompanying music, the essence of it. I am sure that artistic director, composer, librettist, and Nez Perce friends all had a hand in choosing and creating, but it was really Diane’s charge to be the word teller. The scenes were brilliantly chosen—from Lewis and Clark and creation myth through white religion, the Nez Perce War, and on to Nez Perce care of the land today. I loved the inclusion of the Celilo Falls story, that final affront to 12,000 years of Indian living, and thought that wrapping the story around the Nez Perce promise to the Creator that the two-leggeds would always care for the four-leggeds and the land and waters that sustain us was brilliant.

Shakespeare used old stories to address his concerns, and the Bible tells the Gospel four times. We learn with every telling of the Nez Perce story, and now have two Josephys to thank for theirs.

# # #

Note: performances in Sun Valley and Hailey, July 14 and 15. For more information, go to caritaschorale.org/

Bobbie Conner new Board Chair at NMAI

Some of you might have already heard, but it is worth repeating! Roberta “Bobbie” Conner is the incoming Chair of Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has been on the Board since 2008, co-facilitated a Tribal museum directors meeting at NMAI in January, and will chair her first Trustees meeting February 9 and 10 in Washington D.C.

I have known Bobbie primarily through working on the Nez Perce Homeland project in Wallowa, where she and I are still board members. But she also gave a lecture on “Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes” at Fishtrap, and she was in fact one of the writers in Alvin’s last book, the one he and Marc Jaffe edited called Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes. And I had the great good fortune to work with Bobbie, Alvin, Cliff Trafzer, other historians and Tribal elders and editor Jennifer Carson on Wiyaxayxt / Wiyaakaaawn / As Days Go by: Our History, Our Land, Our People: the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla.

I’ll put in a plug for that book while I’m at it. Each section paired an elder with a recognized historian, and each section had an outside reviewer. My role was as reviewer, but meeting with the “team” of elders and historians to discuss the project in its beginnings, and meeting again to review progress were privileged experiences. The project started in 2000–largely, I am sure, because of Bobbie’s vision and hard work–and the book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2006.

Bobbie is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla. Her maternal great grandparents were from the Columbia and Snake Rivers and their tributaries. She is a graduate of Pendleton High School, the University of Oregon, and Willamette University’s Graduate School of Management. She left a fast-rising career at the U.S. Small Business Administration–among other positions, she directed the Sacramento District—to become the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in April 1998. (And if you have not visited that marvelous place, please put it on your must see list. Check the web site at http://Tamastslikt.com/ .)

Of course what completes this circle is that Alvin was the founding board chair at NMAI. Some of that tale is told in A Walk Towards Oregon, how it started with the Heye Museum in New York City, and went through twists and turns that landed the greatest collection of indigenous American artifacts—the Heye collection is said to have numbered a million such—on the Mall in Washington D.C. You can feel Alvin’s hand in the way the museum is a living thing, with history from the Indian point of view and contemporary portrayals of Tribal culture and activities. Visit it if you are ever in the District. I see by my emails that a celebration of chocolate, one of the West’s great contributions to world food and culture, is in the works this February.

And congratulations of course to Bobbie for this well deserved honor. And good luck in the job!

Alvin and Grace: Nez Perce and settlers in the Wallowa Country

Grace Bartlett left Reed College in 1932 to marry a Wallowa Country rancher. She worked on the ranch, raised children, and apprenticed with Harley Horner, the unofficial county historian at the time. With Horner and on her own, she wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the Wallowa County Chieftain, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, and once, on the sockeye salmon, for Sunset Magazine.

When Alvin’s big Nez Perce book came out, Grace quibbled with his descriptions of early people and events in the Wallowas. Alvin told her to “write it,” and she did. In the wonderful and, I am beginning to believe, unique, The Wallowa Country 1867-1877, published in 1976, 11 years after The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, Grace detailed the 10-year transition of the Wallowa Country from Indian to white occupation.

We learn about the early “open” winter (much like this one) when the whites first brought stock into the valley. They didn’t feed all fall and early winter and the news went to Union County newspapers and then to the Oregonian and the rest of the West that the Wallowas was a “Stockman’s paradise.” It was the first of many misunderstandings.

The settlers soon did learn from the Indians to move cattle to lower canyon ground in winter months. The Indians were not in the upper valleys in winter months—or even spring months. They generally arrived in August and hunted, fished, and gathered foods through the fall. There were meeting places—the forks of the rivers above present day Wallowa, where Old Joseph was originally buried; Indian Town on Chesnimnus Creek, and Wallowa Lake for the sockeye salmon harvest. They kept their own herds of horses and cows in the canyons, and moved there themselves after their summer-fall upper valley sojourns.

In general, Indians and settlers got along with each other. There were a few “Indian haters” among the settlers, and, according to Grace, they were known by their neighbors and not much appreciated. There was also a rabble rousing newspaper in Union County. But most of the settlers—even as war loomed with a conflict over horses and a white man killing an Indian, with subsequent “councils” of Indians and whites, movements of soldiers from Walla Walla, and meetings of Indians, generals, and Indian agents in Lapwai—were busy planting and harvesting crops, dealing with their livestock, arranging schooling for children, and going to the Walla Walla Valley to work for cash during the earlier harvest time there.

There were attempts to reconcile the treaty of 1855, which left the Wallowa Country to the Indians, and which the Joseph or Wallowa band Nez Perce had signed, with the 1863 treaty, which took away the Wallowas, and which they and several other bands had not signed. These attempts involved Washington D.C. and the Indian agency in Lapwai.

Without going into details, a division of the valley was envisioned, but Lapwai Indian agent Montieth, Washington authorities and the settlers could not seem to pull it off, because they could not get the “roaming Nez Perce,” as they called them, to agree to settle down. In other words, if Joseph and his people had just agreed to “become white” in their culture and
agriculture, they might not have been expelled from the Wallowa Country.

Alvin said many times that from the beginning of the European adventure in the Americas, we killed Indians with war and disease, but, more importantly, we overwhelmed them with Euro-centered culture. Often, it was the best intentioned who tried to assimilate them, and kill what he called “Indianness.”

Grace Bartlett’s book, written with Alvin’s strong encouragement, gives a blow by blow account of the way that played out in the Wallowa Country.

Oregon is Indian Country

This is a regular “Main Street” newspaper column for the Wallowa County Chieftain, a column that I have been writing every other week for about 24 years. It will also appear on the Oregon Days of Culture web site (OregonDaysofCulture.org). As you will see in the column, dealing with political issues in Indian Country can be tricky–waters run deep. I hope I have done justice to all parties, but especially to the Nez Perce.
rich

The “Oregon is Indian Country” exhibit currently showing at Stage One in Enterprise was put together by the Oregon Historical Society and the “nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon.” Fishtrap and its Josephy Library, the local hosts, have invited elementary student groups for special programs, and are bringing in speakers to address issues suggested by the exhibit.

Most of the young students have quickly identified the Indians who once lived here, in the Wallowas, as Nez Perce. Few could name other Oregon tribes—even our close neighbors on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla. But even adults are surprised to learn that the Nez Perce are not a “federally recognized tribe OF Oregon.”

We’ve hung a good map of the Nez Perce War of 1877 on the wall at Stage One. The retreat starts in the Wallowa valley, crosses the Snake at Dug Bar, and becomes a fighting retreat as it meanders through parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. It stops at Bear Paw in Montana, just 40 miles short of the Canadian border and freedom. A few Nez Perce did, in fact, make it across the border, but most surrendered, and this is where Joseph made his famous speech, asking leave to look for his scattered, hungry old and young.

The map does not show what happened then to the Nez Perce: the trip to Leavenworth Prison and the years in Indian Territory—land the Nez Perce still call the “hot country”; the eventual return by train to the Northwest and the split at Wallula, where the old and Christian were allowed to join Nez Perce from other bands on the much reduced Nez Perce Reservation at Lapwai, and the young, and specifically the followers of Joseph, were sent to Nespelem in north central Washington to live among Indians of different cultures and languages. Oregon and Idaho were afraid of another uprising by Indians wronged by the broken treaty of 1855, which had left the Wallowa Country to the Nez Perce.

Joseph came back to the Wallowas in 1904, with money in his pocket, but newspapers railed against Indians and locals would not sell him land.

Alvin Josephy, the late dean of Western American and Indian history, and part-time Wallowa County resident for over forty years, explains the “conviction,” from colonial days, “among settler-invaders and their descendents that Indians in their native state and Whites could not live together in peace… If the Indian submitted, cut his hair, dressed like a White, lived like a White, became a Christian—in short, was assimilated and no longer an Indian—he might survive. Otherwise, he was to be pushed a safe distance away from White society [onto reservations], isolated and rendered harmless…, or he was to be annihilated.”

According to Josephy, “these three options ran thereafter like threads through the course of Indian-White relations…” The assimilationist urge reached its zenith when the Eisenhower Administration decided to solve the “Indian question” once and for all by “terminating” all tribes with cash buyouts of old treaties. Ironically, according to the “Oregon is Indian Country” exhibit that now celebrates our tribal neighbors, Oregon led the way nationally, with 62 of 109 terminations—all of the Western Oregon tribes—between 1954 and 1961. Fortunately, the policy was reversed, and Oregon tribes have been reinstated, though now “confederated” into one or another of the nine “recognized tribes.”

Our young students were surprised to learn that there were thousands of Indian tribes and bands living in the Americas when Columbus landed—Josephy says that there were probably more than 2500 mutually unintelligible languages spoken, as many as 90 million people, and cities larger than any European cities of the time. Oregon alone must have been home to over 100 tribes and bands.

For the moment, as evidenced by the Oregon exhibit, Indians and Indian culture enjoy more favorable attitudes from the general population. Indians are allowed to dance and drum openly—things once legally outlawed in attempts at assimilation and Christianization—and we go to see them. We applaud their efforts in bringing the salmon back to the rivers.

Locally, we welcome Indians at Chief Joseph Days, and at the Homeland Project in Wallowa and its annual powwow and Nez Perce Art in the Wallowa show. Although Nez Perce Tribal government is headquartered in Idaho, (and the exiled Nez Perce are governmentally part of the “confederated” tribes at Colville, Washington), the tribe owns land in Wallowa County, and, possibly of more importance, its Fisheries and Wildlife departments work IN Oregon under federal recognition of “usual and accustomed” places acknowledged in the 1855 treaty and in subsequent negotiations.

And, in fact, a 1999 Oregon Legislative Assembly joint resolution offers an apology for the Nez Perce removal, and says that “The people of the State of Oregon welcome the Nez Perce Nation in their return to stewardship in the Wallowa Mountains.”

We are Indian country too.

###

The picture at top of the page

I thought that I should briefly explain the banner at the top of the page. The picture at the left is the one that appeared on the cover of Walk Toward Oregon, Alvin Josephy’s memoir. It must be Alvin in his early forties, after he had found the Nez Perce story and country of Idaho and northeast Oregon.

The one in the middle was taken at Wallowa Lake Lodge in October of 1965 at the publication party for The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Alvin is standing at the left. His wife, Betty, and elder Gilbert Conner from the Umatilla Confederate Tribes (Tamastslikt Cultural Institute Director Bobbie Conner’s grandfather!) are seated. Standing behind them is Chester Kerr, President of Yale University Press, publisher of the Nez Perce book.

Alvin had worked on the Nez Perce book for ten years, taking time out to write the book, Patriot Chiefs, and several articles about Indians, including an early one on the “Naming of the Nez Perce” in the autumn 1955 edition of Montana magazine, and a 60 plus page entry on “American Indians” in the 1963 Colliers Encyclopedia. The latter eventually grew into the award winning Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968.

Oh — on the right is an architect’s rendering of a remodeled Coffin House–Fishtrap’s headquarters in Enterprise–with a new Josephy Library wing at its left.