Years ago I asked Otis Halfmoon, an enrolled Nez Perce who was working as an interpreter for the Nez Perce National Historical Park, to come to Wallowa County and give a talk on the Nez Perce War. I don’t remember now why I asked him to address that particular topic, but I do remember his response.
It was in the upstairs room at the Community Church in Enterprise, and over 100 people, many of them old timers who had never shown up for a Fishtrap event in the past, climbed the stairs, harboring their own ideas, stories, and questions of the Nez Perce and sometimes of their own white settling ancestors.
Otis started it off by saying that he couldn’t tell the story of the Nez Perce War, that what he could tell was his own family’s stories of that chapter in tribal life. He began with the old woman, Watkuweis, who had been helped by whites while escaping slavery Read The Article