Category: termination policy

More Good News—and old news about President Nixon!

Chuck Sams, Jaime Pinkham, and Deb Haaland Federal Government appointments were my good news last week. It turns out I stopped short in my research into what is going on in the Biden Administration, and made an error regarding government agencies at the same time. Thanks first to my friend Geoff, who advises that:

“The Army Corps of Engineers is within the Department of Defense, not Interior. Mike Connor, who will be the Asst. Secretary of the Army for Civil Works after confirmation… is Native too, Taos Pueblo. Jaime [Pinkham] Acting in his position, will be one rung below him, so both Native. Bob Anderson, also Native, is the Solicitor to Secretary of Interior, a critically important position, was Senate confirmed.”

And friend Elnora caught another of my misses—Brian Newland. Read Rich’s Post →

Indians are everywhere–again!

Deb Haaland, President-elect Biden’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of the Interior, is a 35th generation New Mexican who is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna. She will be the first enrolled member of an American Indian Nation to serve as a Cabinet secretary, and the fact that it is Interior—the federal agency designated to deal with Indian reservations and tribal issues—is, frankly, mind-blowing. In her first remarks, Haaland reminded people that one of her predecessors at Interior had called for the complete assimilation or extermination of all Indians.  Read Rich’s Post →

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.

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?
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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.

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