Category: Umatilla Confederated Tribes

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 Read The Article

First Foods

The water in Flint

As I read headlines about Flint, Michigan’s water over the past months, and of water contaminated by chemical runoff in the farm belts of the Midwest and on irrigated ground closer to home, the notion that the relationship between humans and the land is mutual and more complicated than science and technology have proffered sends me again to Alvin Josephy and the Indians. Recent accounts of the loss of pollinators, which some say threatens global food supplies, leads to the same place.

Josephy told us that by denigrating the values and practices of Indian peoples, by seeing “human” and “natural world” as two domains, the one to be dominated by the other, by a “Eurocentrism” that saw everything from that point of view and all things Indian as “primitive,” we have denied ourselves valuable information and, possibly, tools to heal contemporary problems such as those mentioned above.

Our friends on the nearby Umatilla Reservation give us Read The Article