When we arrived at the Head Start building that is now used by the walwa ma Nez Perce for Longhouse services, an elder I have known for over thirty years came to say hello and remind me again that the distance from Joseph to Nespelem is the same as that from Nespelem to Joseph!

I looked at his drum and chuckling face, and told him that standing through a service, and drumming for that long, sometimes for more than an hour at a stretch, made it “hard to be an Indian.” He said it had always been hard to be an Indian, smiled and walked to the head of the room where the drum line was setting up.

I thought back to the drive from the springtime lush Wallowa Valley across the wheat fields of the Palouse and harder, rockier country as we closed in on Coulee Dam. How hard it must have been for the walwa ma—Joseph’s people—to be driven from the Wallowa, battle with American armies for five months and 1200 miles, then be herded into Indian Territory where they stayed for seven years. They call it the “hot country” (“eeikish pah” in McWhorter’s attempt to make it phonetic in “Hear Me My Chiefs”). A hundred Nez Perce children born in the Hot Country are in a graveyard there, tended, I was told one time, by a woman from another tribe;

Through Joseph’s diplomacy, the remnants of the war were finally allowed to come west, but not to Oregon and the Wallowa. Some say that Christian Nez Perce were allowed to go to the Idaho reservation in Lapwai, while the others were sent first to Spokane and then to Nespelem on the Colville Reservation. There may be some truth to that, but it could also be that survivors from other non-treaty bands who had fought in the war were allowed to go to Lapwai, and Joseph’s followers—who were not welcome in Oregon or Idaho—went to the Colville Reservation in north-central Washington.

On the Colville, the Nez Perce had to negotiate with eleven other tribes and bands, and to learn new ways of fish, wildlife, and plants to survive. Joseph came back to the Wallowa in 1900 with an agent from Washington and a plan to buy a small piece of the country. He was turned down, and went back to Colville to die, the doctor said, of a broken heart.

Nez Perce hard times were not over. Like Indians across the country, they faced allotment policy, boarding schools, and then, in the 1950s, in living memory of the elders in the room at Nespelem, “termination” and “relocation” programs. These programs and policies were all designed to assimilate Indians, to make them “white,” with white names, clothes, religion, English language, and individual plots of ground to farm.

That this small band of Nez Perce have survived on the Colville for over 140 years is a miracle. That they remember religion, songs and foods against the onslaught of assimilation and popular culture is more miracles.

At Nespelem I learned some of the secrets of that survival: the drums and songs, foods, the stories of survival, and the huge networks of names and relatives. A song is attributed to a certain place in history or person who passed it on. Drummers and dancers and the women who prepare the foods wear fine dress and regalia—their “Sunday clothing—for the Longhouse ceremony, that has often been passed on, maybe added to, over generations. Or sewn specially by a grandmother or auntie.

When people rise to testify or comment on the day and the ceremony, they give their Indian names, and often trace them back generations. There is beauty in this, and sadness too. A woman told me that her parents had not received Indian names, as they came of age in the assimilationist 50s. I think some of them did get names later, but that too marked a period of pain.

The names and testimonies also chronicled another recurring pain among the walwa ma Nez Perce. And at the same time a strength. The relationships are many, and go across reservations in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. There are intermarriages, and families that choose one place or another. These extended family relationships offer support, but they also foreshadow a time when keeping track of blood quantum—the legacy that allows a person to be enrolled on a reservation—will mean fewer and fewer enrolled members of the walwa ma band. It is a problem across Indian country, because marriages between members of different tribes carried three and four generations can result in an individual not having the blood quantum to be enrolled in any one tribe. One could literally be 100 percent native but not qualify to be a member of any tribe,

But now, the Nez Perce at Nespelem hang onto their threads of family and names, and the support and pride is palpable. When I have school visitors in the Josephy Library, I ask them to name their grandparents and any countries, foods, or languages passed down. Rarely can fourth graders or college students, name all four grandparents. And we all eat pizza now—maybe an Italian holiday food that started somewhere in Europe or New England. The Nez Perce at Nespelem at the First Foods feast remembered generations of cousin-brother-sisters, and most could recite their Indian names and the forbearers that they came from.  And share in a meal of salmon, venison, cous and bitterroot, native celery and potato and chokecherries and huckleberries. All foods their ancestors here in the Wallowa once shared.

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