Nez Perce: Removal & Return

 

The exhibit is the Oregon Capitol in Salem in Fall, 2026.

 

Heads & Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes

 

Nez Perce Treaties & Reservations

The exhibit explores the Nez Perce Treaties of 1855 and 1863, and a “Proposed Reservation for the Roaming Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley in Oregon,” promulgated and then rescinded by President U.S. Grant executive orders. The exhibit features historic drawings and paintings, facsimile pages from the treaties, and explanations of treaty language that show their relevance to the present day.  In this exhibit, we note that treaty language is still the law of the land, and allow Nez Perce descendant David Liberty to argue for “annulment” of the 1863 Treaty. Most people come to the Nez Perce story through the 1200-plus mile fighting retreat that we call the Nez Perce War of 1877. They then work back to the Nez Perce people, their history and culture before the War. That history is enmeshed in two major treaties and an aborted presidential attempt to make things right for one band of Nez Perce, all three of which preceded the Nez Perce War.

Native Sport

In 2018, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Reservation showed an exhibit they called “Beautiful Games.” It followed Native Americans in sport from the earliest Mesoamerican contests to the Pendleton Roundup. It displayed games of chance and skill, team games and contests of individuals. It told us that American Indians developed Lacrosse, and that Indians, from Jim Thorpe to Jacoby Ellsbury, have become highly proficient at games developed by white America. The Josephy Center celebrates much of “Beautiful Games,” with updates from regional reservations and current contests that bring “Native Sport” and athletes to Eastern Oregon and the Wallowa’s today.

Nez Perce Music: An Historical Sketch

Dams, Salmon, & Controversy

This exhibit at the Josephy Center, funded in part by a “Arts Build Communities” grant from the Oregon Arts Commission, opened in 2018. It builds on one that Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Reservation did on Celilo and the dam at The Dalles. They called it “Progress vs. Protest,” and told stories of the economic and energy gains—and the losses of fish and Indian culture on the Big River. In planning this exhibit, Tamástslikt Director Bobbie Conner suggested that we localize, with stories of the dam at Wallowa Lake and the High Mountain Sheep Dam—the one that did not get built—joining text and photos from Celilo.

The Josephy Center asked Joe Whittle to research the Wallowa Lake dams, and Jon Rombach to take on High Mountain Sheep. The result is an exhibit that gives background on the march of dams on the Columbia, a good accounting of the flooding of the ancient fishing site at Celilo with the construction of The Dalles Dam, and tells important local stories about dams, fish, and tribal culture.

Early settlers scooped sockeye salmon out of Wallowa Lake by the thousands, and failed to realize the species’ special migration pattern from Ocean to river, lake, and headwaters—and back to the sea. But the understanding of all salmon by the scientists of the day—the late 1800s and early 1900s—was off the mark. Thinking that native streams were not important—that Pacific salmon would randomly find a river to travel—scientists thought they could make up for the huge cannery harvests on the Columbia with hatcheries and moving eggs and smolts from one river to the next. Locally, dams and hatcheries at Minam and Troy, the experts thought, would easily replace the fish the settlers were harvesting on upper rivers and in Wallowa Lake.

No one bothered to ask the Indians.

The Way They Lived

This exhibit is put together by non-Indians, and includes many historical photographs taken by non-Indians. We are using these photos, along with a few artifacts from the Nez Perce National Historical Park—which were actually made by Indians—to try to picture how the People lived here before European contact.

You will often see the word “Nimiipuu,” with various spellings.  Our understanding is that this is a general Nez Perce term meaning “the people” or “Nez Perce people.”

Before contact, the Nimiipuu and their Plateau Indian cousins lived across a wide area of what is now NE Oregon, Idaho, and Eastern Washington. The map from Alvin Josephy’s book, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, shows the area at the time of the missionaries, with places marked by “village headmen”—and not by tribes. Admittedly, this is about 1836, so over 30 years after Lewis and Clark met the Indians of the region, but it is probable that village and tribal structure at that time was still traditional. The point is that primary loyalty was to a place and its leaders.

The Indians who lived here—now often called Joseph or Wallowa Band—were the Wal-lum-wat-kin, or Wellamotkin Band.  (Even white men at the time—Lewis and Clark prominently—heard and transcribed things differently, and often did not agree on spellings.)