Chuck Sams is the incident commander for coronavirus response on the Umatilla Reservation. He recently told Oregon Public Radio\u2019s \u201cThink Out Loud\u201d that<\/p>\n
\u201cThe tribes [Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla] have faced pandemic before; our last one ended in around 1860, but that cost us nearly 90% of our tribal membership \u2014 lost to the measles between 1780 and 1860. That memory still lives on in many of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sams had done research at Tam\u00e1stslikt, the cultural institute on the reservation, and found that people survived the last big measles epidemic about 1860 with isolation. Those who were fishing at Willamette Falls (and yes, inland tribes had fishing places on the Willamette through marriages) and those who were away in buffalo country survived.<\/p>\n
Measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases wreaked havoc on northwest tribes over the time period Sams describes. They came tribe to tribe from the coast, brought by English and Russian ships plying the fur trade. Inland tribes had not met the white traders in the 1780s, when disease might have reduced Willamette valley populations by 50 or 75 %. \u00a0And of course people from east of the Cascades would have been exposed as disease traveled up the Columbia.<\/p>\n
Smallpox followed the fur trade across Canada and the Great Plains in the 1730s, spiking about 1780, before the fur trade was crossing the continental divide. But tribe-to-tribe contagion would have brought it over the divide before the traders.<\/p>\n
Smallpox also traveled north from Mexico:<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1781, a band of Blackfeet attacked a Shoshone camp at dawn. When they slashed through the Shoshone tents, the Blackfeet war cries stopped\u2026 \u2018Our eyes were appalled with terror; there was no one to fight with but the dead and the dying, each a mass of corruption,\u2019” a Blackfeet warrior named \u00a0Saukamappee told a Canadian fur trapper.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting that in this time of a global pandemic, the examples and experiences of American Indians, who arguably suffered the greatest historical losses ever to pandemics, are rarely even mentioned. Charles Mann, in his 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, provides a detailed examination of pandemics on a \u201cvirgin\u201d population. Mann looked at historical records, but also talked with epidemiologists and virologists today.<\/p>\n
Sams\u2019 remarks are the only tribal comments I have heard in the time we have been dealing with our pandemic. I\u2019ve read about impacts on black communities and discrimination in testing availability to African-Americans. I\u2019ve read about impacts based on socio-economic status. I wonder if anyone is paying attention to American Indians at this time, if scholars are evaluating the impacts on tribal peoples\u2014and looking to see how they are responding, based on tribal histories of the killers that some think were, in the end, the primary reason that Europeans came to dominate the Americas?<\/p>\n
We are still not interested in listening to Indians.<\/p>\n
# # #<\/p>\n
Chuck Sams is the incident commander for coronavirus response on the Umatilla Reservation. He recently told Oregon Public Radio\u2019s \u201cThink Out Loud\u201d that \u201cThe tribes [Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla] have faced pandemic before; our last one ended in around 1860, but that cost us nearly 90% of our tribal membership \u2014 lost to the measles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[236,232,239,237,235,188,233,238,234],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}