{"id":34174,"date":"2017-06-05T12:48:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/06\/misunderstanding-indians\/"},"modified":"2017-06-05T12:48:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T19:48:00","slug":"misunderstanding-indians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/06\/misunderstanding-indians\/","title":{"rendered":"Misunderstanding Indians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alvin Josephy with Allen Pinkham Sr. at Betty\u2019s Memorial<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In a talk at the Josephy Center on Saturday night, Nez Perce elder Allen Pinkham Sr. said that non-Indians have never understood that Indians, even while succumbing to Euro-American diseases, arms, numbers, and policies aimed at their cultural destruction, continually borrowed from and adapted to European science and culture. His examples included learning to use horses, cattle, guns, iron, and words on paper.<\/p>\n

He had a different take on missionary zeal and the supposed longing for \u201cThe Book\u201d that is cited in most histories of Indian-white relations in the West. Indians were sent to Hudson Bay\u2019s school in Red River, Canada, and a group of four was sent to St. Lewis to find William Clark in search of information about writing and books, not \u201cThe Book.” But Europeans interpreted all as a thirst for knowledge of their\u2014Christian\u2014religion. What we wanted, Allen\u2019s father had told him, were the \u201ctools,\u201d the way to make words on paper to pass on and extend the store of tribal and human knowledge.<\/p>\n

Pinkham said that Indian veterans coming home from World War 2 reignited an interest in treaty rights and traditional culture. Although language, traditional dress, culture, and agricultural habits had been suppressed for decades, they had survived, and it was often the veterans who said, \u201cwait a minute,\u201d we too deserve to speak our traditional languages, practice our traditional religions, and observe practices guaranteed us by our treaties. <\/p>\n

Of course those Indian veterans ran into a centuries-old buzz saw of policies, laws, favoritism\u2014and misunderstandings\u2014that had brought European miners, buffalo hunters, railroad builders, missionaries, and settlers into their lands.<\/p>\n

Indians have of course been caught in one misunderstanding after another since the day that Columbus and his crew declared them \u201cIndians.\u201d They\u2019ve been mythologized as \u201cnoble savages\u201d by European romantics upset with the forces of enlightenment. And called \u201csavages\u201d for the early defense of their lands. Indian agriculture too was misunderstood\u2014although the Europeans quickly adapted corn, squash, beans, and other American crops, the Europeans didn\u2019t understand the companion planting of corn, squash and beans (remember Squanto!) and eventually put everything in neat rows, forgetting the herbs and medicinal plants that were scattered in Northeast Indian gardens<\/p>\n

Tribes in our area that hunted, fished, and gathered in seasonal patterns were accused of misusing land because they didn\u2019t plow it and plant it and live on a single piece of it year-around. The Indian pattern was to leave enough roots and berry plants to ensure the next year\u2019s harvest, and put the first salmon back in the river so he could tell his relatives to keep making their runs.<\/p>\n

The whole notion of individual land ownership brought from Europe was antithetical to most Indian forms of land usage and tenure, and probably, as the whites moved west, the most crucial misunderstanding of all.<\/p>\n

World War 2 veterans had seen other parts of the US and the world, were literate and capable of measuring their own lives\u2014the boarding schools and the takeaways of languages and cultures\u2014against those of other Americans. It\u2019s been a long hard slog, and there is a long way to go, but Allen Pinkham was generally optimistic on Saturday night. \u201cWe\u2019re teaching Nez Perce in the schools, from elementary to college classes,\u201d and, of course, they are practicing traditional religion.<\/p>\n

And adapting some of their traditional practices\u2014Allen said that beading and basket-making, traditional women\u2019s activities, are now done by men and women, and that women are now drumming and singing the ancient songs.<\/p>\n

And he hinted that we\u2014the huge non-Indian population, might be paying some attention to the old Indian ways of dealing with the water, forests, and other natural resources that we now share.<\/p>\n

# # #<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alvin Josephy with Allen Pinkham Sr. at Betty\u2019s Memorial In a talk at the Josephy Center on Saturday night, Nez Perce elder Allen Pinkham Sr. said that non-Indians have never understood that Indians, even while succumbing to Euro-American diseases, arms, numbers, and policies aimed at their cultural destruction, continually borrowed from and adapted to European […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[427,528,530,529,531],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34174"}],"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=34174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}