The longer I live in this stunning Wallowa–Snake River country, the more complicated the past becomes. The present too. Like the country at large, we are experiencing a Native Revival. Fire, fish, and reconciliation with the past are fueling a nation-wide surge — and the same is true here.
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Transcript of the Voices of the Wild Earth episode. Lightly formatted from the original production script.
RICH WANDSCHNEIDER: NIIMIIPUU RETURN TO WALLOWA
10/31/2022
INTRO FOR WEBSITE : WELCOME BACK TO THE IDAHO MYTHWEAVER’S VOICES OF THE WILD EARTH AND SCHOLAR RICH WANDSCHNEIDER’S TWO-PART PODCAST ON THE NEZ PERCE PEOPLE IN THE WALLOWA COUNTRY. I’M JANE FRITZ.
IN PART ONE, RICH GAVE US AN OVERVIEW OF THE NIMI’IPUU HISTORY IN THE WALLOWA COUNTRY OF NORTHEAST OREGON, BEFORE AND AFTER CHIEF JOSEPH AND HIS WALWA’A MA BAND WERE DRIVEN OUT IN 1877. HERE IN PART TWO, HE’LL TELL US OF THE NEZ PERCE RETURN TO AND RESURGENCE IN WALAWA. LET’S CONTINUE HIS EXPLORATION.
[BRING UP DRUM AMBIENCE, FADE UNDER AND OUT]
RICH: The longer I live in this stunning Wallowa-Snake River country, the more complicated the past becomes. The present too!
Like the country at large, we are experiencing a Native Revival. Fire, fish, and reconciliation with the past are fueling a nation-wide “surge”—that’s Ojibwe writer David Treuer’s term—and the same is true here.
Another truth heralded by scholars today is that while history books often haven’t told us so, Native peoples remained on the land, and have been active participants in the development of the United States since our beginnings. That is true in the Wallowas as well.
The Nez Perce were never completely gone from the Wallowa, and there is a truly new and acknowledged participation of the Nez Perce, or Nimi’ipuu, here today.
I once asked a Nimi’ipuu friend how long it was, after their removal from the Wallowas and the fighting retreat of 1877 that we call the Nez Perce War, before the people returned to the country to fish, hunt, and harvest roots and berries. “There were probably Nez Perce here during the War,” he said. And now, visiting ancient sites with Native elders, I better understand. There were other Nez Perce bands, and along with their Cayuse and Walla Walla relations, some might have been tucked into the canyons of the Minam, the Grande Ronde, and Joseph Creek as the main body of Nez Perce left.
In 1880, after the War ended, in a strange two-step of cooperation and rejection, which colonialists danced with Indians across the continent, settlers here named their town Joseph, after the leader they had forcibly removed three years earlier. On Chief Joseph’s last visit in 1900, he came with government support to buy a piece of the Wallowa, but was totally sidelined by the locals.
Ironically in 1919, the Associated Ditch Company, owners of the dam at the foot of Wallowa Lake that wiped out the teeming historical run of sockeye salmon, deeded five acres of land to the Department of the Interior to be held in trust for Indians of the Nez Perce and Umatilla reservations. It was one of five traditional burial sites identified by a mixed group of Nez Perce from many bands. Some whites must have seen justice in these actions; others looked even then to tourism, cashing in on the connection.
Tiwi-teqis, Old Joseph, was reburied here with a large parade and feast for all. Years later, after the gravesite fell into disarray, an all-Indian CCC camp from Umatilla cleaned the site up and built a rock wall, cistern and drinking fountain. The Indian CCC crew played baseball against local teams, and there were Indian speeches at a rededication. Today thousands of visitors, including many tribal people, visit the gravesite each year, often leaving offerings at the monument.
The White dance with the Nez Perce continued. In 1946, when local boosters, including the actor Walter Brennan, held a rodeo and parade, they called it “Chief Joseph Days.” The following year, a Native dance band from Lapwai, who called themselves the Nez Percians, rode in the parade wearing headdresses and playing their trumpets and saxophones. For a few years there were Indian princesses named alongside Chief Joseph Day queens.
A few Natives always participated in the yearly parade, and eventually a powwow grounds next to the rodeo stadium was built. Nez Perce from Lapwai in Idaho, Colville in Washington, and Umatilla in Oregon gathered there and celebrated together.
In 1990, Taz Conner, a Nez Perce-Cayuse then living in the town of Wallowa, who had participated in the Indian revival at Chief Joseph Days, worked with local school teachers, including the late Terry Crenshaw, to organize a new powwow. It was soon named Tamkaliks. The name means “From Where You Can See the Mountains.” It was first held at the Wallowa school, then on private land, until it moved onto its present site of 320 acres owned by the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland.
Homeland is a non-profit governed by a board comprised of locals and tribal members from Lapwai, Colville, and Umatilla. In 2022, Tamkaliks celebrated its 30th year in its beautiful dance arbor, the largest intertribal gathering in the valley to date.
The walwa’a ma—or Joseph band, long in exile and many driving hours from Nespelem on the Colville Reservation, are less frequent visitors. But that is changing. Jewie Davis is an elder who now drums in the Homeland’s Longhouse.
JEWIE: “Coming back here is like coming home. It feels really good to be here, and you can feel why they wanted to come back when you come here, because it’s so beautiful and the scenery and the land. It just makes you want to stay. And I can see why our elders wanted to come home. But due to the settlers and the farmers, the U.S. government, we couldn’t come back. They wouldn’t allow us. We’re still there—many of the Joseph Band, walwa ma, at Nespelem, Washington.”
RICH: When explaining the Longhouse to non-native friends, I just call it “Indian Church.” The Longhouse is a gathering place for spiritual practices and traditions common to Plateau Tribal peoples. The Wallowa Longhouse brings Nez Perce and related tribal peoples together in this ancestral land. It provides a place to celebrate life in all its stages and to give thanks to the Creator. At a recent summer service, there were over 100 celebrants, Native and non-native.
Yet, there are still very few Nez Perce living here.
Maybe a more permanent Nez Perce return, including the walwa’a ma band, is signaled by the journey of the species of salmon that come to Walawa to spawn, including the long ago extirpated ocean-going sockeye salmon in Wallowa Lake. Rebuilding the century old dam at the lake’s north end, which would allow for fish passage, is a collaborative project between state wildlife agencies, the Nez Perce Tribe, and local irrigators, and is inching closer to reality.
Nez Perce Fisheries in Joseph, which opened in the 1980s, is devoted to the maintenance and restoration of salmon, steelhead and lamprey that link the Snake River and rivers of the Wallowa Country to the sea. It was a result of the 1974 Boldt Decision which affirmed the fishing rights of the Columbia River treaty tribes. Tribal members could fish in “usual and accustomed places” off their reservations. And then, the courts said, if the government guaranteed the people the right to fish, there must be fish.
In 1997, with Bonneville Power Administration government funds and helped by the land conservatory, Trust for Public Lands, the Nez Perce Tribe at Lapwai acquired a ten thousand-acre ranch of aboriginal homeland on the lip of Joseph Canyon. This land in Wallowa County’s northern canyonlands was wildlife mitigation for habitat losses caused by the Snake River dams. Named Hetewisnix Wetes or “Precious Land,” it celebrated the first sizable aboriginal land repatriation in the Wallowa in 120 years. The Nez Perce Tribe owns and manages the land as a wildlife reserve, rich in natural resource values, and makes it accessible to the public, Native and non-native alike. Recorded in 1997 at the dedication ceremony, Jaime Pinkham, then treasurer of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, explained the land’s importance to his people.
PINKHAM: All those things that are on that mountain over there in those valleys, they're all our caretakers, they are all going to look out for the well-being of the Nez Perce people, continue to provide us with the nourishment for our body and for our soul.
RICH: Pinkham later became the director of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, and today works in the executive branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Biden Administration.
The flurry of activity in the Wallowa over the past 30 years has grown since Homeland and Precious Land took root. The Nature Conservancy and Land Trust invite root diggers. Tribal governments at Lapwai, Umatilla, and Colville contributed to the purchase of 62 acres on the terminal moraine of Wallowa Lake. Iwetemlaykin,— “at the edge of the lake,”— was named by the Tribes and is managed by Oregon State Parks. It adjoins Old Joseph’s gravesite, and is a sacred site marking the beginning of the Nez Perce or Nee-mee-poo, National Historic Trail, and the Nez Perce’s forced removal.
There is a hiking trail with gorgeous views of the lake, mountains and moraines. One can imagine a village of tepees in the vast meadow once platted for modern development. The late Horace Axtell’s ancestor, a survivor who left in 1877, recalled the quiet; “the only sounds were those of the horses and cattle as we left.”
Nez Perce Fisheries is working on several easements held by the Tribe in the Wallowa Valley, and perhaps the most significant easement is on the land of braided waters of the Wallowa River between Wallowa Lake and the century old Wallowa Lake Lodge. Its gravel beds now serve the spawning Kokanee landlocked salmon, and await the return of sea-going Sockeye salmon.
In 2020, the Nez Perce Tribe purchased outright 148 acres at the edge of Joseph, not far from the rodeo grounds and on the Lake’s west moraine. In the summer of 2021 hundreds of Nimiipuu and visitors gathered for a land blessing at the site they call Am’sáaxpa, the Place of Boulders. There were drums and horses, speakers, and a longhouse ceremony in a traditional long tent, a tepee pole structure that could be seen high atop the hill from the highway. Native people as far away as Oklahoma, rode, walked, and reveled for a mile from town to a place where their ancestors had camped and fished for millennia—but not for the last 150 years.
The late Agnes Andrews Davis lived at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation and raised and taught Jewie Davis, her grandson, from infancy, now himself an elder making his own return to Walawa. Her father was raised by Chief Joseph and his two wives.
AGNES: I stood at that lake, and I looked up; and, I realized why the old lady used to sit there telling stories and cry, and she’d cry about Wallowa, wishing she was home. She never got the chance to come back here. I heard a lot of stories from the old lady. How they had to leave this area, how they traveled, what they went through. (crying) It's really good to be here today.
RICH: Agnes Davis’s heartfelt words, recorded at the Precious Land dedication in 1997, will continue to resonate for the Nez Perce—the Nimi’ipuu — returning today to the Walawa. And in the Wallowa Longhouse as drummers from Lapwai, Umatilla, and Nespelem sing and dance together. One day, the people will return together to Wallowa Lake, and so will the Sockeye Salmon that have been gone so very long.
For Voices of the Wild Earth, I’m Rich Wandschneider in Joseph, Oregon.
[ BRING IN AND UP DRUM AMBIENCE AND FADE UNDER AND OUT]
VOICES OF THE WILD EARTH PODCASTS ARE PRODUCED BY ME, JANE FRITZ, AND ASSOCIATE PRODUCER, JUSTIN LANTRIP, FOR THE IDAHO MYTHWEAVER. SPECIAL THANKS TO WRITER AND PRODUCER RICH WANDSCHNEIDER OF THE JOSEPHY CENTER FOR ARTS AND CULTURE, AND BOB WEBB OF ENTERPRISE, OREGON FOR HIS ENGINEERING ASSISTANCE.
FUNDING FOR THIS SERIES COMES FROM THE IDAHO HUMANITIES COUNCIL, AND THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES, AS PART OF THE AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN ACT OF 2021. JOIN US AGAIN SOON AT MYTHWEAVER.ORG. THANKS FOR LISTENING.
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INTRO FOR KPBX—COMBINED PROGRAM:
WELCOME TO THE BOOKSHELF AND TO THIS SEGMENT FROM THE IDAHO MYTHWEAVER’S PODCAST SERIES CALLED VOICES OF THE WILD EARTH. I’M JANE FRITZ.
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE NEZ PERCE, OR NIMI’IPUU, IN 1989 WHEN I WALKED THROUGH THE DOORS OF THE UNIQUE, TRIANGULAR SHAPED BUILDING OF THE NEZ PERCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK NEAR LAPWAI, IDAHO. THEIR STORY WAS MY INTRODUCTION TO IDAHO’S NATIVE PEOPLES AND FOR THE NEXT 13 YEARS, I WORKED ON CULTURAL PROJECTS WITH THE LAPWAI TRIBE, INCLUDING PRODUCING FEATURES AND DOCUMENTARIES FOR SPOKANE PUBLIC RADIO.
IN 2020, I RETURNED TO THE WALLOWA COUNTRY IN NORTHEAST OREGON AFTER A 23-YEAR ABSENCE. BUT UNLIKE BEFORE, A STRONG NEZ PERCE PRESENCE NOW EXISTED THERE: A TRIBAL FISHERIES OFFICE, THE WALLOWA HOMELAND VISITOR CENTER, LONGHOUSE AND TAMKALIKS PROPERTY, AND THE JOSEPHY CENTER FOR ARTS AND CULTURE. IT WAS AT THE JOSEPHY WHERE I MET ITS REMARKABLE AND KNOWLEDGEABLE LIBRARY DIRECTOR, RICH WANDSCHNEIDER. LET’S HAVE RICH TELL US HIS AND THE NIMI’IPUU STORY.
[FADE IN AND UP DRUM AMBIENCE AND FADE OUT]
OUTRO FOR KPBX—COMBINED PROGRAM:
VOICES OF THE WILD EARTH PODCASTS ARE PRODUCED BY ME, JANE FRITZ, AND ASSOCIATE PRODUCER, JUSTIN LANTRIP, FOR THE IDAHO MYTHWEAVER. SPECIAL THANKS TO WRITER AND PRODUCER RICH WANDSCHNEIDER OF THE JOSEPHY CENTER FOR ARTS AND CULTURE, AND BOB WEBB OF ENTERPRISE, OREGON FOR HIS ENGINEERING ASSISTANCE.
FUNDING FOR THIS SERIES COMES FROM THE IDAHO HUMANITIES COUNCIL, AND THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES, AS PART OF THE AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN ACT OF 2021. PODCASTS AND TRANSCRIPTS ARE AVAILABLE AT MYTHWEAVER.ORG. THANKS FOR LISTENING TO THE BOOKSHELF.