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Reviews
Warm Springs Millennium: Voices from the Reservation
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by Michael Baughman and Charlotte Hadella
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University of Texas Press, Austin, 2000. Illustrations, photographs, bibliography, index. 179 pages. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Jarold Ramsey
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
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Warm Springs Millennium is not the first book on Oregon's
largest Indian community, and probably it will not be the last.
Let us hope not, anyway, because although its good intentions are
manifest, in the final analysis this book does not measure up to
its intentions.
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1
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At the outset, the authors propose to offer "an honest look at a twentieth-century reservation. In doing so, perhaps we will help prove that many of our real Indians, still living and suffering, always struggling, often succeeding, are worthy of recognition and respect" (p. 10). Having completed their survey of Warm Springs, they conclude that "at the end of the twentieth century, good and hopeful things are happening on Indian reservations, and more Americans need to know about them" (p. 162). |
2
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These are laudable if somewhat sweeping aims. Yet, is the Warm Springs Reservation really so typical of U.S. reservations in general (as the authors assume) that they can validly generalize their findings in central Oregon onto "Indian America"? One might object that the Warm Springs Reservation is in many ways not typical at all, given its tribal diversity, its extensive resources, its recent history of progressive development, and its considerable political and economic clout. Would Baughman and Hadella have filed the same upbeat report if they had visited reservations in Utah or South Dakota? |
3
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Too often in this book, the authors neglect to examine and validate their premises, and they rely too much on undeveloped assumptions and allegations. For example, in their emphasis on Indian education, when they attempt to summarize traditional Chinookan/Sahaptin/Paiute forms of schooling, they wholly ignore the institution, once common to all three groups, of the "spirit quest" in adolescence. Would this not be an important part of an American Indian mind-set on learning? The same kind of negligence weakens their critique of the public schools in Jefferson County, to which Warm Springs kids are bused after fourth grade. The record of School District 509J in dealing with the county's Indian population has been uneven over the years, but it is patently unfair of the authors to ignore (1) that since the 1980s, the district has been trying to cope with the most socially diverse student population in Oregon — not just Anglos and Indians but Latinos in nearly equal numbers — and (2) that the 509J school board has included Tribal members for many years. |
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No one who knows anything about Warm Springs would deny that Madras — the county seat and nearest town — is, as they say, "part of the problem" at Warm Springs. Yet, it serves no good purpose for the authors to represent the Anglo population of Madras and the county as a colony of redneck bigots and ignoramuses (see especially the stereotyping of locals in the chapter titled "One Thousand Square Miles"). If efforts were made to test such gross simplifications by seeking input from teachers, doctors, ministers, farmers, partners in Indian-Anglo marriages, and so on, it does not show, and the book's credibility suffers accordingly. |
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Credibility also suffers in the remarkable assertion that "there have been no medical studies to explain [alcoholism and diabetes] among Indian populations" (p. 33). To learn something about this important subject, the authors might start with the lifelong investigative work on southwestern reservations by Drs. Stephen Kunitz and Jerrold Levy and their colleagues. |
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As a casual "ethnography" of the Warm Springs Reservation, the book tends to be just that, casual to a fault. Readers will note that certain family names appear again and again in the chapters, but the authors seem unaware of the long-standing dominance of a few families in Warm Springs affairs. By the same token, readers may come away not knowing that many Warm Springs families have been in logging and ranching for generations, some of them very successfully. |
7
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One of the most interesting sections here adduces a widely known Chinookan story, "The Deserted Boy," as a kind of "metaphorical framework" for pondering the educational needs and predicaments of the Indians of Warm Springs (p. 137). The story's hero is a spoiled, troublemaking boy who is finally abandoned by his people and in order to survive must educate himself, with spirit help. The story exists in several versions; Baughman and Hadella take up the Wasco text recorded in the 1880s by "Curtain" [they mean Jeremiah Curtin], in which the boy is mainly generous and magnanimous when he rejoins his people. In their interpretation, the story becomes a sort of parable of the educational fate of Indians in Anglo society. The fact that in a Wishram version, recorded a generation later, the boy vengefully kills nearly all of his people expresses to the authors the decline of morale among Indians in the thirty years between the two versions. |
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Now, to be fair about it, the authors acknowledge that these are their own "late-twentieth-century 'reading' " (p. 139) Surely, however, they could have done better with this story, still known at Warm Springs, one that really does express traditional American Indian concerns with learning and personal growth. Having discovered "The Deserted Boy," why did they not take its versions in hand and go asking for "inside" commentary on them from some of their Warm Springs informants? |
9
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It is precisely when the authors do begin to interrogate their subjects and leave off pronouncing on them that their book comes alive and becomes accountable and informative. This happens in most of the extended interviews with Warm Springs residents that they offer. To be sure, one might question the value of including a piece on a retired Anglo physician with no connections to the situation at Warm Springs except that he is a reformed alcoholic who fishes the Deschutes; and one might also fairly ask why there are no interviews here with elders, teenagers, or Tribal officials. Yet, the well-edited self-portrayals of individuals such as school principal Dawn Smith, "expatriate" graduate student and storyteller Brent Florendo, chief of police (and poet) "Stoney" Miller, and Foster Kalama — artist, coach, and Warm Springs liaison officer for Madras schools —are lively and insightful, conveying the authority of "insiders" talking about themselves in their community. As such, these pieces partly make up for the shortcomings of the rest of the book. But only partly. |
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