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Reviews
COMING TO STAY: A COLUMBIA RIVER JOURNEY
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by Mary Dodds Schlick
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| Oregon Historical Society Press in Association with the University of Washington Press, Portland, OR 2006. Photographs, notes, index. 191 pages. $22.50 paper. |
| Midwesterner Mary Schlick came to the Pacific Northwest as a young bride with a lively curiosity, an open mind, and an understanding heart. Those qualities illuminate Coming to Stay, an intensely personal memoir that is also a vivid description of the people and life on Indian reservations in the inland Northwest from the 1950s through the 1970s. Schlick did not study Indian people. She lived among them as friend and neighbor; her descriptions are devoid of both the stereotypes and prejudices that so often mar non-Indians' depiction of Native people. |
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Schlick is best known as author of Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the Ancestors, Gift of the Earth (University of Washington Press, 1994), the definitive work on the intricate twined baskets of the Plateau people, in which she relates their art to practical uses both traditional and contemporary. Schlick is a master artist in the Oregon Traditional Arts Program and received an Oregon Governor's Arts Award in 1998 |
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Mary and her husband William T. "Bud" Schlick came to the Northwest to stay in 1950, when his new forestry degree and Civil Service application led to a job on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington. For the next twenty-eight years — except for intervals in Washington, D.C. — they lived on the Colville, Yakama, and Warm Springs reservations, sharing the daily life of the people and learning their customs. Their three children were born during their early years on the Colville Reservation. |
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While Bud rose from forester to agency superintendent, Mary helped develop preschool education programs, chronicled Yakama Reservation events as a reporter for weekly newspapers, and learned the complicated art of basket weaving. The couple shared tribal celebrations and personal tragedies and developed lifelong friendships. Their children attended a reservation school. It is this story that Schlick tells in intimate detail against a background of changing federal policies toward Indians and the rapidly changing post-World War II Northwest. Hers is a unique view of the region's history, both recent and long past. |
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One of her first visitors on the Colville Reservation told Mary about her father's service with famed Nez Perce Chief Joseph, whose band from Oregon's Wallowa Valley fought the U.S. Cavalry across three states, was sent to exile in Oklahoma for years, and finally was settled on the Colville Reservation, three hundred miles from their homeland. Schlick wrote: "This close contact with the history of the West continued to astonish me. We had been exposed to little Native history beyond the French and Indian War and Custer's Last Stand, and here we were living among those touched by brutal reality" (p. 37). |
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With a background in home economics and technical journalism, Mary Schlick found varied opportunities to work with her Indian neighbors and to learn from them. She was a 4-H Club leader and a Cub Scout den mother. She worked with tribal women in the longhouse kitchen to prepare feasts. She helped develop instruction books for home equipment and learned to dig roots with an Indian digging tool, make wing dresses, and weave baskets. She learned to accept and offer gifts in the Native tradition. |
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The author's feelings for the country and people of the inland Northwest are captured in her description of leaving the Warm Springs Reservation for an assignment in Washington, D.C. "As we crossed the Deschutes River, I had a sudden sensation of loss, of leaving something important behind.... As we followed the beautiful river and climbed the familiar winding grade toward Madras, I began to feel better. I knew without a doubt that we would return. This place and the people we knew here would continue to be part of our lives just as the Mt. Adams country of our first summer and the people of the Colville continued to be. Yes, I thought as we paralleled the chain of mountains south toward Bend, where we would spend the night, we had come to this country to stay. We would be back" (p. 90). |
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Indian people continued to be part of their lives during the Schlicks' final sojourn in Washington, D.C., where Mary spent much of her time in the National Anthropological Archives, doing research that culminated in Columbia River Basketry. The Schlicks came back to the Northwest in 1978, settling in a new house above the Hood River Valley orchards after Bud retired from government service. They were welcomed home by Indian friends. |
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Coming to Stay can be read as a personal memoir, a well-told tale of an interesting life. Or it can be read as a realistic report on the modern Plateau people of the Northwest. Either way, it is well worth the reading, a bit like sitting down with a cup of coffee across the kitchen table from a treasured, literate friend who has an eye for detail and a good supply of empathy. |
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| Roberta Ulrich
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| Beaverton, Oregon |
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