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Reviews
AS DAYS GO BY / WIYÁXAYXT / WIYÁA AWN: OUR HISTORY, OUR LAND, AND OUR PEOPLE — THE CAYUSE, UMATILLA, AND WALLA WALLA
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edited by Jennifer Karson
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| Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Pendleton, Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, and University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, notes, index. 263 pages. $23.95 paper. |
| This compilation is an effort by the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla — the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation — to tell their own story. As the late Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. explained in the foreword, the tribes want to explain their own history from their own perspective. The collaboration includes works on oral traditions of the peoples, early and more recent history, tribal governance, and Self-Determination. |
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Twelve authors, including tribal members and non-Indians, contributed to the book. Additional traditional narratives are interspersed among the essays. An example of how the focus on a tribal perspective is kept while telling the early history of the peoples can be found in the "Early Contact and Incursion" essay by Roberta Conner and William L. Lang. Lang is professor of history at Portland State University and Conner (Umatilla/Cayuse/Nez Perce) is director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, which published the book. The authors describe early contact of the Plateau tribes with non-Indians and add discussion of the means traditional tribal people used to document their own histories. Women used "time balls" to keep track of important events in their lives. A time ball was "a cord or string made of hair or hemp ornamented with beads and knots to provide reference to births, courtship, weddings," and other important occurrences (p. 25). The time ball was a mechanism that assisted elders in teaching younger tribal members. |
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All of the essays on these Sahaptin peoples commingle tribal traditional understanding of events with the documentary history of the people, successfully creating a tribal volume that will be of value to both tribal members and non-Indians. Discussion of the traditional cultures at the time of contact, when people moved from place to place for different food supplies as the seasons changed, is shown to be by design and not in any way haphazard, as has often been suggested in other histories. While tribal perspective is maintained, there is at the same time a good analysis of topics of interest to historians and anthropologists working on the Plateau, such as trade in general, the fur trade specifically, the impact and acquisition of the horse, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. |
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For these tribes, the historical period after Euro-American contact was filled with conflict, loss, and great challenges. In his essay, Antone Minthorn, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Confederated Tribes, provides the tribal perspective of the killing of the Whitmans and the inevitable war that followed. The discussion of the 1855 treaty in his essay will add to an understanding of how tribes viewed the proceedings and what the United States' commitments to them were to be. Both the 1855 treaties and the United States' mixed record of keeping and of breaking treaty commitments contributed to wars with the tribes for more than another twenty years after they were signed. |
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Hardship did not end with the end of the wars. The Dawes Act of 1887 and allotment of the Umatilla Indian Reservation caused the loss of land, and federal policies hindered tribal sovereignty and self-governance. These tribes also suffered from the loss of Celilo Falls. But after surviving the termination policy and participating in claims before the Indian Claims Commission, the tribes began to take more control of their own destiny. The discussion of the importance of the policy of Self-Determination in tribal sovereignty again comes from a valuable tribal perspective. Another strength of the book is the discussion of late-twentieth-century history and contemporary Indian life. |
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Toward the end of the volume, there is a helpful chronology of important events in tribal history and an interesting discussion of future tribal projects and how the tribes aim to maintain tribal sovereignty in coming decades. Lee Moorehouse's photographs from the period 1890 to 1930 add to the book, as do others' photographs, as well as maps and tables. The book has a good index. |
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Non-Indian and tribal scholars have created a work that is both accessible and on a firm foundation of scholarship, and it is well designed. The book is very successful in providing a tribal perspective on history and subjects addressed regularly by non-Indian authors. Anyone interested in the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, or in the history of the Plateau region, will benefit from adding this book his or her library. |
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| E. Richard Hart
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| Winthrop, Washington |
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