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Book Review
| When the River Ran Wild! Indian Traditions on the Mid-Columbia and the Warm Springs Reservation. By George W. Aguilar Sr. Foreword by Jarold Ramsey. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. xviii + 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $22.50, paper.)
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Tribal elder George Aguilar Sr. has lived nearly all his life on the Warm Springs Reservation. Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his Indian grandparents and only sporadically attended boarding school. As a child, he watched the men of his family pull salmon after salmon from the raging torrents of the Columbia River, before the dams silenced its rapids and rendered its waters "easygoing and lifeless," as Aguilar laments (p. 101). After an overseas stint in the army, Aguilar returned to the reservation. Here he raised five children with his wife Ella and worked in a dozen different occupations. At age 75, Aguilar now adds a few new lines to his resume: book author and conservator of the traditional knowledge of his people, the Kiksht Chinook. |
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When the River Ran Wild! is both a family history and a detailed record of the Kiksht Chinook's age-old customs and subsistence practices, many of which are no longer used by contemporary Indians. Aguilar's opening chapter briefly describes the various Native groups that once inhabited the Columbia River Gorge, their prophecies of and eventual interactions with non-Indians, and their subsequent removal to Warm Springs (among other Indian reservations in the region). Aguilar's personal memoirs of reservation life follow in two anecdote-packed chapters, which focus on his early years with his grandparents. Aguilar devotes the remainder of the book to such topics as ethnobotany, hunting and tanning, salmon fishing, spiritualism and ceremonies, ancestral name-giving and genealogy dating back two centuries, reflections on nineteenth-century warfare, and legends and lore. In addition to his own lifetime of lessons learned, Aguilar draws from oral histories of other elders, tribal archives, and published observations of the Kiksht Chinook by non-Indians, including the journals of Lewis and Clark and the writings of ethnographers Leslie Spier and Edward Sapir from the early-twentieth century. |
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Aguilar implicitly states that he wrote When the River Ran Wild! for two audiences: his fellow tribal members "first and foremost" and any layperson interested in an insider's view of the evolving Kiksht Chinook way of life (p. xv). Aguilar's coverage of the Columbia River fishery of his youth is an especially poignant telling of the cultural upheaval his people have endured. |
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A double-column format accommodates lots of sidebars and an excellent collection of photographs—many of the author as a tot—throughout this book. Chapter titles in script typeface add to the author's informal delivery. Far from a linear, interpretive history, When the River Ran Wild! is a treasure trove of primary source material that illuminates how Indian people once lived in and around the Columbia Gorge. |
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| Diane L. Krahe
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| Missoula, Montana |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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