Indians have a message: "We intend to be here forever"

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Sunday, October 9, 2005

Indians have a message: "We intend to be here forever"

By DAVID HORSEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fourth part of a seven-part series.

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DISPATCH FROM KAMIAH, NEZ PERCE RESERVATION, Sept. 22 -- Few people can tell you where their world began, but the Ni-Mii-Puu can.

A big mound rises on a grassy slope above this Idaho town. Myth says the mound covers the buried heart of a great monster that gobbled up all of the animals in the world. Coyotes killed the monster, cut up his heart and, from the blood, created the Ni-Mii-Puu, better known as the Nez Perce tribe.

The Heart of the Monster site lies just across U.S. 12 from the Lewis and Clark Resort, an RV park with log cabins set back in the trees and a motel office, gift shop and restaurant built to resemble a stockade. The restaurant is the Sacajewea Café. The Lewis and Clark theme is ubiquitous in this part of the country.

This morning, I check out of the resort, drive down the hill and cross the bridge over the Clearwater River. A little farther downstream is a sprawling sawmill built on the place where Lewis and Clark camped out for several weeks in the spring of 1806 on their return trip to the United States. Mountain passes were still blocked by snow, so the explorers had little choice but to stay here in what they called their Long Camp and enjoy the hospitality of the Nez Perce.

Now, as I drive into town, the Corps of Discovery II is situated at the city park. I toured this traveling exhibit yesterday and heard yet again about the meetings between Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery and the native tribes who helped them on their trek to the ocean. Today, I have my own meeting with the Indians.

I take a left at the tribal casino and pull up at the community hall where the Nez Perce are sitting in council for three days. Inside on a basketball court, chairs are lined up and an election is taking place. Any member of the tribe who is 18 or older living on the reservation can take part in the vote and the meeting. It is democracy in its purest form.

I find a seat on the bleachers and soon am talking to a big, handsome Indian man with a long braid running down his back. He is Brooklyn Baptiste, a member of the tribe's executive committee and a descendant of Twisted Hair, the chief who welcomed and fed Lewis and Clark when they came out of the mountains at Weippe Prairie.


		David Horsey / P-I

Baptiste confirms what I have heard elsewhere: that the tribes along the path of the expedition began with great skepticism, if not hostility, toward the bicentennial event. After all, why celebrate the moment in history when your ancestors' way of life began to unravel? But, when event organizers assured the Indians they envisioned not a celebration but a commemoration, many tribal members began to see an opportunity, a chance to tell their side of the story.

"We can educate people," Baptiste tells me. "We don't have to kick over tombstones. It's a window, not just for our country, but for the whole world to see who contributed. Lewis and Clark couldn't have done it without us."

I ask Baptiste about his name and background. As with many American Indians, it is a story of blending. The name Brooklyn came from a buddy of his grandfather's who served with him in a tank regiment during World War II; Baptiste comes from a French Canadian branch of the family tree. He is a member of the Nez Perce tribe through his mother, but he is Umatilla by way of his father. He tells me he's just been to the Pendleton Round-Up to visit his Umatilla relations.

Small world -- I was there, too, at the start of my trip. The Round-Up is the only rodeo in America that features Indians almost as prominently as cowboys. The Indian horse relay -- young Indian men riding bareback and switching mounts in midrace -- was more wild and exciting than the bull riding in which cowboys mostly got dumped into the dirt about seven seconds short of their full eight-second ride.

Behind the rodeo arena there was an Indian encampment where Brooklyn Baptiste stayed. I had wandered through trying to find a woman named Roberta Conner, better known as Bobbie. I finally located her teepee but she was in Portland for the day. I left a note saying I hoped we would connect later.

When we finally did, it was at the $18.4 million Tamastslikt Cultural Institute where she is director. The institute sits on a prairie just east of Pendleton, a half mile past the tribal casino and just beyond the tribal golf course. Inside is an impressive museum that presents the history of the Confederated Tribes -- Umatilla, Walla Walla and Cayuse -- whose homeland once covered most of southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon. In 1855, they were all moved away from the Columbia River, the spine of their culture, and pushed together onto a reservation that, over time, kept shrinking.

Bobbie Conner is a genial woman but she doesn't mince words. "The American possession of the West meant dispossession of others," she told me. "Jefferson talked of the West as an empty canvas, but it required the elimination of the people who already lived here to make it empty."

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first incursion of the U.S. government on the Columbia Plateau, she noted, "the first group of emissaries from a young, ambitious country sent by a young, ambitious president."

Unsurprisingly, Conner was not initially thrilled by the idea of throwing a party in honor of Jefferson's men. But, as head of the cultural institute, she soon began to see the bicentennial as an opportunity to be leveraged; a chance to get the story told right, to remind the country of the solemn obligations made when Indian lands were taken in exchange for a set of treaty rights and to begin a national dialogue, not just about what happened, but what happens next.

It is too early for her to say if American Indian engagement with the bicentennial has been a success, but certainly some good has come of it. Indians are at the table when every bicentennial event is planned -- the Corps of Discovery II exhibit is even being supervised by an American Indian -- and the new connections made between scattered tribes can be used to multiply Indian power in future battles.

There is one big thing Conner would like the rest of America to learn if they are paying attention to the bicentennial. It is simply this: Indians are still here -- not assimilated, not dying out. After struggling through a long era of debility and dependence, Conner said, "We are finding a renewal of our strength and independence. We have survived and we intend to be here forever."

Back here in Kamiah, Allen Slickpoo has just been voted in as chairman of the general council. He's a busy man but he gives me a few minutes of his time.

Since the arrival of Lewis and Clark, the Nez Perce and the other tribes have become "a betwixt and between people," he says, not part of mainstream American society but not entirely comfortable in the confines of the reservation. Still, there is resilience.

"We were not conquered," Slickpoo says with intensity. "We know where the center of the Earth is, according to the teachings of our fathers, and we never lost that."

The Nez Perce also are learning the ways of the modern world quite well. That becomes clear when Rebecca Miles, the bright, young tribal chairwoman, reports on the tribe's business. It's all about water rights, fish hatchery management, challenges to tribal sovereignty, salmon recovery, wolf management and lots of litigation -- lawsuits against developers, lawsuits against the states and lawsuits in defense of despoiled nature. Those old treaties in the hands of a new generation of smart, educated Native Americans have become weapons as effective as arrows in defending the people whose claim to this piece of the Earth predates Lewis and Clark by thousands of years.

Coyote was once the trickster who outsmarted the Monster. Today, I think, he's a lawyer.

David Horsey is a P-I editorial cartoonist and columnist and member of the P-I Editorial Board. E-mail: davidhorsey@seattlepi.com.

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