SCRIPT
Louis Adams - Salish
I remember when an old relative of mine that died in 1960, she used to say if
it wasn't for the good people we wouldn't be here. Her folks used to tell her
those things. She said because of one time there was a move to (salish) sweep
us off the face of the earth. She said, but there was too many good people.
And today I rely on that, I never did forget that
. TITLE: "Contemporary Voices Along the Lewis and Clark Trail"
Narcisse Blood - Kainai (Blackfoot Confederacy) Armand Minthorn - Cayuse-Nez Perce Lewis Malatare - Yakama Louis Adams - Salish Narcisse Blood Tony Johnson Bobbie Conner Kathleen Gordon Edwin Benson Narcisse Blood - Kainai Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy Valerie Switzler - Wasco Denelle High Elk - Lakota James Picotte - Lakota Allen Pinkham - Nez Perce Narcisse Blood Allen Pinkham Bobbie Conner Lee Bourgeau - Nez Perce Radine Johnson - Wasco Lee Bourgeau Tony Johnson Loren Yellow Bird (Arikara) Bobbie Conner Chris Howell - Pawnee Lewis Malatare Otis Halfmoon - Nez Perce
…speaking Blackfoot …from time immemorial. We look at time so differently. I
guess we really do, we just say
When this world was created, it was the water that was created first, when the
water was created it spoke a promise, I am going to take care of the Indian
people, I am going to give life to everything. And then the land was created,
and it spoke a promise, I am going to take care of the Indian people from the
day they are born to the day they die, and these are the foods that are going
to take care of them. And then the first one, the first food, that was created
was the salmon, then the deer, then the roots and the berries. So within that
sequence, and then it was the man and then the woman. That man and that woman
were given a belief to take care of everything that was created before them.
And that's what we do today, with our religion we take care of everything that
we're dependent on, briefly.
And so those village sites in the subalpine regions are now explaining to the
anthropologists and the archaeologists that we followed the flow of the water,
because if anything] Water to us is most sacred. When we say we got our sacred
mountains, Pahko or Tahoma, people misconstrue that and say, 'Oh, that must
be their wonderful god.' And we look at them, we go, 'Oh yeah, yeah, if you
say so.' But to us water is the giver of life; if we don't have water, we perish.
The mountains that takes the cold air, create snow, and then the sun that melts
that snow and brings down the streams, gives the life to everything. All life,
animals, insects, birds, humans, we all come from that water.. Everytime you
come to our table, you start the meal with water. Once we say
…My grandmother had a house down here, my Dad's mother, a log house. It was
in December I went down there, I told her (salish) you know I told her, tell
me a coyote story. She said (salish) she said, no, all the animals that hibernate
haven't gone in yet. You have to wait until everything goes to hibernation before,
and you wait for the trees that are water soaked to pop (salish) and then the
coyote stories come out. That's because at tat time until spring the people
wanted to protect the animals that was big, that was going to have little ones,
the elk, the deer and stuff so you left everything alone and you made sure you
had enough wood and stuff to settle in for the winter. That's when the stories
come out….You honor the creatures when it's real cold because they're having
it rough too.
…a lot of the animals are seeking refuge on the reservations. That's really
something. They live along our river bottoms, even the fish, the bull-trout,
a lot of them are on those rivers that border our reserves or go through our
reservations. A lot of the mule deer are going into the reservations, the fowl.
What is that telling us? As we sit here there's noises back here. The bear was
a prairie animal. Today let's just start from today, just quickly -- how many
Indians have you heard being mauled by a bear? None come to my mind. But they
were on the prairie, how we were able to live with them. It was like saying
they had every right to be there. Myrna Leader Charge - Lakota
… When a certain constellation was above this location, and then this location
we were to conduct ceremonies. So all the people knew that, and just based by
watching out for the stars, that we were to be in the Black Hills at certain
times of the year, spring, summer, fall. And we were to be in the Black Hills,
and we were mandated, that was our spiritual law, and we were to conduct these
ceremonies. And of course with the development and the westward expansion, a
lot of those things were abruptly stopped. And the traditional peoples will
adamantly tell you that the western encroachment and the modern expansion of
this country, it was built on the backs and the blood of all the Indian people.
Our very cultural existence has been threatened, and nearly destroyed, nearly
exterminated. The Lakota people are real strong, and we had those individuals
who went underground with a lot of our beliefs and our practices, and that's
why we still have what we have. And if you could imagine, if we still had our
cultural dictates place how strong we, would still be real powerful. Because
we had to work with our, the land and know these locations, and we had to know
our, the constellations. And so white people say, "Oh, how symbiotic." I say
that's, that's about the closest word in English that can describe us. We know
this land, we know how to work with this land, we came from it. Our spiritual
laws have, mandate this, we have our own commandments.
…people really identified themselves as a specific area. As more Americans came
in and the disease was so bad on people, well people moved to one, … consolidated
to villages, and people really became known as that, you know, those names.
There were all kinds of villages that truthfully, I don't think, we'll never
know the name of, and there is lots of villages that we know the name of that
don't have any, we don't even know of specific people there, other than maybe
some myth person or something, some old person that's talked about in a story.
But, you know, that's just the nature I guess of what happened through disease
and everything.
…//Forty-nine years and seven months after the expedition came through here,
the Nez Perce, all the bands and nations of Yakima, the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla
Walla, Palouse, were ceding more than thirty million acres of land. And when
they did that in 1855, the Wallowa's were still ours, they were still part of
our reservation system in that treaty, but by 1863, it was clear that there
was no intent for them to remain our homelands. And by 1871, when old Joseph
dies and tells his son to never let go of the land that hold his ancestors bones,
Joseph and his father and his brother Ollicut know that they're in peril, that
this is coming, that this is happening. And by 1871, when he dies, we're already
fractionalized, and split amongst our relatives and our friends by Christianity,
by treaties, by government intervention, by alcohol, by trappers and traders.
The division and fractionalization has already become part of a way of life.
And by 1877, when they go into exile, it is a mere distance in time from when
the expedition came through and before us it's only a couple generations ago
that that exile began. But the heartbreak carries forward. We don't want that
heartbreak to keep going. We want to be whole again. We have to do, with or
without the help of people outside of here, things that help fix it for future
generations.// And so as we face the two hundred and, the two hundred year anniversary
of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, we can't look at those dates without looking
at the consequence. The consequence is tremendous.
…the government would come in huge trucks and chase the children around and
just grab them and kidnap them and throw them into those trucks and take them
off to school against the parents wishes or anything, and the parents would
try to hide their children, run into the mountains, run into the brush, hide
them under the beds, try to hide them from all those people, officials. coming
to take them away to school. And they were forced to go into those schools and
then they were forced to be stripped of their natural clothes and their languages.
They were punished severely severely for speaking their Indian languages. They
had to learn how to speak English because we were uncivilized savages and they
wanted us to be like them.
Mak -ti-shot.. [with children in classroom]
17:08 … there's nowhere where I could just walk out that door and go any direction
in a community and starts talking Mandan. And somebody could understand me,
and start talking back. There's no one. I don't have anyone to speak Mandan
to here in the community. So I just keep that Mandan language to myself and
pass it on to the young students, like what you saw. And that's kind of where
I'm at. [Yes,] I do miss my language that I could speak to someone my native
tongue. And as well as I like to speak my Hidatsa language, cause I speak Hidatsa
language too. So when somebody comes that's able to speak the language, I feel
very good of speaking it here and then speaking the language that I am able
to speak. And it's even much more better if I can hear someone speaking Mandan
to me, because that was my first language, and my English language and the Hidatsa
came in later.
My first language was Blackfoot and my view is based on that. I suppose there
would have been no other perspective if it wasn't for me going to school. Then
all of a sudden I started realizing that, yeah, there's two world views and
the one that I am most familiar with and comfortable with was the one I was
brought up with.
At the Warm Springs Elementary we were teaching 89 kids a day. Who were there
half an hour every day and this is more Wasco language that anybody has heard
in decades. Now we teach 9 kids on Monday evening one time a week….We were told
that the No Child Left Behind Act was to encompass the community, the needs
of the community, and what it did was left our communities out. …we were teaching
them the language, we were teaching them song, we were teaching them dances,
we were teaching them the culture of the Wasco people. What most people don't
understand is that every tribe had their own culture, that's what we were bringing
back and now we don't have that access to the children to let them know about
our people.
…our culture is really, really important to us. To me it seems like they don't
have anything behind them to fall back on so they have to come and take something
from us back with them. That don't make them a part of us though.
for years, people have been collecting the bones of Native Americans, setting
them on the shelves…one of these remains have come back to, to my office, and
whoever this person was, that collected this. It was interesting to him and
he kept it in his house where his family lives. His sons grew up with this,
and after they moved away from this house or whatever, the skull remained inside
this house. And a contractor working on the house because he didn't want his
wife to be affected by this, put it in the back of an old pick-up outside the
house. And then a person bought this pickup, and was concerned about the skull
in the back of the pickup. And called my office, and says I have this and I
want to return it to you. And so it goes from something out of curiosity, to
maybe a piece of trash. And these are the things that, you know, we experience,
the things that affect us. And so, I always think of it as, you know, would
you want your grandpa's skull rolling around in the back of your pickup.
Indian people have never had voices in an interpretation of the expansion of
the Northwest simply because we were never considered experts. We didn't have
Ph.D.s behind our names to say that oh yeah, we know all this stuff about Native
Americans. Nobody came to us to ask us anything, They came and interviewed us
and said, 'Oh Yes, this is great, there's this quaint Nez Perce story, and away
that story would go.
Lewis and Clark wrote a lot of things based on who they were, and they jotted
a lot of things down. And whether they were right or wrong is irrelevant to
students who look at their writings and will make conclusions based on that
and will come to us and say, "Well we got to set you straight", you know. And
it's not just Lewis and Clark, it's been a number of people have come to us.
Vine Deloria got into a lot of trouble when he did a whole chapter on anthropologists
it didn't matter how wrong their conclusions were if that's all it did was for
them to be wrong and get degrees based on that, that would have been one thing.
But U.S. Indian policy was based on those erroneous conclusions. And today expert
witnesses in that field still testify on behalf of the government for land claims.
I've never seen these people. They don't come up, and they don't know the language.
And they will say things like, 'mythology is erroneous, misleading.' How do
you know?
Clark's son was named "[in Nez Perce] " - the interpretation was Day Time Smoker.
And he never did speak English - all he could say was "Me, Clark, Me Clark"…..,
cause he knew he was. He had some of Clark's features, dark red hair, and light
colored eyes. He went through the war of 1877, went through all the battles,
then died in exile in Oklahoma.
As I was growing up through school, I can recall, especially because it was
during the red power movement of the sixties and seventies, I can remember people
saying, and more recently elected officials in the NW saying, "those are old
documents gathering dust on a shelf, why do you keep bringing that treaty up?"
The attitude is, with treaties, is that the federal government gave the Nez
Perce tribe in the treaty of 1805, and they didn't give us anything, they didn't
give us anything. They took, they took from us, a lot. And what we did as a
people, is we reserved through those treaties, some rights, you know hunting
and fishing and gathering. And when I'm out gathering I always think about,
, what did our people do before contact with Europeans. What was it like when
they went out and gathered and what were the foods like? Because everywhere
we go now, our foods are really being affected by the impact of this being a
farming region.
where we go out today there are fences
put up by farmers, no trespassing signs, we cant get into those places, there's
a place were I go were we can get in and the roots are plentiful there.
A lot of the places where we gather our foods, I mean even up in Weippe, where
a lot of the carrot grows, there's, they're spraying those fields with something,
because the roots are just like, like shriveling up.
…there are plenty of Chinooks who should and want to make a living fishing.
That is they want to be able to fish and sell that fish. Me, myself, if I caught
enough fish to sell it, that's fine, pay for the gas in a boat, but my interest
is the food. We can't be Chinook Indians unless we're eating fish, you know.
We need that fish, sturgeon, salmon, we need those things, smelt, our flounders.
Those are food we have to have to be Chinook Indians. That's where my frustration
is because how do we raise a kid up to be a Chinook Indian if we don't have
it, if we don't have fish. And that's where Federal Recognition is essential
to us.
A lot of things are gone now, a lot of traditions that we don't practice anymore,
but that doesn't mean that is over. Many of us are trying to follow a way to
get back into where we used to be; I think that is important. So when I look
back what it means to be, how I am going to be to my children, my focus is to
let them know they are going to be the keepers of our people. It is not going
to be for you, just for our family, it is for all the Arikara people that we
give this to. So whenever you are, when you become elders if you are ever called
upon you will be able to do what you know because you were taught the way it
is supposed to be done. So that is what I look at when I think about these things.
By the time the Sesquicentennial Observance of the Treaty of 1855 coincides
with the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial in 2005 in our homeland, we would like
our neighbors and our children, to understand here that this is the place we
call home. And in this homeland, all of the places had names before Lewis and
Clark came, and the names are still there if we keep the language alive. The
names are still there if we take care of the places, because our language is
actually a reflection of the ecosystem. We don't have words in our languages
for art, citizen, treaty, boundary, reservation, but we have words for other
things that are very important to us. That reflect the relationship. The names
of things are actually stories, every place and every person has a story. And
the story is how they get their name, and you can't take the name in isolation.
You take the story and the landscape and the ecosystem, part and parcel, the
whole thing together. It's a whole idea, and they don't get separated. And if
we separate those, if we break those connections we have disrupted our culture
even further.
And I think now it's time for the American Indian people to tell their own stories,
write their own stories and they can correct some of the things that have been
written about them. Some of the awful characterizations, some of these images,
the very derogatory images can be corrected now. What I would really like to
see the history to finally be told from the tribal perspective, it's a perspective
that has been long over looked.
…it is a time for healing, not with only the Native Americans, but with the
non-Native Americans,
Back in 1803 when President Jefferson
sent out the Corps of Discovery, he wanted a physical connection from sea to
shining sea. Here in the 21st century - and again we look at it, and also the
turmoil that our country is in - I think that what we need now, from sea to
shining sea, is a spiritual connection