112. A Potluck of Words

Indians are still teaching us

 

Last night—Saturday night—I joined a big crowd in a large and gorgeous old barn set with tables for a potluck. Potlucks have been part of the social currency here since I moved here 50 Junes ago. It’s only in this Covid year that they have not been part of the standard menu. 

 

But this was as new an event as it was old. We came together to celebrate a return of a score and more of Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakima root diggers, invited to Nature Conservancy and private lands to dig camas, biscuitroot, and other delicacies that their ancestors had lived on for millennia before the coming of the Europeans. 

 

The event was hosted by a man I’d first met as a high school student—I remember his parents well, and can see him now at the county fair in a 4-H jacket. His words were few but powerful last night. “We want to welcome you back” was the gist of it. I think I caught a tear in his eye, and saw him stand respectfully while a tribal elder rang a bell and sang a song of thanks.

 

A beautiful young woman came up to give me a hug—and had to remind me that she was the high school girl I’d watched on the basketball court, the granddaughter of some of my first and best friends in this place. With urgings from her uncles, she represented one of the families that is opening their land to tribal peoples. 

 

I did not know all of the Indians there, and some of the people from the Colville Reservation I’d hoped to see were still in the field, digging roots. That’s what organizers from the Wallowa Land Trust told me. Nature Conservancy, Land Trust—and people from the Walla Walla Land Trust came to celebrate with us, the Wallowa Nez Perce Homeland, a county commissioner, and friends, families and supporters of all of the above made up the “hosting” crowd, which had to be over 100. 

 

But Indian friends I know were there. I’d heard their songs and their talks in other places, but in no place and in no way did it match this time and place, because we were meeting on old Indian lands and Indians were thanking us for welcoming them home, and reminding us that the heart and friendship are the most important virtues, echoing the words of hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Young Chief Joseph:

 

“Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike - brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us… Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land, and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers' hands from the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race are waiting and praying. I hope that no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people.”

 

  

67. Gifts

Moving to Wallowa County fifty years ago, meeting and getting to know Alvin Josephy, and then the Indian people who lived here once and still call this place home have all been great gifts to me. In times of uncertainty and even darkness in the past few years, the face and words of a Nez Perce elder have come to take my thoughts and mind to older things, better things. 

Even when the lessons are hard, there is something assuring in them. Bad presidents? You wanna start with Jackson? Covid-19? My grandmother talked of 1918. 

 

And in the quick words of many Indian friends and in the new history books I read, I know that viral diseases were the tidal waves that swept the European settlers into power across the continent. And when I hear news of Covid-19 in the Navajo Nation and on reservations here with the Nez Perce and their Plateau cousins, I know that there is generational memory of the first smallpox and measles and diphtheria that crept ahead of the white Europeans who brought them and devastated Indian peoples.

 

What’s the gift of that? It’s the knowledge of resiliency, of Indians now helping themselves in this pandemic, all the while reviving ancient languages and traditions, remembering deeper pasts, embracing land, water, and fish in a kind of national surge that has us—Whites and descendants of the unwilling immigrants from Africa, and newer immigrants from all continents and—paying attention to how to live in this land. 

 

There are the practical things: using fire and restoring waters so that plants, fish, birds and the rest of animate nature can thrive; learning to take what we need and give back, so that fish and forests and soil will come back. Patience: the fish will remember ancient ways when dams fail or are breached.

 

And the spiritual things: learning to be together on this planet instead of siloed in our competitive worlds. The governor of California and the Texas mayor who put individual and family pleasure above community health on this pandemic Thanksgiving should listen to their Indian citizens. 

 

While pandemic cases and deaths rise today, I know that the world will live beyond this one, and tell myself and ask you to listen to our Indian friends. Take care of the earth and each other.

 

# # #