Shadow Tribe

The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity

Andrew H. Fisher

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780295990200
• eBook ISBN: 9780295801971
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization. Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fisher's groundbreaking book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and troublemakers even among their own people. Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.

The people and communities that are represented by the Mid-Columbia River Council are the children of the ancestors who were created in these lands, along side the rivers and creeks, and in harmony with all other life in this part of the world. Our existence represents an uninterrupted history that dates back to the time of our creation within these lands.

—MID-COLUMBIA RIVER COUNCIL, STATEMENT OF UNIFICATION, 1990

1

PEOPLE OF THE RIVER

On the morning of April 18, 1806, William Clark woke from a fitful sleep in the village of Nixlúidix (Wishram), on the banks of the Columbia River. The co-captain of the homeward bound Corps of Discovery had arrived there two days earlier, seeking horses to ease the expedition’s upriver portage around the treacherous Long Narrows. Although the local “Skillutes” had furnished few pack animals, they had welcomed him and asked him to spend the night. “Great numbers of Indians from defferent [sic] directions” passed through the Kiksht-speaking community during his brief stay. “Among other Nations who visit this place for the purpose of trade is the Skad-datt’s,” he wrote, noting the arrival of a group that “bantered the Skillutes to play at a Singular kind of game . . . Composed of 9 men on a Side.”

They Set down opposit to each other at the distance of about 10 feet. In front of each party a long pole was placed on which they Struck with a Small Stick to the time of their Songs. After the bets were made up which was nearly half an hour after they Set down, two round bones was producd about the Size of a mans little finger or Something Smaller and 2¼ inches in length, which they held in their hand Changeing it from one hand to the other with great dexterity. 2 men on [each] the Same Side performed this part, and when they had the bone in the hand they wished, they looked at their advosarys Swinging arms around their Sholders for their advosary Guess which they pirformed by the motion the hand either to the right or left.

Clark watched them gamble for hours, impressed by their sleight of hand and the volume of goods exchanged, but the rules of one contest ultimately baffled him. “This is a very intricate game,” he confessed in his journal entry for the day, “and I cannot Sufficiently understand to discribe [sic] it.”¹

More than the nuances of the stick game eluded Clark that day. Despite their keen powers of observation, he and his companions never grasped the full complexity of aboriginal society along the Columbia River. They certainly recognized that the area between The Cascades and Celilo Falls served as a “great mart” for the indigenous peoples of the region. The desire to deal had brought the Corps of Discovery to Nixlúidix (“coming-together place”) just as it had drawn representatives of the diverse “Tribes” and “Nations” Clark encountered during his stay. The “Skadatts,” however, came from Łádaxat, a nearby Klickitat village with a mixed population of Sahaptin and Kiksht speakers. The visiting Indians probably had relatives among the “Skillutes,” and personal ties clouded the tribal labels applied by the American explorers. The boundaries separating Native communities along the Columbia River were rarely as clear-cut as the parallel lines of the stick game would suggest. Largely hidden from view, like the bones passed among the Indian gamblers, an intricate kinship network stretched across the Mid-Columbia region and beyond. Lewis and Clark caught glimpses of this network during their sojourn, but they never understood it well enough to describe it.²

The co-captains and their government failed to understand because they tried to fit Native communities into a simplistic model of social and political organization. As the first whites to cross the Columbia Plateau, Lewis and Clark began the process of dividing its indigenous population into discrete “tribes” and “bands” with which the United States government could deal efficiently. Before contact with Europeans, however, Indian relations along the Columbia River flowed through channels quite different from those the newcomers constructed. The names listed in Lewis and Clark’s journals did not represent distinct “tribes” in the modern sense of the word, but instead denoted autonomous winter villages. These self-governing communities typically formed the largest political units in a regional social network bound together by shared territory, cultural affinity, economic exchange, and extensive intermarriage. Family ties crisscrossed the Columbia Basin, bridging both geographic barriers and linguistic boundaries, and individuals moved in and out of different social groupings during the year. In this world of interconnected communities, Indians had multiple affiliations and multifaceted identities that would complicate future attempts to place them in singular tribal categories.³

The roots of Columbia River Indian identity tap the river itself. Called Nch’í Wána in Sahaptin and Wi’mahl in Upper Chinookan (Kiksht), “the Big River” has sustained life and shaped culture in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains for at least ten thousand years. The Indians of the dry plateau country relied on the river for much of their water and food. Mutual dependence forged a common human bond to the Columbia that belied its later use as a boundary between tribes, territories, and states. While modern history has invested this line with power and meaning, the separation of peoples and polities in aboriginal times was neither so neat nor natural as maps suggest. In fact, the waters of the Columbia River typically united rather than divided human populations. At The Dalles, the region’s largest fishery and main commercial center, Indians from across the Plateau gathered to trade for salmon and other valued commodities. Salmon tied people to each other and linked them all to the river. As one elder explained in 1915, the Columbia formed “a table for [Indians on] both sides of the river. It laid right in between them, and they came and ate and were gone.” Those who lived on its banks became known in the Sahaptin language as Wanałáma or Wánapam, “people of the river,” a name that connotes a spiritual connection as well as a spatial relationship. In the words of Johnny Jackson, a current leader of the River People, “All our traditional values are along the Columbia River.”⁴

Mid-Columbia Indians expressed their ties to the river through shared oral traditions that stretch back over centuries and across different groups. Several stories describe an epic battle between two sets of brothers representing the cold east winds and the warm west winds that blow alternately through the Columbia Gorge. In one version of the story, the trickster Coyote intervened and established a balance between the warring sides. In another, the victorious west winds dictated terms to their vanquished winter rivals:

From now on you will no longer be a person and go around freezing people. You can blow once in awhile, then I will come and overpower you. Rain will be your enemy too. You will blow and freeze everything, but then he and I will come; we will thaw out the ground, warm everything up, and make the earth green and beautiful again.

Significantly, some of the groups occupying the gorge had known its prevailing air currents for so many centuries that their dialects lacked words for “north wind” and “south wind.”⁵

Geological events made a similar impression on indigenous cultural memories. Around eight hundred years ago, a huge chunk of Table Mountain slid into the Columbia River, temporarily damming it and blocking the salmon runs. The people living upstream felt the impact deeply. Generations later their descendants still related stories about the time Coyote freed the salmon from a pair of sisters who had imprisoned them behind a dam. To punish the women for their selfishness, the trickster transformed them into swallows, whose return each spring heralds the arrival of the first salmon runs. Linguists traditionally assigned different versions of this tradition to particular tribes, but Native groups swapped stories as frequently as they traded goods. Mid-Columbia Indians told similar tales because they had shared the same places, the same experiences, and the same traditions for such a long time.⁶

Archaeological evidence confirms the ancient presence of Native Americans along the Columbia River. The ancestors of the people who met Lewis and Clark etched petroglyphs such as Tsagiglalal, “She Who Watches,” into the basalt cliffs overlooking the Long Narrows. They buried their dead in the talus slopes beneath or on islands in the river. Their garbage accumulated in huge middens such as Wakemap Mound, near the village where Clark witnessed the stick game. In the 1950s, just before The Dalles Dam flooded one of the oldest living communities in the world, scientists dug through thirty feet of camp refuse at a site across the river. The upper layers contained modern trade goods, similar to those Lewis and Clark carried, while the lowest levels held material dating back more than ten thousand years. The precise extent and timing of cultural change in the intervening period remains a subject of debate among archaeologists, who often differ with the Indians themselves. Still, most scholars agree that the defining characteristics of the contact-era Plateau culture had developed at least two thousand years before the Corps of Discovery first described it.⁷

The peoples of the Columbia Plateau shared a way of life based on the seasonal harvesting of fish, game, and wild plant foods. Naturally, the details of the annual subsistence cycle varied across the region, with some groups relying more than others on particular resources. Those living closest to the great fisheries of the Columbia River depended most heavily on salmon and often traded their surplus catch for other foodstuffs, whereas their interior neighbors placed slightly greater emphasis on hunting and gathering. In most years, the seasonal round also afforded room for individual choice. One family might remain in the Cascade Mountains until October, hunting and harvesting berries, while another hastened back to the Columbia River to meet the fall salmon runs. Those too old or too sick to travel typically remained on the river year-round, perhaps shifting between a winter village and temporary summer fishing camps. Generally speaking, though, Plateau Indians traced familiar patterns on the landscape and through time as they followed the familiar rhythm of the seasons.⁸

During the dreary winter months, when overcast skies blanketed much of the region, families congregated in village sites along major rivers and tributary streams. Subsisting primarily on dried food stores, they used this time for storytelling, spiritual renewal, and the maintenance or manufacture of tools. Families often traveled to neighboring villages to participate in a regional complex of ceremonial dances and shamanic performances. By the early 1800s, some groups from eastern Oregon spent the entire winter at The Dalles, where they traded and worshiped with the local population. Besides breaking the monotony of cold-weather confinement, visiting had a vital economic function, as people met to plan their foraging activities and redistribute local food surpluses through feasting. As much as the Indians enjoyed these festivities, they welcomed the arrival of the warm Chinook winds in early March. Rising temperatures and melting snow signaled the start of a new seasonal round, when families left their winter lodges to begin a period of increased mobility and social activity.⁹

Mid-Columbia Indians harvested subsistence resources as they became available. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of local ecology, they adapted the size and distribution of task groups to best exploit seasonal variations in the abundance of traditional foods. Wilbur Slockish, Jr., has described the land as a vast grocery store, with different places representing separate aisles stocked with particular goods. The patterns of aboriginal “shopping” reflected Plateau gender roles. Depending on their specific location within the region, women fulfilled between 50 and 70 percent of a village’s dietary needs through the gathering of wild plant foods. They also preserved and prepared most of the game and fish that men procured. Euro-American observers perceived such work as evidence of “squaw drudgery,” but economic parity gave Mid-Columbia women greater status and influence than that of their contemporary American counterparts. Although few women became village chiefs, they often led task groups and ceremonial gathering expeditions. Women knew the locations and uses of important plant resources, and they knew precisely when to harvest them.¹⁰

Plateau women broke the long winter fast with the first fresh foods of the season. In early spring they gathered bitterroot and lomatiums (Indian celeries) in the hills near their villages, while men caught spawning suckers in the rivers and streams. This fare whetted appetites for the runs of spring chinook, which generally arrived in late April and continued through May. Lewis and Clark witnessed the start of the season and marveled at the amount of fish the Indians landed. Each village between The Dalles and Celilo utilized a cluster of traditional fishing stations, typically composed of rocks, islands, and cliffs adjoining the falls and rapids in the river. At such points, where the current forced the fish into eddies and narrow channels, Indian men gaffed, speared, seined, or dipnetted salmon, depending on the site and the stream conditions. Women cleaned and dried the fish on racks, then packed them into bundles or pounded them into “salmon flour.” Walking among the towering stacks of dried salmon at Wishram, Lewis and Clark estimated that the villagers had processed some ten thousand pounds of fish.¹¹

The local Indians earmarked much of this salmon for trade. Long before the Corps of Discovery passed through the region, The Dalles had developed into one of the greatest commercial centers in North America. Every year during the salmon runs, the area’s permanent population swelled by several thousand people. Indians traveled to the fisheries from across the Plateau and beyond to swap goods, ideas, and genes with the local residents. In exchange for dried salmon, Indians from the Lower Columbia River traded eulachon (candlefish), cured shellfish, and wapato. Interior Plateau peoples contributed venison, roots, and berries from their own territory as well as buffalo meat from the Great Plains. These food items mingled with a wide array of other commodities, including dentalia shells, obsidian, canoes, baskets, mats, furs, hides, and horses. Some people also purchased captives taken from enemies to the south, who were generally traded as slaves to downstream neighbors and visitors from the Northwest Coast.¹² During the late eighteenth century, blankets, glass beads, metal tools, guns, and other Euro-American manufactured goods became a regular part of the bargaining process. More than just a prime fishery, The Dalles served as the focal point of a vast economic and social network. It was, in the words of one American writer, “the Billingsgate of Oregon,” a reference to the London market famous for its foul-mouthed fishwives.¹³

The first trading season ended in late May or early June, when spring runoff rendered the rivers too high and muddy for fishing. At that time, many families stored their catch and moved on to root-digging grounds in the Cascade foothills or the Blue Mountains. Following the receding snow and the ripening of plants at higher elevations, women gathered roots and berries, while men hunted deer, elk, and other game. Families progressed from camp to camp until they reached their traditional camas meadows and enjoyed another opportunity for large social gatherings. Kittitas, Fox Valley, and Camas Prairie hosted hundreds or even thousands of Indians each year. “The gathering was for the purpose of digging these roots,” recalled Chief William Yallup of Rock Creek. “[The Indians] killed game and they fished and had a big time.” “A big time” included gambling, trading, socializing, and (after about 1730) horse racing. Some families also arranged the marriages that tied Plateau communities together and underpinned friendly relations.¹⁴

This pattern of economic and social exchange among village groups continued throughout the sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. People of the River
• 2. Making Treaties, Making Tribes
• 3. They Mean to Be Indian Always
• 4. Places of Persistence
• 5. Spaces of Resistance
• 6. Home Folk
• 7. Submergence and Resurgence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index