At the intersection of academics and reality, Christine Dupres, a Cowlitz tribal member, analyzes her leaders, community, and events in terms of a climactic 6 November 2004 tribal membership meeting when long-delayed land-claim funds ($1.5 million) were released by federal authorities. More generally, her 1997 to 2004 fieldwork interviews, conducted sometimes while elected to her tribal council, ask how members “do” being Indian, as well as “being Cowlitz,” in the service of both scholarship and “personal repatriation.” Her degree, dissertation, and book seem to be intended less for an academic career than for her current efforts as councilor and therapist in Portland, Oregon.
Like other tribes throughout this region, Cowlitz dwelt in a river basin of the same name draining into the Columbia River, and, indeed, attachment to this land and its places continues at the core of their native identity. Long alienated by major institutions such as the Hudson Bay Company, the Catholic Church, French Canada, Russian Alaska, and corporate farming, Cowlitz have continued to visit and absorb their land’s essences. They are also making concerted efforts to buy some of it back. Earlier, some provision was made for them as “fish eating Indians” to be allotted among the proud Quinault on the Pacific coast, an uneasy relationship at best.
Both landless and dropped from federal status in 1953 (during the Termination era), several thousand Cowlitz fought firmly and politely through federal courts to win a land claims settlement (ICC Docket 218) in 1973 that was held up until the tribe achieved final re-recognition in 2002 after a counter-challenge to their 1997 determination of eligibility.
Studying the rhetorical strategies and the performance styles and devices of “leaders and legends,” Dupres profiles chairmen Roy Wilson, now spiritual leader, and John Barnett, whose sudden death while serving in office installed the current leader, who has built clinics and finally had the land taken into trust in 2014.
Barnett’s father was Cowlitz-Chippewa, his mother was Finnish, and he was raised on the wet side of Washington State. His speeches favored images from nature and outrages in local and national history, especially an aborted 1855 treaty council. Comparing Barnett’s stories of this history with reliable documents from that time shows shifts in emphasis, self-interest, and nation-building, as well as general agreements on the officials, events, and places involved.
Wilson had a Cowlitz father, a fervent German mother, and was raised on the dry side of the Cascade Mountains among Yakamas. (A century ago, seeking lands of their own, a thousand Cowlitz, many already speaking a Sahaptin dialect, Taitnapam, joined the Yakama reservation.) For many years, he was a lay Methodist preacher, while also engaged in vision quests, sweatlodges, and healing arts. His focus is on the “Word,” emphasizing his conversations with revered elder Mary Kiona; use of Chinuk Wawa, the regional trading jargon; and “Klahowya,” its all-purpose word of greeting. Featured at the pivotal 2004 meeting, Wilson’s story of the first race horse (Cowlitz eventually developed their own breed) still resonates across time and space for the tribal membership. (Continually “doing” Indian, Wilson has just completed a small longhouse in the ancient style, surrounded by a variety of mazes, as a place for Cowlitz gatherings of all sorts. He paid for it with the royalties from a series of books he has written and assembled to present a healing blend of Christian and Native beliefs and practices.)
Dupres’s published book is a major achievement, though an index would have been helpful. In addition to citing a range of folkloristic and linguistic theorists, she quotes from dissertations and manuscripts about Cowlitz that have been refused publication or banned from distribution. Confirming her identity, Dupres includes generational photographs of her handsome, well-dressed, and well-groomed family. While her grandparents worked as brush pickers and loggers, feeding their families from the lands and waters, their life in Oregon had some advantages. In the homeland, however, complexities of Cowlitz origins are slighted, though this does save this press from messing up the spelling of another native language. While Dupres does note Salish- and Yakama-speaking ancestors, Cowlitz also spoke many other native languages, in addition to fluent French and later English. Key among these were Chinookan proper, Chinuk Wawa, and, most distinctive, Swaal, an Athapaskan language with origins from what is now central Alaska. (In Canada, many Cowlitz would be regarded as Metis. Their more prosperous members have included teachers, lawyers, archivists, artists, and a priest.) Their most recent successes have included ancestral lands returned by the Catholic Church, and the legal recognition, with some federal protection, of Mt. St. Helens, a central, sacred, visible landmark of their traditional territory. Its eruption (8:32 am, 18 May 1980) has often been regarded as an angry cosmic response to how Cowlitz were then being treated.
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[Review length: 797 words • Review posted on April 15, 2015]