A landmark publication for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation (Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla) located in eastern Oregon, As Days Go By represents a collaboration of twenty-seven people, Indian and non-Indian, who, according to editor Jennifer Karson, have moved “from a tradition of oral repetition to a written format, while retaining the repetition and storytelling that goes hand-in-hand with passing down the oral history.” The book targets two audiences: the local community, particularly students in the recently opened Nixyáawii Community High School, the first school on a reservation that has existed since 1855; and Indians and non-Indians outside the reservation community. It is the first “tribal history book” of that community.
The book’s excellent preliminary chapter will be of particular interest to folklorists concerned with how the oral tradition is presented in the volume. Linguist Phillip E. Cash Cash offers a fine generic overview of a Native American oral-literary heritage by carefully distinguishing among the various literary genres known to speakers of the local languages in terms of form and function. Cash Cash’s brief essay provides a model whose imitation would contribute to our understanding of indigenous literary criticism in other American Indian oral traditions.
The remaining sections of the book are, for the most part, chronological history. They deal with some two centuries of response and reaction to a Euroamerican presence in what is now eastern Oregon that began in the early nineteenth century. The book’s coverage continues through 2006. Especially for the early years, these sections combine Euroamerican sources such as the journals of Lewis and Clark, who contacted the groups who comprise the Confederated Tribes in 1805, with oral history from Indian sources. Even when the book relies primarily on the writings of European explorers and missionaries, it tends to represent a Native perspective both by focusing on those issues which are of primary interest to Indians and by adopting a healthily skeptical reading of those writings. One of the most effective sections of the work deals with perhaps the most critical event in the community’s history, the negotiations at the Walla Walla Treaty Council in 1855 which established the reservation. The territorial governors for Washington and Oregon represented United States interests, while leaders of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla joined with Nez Perce and Yakama negotiators to represent Indian interests. As almost invariably occurred at such councils, the Indians lost territory, but in this case the forceful leadership especially of Piopiomoxmox of the Walla Walla and Young Chief of the Cayuse ensured the creation of three reservations instead of the two which the government was proposing. The third, called the Umatilla for the river that runs through it, remains home for the descendants of some of those who negotiated the treaty. The account of the negotiations, written by Tribal Chairman Antone Minthorne with some input from historian Clifford Trafzer, stresses that the Indian diplomats, faced with the inevitability of land loss, nevertheless exercised some control over the proceedings and their outcome. The narrative particularly emphasizes the role of the Dreamer religion and of tamánwit , the indigenous code of law, in shaping the views of the Indian negotiators.
The Cayuse may be best known to conventional history for their role in the “massacre” of missionary Marcus Whitman. Noting that the term “massacre” may not be appropriate, Minthorne places that event in context. Though seen as an act of war by the Euroamerican establishment, it was from the Native perspective a response to Whitman’s role in promoting the colonial aspirations of the federal government and to the traditional practice of taking the life of a healer who had failed to cure the sick, as Whitman had failed in response to an epidemic that was devastating the indigenous community. Whitman’s death precipitated the two-year Cayuse War, which ended in 1850 only when five Cayuse leaders, who may not themselves have participated in Whitman’s death, were executed by the government. Re-readings of the past such as this one demonstrate the effects of adding voices other than those in conventional historical documents and of recognizing that conventional interpretations of those events are not necessarily the only ones and may, in fact, be misleading.
Twentieth-century events in the community’s history also receive considerable attention in As Days Go By , and the reader takes away a sense of progress and accomplishment: especially in heading off termination during the 1950s, restoring salmon to the Umatilla River, and establishing the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, Oregon, with the mission of presenting and preserving traditional culture.
The book is very nicely designed and should work very well in classrooms on the reservation and, one hopes, nearby. It has the visual feel of a contemporary textbook: many photographs and other illustrations, maps and charts, and “text boxes,” which itemize information that is developed in the text, for example.
In most ways this is a model study. The qualification in that statement comes only because I believe that it would have been useful to include an annotated list of bibliographic, aural, and visual resources on the community and its constituent tribes. However, Karson and her collaborators should be proud of this book, as should the community which it introduces so effectively. As Days Go By is essential reading for anyone interested in the American Indian communities of the Plateau culture area as well as for readers concerned with how those and similar communities should present their own story.
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[Review length: 903 words • Review posted on July 19, 2007]