A Tale of Two Ways: Sharing Indigenous Stories from Eastern Oregon

BAKER CITY – Coyote the storyteller has taken up residence at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City. And he uses his voice to share a side of the story that is sometimes forgotten.

The 250,000-square-foot facility, operated by the Bureau of Land Management, opened a new Native American exhibit in late October.

Exhibits include a gallery dedicated to the history, culture and languages ​​of the tribes that inhabited the lands along the Oregon Trail for thousands of generations before mass European-American migration began in the early 1840s.

In the language of the Umatilla tribe, Coyote is called spilyáy. Its primary mission is to teach visitors the history of the Oregon Trail from a Native American perspective.

“A big change is coming!” spilyáy proclaims on colorful signs along the center’s main gallery, lined with life-size dioramas of settler men, women and children, covered wagons, oxen, sheep, horses, Indian men and a howling coyote.

“I see the storm of your future,” he warns. “The ŝuyápuma (European Americans) will come in greater numbers than in any previous season. Your need will be insatiable. Their chariots bring wonder and comfort, but their ways are not your ways; Their friendship brings pain. They are a conflagration that is consuming the land and everything I have prepared.

“Are you listening?”

Coyote’s narrative complements numerous Native American exhibits already found throughout the center, including a diorama depicting the importance of trade between settlers and Native Americans and an exhibit detailing contacts and confrontations on the frontier that often occurred on Cultural differences, lack of communication etc. are due to government inaction.

Baker City resident John Bearinside was one of the first visitors to see the new exhibit at the Interpretive Center, bringing the plight of the Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla and Nez Perce – who were moved to reservations by the Treaty of 1855 – to the from in connection his own ancestors.

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Apache, Bearinside grew up on the Choctaw Reservation. His great-great-great-grandparents were expelled from their native Mississippi and forced to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Bearinside, who speaks about Native American culture and history, emphasized that not all written accounts of Native American history are accurate.

“It’s amazing to me how much has happened, but it’s not being put into books technically, it’s not being put into books realistically, it’s being put into books in a way to sell the books – larger than life,” he explained.

“My grandmother always told us: ‘Read between the lines, in your history books, in your newspapers, in your stories, in your wanted posters. You know, if they say he murdered 25 people, he might have murdered two people,” Bearinside said.

“If someone is truly genuinely interested and we feel we can trust them, only then can we tell them our stories.”

The stories of many diverse groups of people whose lives were forever changed by the Oregon Trail are told through photos, films, artifacts and quotes at the Interpretive Center.

The idea for an Oregon Trail Museum came about as part of former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt’s “Oregon Comeback” plan after the 1980s recession, said Dave Hunsaker, the original project manager and first director of the Interpretive Center.

The planning was tied to the construction of several other cultural centers: the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City, the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, and the Four Rivers Cultural Center Museum in Ontario. Each of these centers focused on the way the Oregon Trail impacted its region, Hunsaker noted.

“We’re the ones who have really focused largely on the Oregon Trail itself,” he said.

The Baker City facility was the first to open in May 1992, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation blessed the building at its grand opening. The original plan, according to Hunsaker, focused on six topics, including Native Americans, with the goal of later expanding that topic after Tamástslikt became operational.

Ground was broken for the development of the new Native American exhibit in 2015, said Bobby Reis, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Interpretive Center, but development was delayed due to renovations and COVID-19. Bobbie Conner, director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, was involved in the early planning stages. Tamástslikt opened in 1998 and is the only Indian museum directly on the Oregon Trail. It looks in detail at how the arrival of settlers caused disease, wars, broken treaties, and attempts at assimilation, including boarding schools.

The new exhibitions in the Interpretive Center are a permanent addition and can be viewed all year round.

Read more: The Tamástslikt Museum shows the history of Oregon from a Native American perspective

The National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center’s winter hours are Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; 22267 Hwy. 86, Baker City; free entry in December; January 2 – March 31, $5 for 16 and older, $4 for seniors, valid for two days with receipt; blm.gov/learn/interpretive-centers/national-historic-oregon-trail-interpretive-center

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Another exhibit making its rounds through Oregon highlights the history and resilience of the Wallowa Band Nez Perce, or Nimiipuu.

The traveling exhibit, titled “Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return,” was created by the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph through a grant from the Oregon State Capitol Foundation, said Rich Wandschneider, director of the Josephy Library of Western History cultural historian and historian Wallowa County. The exhibit is currently on display at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande and will move to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton in mid-January before finding a home at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem next September.

Wandschneider consulted with Nez Perce tribal elders to develop depictions that interpret the history of the Wallowa Band Nez Perce and how the lives of its people, who had always lived in the Wallowa Valley, were irrevocably changed by the arrival of European-American explorers. Fur traders, missionaries, gold diggers and settlers.

The exhibit explores settlements and conflicts in the Wallowa Valley, beginning with the wave of Oregon Trail settlers that moved ever closer to Nez Perce territory in the 1860s. Old Chief Joseph built stone monuments to keep them out, but after his death in 1871, settlers streamed in. Although the Nez Perce were friendly toward the newcomers, tensions grew between them.

As the exhibit explains, under the U.S. Constitution, contracts are part of the “supreme law of the land.” In 1877, the young chief Joseph was forced to honor the 1863 Nez Perce Treaty – even though his father had refused to sign it – and lead his people from the Wallowa Valley to a reservation at Lapwai in the Idaho Territory .

En route to Lapwai, overwhelming emotions led a young Nez Perce man, whose father had been murdered by a settler, to launch a deadly revenge attack on settlers in the Idaho Territory, and, according to the exhibit, “the Nez Perce War was underway “.

The fighting retreat sent about 800 Nez Perce people on a nearly 1,200-mile journey across four states, closely followed by the U.S. Army. Just 40 miles from the Canadian border, with his people cold, exhausted and starving and most of his chiefs killed in some 13 battles and skirmishes, Chief Joseph surrendered. He and most of his tribe were exiled to Kansas and Oklahoma and eventually sent to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, while Chief White Bird and 200 others fled to Canada.

Charlie Moses, 88, who grew up on the Colville Reservation in Nespelem, Washington and now lives in Vancouver, has close ties to the Nez Perce War. His grandfather and great-grandfather both fought in the war, and his great-uncle was killed in the bloody Battle of the Big Hole.

“My tribe is truly the White Bird,” Moses said, “but after we came back from Oklahoma, my grandfather, Black Eagle, followed Joseph to Nespelem.”

Moses, who retired after a 30-year career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has spent much of his time discussing his family lineage and history in the Nez Perce War and providing that information to the Josephy Center , which created the new exhibition. He has been involved with the Wallowa Homeland Project since the 1990s and regularly travels to Wallowa County to participate in the Tamkaliks Celebration and the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo.

Chief Joseph remained an activist for his people until his death in 1904, and although he was never allowed to return to his Wallowa homeland, he made several trips to Washington, D.C. to advocate for his people’s return. In 1879 he summarized his thoughts on the relationship between Native Americans and European Americans:

“Whenever the white man treats an Indian the way they treat each other, we will have no more wars. We will be equal—brothers of one father and one mother, with one heaven above us and one land around us…that all men may be one people.”

“Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return” can be seen Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.; Loso Hall, Eastern Oregon University; Sixth Street, La Grande; no entrance fee. The exhibit will move to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton in mid-January and to the Oregon State Capitol in Salem in September; Library.josephy.org/the-nez-perce-in-oregon-removal-and-return

—Kathy Patten, for The Oregonian/OregonLive