Alvin Josephy and the Indians
Rich Wandschneider
A talk given at Fishtrap April 29, 2009
Introduction:
Let me begin by saying that I am not a historian, though I love history and story. My mind captures the odd fact and date, but clings to stories and anecdotes. Quite unlike Alvin’s mind. I imagine some of you who knew him had the experience I had of having him remember a book or event in vivid detail which we had discussed years or even decades earlier—the whole thing having washed from my own mind like yesterday’s weather.
Alvin not only glommed onto dates, facts, and the weather of a given day; he also loved the stories and saw real history as a weaving of these things together—“narrative history,” he called it.
My goal here is to give the broad outline of Alvin’s involvement with Indian history and affairs—and fill in with some of the stories he told during Fishtrap events, trips on book tours, and occasional conversations over three decades of friendship. I think it is important, because I think Alvin was one of the key figures in the field in a trying and exciting time for American Indians. I think someone will come along and frame his accomplishments, along with those of others like his good friend Vine Deloria, into an overall history of Indian Affairs in the twentieth century. I’d like to be a helpmate in that process. And so I invite you who knew him to remember your own Alvin stories—and Betty stories too (she too was an Indian activist of note, as I will mention later). I invite corrections of course—as I have said, my mind is not the mousetrap for fact and detail that Alvin’s was..
The Title:
I hesitated with the title of this talk—is it in some way presumptuous to name Alvin alongside the general term for an entire people, no, 500 nations of peoples? But it came to me, like so many things, in an anecdote. Alvin was speaking at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and he used the term “Indian” in his talk. During the question period, a college professor asked him why he had said “Indian” rather than “Native American”; the professor intimating that “Native American” was more proper, honorable, and politically correct. Alvin’s simple reply was that “Indian” is what his friends in Indian country called themselves and each other.
This is an example of what Alvin brought to Indian history—he listened to the people he wrote about.
Background:
But let’s go back, and put his whole career as an historian and activist into perspective. Those of you who have read the memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon, know this outline, but let me remind you, and fill others in on some of the major facts and events in Alvin’s life.
He was born in 1915 into a well-off New York family. His grandfather was Samuel, or S.K. Knopf, a very successful businessman who backed H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury and, eventually, his son and Alvin’s uncle Alfred J. Knopf’s very successful publishing firm. Alvin was a first grandchild doted on by this grandfather—in the memoir he is mentioned even before Alvin’s own father as a person of great influence in his life.
The book opens with boyhood dreams of Indians and a frontier across the Hudson River, in his own mind the first steps in a walk toward Oregon and a career involved with Indians and the West.
He went to high school at the Horace Mann School for boys in New York City, where he wrote for the school newspaper, interviewing the likes of Mencken and Theodore Dreiser. And after that to Harvard—the doting grandfather having had Mencken write a recommendation letter for Alvin without him even knowing about it. The country was in ferment. The Depression had begun and was about to impact his own family. Political causes from far right to far left found voice on campuses and in the intellectual forums of the day. While at Harvard Alvin became a New Deal Democrat, traveled the country organizing students and advocating political reform. He even went to capital hill to testify against Huey Long.
But then, because of family financial problems brought on by the Depression, Alvin left school and set off for Hollywood where a relative got him on as a junior screenwriter. He once told me that the major job of a junior screenwriter was writing plays for the young “starlets in waiting” to perform on stages around Los Angeles. While in waiting these ladies also received the attentions of Hollywood directors, producers, etc. (Now there is an anecdote that doesn’t quite fit the theme of this talk, but I couldn’t pass up including it.)
At any rate, Hollywood didn’t pan out, he came back to New York, walked the streets with thousands of others, continued support for Roosevelt’s New Deal politics, and eventually got on with the New York Herald Tribune. The job had to do with coordinating a high school essay program, which meant that Summer months might relegate him to less interesting work.
As it happened, a friend was on his way to Mexico. Alvin approached editors at the newspaper, who said that they did not hire foreign correspondents, but would give him press credentials and pay him by the inch for anything that they published.
His primary goal was to interview the new President of Mexico, Lazaro Cárdenas. Cardenas was an Indian—maybe the first blood Indian that Alvin ever met or at least interviewed. He was a populist taking on a wealthy oligarchy, which included the Catholic Church Hierarchy. Among other reforms, Cardenas nationalized Oil. Alvin got that interview, and tried to interview General Cedillo, the establishment figure backed by Oil and the Church, but was unsuccessful. In a footnote in Walk Toward Oregon, he notes that novelist Graham Greene, a Catholic, was the only foreigner to gain access to Cedillo, who eventually did try to lead an uprising against Cardenas, and was killed in the attempt.
The more famous result of the Mexico trip was an interview with Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary who had run afoul of Lenin and gained exile in Mexico. Alvin interviewed him in Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City!! This is in 1937, when Alvin was 22 years old! [ONCE AT FISHRAP…………anecdote...]
On his return from Mexico, he got on with the news division of WOR, Mutual’s lead radio station in New York. It was from this perch that he heard and reported about Pearl Harbor, rumors of German planes over New York and submarines off shore. Fervently anti-Nazi, he jumped at a chance to go to Washington and work for the Office of Facts and Figures, the government propaganda unit under distinguished poet Archibald MacLeish, Alvin had married and after some trouble in finding suitable lodging in Washington, his wife Roz joined him in D.C.
The work was exhilarating, but it was not close enough to the War. He tried the Navy, but eyesight or asthma kept him out. Eventually it was the Marines and General Robert Denig, a hard boiled leader of an exceptional team of talented newsmen that got him in and shipped off to Guadalcanal, Guam, and Iwo Jima as a Marine Corps journalist.
Once, at Fishtrap, in a program on the legacy of World War II in the West, Alvin played the recording he had made of a ship to shore landing on Guam—the only such live recording extant, and for which he eventually received a bronze star. We couldn’t make out the words between the shouts and shots—but he visibly could. He talked briefly afterwards about the feelings of guilt of coming home alive when so many fellow Marines had died. On book tour with Walk Toward Oregon, it was aging veterans of the Pacific who would quietly come up to have a book signed, then mention that they had been on Guadalcanal or at Iwo Jima. Alvin would eventually be a writer, editor, publisher, and Indian activist of note; through it all he was a Marine and a war veteran.
He did make it home, came back to Hollywood and a screenwriting position, envisioning the fall of the old Hollywood moguls and their escapist pictures and a day of new realistic pictures. That didn’t happen, and his marriage did not survive the War, though a daughter, Diane, had been born while he was in the Pacific.
He became active in veterans affairs and organizations—he told us at that Fishtrap that WW II didn’t bring the country together; the GI Bill did!, and he began writing—a column on veterans’ affairs at first, then more general reporting—for a group of weekly newspapers owned by another ex-Marine, Herb Chase.
While in California he met Betty Peat, another Easterner working in Hollywood. They married, and began their own family—Allison, Alvin, and Kathy came along to join Diane, who always spent summers with the new family. He continued writing scripts with little success, then got into an interesting small town gambling scandal with big connections to the mob. There were some tense moments, and a fortuitous appearance of Senator Kefauver’s commission on organized crime. Alvin and Herb dumped all of their crime information on the Commission and Alvin wrote the screenplay for Captive City. That movie was produced, with John Forsythia in the semi-autobiographical Alvin role, and Senator Kefauver making a closing address.
Betty’s asthma attacks and a job offer from Time Magazine sent them east again in 1951. The position at Time put him in charge of a weekly black and white news photo feature and a monthly color feature. They bought a house in Greenwich, Ct, and Alvin became a commuter for the next 30 years, although he spent much time on the road across the US and even into Europe.
It was while at Time that he discovered the Nez Perce and the story that changed their lives. He was in California, set to go to Utah to build a color feature on that State. Henry Luce, the legendary publisher at Time, had a plane diverted and set down in Boise, where he was well treated and enthralled with what he saw. He telegraphed Alvin to “forget Utah and do Idaho.”
The Nez Perce:
So Alvin flew to Boise, and then flew downriver to Lewiston. While in Lewiston, hosted by the Chamber of Commerce and Potlach Lumber, he found himself on the Reservation at Lapwai talking to a Nez Perce named Bill Stevens. Stevens, sensing the importance of a reporter from a national magazine, asked him if he knew about the Nez Perce, their war, and the injustices done to them. Of course he did not, but when Harry Hughes, the Lewiston Chamber man, came out of his meeting, he confirmed Stevens’ story about the Nez Perce and their battle with the US Army.
Alvin picked up the pamphlets and brochures that he could while in town, and began looking for The Book on this people and their war. He couldn’t fine it. But what couldn’t he find? Remember, Alvin is now just back from covering a War and a frustrating time trying to write realistic scripts in Hollywood. He’d interviewed warriors, generals, and President Cardenas, written radio scripts, even radio plays performed in New York. In other words, he wanted drama and realism—if possible first person accounts by the principal actors in the drama. And he saw immediately in the Nez Perce story this kind of “great American epic.”
And he fell in love again with the West. He and Betty began spending time in Lewiston, meeting city and Indian leaders. He kept looking for Nez Perce information—and the book that told the story the right way, with the Indians’ point of view well represented. Once, in the early 50s, he and Betty stopped in Caldwell, Idaho on a cross country drive to meet an independent editor of a small publishing house called Caxton. Jim Gipson gave him copies of two books he had published, Yellow Wolf and Hear Me My Chiefs, first person accounts by Nez Perce about their history and the 1877 War, transcribed by an eccentric white man with a history as interesting and curious as that that Alvin brought to the story. Lucullus McWhorter, a West Virginia “Indian lover” from childhood, had come west and bought a ranch in central Washington, been welcomed into the Yakima Tribe, and come across Nez Perce War survivors. He’d gone back over the battlefields with them and recorded their accounts in these books—this was the kind of stuff Josephy could dig into!
He did, and determined soon after finding the books that he would write the Nez Perce story, not just the story of the War, but of this people who had been powerful in the pre-white settlement West, had befriended—and in fact saved—Lewis and Clark, and then been displaced by government chicanery and a War in which they distinguished themselves and befuddled several American armies in a fighting retreat toward Canada.
Alvin found and talked with three 1877 War survivors. He learned that most survivors had ended up on the Colville Reservation in north central Washington, so he went there and met with descendants. He went to powwows and sweats, read all the small local pamphlets he could find, and began acquiring official tomes—government documents and contemporary newspaper accounts, that told pieces of this incredible story. (Alvin often said that it was the amateur historians, the chroniclers of local stories and events, who kept Western history alive; academics were too tied to their official documents, most often the words of white men in official capacities.)
In 1955, he published his first piece on Indians, “the Naming of the Nez Perce,” in a Montana history magazine. This was followed by “The Last Stand of Chief Joseph” in American Heritage Magazine in 1958. Editors at Viking immediately contacted him and asked for a book with other stories of other Indian chiefs. The Patriot Chiefs was published in 1961.
Shortly after its publication, a Crow Indian leader told Alvin that “no one had ever called us Indians patriots before,” though of course fighting for and holding traditional lands and culture have always been of premier importance to Indians. And isn’t that the definition of patriotism? [AND DID YOU SEE THE PUBLIC TELEVISION SHOW ON THE CHEROKEE MONDAY NIGHT?]
Alvin’s research and what now became annual summer trips west involved both Alvin and Betty deeply in Indian organizations and causes. And brought them into the Wallowa Valley. Alvin had wanted to learn more about the home of Chief Joseph’s band, and on one of his Western journeys arranged a meeting with Wallowa County Chieftain publisher Gwen Coffin. Gwen and his wife Gladys treated him to lunch in their home–now the Coffin House, the home of Fishtrap!! And then Gwen showed him around the county. Eventually, in 1961, they bought a small ranch out of Joseph. In summers, Betty would drive the family across country in their Jeep Wagoneer, and Alvin would fly out—and be picked up at some airport by Ted Grote and brought to Joseph.
I’ll mention only two of the many ways they became involved with Indians and Indian issues on a personal basis. I use these because they relate directly to the Wallowa Valley. First, there happened to be an Episcopalian Minister in Greenwich, Connecticut with ties to the Wallowa Valley. Clifford Samuelson hunted in the Wallowas, and headed up church efforts on behalf of Indian organizations like the National Congress of American Indians. Alvin and Betty were soon both involved in the Congress and other Indian organizations through Samuelson and Indians Alvin was meeting in his research.
But the meeting with Samuelson also tied in directly with their Wallowa County lives.
Samuelson and the Episcopalians were instrumental in getting a summer education program going in the valley. It was called the Wallowa County Day Camp, which later became the Chief Joseph Summer Seminar. And Betty was soon recruiting Indian kids from Lapwai to come and stay at the Joseph ranch while they attended the Day Camp. Some of these Indian students eventually came East, some even stayed in the Josephy house there and went to school in Greenwich. But the important fact is that many Nez Perce children who stayed with Alvin and Betty and their children here at the ranch have gone on to become tribal leaders and important employees of government agencies who work with Indian affairs.
Termination:
Indian policy during the fifties and the Eisenhower administration was dominated by one word and concept: Termination. I believe that the spectacle of Indian reservations being “terminated” and Indians being moved away from roots to foreign urban environments is what turned Alvin from Indian chronicler and sympathizer to activist. At one point he even went to Wisconsin among the Menominees to research a book on the termination process there. A Mormon Senator from Utah was alleged to have had been extremely upset with the Menominee because they had thrown a couple of missionaries off the reservation; and he was now intent on getting rid of their reservation!
Alvin began research but didn’t get very far–it was hard to find cooperative informanst, and he was still working on the Nez Perce book. And attempts at termination were gaining ground in his backyard, on the Colville Reservation. He had many Nez Perce friends on the Colville, and knew their painful history, and was soon giving anti-termination speeches across the land.
Alvin often said that from the very beginning Indian policy in America was dominated by two strains of thought: romanticize them; or kill them. Intellectuals’ romanticizing of Indians was epitomized with Rousseau’s writings about the “noble savage.” But there was tremendous popular romantic support as well—remember Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveling across America and Europe with entire trains of horses, buffalo, and real Indian chiefs in all their fancy regalia. In this romantic view, Indians are closer to what is real and important in this world.
The killers were divided into two camps. There were those, like the Georgians, who wanted Cherokee land, and other white people in other places who wanted the Indians gone for good for land or outright racism. They thought that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and they didn’t have any compunction about killing them. Sometimes it was with guns; sometimes with disease ridden blankets.
The second camp of killers was, according to Alvin, the “do gooders” who wanted to make the Indians white. They were not interested in killing individual Indians, he said, but in killing “Indian-ness.” They wanted them to be Christians, wanted them to be farmers, wanted them to own their own land and cultivate it like any good white yeoman farmer. General Howard of Nez Perce War fame was this kind of Indian killer—but that is another story.
The terminators of the Eisenhower years mostly fell into this second camp. But like the Allotment Act supporters of a half century before, their cadres were made up of those who genuinely thought that the only way for Indians to survive was to assimilate—and those who counted heads and acres and thought that there would be land left over for the taking or cheap purchase when each Indian family got its 160 acres. They thought too—correctly it turns out—that once the land was “owned” by an Indian, it might be easy to purchase it at a good price.
In what I know was one of Alvin Josephy’s proudest achievements, he wrote a memo on Indian affairs for the incoming Nixon Administration in 1969. In it he harshly criticized the termination policy and advocated Indian involvement and leadership in decision making on the reservations and within the government bureaucracy—the Bureau of Indian Affairs—which supposedly worked on behalf of Indians. (He sometimes talked of this kind of patronage of Indians as a third way of treating them: they were children who needed forceful and loving parents to manage their affairs until they could grow up and join white society.)
A couple of years later President Nixon famously said that there would be “no termination, but self-determination,” for Indians in America. Nixon wrote Alvin a nice note saying that his voice had been important in the decision. Alvin thought that it was Nixon’s part Indian football coach at Whittier College and/or the Indian affiliations of one of the infamous henchmen of the Nixon fall—Ehrlechman or Haldeman—that had tipped the scales in the Indians favor on this huge issue. No matter, Nixon is still a favored President in Indian Country.
And the reservations remain. Alvin always thought that it is the land that has kept Indian culture–“Indian-ness” as well as individual Indians–alive. And especially this reservation land, the “reserves” being small parts of what were once vast landscapes where they hunted, gathered, fished, even farmed, where their ancestors were buried and where they could practice and pass on old teachings. In most places the diminished reservations were and are still connected to that vast past.
The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest
The big book on the Nez Perce was published in 1965 by Yale University Press., and it was greeted with wide appreciation and approval. It broke ground in putting Indian history in context, making Indian history part of history. After Patriot Chiefs, Alvin told me that he would go to bookstores and libraries and look for copies of the book (he was still doing that in 2001, by the way!) and look to see if they had it and where they put it. Most often it was with the “rocks and the dinosaurs.” Indians, Alvin said, did not have “history”; they had archeology and paleontology, maybe anthropology, but not history or biography.
There is another funny and telling story about this book. A big party was arranged at the Lewis - Clark Hotel in Lewiston, Idaho, and the Director of Yale University Press, Chester Kerr, came out for it. During the event, he had a message and a phone call. When he came back into the meeting, he announced excitedly news about another Yale publication, The Vinland Map, which described the early Viking “discovery” of America. The Indian elders in attendance were not impressed. They knew where they were and always had been and were in no need of discovery!
Alvin might not have been alone in his insistence on Indian history, but he was its great cheerleader. He reinforced it with a series of books that he edited and wrote while at American Heritage Publishing Company (he had left Time in 1961 to move to American Heritage, where he worked until his retirement, as Vice President and Editor in Chief, in 1979). The Indian Heritage of America was nominated for an American Book Award in 1969. Red Power captured the heightened rhetoric and aspirations of Indian activists in the 60s. Now that the Buffalo’s Gone used case studies to address major policy issues, including land, fish, language, and religion, affecting Indians. That was how I learned that Indians did not have religion in our country until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978! Christians, Buddhists, Moslems, and Jews of all stripes had religion and religious freedom. Indians had superstition.
Years before, during the post Civil War Grand Administration, in what Alvin says was the most serious breech of the separation of church and state in America, reservations were assigned to specific churches or denominations: Methodists here, Catholics there, even the Friends, who have a great reputation for fairness, were made reservation administrators and became involved with attempts to use favored status to proselytize. From then until recent times, Indian languages, dances, regalia, and ceremonies were often banned. Children were literally abducted and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut and their languages outlawed.
Christian Indians from Lapwai went back to their Nez Perce cousins in Indian Territory after the 1877 War and tried to convince them to convert so that they could come home! Rations there—in Indian territory—were withheld from non-church-goers. Eventually, when they did come home, it was old people and children—and Christians—who were allowed to return to Idaho. Young people and heathens went to the Colville Reservation to live among different tribes.
The New Indian World
During these activist years Alvin was an advocate for higher education for Indians. He felt that a group of educated Indians with a foot in each world would be able to successfully advocate for their people and tell their important stories to the world. Gradually, Alvin realized that biography and history—of the kind that scholars pay attention to, the kind that changes people’s minds about the past—is very difficult for Indians. Indians will speak for themselves, for their families, and in some instances will raise voices of a tribal nature, but they are often not comfortable speaking for other Indians and other Indians’ needs, concerns, and pasts. Years ago, when Josephy friend Otis Halfmoon—I believe he was a daycamper at one time—talked on the Nez Perce War for Fishtrap, he said that he would tell his family’s stories of the War. More, what other families saw and experienced and passed down, he was reluctant to say.
So Alvin’s last book, a book that he envisioned and recruited writers for but did not write himself, was called “Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes.” In it he invited a number of Indian friends to say what they wanted to say about Lewis and Clark. He held them to no formal history, expected no particular point of view—individual, family, or tribal. And out of it came a marvelous collection of stories that give one the flavor of Indian country without dictionary definitions.
The Heye Foundation and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.
While Alvin was alive, even in those last years as he weakened, he was always doing or saying something that taught or amazed me. And just this week as I was preparing for this talk, it happened again. I was re-reading the chapter on Indians in A Walk Toward Oregon and it struck me that there is no mention of his role with the Smithsonian Museum. I went back and checked the vita that he had written, probably in 2000, as that is the last date noted in it. Sure enough, under “Other Major Positions” there is: “1990-93: Founding Chairman, Board of Trustees, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.” And tucked under that: “1976-90: Trustee, Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, New York City.”
That would be 17 years at the heart of one of the greatest affairs involving the history, art, and culture of American Indians. And the short answer to my own question is obvious: Alvin saw himself as an advocate, a friend, a cheerleader, accomplice, catalyst, and recorder of Indian stories as Indians themselves told them. He did not want to be a character in their epic stories.
I guess I have two choices. I can just shut up about it, as Alvin does in the memoir, or I can try to reconstruct some of it as I remember from conversations with him and my own brief research on the subject. I choose to do the latter because I believe with Alvin that American Indians still have things to teach us, and because I believe that we must be vigilant as a cultural majority about helping Indians hold onto the recognition and the freedoms they have gained in the last 50 years—remember that it was not that long ago that treaties were broken, that “termination policy” threatened the very existence of tribal identities.
Besides, it is all a very complex and interesting tale—and one that says much about changing attitudes not only about Indians, but about academic disciplines like anthropology and ethnology.
It begins with a wealthy New Yorker named George Gustav Heye, who was born in 1874 and graduated from Columbia College in 1896 with an engineering degree. Heye was on an assignment in Arizona in 1897 when he acquired a Navajo deerskin shirt and the collecting bug bit him. For the next half century he traveled the Americas and sent people across the Americas acquiring Indian artifacts. He financed expeditions and shipped boxcars of artifacts back to New York. The Museum of the American Indian was established in 1917 and opened to the public in 1922, The collection contained an estimated million artifacts and thousands of historical photos. Its home was part of a New York museum complex called Audubon Terrace. Heye was its director until his death in 1957.
Heye’s and the Museum’s golden years were the early ones: the stock market crash of 29 hamstringed operations, expeditions, and scholarly publications. And, after Heye’s death, the once proud location became a liability as the neighborhood declined and mkuseum attendance shrunk. Eventually there was scandal. The director and trustees had not kept good books, had traded artifacts on less than fair terms, inflated the value of donations they made, sold artifacts when they ran out of money to keep the Museum going, even sold some of the artifacts to themselves. In 1975 the attorney general got into it, trustees resigned—and Alvin, and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s banking brother David, were appointed to a new Board of Trustees.
They quickly adopted new procedures, including detailed cataloging of Museum holdings, and began looking for a suitable and much larger place to exhibit the collection.
One idea was to merge with the Smithsonian, which had extensive Indian holdings in its museum of natural history. And Ross Perot offered them big money to bring it to Texas. But the Heye collection was left to the citizens of New York, and there were other competing interests for a spot on the Washington D.C. Mall.
I am not going to get into the particulars of the negotiations. I don’t know all that much about them for one thing, though I have a vague recollection, which I could not substantiate via Google, that Senator Inouye’s learning about the Smithsonian’s holding the skeletal remains of 16,000 Indians playing a role in the final decision to give the place on the Mall to the Indians and not to Women or to the Descendants of Slaves.
The important result is the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act. The Heye Collection would join Smithsonian holdings in forming the basis for a new Museum of the American Indian.
Alvin had been a Heye Trustee from 1977, so was involved with these negotiations, and in 1990, was appointed a Trustee of the new combined board. The new legislation called for a $106 million museum on the Mall, a $44 million support center in Suitland, Maryland, and a $25 million satellite museum in the Customs House, lower Manhattan—the New Yorkers would get their piece of the pie.
From 1990 until 1993, Alvin steered the new entity as it worked out the details. Vine Deloria was his vice chair, and the board included David Rockefeller, Senator Inouye, and Indians from across the land. I know that he stepped aside as Indian leadership grew, and that he was an extremely proud guest of honor when the museum on the Mall opened in September, 2004.
As I said earlier, I do not know the details of things that went on in this crucial 17 year period in American Indian affairs. But it is interesting to consider the differences between the Heye Collection and Museum of the 20s, 30s, and into the 60s with the new Museum. Then, artifacts were stacked five and six deep on dark shelves in an old building built for something else—private mansion probably. The holdings were seen mostly by specialists, who wrote academic monographs on them, reconstructing pieces of cultures that most people assumed were dead.
The new museum is a living breathing thing, down to the best cafeteria foods in Washington—you can get Northwest salmon and Midwest maple pudding. It is designed to blend into a restored natural environment—the museum does not stop at its walls. Eight or nine tribes have rotating –and the rotation is years long—living exhibits of their cultures. The Yakima have a fine one now. There are continuous demonstrations—two Ecuadorians were building a reed boat one time that I visited—evening programs, and a gift shop with outstanding contemporary Indian art.
It is, in every way, designed by and for Indians to tell their stories, stories of the past, but stories too of their current lives. The tools, toys, boats, regalia, foods, pictures, and video displays are none of them Alvin’s ideas—but the idea of having them and showing them to the American public, and, more importantly, to Indians themselves, was part of a personal mission beginning with that chance meeting in Lapwai, Idaho, a half century earlier.
A story or two
I can’t resist ending with one of Alvin’s favorite Indian stories, passed on to him by Scott Momaday, the noted Indian writer and storyteller, a fellow Trustee, and, by the way, the man who brought the story of the Gift Horse back to the Wood family and the Nez Perce.
Scott was telling stories to a group of very young people, probably kindergartners, and began with “a very, very, very long time ago, when the animals could speak.” He paused briefly and a bright young student said “ah, those were the days.” Alvin would chuckle and smile every time he told that story.
Those were the days, and somehow, despite everything, “those days, “Indians and their cultures, are still here. That I think, is what Alvin wanted more than anything. I didn’t know him as a religious man, but when Nez Perce elder Horace Axtell and tribal council member Carla Higheagle and the poet Elise Paschen, daughter of the Indian ballerina Maria Tallchief, spoke at Wallowa Lake Camp at Summer Fishtrap some years back, Alvin leaned back, looked to the open ceiling and sky, and said that he thought the ancestors were with us at Wallowa Lake, and that they were pleased.