Dear Friends,

August 27, 2009

Dear Friends of Fishtrap and the Josephy Library,

I am writing to ask for your help.

But first let me tell you what is happening with the Josephy Library. The enclosed brochure says much of it, but there is more. The books we have cataloged already make a great collection for writers and scholars, and we are at a small fraction of the total. I am talking with the Josephy family and scholars about Alvin’s work, and each day brings excitement of one kind or another around that work.

I knew Alvin through his books and a friendship built around them, his help in getting Fishtrap going, and years of conversation about many things. But I did not really see the extent of his advocacy for Indian people until going through a box of magazine and journal articles that came from the Greenwich house. There is a story on the Custer Battlefield in Life Magazine in 1971, in which he told the world that government "interpreters" were still calling Indians "savages" and Custer a military hero. And one in Learning Magazine in 1973, in which he said that history text books then in use in American schools contained "numerous misrepresentations, distortions and ethnocentric anti-Indian interpretations, or–just as bad–omitted any mention at all of Indians, as if they had never existed."

There are other stories, some in national publications like the New York Times, others in Idaho Yesterdays and other small journals. For over half a century Alvin brought his extensive historical scholarship and first person knowledge of the situation in Indian Country to the public.

So this Library project is not purely academic, or is academic in the best sense of the word. It will make Alvin’s work, much of his personal library, and the work of over 300 other Fishtrap writers easily available to poets, novelists, historians, and students, to people who, as Alvin would have said, "are trying to get history right."

Sometimes I feel like a mother with an overdue child.. When Alvin and I started talking about the library almost ten years ago, I assumed that 2009 would see us up and running in a fine new building adjoining our Coffin House. But a couple of things happened on the journey. First, the director transition. Although Rick Bombaci and I have a great working relationship, the search process itself took almost a year, and the process of handing over the big and small things–names, addresses, books, themes, and ideas garnered over 21 years–has taken its own measure of time and energy.

More importantly, the economic climate that greeted Rick as the new Director and me finally getting the Library off the ground is a drastically different one than the one in which I had talked with major foundations over several years. Earlier enthusiasm has been replaced with "no requests for capital expenditures this year; concentrate on your core programs."

So we–Fishtrap–did. I backed off on capital grants and began the process of getting the Library up and running, with plans to raise the capital for a new building as the economy improves and we prove the worth of what we are doing. Fortunately, we had a few dollars in the Library account as I slid across the Fishtrap House to my new job at the beginning of the year, and fortunately the Lamb Foundation came to us with yet another grant. (They had funded the original planning and architectural work four years ago.)

I am now writing a few small grants for Library activities, and will begin writing big grants for remodeling the Coffin House and building the Library addition soon. Meanwhile, operating expenses for the Library are about $35,000 per year, and we need $15,000 to get us through the end of 2009–and then $35,000 again for the 2010 calendar year. So your gifts this year and next will be the take-off money that gets the rest of the books cataloged and the first writers poking through stacks to see some of what Alvin saw and built over 70 years as a writer.

I promise to keep you informed as this happens, and to let you know about new publications of Alvin’s own work and new uses of his scholarship by writers today.

Thank you for your continuing support!

rich

Jack McClaran, Alvin Josephy, and the power of story

On Tuesday night, April 14, Jack McClaran spoke to over 150 people at the Oddfellows Hall in Enterprise about his experiences in WW II. He began the evening with a nod to Alvin Josephy–they had talked about the importance of telling the important stories of our lives as Alvin wrote his "Walk Towards Oregon"–and then described in vivid detail his own War.

The crowd included a very few WW II vets, a sprinkling of vets from other wars, students from the local high schools, and Jack’s children and grandchildren. (The people who carry these stories are getting on in years–most of them in fact are gone.)

Jack was a sheep ranching kid from the Wallowa Snake River country who graduated from Lewiston High in the spring of 1944, was immediately drafted, and by fall-winter of 1944 was in a tank driving the Germans east across the Rhine River. They went on to Buchenwald and helped pull the remnants of a sick and dying population of Jewish, RAF, and other Nazi dissident survivors back to life. He told us that the stench of that camp was different than and worse than any smell we’d ever smelled, and described the deep hand-scratched grooves on the wall along a conveyer where humans were hung by their collarbones like animal carcasses in a slaughterhouse and pulled into crematoriums.

Jack gave us context and asked us to think–he talked about 20 million Russians dead on the Eastern Front, and of 6,000 Russian and German tanks at each other in the largest pitched tank battle in history. He talked of the horror of the Nazi's "final solution," and wondered at man's inhumanity to man. He wondered at our own country's treatment of Indians, and of Japanese-Americans during the War.

Tanks, he said right at the beginning of his talk, are designed for one thing, to kill people. Later, he returned to tanks as "killing machines" not only for the enemy combatants, but for the soldiers inside them. After chasing the Germans up to the Rhine and retreating into Holland, they went forward again; getting back into that tank was maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done. Closer to the end of his talk, Jack explained that the "killing machine" referred not only to the enemy, but to the men inside the tanks. But even death was trumped by something worse: tankers’ greatest fear, he said, was not being killed, but being trapped inside and burned alive. Those recruiting posters of men hopping happily out of tanks should be replaced with reality, with burning men being blown out of tanks.

Alvin Josephy’s recollections of WW II in the Pacific are among the most vivid in his memoir. I remember traveling with him on book tour with Walk Towards Oregon, remember the many vets standing in lines to get a books signed, and then quietly reciting their units and the places they had fought, the places in which they had watched people live and die.

It’s my belief that Alvin’s war experience as a Marine correspondent gave him unique and essential training for his later work as a historian of and advocate for American Indians. Of course, before the War he had already worked as a newspaper and radio journalist, and tried his hand at play writing in New York and screen writing in Hollywood. These too prepared him for Indian history.

In the Pacific he met not only generals and admirals–some of them important in the overall conduct of the War–but thousands of ordinary men on ships, landing crafts, and in fox holes. He listened to them and sent their stories back to hometown newspapers and the New York Times. He trusted their stories and honored them in the retelling.

Years later, when he met the Nez Perce at Lapwai and heard his first bits of story about them and "their" war, his old war corespondent’s nose and screenwriter’s ear drove him to get the rest of their story–one of the great American epics, he immediately recognized. Unlike the professional historians of the day, he was not constrained by official documents and reports–most of which had been prepared by white men. When he found first person accounts in Hear Me My Chiefs he exulted and determined to tell the story himself. He went to Colville to meet Joseph Band Descendants, and, very importantly, found three aging survivors of the War of 1877. He listened in sweat lodges and at powwows, and listened for the Indian voices behind the treaties and official documents written by white men.

Someday, I believe, someone will write the story of Alvin’s important work with and among the Indians. They will fill out the brief outline he gives in Walk Towards Oregon with others’ memories and stories. I hope the Josephy Library here at Fishtrap will help in this work. And, as part of that effort, I invite you out there, family members, friends, and colleagues, to tell your stories about Alvin and Betty, especially about their work with Indians, but other things too. We don’t know now what future writers will find important, how they will find links that are not evident to us as we sit at our own desks. I don’t know which of you might rise to tell this Josephy story–or all the other stories of the West which Alvin held so dear.

As for me, I plan to get together with Jack and Marge McClaran, who were great friends with Alvin and Betty here in the Wallowas, to reminisce and reconstruct decades of conversations about history and the big people and foxhole grunts who live and make it.

Be well, and stay in touch!

rich