Once in situ, the Columbia Plateau’s residents certainly played their part in what was probably the most remarkable cultural explosion in human history, as the North American continent began to throw up a wildly diverse wave of new civilizations, each forged by the demands of their surroundings and rendered unique by this capacious land. From the proto-socialism of the Pueblos to the senatorial politics of the New York Iroquois, from the conspicuous, slave-based wealth of some Pacific coast communities to the eternal fires of the Mississippian temple-mound faith, the range, fluidity and distinctiveness of these cultures would fill several lifetimes’ study. It’s estimated that more than six hundred distinct and autonomous societies were in place in Canada and North America by the fifteenth century, speaking a range of at least 250 mutually unintelligible tongues, subdivided many times by dialect.
In the eastern Columbia plateau, in the land surrounding the Snake River, one language group formed around the Sahaptin dialect — and at the centre of the linguistic region lay a loose community of families and bands, dominating the area where the wide Snake, Salmon and Clearwater rivers converge. They came to call themselves Nimiipuu — meaning We, The People.
The Nimiipuu way of life was never trapped in aspic, but was, rather, in constant development and amendment; nevertheless, a snapshot of that lifestyle in the centuries prior to the first approaches of the white man can illuminate a vital, enviable culture. Seminomadic, the Nimiipuu moved about their varied homeland in a seasonal round trip, each village band — only loosely connected to one another, in a friendship recognized as neither tribal nor national — moving to their favoured camping spot to perform each task in the annual natural cycle. There were as many as seventy of these village groups scattered across the homeland, very rarely reaching three hundred members and often much smaller, each with a recognized home base and other seasonal outposts. A leader controlled each band, but with very conditional authority — individual freedom was highly valued and the right to do your own thing was well protected.
Nimiipuu petroglyphs on the banks of the Snake River, thought to be 9–11,000 years old.
That annual natural cycle, essential for the survival of a hunter-gatherer culture, was revered in ceremony and song, providing the basis for all endeavour. With the first melt of spring it was time to head to the alpine meadows and harvest the freshly exposed edible root plants; as June approached the salmon spawn beckoned, and fishing platforms and trapping weirs, known as wallowas, needed building at the most bountiful rapids along the homeland’s rivers; in the height of summer the camas, a kind of wild garlic, bulged beneath lush, wide-open prairies, and the Nimiipuu gathered on the grasslands for weeks of socializing and harvesting; in fall the deer and elk were at their most active and the hunters would disappear into the high country for days in pursuit, while closer to home the serviceberries and huckleberries needed picking and drying. But the long, fierce winter was perhaps the most remarkable season; having dried and stored food in preparation, the Nimiipuu would gather at the base of the lowest, mildest valleys in extended A-framed matting lodges, known as longhouses (sometimes over thirty metres long) to see the snows out together, the families sleeping along the edge of the lodge, with fires burning in the middle. It was a time to make and repair clothes and tools, teach children crafts, and for the elders to tell the young people stories — stories of an earlier time, when people and animals conversed, when the lessons and rules of inhabiting the earth were learned, and the mischievous, capricious Coyote ruled the roost.
It was most certainly not a life of ease, but the Nimiipuu were blessed with a bountiful and ceaselessly beautiful territory, of clean, well-stocked rivers, forests dense with game and plentiful meadows, and their comparative natural wealth and subsequent inclination towards openness, friendliness and, where possible, peace was well captured by one of their earliest non-Indian friends, the historian L. V. McWhorter, in 1952: ‘They were the wilderness gentry of the Pacific Northwest.’
One of the most oft-repeated assertions when modern Nimiipuu discuss their ancestors is that they had no religion in the compartmentalized, Sunday Service meaning; instead they possessed an all-encompassing way of life, in which devotional acts and the actions required for living were inseparable. Spirituality was recognized in everyday moments, such as greeting dawn in prayer or song; in celebrations of the various significant events in the natural calendar, such as the arrival of the salmon or the ripening of the camas roots; and a child’s developing capacity to participate in the life of the band was also sanctified in a series of rites, such as a girl’s first outing to gather roots or a boy’s first hunting expedition.
The most significant and revealing of these rites was the spirit quest, the search for a wyakin, or protective spirit. After several years of preparatory conversations with the elders, each Nimiipuu child (when aged from around nine to fifteen) would head away from the lodges and into the wilderness, without food or water, to begin a lonely, cold vigil for the arrival of their personal wyakin. Sitting alone on a mountain-top or outcrop sometimes for days on end, they would seek the revelation of a source of spiritual strength, an image, sometimes real, sometimes coming in a dream or hunger-induced hallucination, that filled their consciousness and left them certain that protection was being offered — an eagle soaring above them, a bear crossing the horizon, a passing hummingbird, rain falling in the distance. Blessed with this vision, they stumbled back home, now in personal and private possession of a supernatural guardian, to whom they could appeal in times of tribulation, effort and, for some, war.
The wyakin quest offers us today a powerfully illuminating vision: of a Nimiipuu world view in which everything within their lands possessed a spiritual centre. Protection was not the preserve of angels or divinities, because spirits resided in creatures, rivers, land forms, weather patterns, all of creation. And to be connected to that natural order, partly revealed in a knowledge of the patterns and foibles of the local environment on which survival depended, partly in your respect for your spiritual kinship with all nature, was to be a Nimiipuu. The band leader whose eloquence would earn him unwelcome fame, Young Joseph, expressed this state of permanent communion best:
As the Nez Perce man wandered through the forest the moving trees whispered to him and his heart swelled with the song of the swaying pine. He looked through the green branches and saw white clouds drifting across the blue dome, and he felt the song of the clouds. Each bird twittering in the branches, each water-fowl among the reeds or on the surface of the lake, spoke its intelligible message to his heart; and as he looked into the sky and saw the high-flying birds of passage, he knew their flight was made strong by the uplifted voices of ten thousand birds of the meadow, forest and lake, and his heart, fairly in tune with all this, vibrated with the songs of its fullness.
In a time of great stress, he reduced this sentiment to its essence: ‘The earth and myself are of one mind.’
This affiliation to the earth was redoubled by the prominent position that ancestors held in Nimiipuu culture. Referred to often in ceremony and conversation, commemorated in careful genealogy and in the passing on of names, possessions and skills, the ancestors were a constant presence in the villages, with those who have passed on serving both as an example in life and a familiar face in death. Nez Perce spiritual leader Horace Axtell received this explanation from an elder: ‘He said, “This is what we do. We look at these tracks laid by our ancestors and we follow them to where they are now. These tracks lead us to the Good Land, The Good Place, where all Indians go after they have spent their time on this earth.”’
The spiritual power of songs, prayers, dances — and of everyday actions such as berry picking or salmon fishing — thus sprang from two sources, the affiliation to the spirit forces of creation and also the connection, by repetition of their actions, words, names and tunes, with the past Nimiipuu — as Axtell observes, ‘the reason our spirituality is so strong is because it comes from our old people, our old ancestors’.
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