You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandparents. So that they will respect the land, tell your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth. If you spit upon the ground you spit upon yourselves. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being.
The Crow chief Curley was forced to make a similar point when trying to preserve the remnants of his people’s homelands in 1912, telling white people who wanted the land for cultivation and enrichment: ‘You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth, as the upper portion is Crow. The land, as it is, is my blood and my dead.’
The homeland was inseparable from both individual growth and community life. Personal wisdom was acquired not only through the ancestors’ stories and skills, but through direct experience of the landscape, the seasonal whims and the interrelations of the flora and fauna, that both dictated survival and taught the young Nimiipuu their inseparable link to what modern Native American thinker Donald L. Fixico calls ‘the Natural Democracy’ of the home landscape — ‘This democracy is based on respect. In this belief, all things are equally important. Where a native person grows up is relevant to how one understands all things around him or her…and this set of surroundings becomes fixed in the mind like reference points for later in life.’ From a community perspective, the homeland conferred humility: its encapsulation of the past, present and future of the Nimiipuu serving as a reminder from dawn to dusk that individual fulfilment took second place to the continuation of a narrative of which your life was a small but integral part.
It’s important not to romanticize excessively the Nimiipuu’s relationship with the natural world, as many sympathetic chroniclers of Native America have. The image of the American Indian as the irreproachable steward of an unsullied continent is a powerful and popular one — and one that has also been ferociously challenged in recent years. The Nimiipuu, of course, were human beings, inclined towards improving their lives and capable of changing their surroundings, and they affected their landscape through hunting, harvest, burning and grazing. But what seems certain is that not just their spirituality but their survival did depend on a cautious management of the naturally occurring flora and fauna around them. As numerous tribal oral histories testify, if you didn’t let enough salmon escape the fish traps, there’d be nothing in those traps in three years’ time. Hunt elk while they were carrying or caring for foals and there would be fewer elk the following year.
But it also seems clear that in this independent era there was little conflict between the tribe’s stated values and their material ambitions, thanks to a luxury of space — in the years just prior to the arrival of the white man the Nimiipuu are estimated to have numbered from four to six thousand people, enjoying near-exclusive occupation of around thirteen million acres of land. The defining characteristic of the Nimiipuu, in terms of their environmental impact, was simple lack of numbers — they were at a point on the curve where their actions, though crucial to their immediate locality and their own survival, were not likely to shatter entire ecosystems. As a local anthropologist put it to me: ‘It doesn’t really matter if you run a few hundred buffalo off a cliff, if you only do it once a year.’
Then, of course, everything would change. And to question the sincerity of a culture’s core values because they were not too severely tested until you came along seems churlish, at best — particularly as you arrived uninvited.
For the Nimiipuu the first impact of the European invasion of the Americas was largely a benign one — the reintroduction of the horse. Despite their prominence in the mythical West, horses had in fact disappeared from the continent at the same time the first spear point had swept through it, the attractions of protein outweighing load-bearing capacity in those early hunters’ estimation.
Columbus then brought horses to Hispaniola on his second Atlantic crossing, the Spanish left many behind on their subsequent murderous ramblings through Mexico, and by the early eighteenth century the burgeoning mustang herds, and European concepts of domesticating and riding horses, had reached the Columbia Plateau. The ever-adaptable Nimiipuu rapidly became expert riders and breeders, developing a herd numbered in thousands, greatly expanding the range of their endeavours. Larger groups could now travel further afield in search of game and trade, over the rough crossing routes of the Bitterroot Mountains into modern-day Montana, onwards to the wide open Big Hole Valley, still further east to the eerie, steaming landscapes of Yellowstone, north into the great plains of the buffalo tribes. New skills were learned, such as covering lodges in buffalo hides, friendships and intermarrying relationships were strengthened, for example with the Salish people to the east, and military rivalries sprang up with once-distant enemies, now rivals for the bounty of the hunting grounds. The arrival of the horse, the rifle and the East Coast Pilgrims had greatly destabilized Native America’s already fractious territorial arrangements, with many tribes dominoing west, while others expanded rapidly with their new tools of war, and as the Nimiipuu fought their share of conflicts with raiders and land-grabbers the tribe’s warrior culture developed rapidly. Bravery in battle had been a rich source of male identity in pedestrian times, but now that the Nimiipuu were a horse people, the ceremonies of war grew more regular, the traditions of scalp-taking and counting coups (getting close enough to an opponent to touch him, then retreating unharmed) became more ingrained across the Northwest and the prestige of conflict grew ever more alluring to the young and the fearless. The Nimiipuu became proud of their reputation as one of the toughest and smartest martial opponents in the region, sharpening the tactics of warfare and horsemanship that they would later rely on for their very survival.
Around the end of the eighteenth century, during an otherwise unremarkable skirmish in the eastern buffalo fields, a Nimiipuu woman was captured by a raiding tribe and taken north to Canada, where she encountered proof of a long-rumoured apparition — white faces, thick beards and strong medicine. She was well cared for by the trappers and fur traders she encountered, and, fatefully, returned to her village by 1805. Without her elderly recollection that white people were kind and harmless, the seven half-starved men who stumbled into a Nimiipuu camas-gathering camp in the autumn of that year might well have met the fate that many of the village leaders prescribed for them — a swift dispatch. The Nez Perce are not the only tribe in the American West to recall, with bleak humour, that life might have been a great deal simpler if they’d only decided to fatally hinder the Lewis and Clark expedition, rather than graciously help it.
William Clark and Meriwether Lewis had been challenged by President Thomas Jefferson to find a route from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, ostensibly to uncover the geographical and biological wonders of the continent but, in reality, to open up territory to the fur trade and establish nautical links with Asia. Twenty-eight years after achieving independence from Britain, the United States was now engaged in an old-fashioned mercantile struggle with the mother country for control of its hinterland’s resources, and packing the West with fur trappers who had an easy sales route to the Orient seemed the best way to squeeze the giant British trading enterprise the Hudson’s Bay Company (an enemy larger and better resourced than the juvenile US government) up into Canada, or even into the sea. Jefferson had struck a mighty blow against the British in 1803 when Napoleon had sold him 800,000 square miles of land between the Mississippi and the Rockies for $15 million. When Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery expedition set off west in May 1804 it had thus become a much grander, nation-building enterprise — the United States had just more than doubled