A Tale of Two Trails: 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’s using his voice to share a side of history sometimes forgotten.

The 23,000 square-foot facility, operated by the Bureau of Land Management, opened a new Native American exhibit at the end of October.

The displays include a gallery dedicated to the history, culture and languages of the tribes who have inhabited the land along the Oregon Trail for thousands of generations prior to the mass European American migration that began in the early 1840s.

In the language of the Umatilla Tribe, Coyote’s name is spilyáy. His role at the center is to teach visitors the Oregon Trail story from the Native American perspective.

“Great change is coming!” spilyáy proclaims in colorful signs along the center’s main gallery, lined with life-sized dioramas of settler men, women and children, covered wagons, oxen, sheep, horses, Native American 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 season past. Their need will be unquenchable. Their wagons bring wonders and comforts, but their ways are not your ways; their friendship brings pain. They are wildfire, consuming the land and all I have prepared.

“Are you listening?”

Coyote’s narrative adds to numerous Native American exhibits already woven throughout the center, including a diorama depicting the importance of trade among settlers and Native Americans, and a display describing contact and confrontation on the frontier, often a result of cultural differences, lack of communication and government inaction.

Baker City resident John Bearinside was one of the first visitors to see the new exhibit at the Interpretive Center and related the plight of the Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla and Nez Perce —who were moved to reservations through the Treaty of 1855 — to that of 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 removed from their homeland in Mississippi and forced to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma.

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

“It’s amazing to me how much transpired, but it’s not put into books technically, it’s put into books not realistically, it’s put into books in a way to sell the books—bigger than life,” he explained.

“My grandmother would tell us, ‘Read between the lines, of your history books, of your newspapers, your stories, your wanted posters. You know, when they say he murdered 25 people, he might have murdered two people,’” Bearinside said.

“If a person has a real serious interest and we feel that we can trust them, only then can we tell them our stories.”

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

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

Planning was tied in with 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, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton and the Four Rivers Cultural Center and Museum in Ontario. Each of those centers focused on the way the Oregon Trail affected their region, Hunsaker noted.

“We’re the one that really focused broadly 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 focused on six themes, Hunsaker said, one of which was Native Americans, with the goal of expanding that theme later, after Tamástslikt was up and running.

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

The new displays at the Interpretive Center are a permanent addition and are viewable year-round.

Read more: Tamástslikt museum shows Oregon history through a Native American lens

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

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

Titled “Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return,” the traveling exhibit 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 and Culture and a Wallowa County historian. Currently on display at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, the exhibit will move in mid-January to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton before finding a home at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem next September.

Wandschneider consulted with Nez Perce tribal elders in developing displays that interpret the history of the Wallowa Band Nez Perce and how the lives of its people, who had lived in the Wallowa Valley from time immemorial, were changed irrevocably by the arrival of European American explorers, fur traders, missionaries, gold miners and settlers.

The exhibit discusses settlement and conflict in the Wallowa Valley, starting with the wave of Oregon Trail settlers who edged ever-nearer to Nez Perce territory in the 1860s. Old Chief Joseph constructed stone monuments to keep them out, but after his death in 1871, settlers began flooding in. Although the Nez Perce were friendly toward the newcomers, tensions grew between them.

As the exhibit explains, treaties are part of “The supreme Law of the Land,” according to the U.S. Constitution. In 1877, Young Chief Joseph was forced to comply with the Nez Perce Treaty of 1863—although his father had refused to sign it—and lead his people out of the Wallowa Valley to a reservation in Lapwai, Idaho Territory.

On the way to Lapwai, overwhelming emotions sparked a young Nez Perce man, whose father had been murdered by a settler, to lead a deadly revenge attack on Idaho Territory settlers, and according to the exhibit, “the Nez Perce War was on.”

The fighting retreat sent some 800 Nez Perce people on a nearly 1,200-mile journey across four states, with the U.S. Army close behind. 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 finally sent to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, while Chief White Bird and 200 others escaped to Canada.

Charlie Moses, 88, who grew up on the Colville reservation in Nespelem, Wash., 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 at the bloody Battle of the Big Hole.

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

Moses, who retired following a 30-year career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has spent much of his time speaking about his family lineage and history in the Nez Perce War, providing that information to the Josephy Center, which created the new exhibit. He’s been involved with the Wallowa Homeland Project since the 1990s and makes regular journeys 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 never allowed to go back to his Wallowa Homeland, he made several trips to Washington, D.C., to plead 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 as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall be alike—brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us…that all people may be one people.”

“Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return” is viewable 7 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday; Loso Hall, Eastern Oregon University; Sixth Street, La Grande; no admission 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