CITY OF BAKER The storyteller Coyote has made Baker City his home at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. Additionally, he is sharing a sometimes-forgotten aspect of history through his voice.
At the end of October, a new Native American display was unveiled at the Bureau of Land Management’s 23,000-square-foot headquarters.
A museum devoted to the history, culture, and languages of the tribes that have lived along the Oregon Trail for thousands of years before the large-scale European American migration that started in the early 1840s is one of the exhibits.
Coyote’s name is spily y in the Umatilla Tribe’s language. Teaching guests about the Oregon Trail from a Native American point of view is his responsibility at the institution.
There will be a big shift soon! Spicy food shouts in vibrant placards along the main gallery of the center, which is surrounded by life-size dioramas of Native American men, women, and children, oxen, lambs, horses, covered wagons, and a howling coyote.
He cautions, “I see the storm of your future.” There will be more European Americans, or uy puma, than in any previous season. They will have an insatiable need. Their relationship brings suffering, yet their methods are not yours. Their caravans bring comforts and wonders. The land and all I’ve planned are being consumed by wildfire.
Do you hear me?
Coyote’s story complements the many Native American exhibits already present in the center, such as a diorama that highlights the value of trade between settlers and Native Americans and a display that details encounters and conflict on the frontier, which are frequently caused by cultural differences, a lack of communication, and inaction on the part of the government.
One of the first people to see the new exhibit at the Interpretive Center was John Bearinside, a resident of Baker City, who compared the situation of his own ancestors to that of the Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Nez Perce who were forced to live on reservations by the Treaty of 1855.
Bearinside, an Apache and member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, was raised on the Choctaw Reservation. After being uprooted from their native Mississippi, his great-great-great ancestors were compelled to move to an Oklahoma reservation.
Not all recorded accounts of Native American history are true, Bearinside, a speaker on Native American culture and history, stressed.
I think it’s incredible how much happened, but he clarified that it’s not technically or really included in books; rather, it’s included to make the books seem more important than life.
Read between the lines of your history books, newspapers, stories, and wanted posters, my grandma would advise us. Bearinside stated, “You know, when they say he murdered 25 people, he might have murdered two.”
We can only share our stories with someone we believe we can trust and who shows genuine attention.
At the Interpretive Center, images, videos, artifacts, and quotes tell the tales of numerous diverse groups of people whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Oregon Trail.
According to Dave Hunsaker, the Interpretive Center’s initial director and project manager, the concept for an Oregon Trail museum was first conceived as part of former Governor Neil Goldschmidt’s Oregon Comeback plan during the 1980s recession.
Planning was linked to the building of a number of other cultural centers, including the Four Rivers Cultural Center and Museum in Ontario, the Tam stslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, and the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City. According to Hunsaker, each of the institutions concentrated on how the Oregon Trail impacted their locality.
He claimed that we were the ones who had a more comprehensive focus on the Oregon Trail.
The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation blessed the building at its grand inauguration in May 1992, making the Baker City facility the first to open. Hunsaker stated that one of the six themes in the initial proposal was Native Americans, with the intention of extending that topic once Tam stslikt was operational.
According to Bobby Reis, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Interpretive Center, the idea for the new Native American display was sown in 2015, but COVID-19 and renovations caused a delay in its development. The director of the Tamstslikt Cultural Institute, Bobbie Conner, participated in the preliminary planning phases. The only Native American museum situated directly along the Oregon Trail, Tam Stslikt opened its doors in 1998 and focuses on the ways that the introduction of settlers led to conflicts, epidemics, treaty violations, and assimilation efforts, including boarding schools.
The new exhibits at the Interpretive Center are open all year round and are a permanent feature.
See also: Native American perspective on Oregon history at Tam Stslikt Museum
The history and tenacity of the Wallowa Band Nez Perce, or nimiipuu, are highlighted in another display traveling throughout Oregon.
The traveling exhibit, titled Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return, was developed by the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph with funding from the Oregon State Capitol Foundation, according to Wallowa County historian and director of the Josephy Library of Western History and Culture Rich Wandschneider. The exhibit, which is now on display at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, will relocate to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton in mid-January before being placed at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem in September of the following year.
In order to create exhibits that tell the story of the Wallowa Band Nez Perce and how the arrival of European American explorers, fur traders, missionaries, gold miners, and settlers permanently altered the lives of the people who had lived in the Wallowa Valley since the beginning of time, Wandschneider conferred with Nez Perce tribal elders.
Beginning with the influx of Oregon Trail immigrants who gradually approached Nez Perce land in the 1860s, the exhibit explores colonization and conflict in the Wallowa Valley. To keep them out, Old Chief Joseph built stone memorials, but settlers started to pour in following his death in 1871. Tensions between the immigrants and the Nez Perce increased despite their friendliness.
According to the U.S. Constitution, treaties are a component of the supreme law of the land, as the exhibit demonstrates. Young Chief Joseph led his people from the Wallowa Valley to a reserve in Lapwai, Idaho Territory, in 1877, despite his father’s refusal to sign the Nez Perce Treaty of 1863.
The display claims that the Nez Perce War began when a young Nez Perce man, whose father had been killed by a settler, led a lethal retaliatory attack on Idaho Territory settlers due to excessive emotions on the route to Lapwai.
About 800 Nez Perce people made the roughly 1,200-mile trek across four states as part of the fighting withdrawal, with the U.S. Army following closely behind. Chief Joseph gave up within 40 miles from the Canadian border, with his people cold, tired, and malnourished, and the majority of his chiefs dead from about 13 wars and skirmishes. While Chief White Bird and 200 other members of his tribe fled to Canada, he and the majority of his tribe were banished to Kansas and Oklahoma before being transferred to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington.
Charlie Moses, an 88-year-old Vancouver resident who was raised on the Colville reservation in Nespelem, Washington, has strong connections 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.
Moses claimed that my tribe is actually the White Bird, although my grandfather, Black Eagle, accompanied Joseph to Nespelem after we returned from Oklahoma.
The Josephy Center, which developed the new display, received information from Moses, who retired after a 30-year career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, regarding his family’s history and ancestry during the Nez Perce War. He has been a part of the Wallowa Homeland Project since the 1990s and frequently travels to Wallowa County to take part in the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo and the Tamkaliks Celebration.
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. He summed up his opinions on the interaction between Native Americans and European Americans in 1879 as follows:
There won’t be any more wars as long as white people treat Indians the same way they treat one another. 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.
For The Oregonian/OregonLive, Kathy Patten
Note: Every piece of content is rigorously reviewed by our team of experienced writers and editors to ensure its accuracy. Our writers use credible sources and adhere to strict fact-checking protocols to verify all claims and data before publication. If an error is identified, we promptly correct it and strive for transparency in all updates, feel free to reach out to us via email. We appreciate your trust and support!