Missoula News

Western Writers

An Interview With Charles Wilkinson, Author of Siletz History ‘The People Are Dancing Again’

By Hudson Spivey, Guest Writer, 4-15-11

Charles Wilkinson has written several notable books on a wide range of issues facing the modern West. His latest book, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (University of Washington Press, 576 pages, $35) is a fascinating, at times heart-wrenching, historical account of the tribe he worked to help restore in the seventies. The book traces the long history of the Siletz, from the days preceding contact with Euro-American settlers, through war, relocation, and eventual termination as a federally recognized tribe. It continues into the modern era with the tribe’s restoration and subsequent revival of traditional heritage, arts, and language. Widely regarded as one of the nation’s pre-eminent experts in tribal and natural resources law in the West, Wilkinson is Distinguished Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and is the author of many books, including The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West and Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.

New West: This book obviously grew from a deep personal regard for the Siletz people, and for their remarkable survival amidst immense adversity. How did this project first come about?

Charles Wilkinson: I was an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund here in Boulder in the seventies, and had represented the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin in being restored. Congress had terminated tribes in the fifties, broken the treaties, sold off the land, and ended all federal services, with the idea that they’d just blend into the larger society. The policy was a colossal failure. When the Menominee were the first tribe to be restored, people from Siletz came out and said they wanted to achieve restoration, and I was assigned to the case.

Very soon after that, by coincidence I went to teach at the University of Oregon Law School and I was now within two hours of the reservation. That meant that I got to see a lot of the Siletz people. It was the time of the fish wars in the Northwest, when tribes had been awarded fifty percent of the salmon runs, so Indian issues were very sensitive and there was strong opposition from the fishing community to the bill.  There were a lot of public meetings, at which the tribal members and I would go to explain that the bill didn’t affect fishing rights. There were a lot of late night meetings and I just got to know people really well.

The bill went through in ‘77, and then in 1980 they got a small reservation and at that point I signed off as being tribal attorney. But I kept up with people over the years, and one thing I came to realize over the years is that the Siletz cemetery is the only place where I really know a number of people who have passed away and where their gravesites are. When I’d go back there, I’d find myself walking the Paul Washington cemetery—which has great meaning to the Siletz people—and I began to realize the bond I felt with them.

So then in 2005 the tribe asked me to write the history, and I thought about it a bit. I was in between books, which is a time I love, because I can let my mind roam and see what I want to do next. I hadn’t thought of this, but then wow—I’d always been interested in their history, I knew some of their history—but then the idea to really get into it really, really intrigued me.

NW: You mention in the Preface the extensive collaboration in the creation of this book between yourself—as writer—and the tribe. In what ways were the Siletz people involved in producing The People Are Dancing Again?

CW: I told them right at the beginning—this came up at a tribal council meeting—that I had to be completely independent. We would be working closely together, but the calls had to be mine. They just weren’t going to have a rigorous history written if they could overrule the author. But they very quickly agreed to that.

I realized later that it was a matter of enlightened self-interest. They wanted a book that would stand the test of time and independence was necessary for that. It was a very important part of our relationship.

Two people in the cultural resources department, Robert Kentta and Bud Lane, are just deeply steeped in Western Oregon history, Western Indian history. They are amazing. They have knowledge both from the stories that they’ve been hearing all their lives—the oral tradition—and have also read everything that the white people have written. It was just amazingly helpful, and essential to the book, to have people of that quality available to me.

NW: I understand that the tribe was also involved in editing the manuscript once you completed the original first draft.

CW: We had a total of four days of retreats going over the manuscript page by page. And I mean, as in: “Okay, we’ve talked about page 80. Anybody have anything else on page 80? Ready to turn to page 81? Okay, what do we have on page 81?” And it was a 600-page manuscript!

NW: Was that a painstaking process, going over the manuscript page by page?

CW: It was painstaking. It was also painful. In this book, basically the first two chapters are very positive from the tribal standpoint. Before white people came, they’re very proud of their traditional culture, and think of those times as being times when they were totally under their own sovereignty. Then the last three chapters are positive. In the modern era, they’ve had a revival, as really nearly every tribe has.

But then the eleven chapters in between are just murder, and disease, and being torn away from their ancestral villages, forced assimilation, breaking up of the reservation—it just goes on and on. It was hard to be in the room. Being called savages, and uncivilized, and so forth—really very painful. It was an exhausting process.

We did one day on the first two chapters—aboriginal—because there’s a lot of complexity there. So we put those chapters off, and rewrote those, and then we went through about thirteen chapters in a two-day period. That was incredibly intense. At the start of the second day, everybody was just talking about how they just went back, got in bed and went to sleep after the first day. Then, later on, we had a fourth day.

NW: You mention early in the book that much of the histories written about Indian peoples fail to “convey the humanity of the Indian people.” What challenges did you face as a non-Indian writer attempting to present the Indian voice, and how were you able to overcome them?

CW: Well, in a personal way, I’ve always been very interested in and sympathetic to dispossessed people. My father was a Southerner who did not believe in segregation, and that always made a mark on me.

But in terms of how it is I try to capture their views, I try to get them from them. I don’t think of it as my views or my understanding them, as much as it is my putting down what they say—and then having to test it sometimes to see if I have any difficulty with accuracy. If I’m trying to understand how they feel about something, I’m triangulating their experiences. It doesn’t come from me. I’m a pass-through.

NW: In the introduction you write that the Siletz reservation was “one of the finest Indian reserves ever created,” and that its loss is “one of those dark and stained episodes” of Siletz history. Since restoration, have there been any recent steps to reclaim some of the former land?

CW: First, there were about 3,200 acres reclaimed at restoration in 1980 by statute. The reservation had 1.1 million acres, so returning three thousand is a very small percentage of that. Like all tribes, they have a very ambitious land acquisition program. I don’t know what the latest numbers are, because in terms of land they are a land-poor tribe. I think now they’re up around thirty or forty thousand acres, and they are buying it regularly.

NW: The Siletz tribe was one of the first few tribes to be recommended for termination. What was the government’s rationale for terminating the Siletz tribe, and how were they able to achieve consent from the tribe to do that?

CW: Termination came out of a particular era in American history, and American Indian history. First of all, there’s always been pressures to eliminate Indian reservations, such as, “Why do we need them? Why can’t these people just get on with it and become regular Americans, and be assimilated?” One reason is that they don’t want to be. They want to maintain their cultures. But there’s always been that pressure, and always will be, to eliminate what are viewed as special rights.

But on the other hand, the kind of rubric that was used was that this would free them from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was a disaster back then, and Indian Country was just in shambles; worst poverty in the United States, anywhere, including rural African-American communities in the South. And the number of senators and representatives who actually worked on this was very small. So if somebody who was not really focused on it would say, “Why should I vote for this bill?” it would just be easy to say, “Well, you have an idea how poor Indians are and how oppressive the Bureau of Indian Affairs is. This will give them a chance.” So some of that was sincere, and some of it was just a cover for the real business of ending the treaties, ending the reservations and selling them off.

NW: I really enjoyed the way this book personalizes the struggle of the Siletz to persevere as a people—through war, relocation, encroachment, termination, and restoration. What figure, or figures, do you feel personify the willpower and determination of the Siletz people as a whole?

CW: I believe that part of Indian culture being maintained is that the people care about it, they love it, and they want to keep it. That’s the foundation. But that there are also “sustainers,” people who embody the values, are admired and inspire people to keep their cultures. And somebody like Jim Thorpe would be an example of that—to Indian people generally, in addition to his own tribe. Vine Deloria, Jr., I think, is an example of that in more recent times.

There are two sustainers I see here. First would be Tyee John, who I had not heard of before this book. It turns out that he is one of the great war chiefs in all of U.S. tribal history, and the victories in the Rogue River War were just unbelievable. Then when you get to understand him, you see that he was a general and a military leader in the largest sense. He was imbued with the rules of war, and was in that sense a very ethical soldier, and a great one, and a great strategist, and was victorious in these four major battles going down the Rogue River. But then, after his great speech when he said he wouldn’t go to the reservation, he did. He was forced to after losing the battle of Big Bend, and was force-marched north on the Trail of Tears. But he never quit.

There was a rule back then that you had to get a pass to leave the reservation. And he just hated that—he wanted to go down south and hunt in his old homeland and forests. His name was “Elk Killer,” Tecumtum.  Tyee John took the position, “Well, if we’ve got to get a pass to leave—this is our land, our sovereign land, this is our reservation—so if military officials want to come on our reservation then they’re going to have to get a pass from me to come onto the reservation.” And, he says, “I’ll souse anybody in the river who comes onto this reservation—any military officer who comes on without at pass.” So I think he was very inspirational, in terms of being a sustainer and keeping the culture alive.

And then the other would be a modern person, Gladys (Bensell) Muschamp, who was an artist. There are basket-making people, and she was an artist. At one point she joined the Indian Shaker Religion, and stopped drinking. She’d been drinking too much. Her grandson—you know, I talked with him in some detail—he wanted this story to be in the book, that she stopped drinking and that’s when her greatest basket period was done. She passed it on to young people and she would pass on the language, also, and stories. I think that she was very inspirational, and was a sustainer in a different way than Tyee John.

NW: Reading this book, I was continually reminded of the scars that still remain in the West from Euro-American conquest and settlement. What role—if any—do you think this book, and other tribal histories like it, should play in our identity as people living in the West? Is this a story that should be taught in Oregon schools?

CW: That was one subject we took up in Seattle, because the book is too large to be a text in most circumstances. There will probably be a paperback edition that won’t have the note material, bibliography, and so on in the back, and maybe fewer photographs and fewer maps. That makes it a shorter book.

The Oregon Historical society has a Mark Hatfield lecture every year, and two years ago I gave it. It was two nights, and I read the removal chapter in Portland on one night, and then part of the first two chapters at Willamette the next night. But in Portland it was quite a large crowd, really several hundred people, and of course a lot of them were history buffs—particularly Oregon history buffs.

I felt deluged by people afterward who said, “I’ve never heard of this before. This is really interesting. I had no idea. We have to somehow come to grips with this. This is just something totally new to me.”

A couple weeks ago in Newport they have a monthly group called, “Writers on the Edge.” They actually asked me to do this before they knew about the book, and here the book is writing about their town in part. So I was up there, and it was a large crowd, and just intense interest. It was very moving, how interested the people were. So I think that it probably will result in a greater understanding, appreciation, and support of the tribe in a general, unquantifiable way. But still, something of significance.

Hudson Spivey lives and writes in Missoula, Montana where he is pursuing a degree in environmental thought and writing. His work has previously appeared in Adbusters Magazine.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.