Considering the Revolution

“Considering the Revolution: Indigenous Histories and Memory in Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Indigenous Plateau” was the opening public plenary at the 2021 virtual conference of the National Council on Public History (NCPH). The session, sponsored by NCPH and the National Park Service (NPS), initiated what will be a series of five annual scholarly roundtables considering the origins and legacies of the American Revolution, dialogues which will contribute to larger discussions during NPS’s commemorations of the Revolution’s 250th anniversary about its changing interpretation and its continuing relevance to the American people. These discussions will be used by NPS staff in their interpretive work with the public regardless of their geographic location or primary interpretive focus, by NCPH members as they prepare themselves and their students for the 250th commemorations, and by members of the public as they consider the relevance of the Revolution to their own lives.Laurie Arnold (Sinixt), director of Native American Studies and associate professor of history at Gonzaga University, Miki’ala Ayau Pescaia (Native Hawaiian) Chief of Interpretation, Education and Volunteers, Kalaupapa National Historical Park, and Maija Katak Lukin (Inupiat) Alaska Native Tribal Relations Program Manager, Region 11 Alaska, shared stories of their homelands, their communities, and their ancestors, narratives specific to place and spanning temporalities, knowledge built from lifeways and passed through generations. Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, demonstrated ways we can employ Indigenous heritage reclamation and decolonizing museum and interpretation practices to amplify Indigenous voices and re-center Indigenous knowledge.The resonance of these stories was even more heightened that day, March 18, because the session occurred mere hours after Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) was sworn in, becoming the first Native American to serve on a presidential cabinet. NCPH and NPS are institutions determined to broaden the American stories we learn and to expand our comprehension of American history. As Miki’ala Pescaia noted, “We need to revisit history over and over again…at NPS, we’re continuously trying to shift the narrative and create more space for more voices.” The panelists will remember the day they—four Indigenous women—took the virtual stage to initiate a five-year conversation co-hosted by an agency which now answers to an Indigenous woman as a leap forward, one step in a journey begun by others and carried on by those who will come next.In West of the Revolution, historian Claudio Saunt called on readers to broaden their boundaries of “1776” and recognize a vibrant continent beyond the battles waged in the first American colonies. This panel advanced that work. Despite enormous change wrought by colonialism, 250 years is only one long moment in time on Indigenous homelands peopled for millennia. With this in mind, the essay that follows includes place-based narratives from the Indigenous Plateau, Hawai‘i, and Alaska. Amy Lonetree’s discussion of Indigenous heritage reclamation follows as a separate essay.Ten thousand years ago, Creator placed our ancestors by these waters, the Swanetkqha. He charged the four-legged beings with our care, knowing that humans were yet too pitiful to survive on our own. Salmon also volunteered his body to feed us, sustain us, foster us, and with these guides and protectors by our side, we made our homes and grew our families and cared for the lands which cared for us.Centuries passed. About 9500 years ago, the man who would become known around the world as the Ancient One died and found a resting place along the Swanetkqha where he remained undisturbed until the last decade of the twentieth century. Then he was dislocated by people unknown to him, removed from his river, and suffered years of scientific experiments before he was once again laid to rest in his homelands.Many stories unfolded and were told and retold in those intervening millennia, and cultures and identities emerged from those narratives, shaping what we recognize today as Plateau lifeways and values. Some aspects will resonate across Indigenous communities, some are distinctly our own. As we think about the 1770s in what is currently the Northeastern United States, I call on us to look west, west, farther west to a place sheltered by mountain ranges, nourished by rivers, and fed by prairies rich with foods that nourished us.The place we call home is known as the Columbia Plateau. I call it the Indigenous Plateau because it was and remains an Indigenous homeland, and because the man after whom it was named never ventured to it. Rather than erase its own people, we can decolonize that name and restore them. The region sits between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range, spanning a territory from what is currently southern British Columbia, Canada, to northeastern Oregon in the United States. The people of this place speak both Salish and Sahaptian languages, and they have resided on these lands together since Europe was in its Mesolithic epoch. Imagine that for a moment—our ancestors recognized each other then, in ways we recognize each other now.Plateau peoples were interdependent. They typically lived in small group or village formations, joining other villages sometimes, separating into small groups at others. They practiced the seasonal round, a lifeway built from place-based knowledge of foods, animal migrations, and seasons. They were not nomadic, as scholars and popular culture have previously characterized many Native and Indigenous groups, but practiced an informed cyclical migration that derived meaning from ancestral knowledge passed through generations. Interdependence allowed them to thrive in good years and survive in lean years, while trade and kinship with partners and families across mountains, plains, and rivers connected this place to much of what is now the American West.The horse arrived on the Plateau in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but human signifiers of change—traders, missionaries, settlers—did not appear for another century. When we think about the 1770s and noise from the guns and the cannons and the men in throes of battle and death fighting the American Revolution, it is important to contrast that with the quiet and the peace of the Plateau. Aside from the horse, a new four-legged brother, it was a place largely unchanged since the Creator’s time. Indigenous communities frequently observe how the time since colonial contact represents the equivalent of a few moments in the span of our histories. Non-Indigenous traders did not arrive on the northern Plateau until 1810, only a few years after Lewis and Clark’s expedition took them across the southern Plateau. The United States signed its first treaty with an Indigenous nation in 1778, the Delaware Treaty. The first treaty on the Indigenous Plateau did not come until 1855, and the four northern Plateau reservations were created by Executive Order after the United States ended the practice of treaty-making with Native nations in 1871. The most recent one, the Kalispel Reservation, was not created until 1914, the eve of World War I.Despite their recency, colonization and settler colonialism have wrought great change on the Plateau. Gone is the silence which pervaded this place until extractive industries moved in. While the outlines of the mountains provide the same ballast, hydroelectric dams have changed the shape and flow of the rivers, perhaps none more than the mighty Swanetkqha. This river begins in British Columbia and flows nearly 1250 miles to the Pacific Ocean. Less than a century ago, it still followed its self-selected channels. Today, fourteen dams mechanize the river, electrifying much of the of the Pacific Northwest and California and irrigating the Columbia River Basin. Grand Coulee Dam, constructed between 1933 and 1942, was built without fish passage, so the salmon who were indigenous to the river’s headwaters have not been home in eighty years.For millennia, Kettle Falls was the most important fishing and trading site on the northern Indigenous Plateau. Thousands of Indigenous People would travel to this site in the summer, reuniting to fish, trade, gamble, and renew or create kinship ties. People remember that in good years, there were so many fish it seemed possible to cross the river on their backs. In lean years, when fewer salmon made their way up the river, people took what they needed to get through the winter but left many more undisturbed so they would return again the next year. They took time to pass down a story of how salmon came to be at Kettle Falls. Coyote, that trickster, was in search of a wife, and he was in a bargaining mood. He began a journey from the ocean, following the Swanetkqha and bringing salmon along with him. When he spied a village that was home to marriageable women, he stopped and built a waterfall which acted as a barrier for salmon migration upstream. Villages were happy to welcome him and the abundant salmon, but Coyote would only leave the waterfall intact if a woman agreed to marry him. Several times he made this request and each time was laughed out of the village. Coyote destroyed the falls in fits of petulance and pique each time, promising that salmon would swim right by those spots instead of pausing, making it difficult for the people to catch salmon. When Coyote created Kettle Falls, he repeated his promises and asked who would marry him in return for his largesse. The people fell silent. Beaver, shy and reserved, stepped forward and accepted his proposal. Coyote was so happy he made the falls larger and more beautiful for her, with many places for her to stay hidden while she watched the world around her.The People gathered at the falls and the falls sustained them. For millennia. Until 1941. In 1941, Grand Coulee Dam was nearing completion and the US government told citizens and leaders of the Colville Confederated Tribes that the reservoir created by the dam would soon change the river’s flow and its shorelines and would submerge Kettle Falls under the man-made body of water. The reservoir would be 130 miles long and would be named for the president who visited the dam during construction, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In June 1941, the community hosted a Ceremony of Tears to bid farewell not only to the falls, but to the way of life which had sustained countless generations of ancestors. Plateau People dressed in their finest and sang and prayed and feasted in honor of their past and the salmon, and so much more. Once the reservoir was complete, Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area (LRNRA) opened to visitors.These days, more than one million people per year visit the Lake Roosevelt section of the Swanetkqha. They come to waterski and camp and revel on houseboats. For these visitors, Coyote and Beaver and Kettle Falls feel as distant as the American Revolution. Or perhaps they are entirely unknown, because the LRNRA materials do practically nothing to acquaint visitors with this place. The NPS describes national parks as “large natural places having a wide variety of attributes, at times including significant historic assets,” while recreation areas are characterized as “large reservoirs and emphasize water-based recreation.” The Swanetkqha is clearly a place replete with narratives and “historic assets,” so minimizing it as a playground misses opportunities to introduce visitors to its vibrant past and dynamic present.On the LRNRA website (which hasn’t been updated since 2015), visitors find the following on the History and Culture tab:The mighty Columbia River has drawn people to its waters for over 9,000 years. 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This session, called on us to broaden the Revolution’s The 1770s an significant moment in American but its was not in its time. of Indigenous peoples lived beyond the of those and for them the we each was another day in their was for one region at one and while its across the it is an to its as The initiated but it would nearly a century before colonization was on the Plateau, and even now it is important to that a is but a moment when to of the Plateau we recognize the and of lifeways and because the People and this place the stories for time. in the of to and our people where we left our the will remember and them to and The United States of was its boundaries In the of and the of made its way across the great out the voices that had on and for a thousand and to be under also for more lands to and of their the of or what is called the Pacific a group of These are home to a people with to the the the and to the of the into in one would find a of a million people. were and on their with the world around them. the history of their ancestors, and with generations in mind, there was a and to the than on scholars of and to the of at the time did not for their knowledge and In used a to the between named and to its used for and even They that the was round, that the its from the and that the was a while so many still the to be in who in the world the none of them stopped in, until in under the British was to and about the and people of the He had on and who were his trying to their and scholars who were to this some with other Pacific there are practices that are to and of these practices would in this between and the to this moment to a great would prepare in with was used to the body of a their the until the When was he was the same as body was the and he were and his his and were to the so that his people with their and honor him as his culture and were laid in public in The one on another was to or their their would to they were from history and nothing of them 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came across He his on and trade, and of would be to in for his as the provide would the between and made his way up through the Pacific Northwest and how were but more he how important the trade and he began to about this world for the of the When he to Hawai‘i, the had He that who him on his was still a out for him so he had but to his and to who would become was to with the way he is in narratives The who him him for his and others him and him as a and is by many each his name and Several him in When to the with he of his and and also right after and they how and the people to and the many and is this have to of these and and but what is the and who was these of and for what and The first of the for the rest of the world was in these This would the of the great of and of and would in that would nearly the is through that we can a more and of the of history to our the of the American Revolution through an Indigenous with who Indigenous peoples the interpretation and of history to and is as is the of Indigenous voices in the The is difficult and but we each have a to work and the history each is would be and the session, each that Indigenous people begins with our Maija Katak Lukin that in Alaska practices are the same as 250 years or years or generations knowledge and through and work is shared as the community to the and each Lukin this knowledge with created by and the and about peoples in the narratives that government and visitors still up on to learn about Northwest Alaska. the created by and which characterized people as or when recognize themselves as and with the Indigenous Plateau, geographic of to what is now Alaska. arrived in the region in a across the Ocean. the Indigenous peoples of this place from a and his them as They were and and they the people he as and For Lukin shared a of a woman and by in Alaska, that in the years between visit and the session, remained with their ancestors, as it also asked the to consider what it to look at of find in their that the first to visit our homes told the world we were the Indigenous people to our narratives by us as not only Indigenous people, but who those stories as of Alaska during the century but changed for people until the both colonization and a In Indigenous people and culture were and its arrived in the of and The to a call for by in who were themselves to from and in as the US Education in Alaska. years of the there was not a in the who to the National Park Service of and work in Alaska is a one of both and for indigenous people in many were to their Native and practices as and many of the from the century as of village of the her the of culture and by that the with of Native out of and into He and of Native to Native American remains one of most is important to recognize that these those of people from an These are stories from the last century, of from or having because they did not speak were passed down the to learn others in their as a because into and relevance is through For the of people having many for is more than a by the how of are can the between life and death in the Alaska that of Alaska history is by but that her history and knowledge is from the had a as the of the National first Indigenous in that of her was her and her as she have we it to be and we not to and to generations of history. Lukin that the of and through or in can us what and how their were but that the is and and arrived in homelands where lifeways were and they to have to new and new and community members speak as as but ancestors from would recognize the practices as those and passed down across generations. people honor as a lived of and a lifeway with meaning that a century of colonization These narratives the United States but they also resonate as American stories of a shared past and a dynamic Ayau Pescaia shared her stories as a Native from generations of her before noted, the first Park and Chief of for is not a but a to that and our is the people who were there before and what made that and that place so we to broaden our boundaries of and more of American this panel the National Park Service on place as much as on Indigenous people as of knowledge than This in interpretation is a which than a call to interpretation of our homelands can become a an a look forward to more

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