Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest by Jack Nisbet

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 treaty proved tortuous and a feeling of “It’s a lie. He’s lying” spread among the conferees (p. 20). In the end, the document was signed and ratified, but the repercussions that unfolded from that fateful moment have remained with the signatory parties to the present day. On the Tulalip reservation that was created by the authority vested in the Point Elliott Treaty, Dover describes deplorable social and economic conditions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Unemployment was rampant, hunger was a daily reality, medical care was virtually non-existent, neither the tribe nor its members had any money, and racist attitudes exhibited by neighboring non-Natives were pervasive.Death hovered all around, with Dover’s older sister numbering among the casualties. The survivors were left suspended in a state of demoralization and alcoholism. Boarding school education, treaties, and reservation life are three topics of many that Dover raises from the welcome perspective of a Native American woman who struggled to survive through those trying and troubling times. Anyone seeking a deeper and richer understanding of Native American history, as well as the growth and development of the reservation community at Tulalip,and Dover’s long-standing efforts in adulthood to revive the cultural practices and traditions that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been so obsessed with stamping out, will find Tulalip, From My Heart an indispensable resource. Readers interested in this area of American history may want to consult what is a growing literature on Native American leaders in the Pacific Northwest. Recommended as a starting place is this reviewer’s own article on the late Chehalis basket weaver Hazel Pete: “A Future with a Past”(Pacific Northwest Quarterly,2000). OtherworksincludeTwoPaths:EmmettOliver’s Revolution in Indian Education (1995) by Ben Smith; Esther Ross: Stillaguamish Champion by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown (2001); White Grizzly Bear’s Legacy: Learning to be Indian (2002) by Lawney Reyes; Standing Tall: TheLifewayof KathrynJonesHarrison(2005)by Kristine Olson;Where the Salmon Run: The Life andLegacyofBillyFrank,Jr.(2012)byTrovaHeffernan ; and, Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman’s Life on Oyster Bay (2013) by LLyn De Danaan. Cary C. Collins Maple Valley, Washington ANCIENT PLACES: PEOPLE AND LANDSCAPE IN THE EMERGING NORTHWEST by Jack Nisbet Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2015. Notes, bibliography. 256 pages. $21.95 cloth. Ancient Places is a guided tour through the natural and cultural history of the inland Northwest with a few jaunts farther afield. Its ten essay-chapters are linked by their rootedness in a rugged landscape and by the genial erudition of their narrator. Jack Nisbet brings deep research and a keen naturalist’s eye to his main story, which is the emergence of the modern Northwest out of a crucible of upheaval that goes all the way back to the Bretz floods — cataclysms that carved the Columbia Gorge and scraped out eastern Washington’s coulee country — and continues through Euro-American settlement, Native dispossession,and the birth pangs of an extractive economy. Nisbet resists sweeping narratives, instead letting the big picture emerge from ordinary lives,little-known events,and odd twists of fate. He tells of Leno Prestini, the Italian terracotta artist who ended up in Clayton, Washington, making decorative facades for big-city banks, and William Manning, the up-and-coming mining engineer who collected Native artifacts from what he assumed was a dying race,  OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 and who is himself forgotten but for Nisbet’s thoughtful portrait, while the Tribes are still here. He tells of the Kalispel elder Victor and his son Masselow, who argued forcefully, in vain, for a reservation in their Pend Oreille Valley homeland. As in his 1994 book, Sources of the River, Nisbet interweaves historical accounts with his own closely observed experiences, moving back and forth through time on the same piece of ground. Sources of the River tethers its digressions to a strong narrative thread: the life of the explorer and fur trader David Thompson. The essays in Ancient Places, by contrast, are multi-threaded, and the tethers are sometimes a little loose. I found the first chapter a tough introduction — readers start with David Thompson’s hunting...