Our Culture and History: The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians by Don Whereat Patty Whereat Phillips, Melody Caldera, Ron Thomas, Reg Pullan, and Stephen Dow Beckham

Abstract

 Reviews What is missing from this book, and from the work of nearly every historian of Japanese America (this reviewer included), is the experience of Japanese Americans after World War II. Walz’s history covers the years 1882 to 1945: sixty-three years. From 1945 to the present is sixty-eight years. Yet we still lack a history of that very different era for Japanese Americans, when many thousands more immigrated and whose stories don’t fit the Issei-Nisei-Sansei generational model of most JapaneseAmerican history writing. EricWalz has given us what may turn out to be the definitive treatment of inland Japanese Americans, and happy we are to have it. Now maybe Walz, or someone else similarly skilled, can give us the history of Japanese Americans since 1945. Paul Spickard University of California, Santa Barbara Our Culture and History: The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians by Don Whereat with Patty Whereat Phillips, Melody Caldera, Ron Thomas, Reg Pullan, and Stephen Dow Beckham Don Whereat, Newport, Oregon, 2011. Illustrations, notes. 390 pages. $24.95 paper. OurCultureandHistory consistsof sixtyarticles written primarily for the Coos,Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw tribal newsletter during the early 1990s. Tribal member Don Whereat wrote the newsletter and most of the articles in order to disseminate and preserve knowledge of tribal history and culture within the community. The other authors contributed either to the newsletter or to this volume for the same reason .Most of the brief and wide-ranging articles are organized under the category History, but several appear under subdivisions of Language and Ethnology, Cultural Practices, Myths and Spiritual Practices, and Miscellaneous. The Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw are three affiliated coastal Oregon tribes that became confederated in the early twentieth century. They represent different language and culture groups but have interacted and associated with each other since long before whitecontact.Theirhistoriesareentwinedwith each other, and today they are governed by a single tribal entity. Present-day knowledge of their culture and heritage has benefited from oral histories,archaeological work,the research of several early twentieth century ethnologists — including most notably John Peabody Harrington ,Leo Frachtenberg,and Melville Jacobs — and from documentation of their relations with the federal government.Whereat utilized all these resources to write the newsletter articles in his efforts to document and edify his community. In some cases he summarized the sources; in others he transcribed them directly. Whereat’s historical vignettes begin in the pre-contact period but focus most heavily on the nineteenth century. He also includes brief articles on some key court cases that have impacted all of Indian country, including his tribes. Stephen Dow Beckham’s contribution consists of an annotated chronology of key dates in tribal history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.PattyWhereat Phillips, the tribe’s linguist, provides several articles on cultural practices. Archaeologist Reg Pullen contributed an article describing the findings from a site near present-day Bandon.Whereat’s section titled “Language and Ethnology” provides brief biographies of numerous linguists and ethnologists who worked with the tribes, which helpfully provide readers with an understanding of the outsiders who recorded tribal knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The section on myths incorporates mythology and a discussion of its role in tribal life. The articles are brief and easy to read, and the book is a valuable resource for members of  OHQ vol. 114, no. 2 the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw tribal community as well as those interested in tribal and local history in Oregon. Teachers will find some of the stories useful in lesson plans. The book is most valuable, however, because it reflects what people inside the tribal community believe to be the important aspects of their history and culture.As such,it provides insights not only into the past but also into the meaning of that past to the present-day community. David R.M. Beck University of Montana Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer by Chad S. Hamill Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2012. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 192 pages. $21.95 paper. Chad Hamill’s book is...