Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,087

This is the grave of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, or Chief Joseph to the genocidal white Americans.

Born in 1840 in the Nez Perce’s home of the Wallowa Valley in what became Oregon, Joseph was the son of “Old Chief Joseph,” better known among his own people as Tuekakas, the generally pro-American chief of the Nez Perce. Now, Tuekakas had taken the name Joseph when he was baptized into Christianity and so he generally called his son by the same name. So we will use that here, not to mention it’s much shorter for me to type. Joseph was born into a pretty stable society. At that time, the Nez Perce was largely benefitting from the arrival of Europeans, because of the trading possibilities. But that only lasted while any tribe was on the margins of European society. Too many whites and they become a plague of locusts who devour anything, still true today.

Gold was discovered on Nez Perce land in 1863. It wasn’t a huge amount, so this wasn’t California in 1849 or Colorado in 1859, but plenty of whites broke the law and rushed onto Nez Perce land and the limited American military presence in the region wasn’t going to do anything to stop them, regardless of the treaties. Some Nez Perce felt they had no choice but to move to the reservation the whites created in Idaho, but since that did not include the homeland of the Wallowa Valley, Joseph became leader of the non-treaty Nez Perce who wanted to remain at any costs. When Tuekakas died in 1871, Joseph took his spot as the most important Nez Perce leader.

By the early 1870s, it was increasingly impossible for the Nez Perce to survive in the Wallowa Valley. All the treaties were lies. All the presidents were liars. All the missionaries were liars. Whites were and are an evil race. Violence against the Nez Perce became commonplace. Joseph was hardly a firebrand. But what choice did he have? He knew that his people could not stay and fight for their homelands? They would be slaughtered. So he decided to gather up as many as would go and make a dash for Canada, where the genocidal project was a little less militaristic and which seemed a possibility for a lot of the tribes still able to move with some autonomy in the northern United States. This happened after the military under O.O. Howard got more aggressive and said that if they did not move, they would be considered enemies and face forced removal. Howard was the abolitionist and pro-Black general who most definitely did not feel the same way about the tribes, though he did have some sympathy for them. He also did a very poor job of catching up to the Nez Perce.

The story of the Nez Perce flight to Canada is well-known and in fact, we’ve talked about it several times in this series due to the graves of some of the American officers who hunted him down. The Nez Perce took an 1,100 mile route, through Yellowstone National Park and north through Montana. This was devastating to the Nez Perce, as people died of all sorts of things in this desperate race to freedom, even outside of white bullets. But finally, they were defeated 40 miles from the Canadian border. Why it would have been so terrible to let the Nez Perce just go to Canada if they wanted has never been clear to me. Howard couldn’t bring them down, so the Army sent Nelson Miles to finish the job. Whether Joseph actually gave the famed speech closing “I will fight no more forever” is unlikely. It was probably fancy, poetic lines created by Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who was there and later became a well-known anarchist, writer, birth control advocate, and painter of Indians.

Chief Joseph surrendered with the understanding that his people would be allowed to return to the reservation in Idaho, where those Nez Perce who hadn’t run away were located. But will you be shocked that whites were a bunch of lying genocidal assholes? You should not be. Miles was fine with this, but that genocidal scumbag William Tecumseh Sherman was not and overruled him. Sherman was a true Indian hater. Instead, they were sent to Kansas. It wasn’t a pleasant journey. They were loaded on cattle cars, like other minority groups in the future, and sent to likely death. This was in eastern Kansas, after a several day railroad ride without heat, totally exposed to the elements. More people died. There, they were held in a concentration camp for several months. Eventually, they were dumped in Oklahoma. Many more died over the next seven years they were there. Overall Nez Perce populations plummeted, as they did for all the tribes when they were exposed to this treatment. Disease epidemics, alcoholism, suicide, giving up on life. Why live?

Joseph worked to get his people back home, trying to convince white authorities that they were defeated and would stick around. He and his people had captured enough of the white imagination to generate some sympathy. At the very moment that whites were putting down the tribes, whites were already starting to romanticize the whole process and so there was some area for sympathy for entertainment value, i.e., Sitting Bull working for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and whites eating it up.

Well, eventually this did get Joseph back to the West, but never his homeland. After being moved around the Great Plains some, which at least wasn’t Florida, Joseph and many of the Nez Perce were assigned to the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington. It wasn’t the Wallowa Valley, but it was a large piece of land and it was similar to that area, both in terms of climate and look. By this time, many hundreds of removed Nez Perce had died of disease, exposure, and all sorts of terrible things. Moreover, the Colville Reservation wasn’t for the Nez Perce. It was a place where whites jump dumped all the local tribes. So there were around 11 different peoples stuck there and they all had histories of not liking each other, warfare, etc. Conflicts abounded. All Joseph wanted was to get to Lapwai, with the Nez Perce who had not fled. At least it was close to home. But nope, not going to happen.

Joseph worked hard at it. He would go anywhere to make his case. He did a bit of work with Bill Cody. He met with Theodore Roosevelt. He let Edward Curtis take a bunch of his pictures. He lobbied powerful Northwesterners. They all thought he was a cute Indian, a reminder of the romantic past. Classic Roosevelt, revel in this while doing jack shit for indigenous Americans.

Joseph died in 1904. He was 64 years old. Supposedly it was of a broken heart, but this is probably romanticizing it. He was too much of a fighter for that.

Chief Joseph is buried in Nez Perce Cemetery, Nespelem, Washington. I don’t know precisely if this gravestone was placed up at the time, but it’s not typical of Nez Perce burials, which at this point is huge piles of dirt where people stick things that remind them of the dead. One recent burial had a six-pack of beer in it. What I do know is that Curtis and Edmond Meany, a big player in Washington historical memory and Native American issues were involved in the burial, so probably it’s them.

If you would like this series to visit other Native Americans fighters against white domination of their people, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Raymond Nakai is in Lukachukai, Arizona and Richard Oakes is in Stewarts Point, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.