The Restoration of an iłkák'mana: A Chief called Multnomah
Rent from DeepDyveIłkák'mana/a Chief
An iłkák'mana called Multnomah once lived near the river where New England merchants chopped Portland, Oregon, out of a Douglas-fir forest. Perhaps this chief was as influential as Aionwatha/Hiawatha, who helped lay the foundation of the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois Confederacy to the east. With a bow and shield slung behind his back, the chief stood imperiously in Hermon A. MacNeil's 1904 statuette inscribed at its base with his name. Multnomah rose up on his toes to scrutinize the arrival of Bostons, the name for Americans in Chinuk Wawa/Chinook Jargon.1 His sculpted body was that of an older man who still had the strength and agility to vanquish his foes.
Multnomah emerged from the artist's bronze reflecting some Bostons' image of the Noble Savage—a glorious human specimen whose natural qualities of pride, virtue, and courage challenged the need for Western civilization. Influenced by the artistic style of Romantic naturalism, Hermon MacNeil turned the lower Willamette River Valley headman into a Noble Savage.2
Nearby tribes preserved Multnomah in words, but years later many Portlanders believed he was a fake because people who were not Natives romanticized, and denied Indigenous history. Most Portlanders knew nothing about a real chief, although they lived in a town steeped in his identity. Portland was the seat of Multnomah County and it overflowed with bakeries, cleaners, taverns, and organizations bearing Multnomah's name. Residents walked over ground covering the bones of Multnomah's people. [End Page 110]
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Hermon A. MacNeil, "Multnomah," ca. 1907. Bronze, 37 x 10 x 10.25 in. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Jacob Ruppert, 1939 (39.65.54 a,b). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
A powerful headman emerges from the record-keeping traditions of both Indigenous and Western cultures. A small number of oral accounts and chroniclers' written words, bound together with measures of plausibility and probability, corroborate his existence. The restoration of the headman Multnomah returns a Native leader to his rightful place of prominence. It continues the custom of handing down sagas to strengthen Indigenous people. As Elder George W. Aguilar Sr. wrote in 2005 about his Mid-Columbia River and Warm Springs Reservation past, "This is a story that is important to tell for our children, grandchildren, and relatives and anyone connected to our heritage."3
At the height of his power Multnomah was probably sixty years old; for forty years the riverbank where Portland grew was his territory. "His dark, grandly impassible face, with its imposing regularity of feature, showed a penetration that read everything, a reserve that revealed nothing, a dominating power that gave strength and command to every line," stated late nineteenth-century chronicler Frederic H. Balch about the chief.4 Balch told a Native story, but he described the man as a Noble Savage in language that was the literary equivalent of the Romantic naturalism that guided the sculptor's knife.
Uncertainty shrouds the time and name of the headman. Most likely he lived before 1790, but dates of long-ago leaders and alliances often escape the chronological pinpoint. Balch and other chroniclers wrote down "Multnomah" as his name after listening to Columbia River Valley elders, but in the Chinookan language of Kiksht, máłnuma probably means "those towards the water" or "those closer to the Columbia River," so máłnuma describes a people.5
The chief's genealogy is uncertain too. Multnomah probably was a máłnuma, but Balch said that the chief led the "Willamette Nation," so perhaps he was a member of the tribe some pioneers called "Wallamets." Hudson's Bay Company physician Forbes Barclay, who came to the country in 1837 and remained there throughout his life, remembered that Indian people called the nation that...
