Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964

PREFACE

PREFACE The present work is an outgrowth of my previous research on various Indian tribes living on the Columbia River Plateau. In 1977, I began research on a book dealing with the history of the Palouse Indians of eastern Washington. During the course of my research, I traveled west with my colleague, Richard D. Scheuerman, to the Yakama Reservation where we interviewed descendants of the Palouse people. As a result, we met Mary Jim and Andrew George, and our association with these and other elders enriched our research and our lives. This was my first acquaintance with the Yakama Reservation, and it is one that has developed over the years. In addition to researching on the reservation, I traveled to Seattle to conduct research at the National; Archives, Pacific Northwest Region. There I met the gracious and helpful archivist, Joyce Justice, who introduced me to the papers of the Yakama Indian Agency, and I was impressed with the large collection of materials available dealing with the Yakama Reservation. After becoming acquainted with the collection, I determined that when I finished the Palouse book, I would begin a study of the Yakama Reservation . In 1986, Washington State University Press published Renegade Tribe: The Palouse Indians and the Invasion of the Inland Pacific Northwest, and after the book was released, I started work on a study of the Yakama Reservation. Originally, I intended to write a history of the Yakama Reservation , and I began reading the letters found in the voluminous letter books kept at the National Archives. However, the more I read, the more I realized that the Yakama Reservation was little different from other reservations in terms of administrative history. I asked Joyce Justice if I could review some other documents, including records of the Indian court, birth records, death certificates, bills of sale, and marnage zx x Death Stalks the Yakama certificates. These were documents that required a statistical methodology, and I resolved to collect these documents in order to study selected aspects of Yakama social history. I first worked through the bills of sale, since I had a good deal of experience dealing with the Indian trade on another reservation. After coding the bills of sale and entering them into the computer, I generated data that demonstrated the purchasing power of Yakama women on the reservation. The results of this work have been published in Nancy Shoemaker, editor, Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, Routledge, 1995. Work on the Yakama bills of sale and helpful encouragement from Fred Hoxie stimulated my interest in the social history of the people, and so I turned my attention to nearly four thousand Yakama Death Certificates in Record Group 75 of the National Archives, Pacific Northwest Region. When I was a child, my mother explained that Indian reservations had been dangerous places to live, places where large numbers of people, particularly small children, died because of diseases. This is a common theme among Indian people and among historians who study Native Americans. I decided to investigate the notion through a statistical analysis of Yakama Death Certificates. I chose to focus on one reservation, knowing that no one had used Death Certificates in work on Yakama people. In order to study disease, population, and childhood mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, I copied every Death Certificate available, sorted the documents to remove duplicates, and arranged them by year. Next, the certificates were coded and entered into the computer. With the able help of Neal Hickman, Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, and currently Director of Research for the Gallop Organization, we generated a great deal of data dealing with causes of death, ages at death, and location of the the person at the time of death. We addressed a number of variables and asked numerous questions about the data. Hickman's assistance has been invaluable. For eight years I have labored with the data and have written a narrowly-defined scholarly study emphasizing on aspects of death on the Yakama Indian Reservation using an interdisciplinary Native American studies approach. I focus on epidemiological and nutritional Preface Xl transitions among the Yakama that significantly affected disease and death on the reservation over time. Work on Native American mortality has been difficult personally due to the deaths of so many people, particularly infants and children. People of the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation are more than numbers to...