Plateau Indian Ways with Words: The Rhetorical Tradition of the Tribes of the Inland Pacific Northwest

4. Writing in English: 1910–1921

75 Writing in English 1910–1921 In 1915 government rangers caught a band of Yakama shooting and trapping wild game animals in the prohibited area of Mount Rainier National Park. The band was led by eighty-two-year-old Chief Sluiskin, who as a boy had tended Chief Owhi’s horses at the Treaty Council of Walla Walla. When the rangers informed the band they were in violation of state law, Chief Sluiskin produced three documents to show that they had been granted the right to hunt and fish. One document dated 1854—a year before the Treaty of Walla Walla—was a treaty written by Governor Stevens; two other documents, written by a judge and a former Indian agent, urged that the Indians should be left alone and not cited for any violation.1 The newspaper article describes the encounter this way: “‘Ugh, wait,’ mumbled old Chief Sluiskin, as he trotted to one of the two tepees that provides shelter for the 30 redskins—the party consisting of that number—and returned with several papers. The rangers read the documents while the old leader smilingly watched them and spoke in his native tongue to his followers.”2 A “lengthy talk” ensued, facilitated by girl interpreters, graduates of the local Indian school, who spoke English fluently. The matter unresolved, it was then referred to officials in 4 76 • Writing in English, 1910–1921 Washington, D.C., who eventually ruled that they were unable to sort out the tangle of legislation and treaties to determine which tribes had which concessions, and in what parts of the state. Chief Sluiskin was not the first nor would he be the last to test the legal limits of state and federal laws and then use written documents to back claims to sovereign rights. His protest nonetheless typifies the nonviolent methods of Plateau Indian activism, with its focus on concerted, strategic legal stands, directly confronting those in power in a manner consistent with traditional ways of direct democracy . This episode calls to mind long-standing tribal values of multilingualism , literacy, and education. These values carried forward through the Allotment Period (1877–1934), the dark period of critical transitions from oral to written communications and from ancestral language to English, giving rise to Plateau Indian English. The move to literacy, of course, did not obviate oral communications ; nor did it suddenly enable Indians to cross the fictive Great Cognitive Divide from concrete to abstract thinking. Largely advanced by scholarship in the 1980s, those paradigms, I hope, have been laid to rest in chapter 2. The question is not what literacy does to people’s thinking, but what people think about literacy.3 Only when a community regards writing as “fulfilling a culturally conserving role,” it is more likely to be acquired and used.4 That is precisely the case with the Plateau Indians. The traverse into literacy and English was largely accomplished by way of schooling, which the Plateau Indians embraced, viewing education not as a tool of civilization and assimilation, as white men had hoped, and but as a tool for cultural preservation and political activism. That Chief Sluiskin putatively “smilingly watched” as the rangers read the documents suggests that he enjoyed beating the white man at his own game, using the white man’s tools to dismantle the white man’s house. He was keenly aware of non-Indian control of written media, as he is quoted in another newspaper article that same year: “White people are always making me stand up and talk. Why is this? I do not understand what they want. They get me tangled. Then the temis tells my talk different from my words. I do not want this. It is a lie. It is the same as stealing.”5 This second article attests to Chief Sluiskin’s effort to set the record straight, as he corrects the rumor reported earlier that he guided Governor Stevens’s son and another man to the summit of Mount Tacoma in 1870 (rather, he guided two unidentified white surveyors in 1855 or 1856, according to his narrative reported in this article). He distrusts the media even as he embraces it, using it for his own ends. His distrust is well placed in another regard. The fascination with the public oratory of authentic, vanquished Indians, telling tales of long ago and far away, Writing in English, 1910–1921 • 77 performs the spectacle...