Nez Perce Remain A People Divided By Faith
The word “heathen” still makes her cringe.
Robbie Paul, a Nez Perce Indian, heard it often growing up as a Presbyterian. And she still hears it among her people, the Christian Nez Perce who live in Lapwai, Idaho.
“I struggle with the word,” said Paul of Spokane, a coordinator for the Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education. “How can we put down our own brothers who live traditionally? … It hurts to hear it.”
“Heathen,” which refers to people who don’t believe in God or the Bible, was occasionally used during the Talmaks Presbyterian Camp Meeting this month.
As a tribe, the Nez Perce have been divided not only by treaties, but also by religion.
Most of the Nez Perce in Idaho are Presbyterians. Those who live on the Colville Reservation in Nespelem, Wash., are mostly followers of the Seven Drum Religion or Dreamer faith, the traditionalists who dance, drum and worship the Great Spirit. Some have also converted to Catholicism, like many other members of the Colville Confedereated Tribes.
The Nee-Mee-Poo, which means “the people” in Nez Perce, weren’t always geographically divided. Before the treaties of 1855, 1863 and 1887, the Nez Perce territory used to cover 17 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Oregon.
Those treaties reduced their land to a 138,000-acre reservation - 1 percent of what they once owned.
Joseph, one of the Nez Perce chiefs, refused to leave his ancestral land in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. After months of fighting and forced marches in 1877, members of his band of the Nez Perce were sent to Oklahoma, where many died of malaria and starvation. Eight years after they left their ancestral land, they returned west to resettle in Nespelem.
Chief Joseph was a follower of the Great Spirit. During treaty meetings, government officials couldn’t understand that his naturalist religion was inevitably tied to his ancestral lands.
“We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do,” Chief Joseph once said. “We do not want that. We may quarrel with men about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit.”
While the descendants of those who signed the treaties are now sovereign Nez Perce representatives under U.S. law and live on the Idaho reservation, those of the Chief Joseph tribe are still considered exiles. In Nespelem, their band is one of 11 that make up the Colville Confederated Tribes.
These Nez Perce, about 500 in all, don’t view the Christian Nez Perce as traitors, said John Grant, a Nez Perce who lives in Nespelem. But there is still tension between the groups.
“We still feel the same way that Chief Joseph did,” he said. “It hurts us that they’re Christians.”
After Presbyterianism came to the Nez Perce in the mid-1800s, the two camps lived side by side for 12 years, said Cecil Corbett, a church elder and former president of what’s now the Cook School of Theology in Arizona. They would mix on occasion and sometimes influence each other’s practices.
Even after Joseph’s band departed, some traditionalists remained. Talmaks, an area about a square mile in size, was reserved strictly for the Christian Nez Perce, said Lynus Walker of Kamiah, the ruling elder of the Presbyterian Camp Meeting Association. They were too close to the “non-believers” and needed a Christian refuge, he said.
“They didn’t believe in God above,” said Walker, 84, of the traditionalists. “They believed they could find spirits by going out into the mountains. … They do their rituals and dance and jump around. We sing songs in harmony but we don’t jump around.”
Traditional Nez Perce have followed the Seven Drum religion for thousands of years, Grant said.
“We learned it by mouth and ear and it is passed down to us by our elders,” he said.
But the conflicts of the 19th century aren’t as divisive now, said James Stripes, an American Indian history instructor at Washington State University.
The Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho uses a picture of Chief Joseph on its seal. People from both camps have intermarried and moved back and forth from Nespelem to Idaho. There also are many Nez Perce on the reservation who are sympathetic to the Seven Drum tradition, he said.
“The (conflict) was the result of outside pressures from an imperial power,” Stripes said, referring to the U.S. government. “The U.S. Indian policy deliberately stimulated tensions within the Indian community to create factions.
“The differences are less divisive today because natives have more of an understanding of that process.”
While acknowledging the religious divide, some of the Nez Perce at the Talmaks gathering say they still have much in common.
“There’s always been a respect for the Creator and creation,” said Corbett, pointing out that Chief Joseph’s father, Old Joseph, was one of Henry Spalding’s first two converts.
In fact, one of the goals of the six local Presbyterian churches that sponsor the Talmaks camp is to “begin conversation” with traditionalist Nez Perce, Corbett said.
Paul, a descendant of both Nez Perce camps, found comfort and a sense of family at the Talmaks gathering. But she sometimes has mixed feelings about being Presbyterian.
“I hope we can come together and stop putting each other down because one (group) is Christian and one is not,” she said. “We both have connections with the Creator.”
, DataTimes