Power Of Tradition Nez Perce Spiritual And Cultural Leader Puts Years Of Wisdom In A Book

Near the beginning of “A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder,” Horace Axtell describes the importance of keeping his tribe’s rituals separate from each other.

For instance, it’s important not to mix the weyakin - the Nez Perce word for power - with the tribe’s religion.

The same goes for the teachings of the sweat house and the war dance, or for name-giving ceremonies and memorials.

“When we mix these things up, they lose their point,” says Axtell.

In that very same sense, his memoir also chronicles another kind of separation: the one between the man Horace Axtell used to be and the strong ideals he and collaborator Margo Aragon have written about in spoken-word style.

That’s the crux. Axtell is just a man. He’s made big mistakes in his life. He did time in prison. Two of his marriages failed.

But the ideals his grandmother and other elders taught him while he was still young managed to survive inside him. Despite his setbacks, Axtell today has emerged as one of his tribe’s foremost spiritual and cultural leaders.

“In our growing-up years, we’re taught the right things. Then something happens … ,” says Axtell, his voice trailing off the further he wanders back. “I do want to illustrate to the young people that you can get down to rock bottom, but you can make up your mind to pull yourself out of there.”

Axtell is 72 years old and has diabetes. His thick hair, in two chestlength braids, has been pewter-grey for decades.

But something in his eyes tells you the fire burning there since Nov. 7, 1924, is as strong as ever. Stronger, even.

For nine years, Axtell has taught Nez Perce language classes at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston. In nearby Lapwai, he leads meetings of the native Seven Drums religion, which had all but died out 30 years ago when he and a group of other Nez Perce elders began to revive it.

He is a member of the Council of Elders of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a Boulder, Colo.-based group which helps Native American college students.

“As they are learning the tools they need to survive in the modern world, they look to the Council of Elders to learn how to keep their own heritage alive,” he says.

Axtell also dances at powwows throughout the region. It was at one of these traditional Native American gatherings in Kamiah, Idaho, that he met Aragon. She was then filming “Nee-mee-poo: The Power of Our Dance,” a 1992 documentary on the importance of Nez Perce dance to tribal culture. Another dancer introduced the two.

“When I interviewed Horace, he just had so many things to say,” recalls Aragon, now the host of a Lewiston TV interview program which uses both the English and Nez Perce languages.

In his Nez Perce dress, Axtell looked every inch the powerful man - a teacher of the language, a respected Native American elder.

But it wasn’t until their conversation was nearly over that Axtell dropped a bombshell - the bombshell that has captured Aragon’s attention for the last five years.

“He told me, ‘I wasn’t always this way,’ ” Aragon says.

What ensued were 20 90-minute conversations that Aragon taped in Axtell’s living room. After culling through the tapes and completing her master’s degree in creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont in June, Aragon finished writing the “A Little Bit of Wisdom” last summer.

For the book, released three weeks ago by Confluence Press in Lewiston (217 pages, $25), Axtell told Aragon things he hadn’t spoken of in years.

The Ferdinand, Idaho, native was raised a Christian, but spoke only the Nez Perce language’s Prairie dialect until he started grammar school. In this windy little town, he still owns property his family received after the Dawes Act deeded land to Native Americans a century ago.

He went to Japan as a soldier at the conclusion of World War II and saw Nagasaki and Hiroshima. By the time he came home, both his mother and grandmother were dead. With them gone, Axtell says he felt lost.

Fueled by alcohol, what Axtell describes as “bad medicine” in his book, he began running with a shifty crowd. He was arrested for stealing tools, tires and gasoline in the late 1940s and spent 11 months in the state penitentiary at Boise.

“I think once in a while, a person should sit down and review himself,” says Axtell, on why he decided to allow his most personal details to go to print.

Says Aragon on the book’s unique, storyteller-style approach: “Horace’s voice is not what you think of as standard written English. He can speak to a person’s heart - and mind.”

What’s so important about this book, Aragon says, is it tells a contemporary Nez Perce man’s story. Most books on the tribe deal with the War of 1877, which culminated in the Nez Perce and their young Chief Joseph being scattered from their Palouse homeland to Oklahoma and the Colville Reservation northwest of Spokane.

Not since 1940, when L.V. McWhorter wrote “Yellow Wolf - His Own Story,” have the thoughts of a Nez Perce elder been recorded in a book, Aragon says.

Those in the tribe who already have read the book say it is “pure Horace.”

“It’s a very modest title, ‘A Little Bit of Wisdom,”’ says Diane Miles, a park ranger and cultural interpreter at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Lapwai. “Because it’s really a lot of wisdom.”

The book represents a different kind of learning than what you might find in college or in technical school, Miles says. It’s the kind of learning a Nez Perce Indian gets from his elders - on relationships, religion and life.

“In Nez Perce tradition, a lot of that kind of knowledge takes a lifetime to learn,” Miles says.

Josiah Pinkham, 25, Axtell’s nephew, says he has called Horace by his Indian name - Isluumts - ever since he can remember. Like Axtell, Pinkham was raised in a Christian family. Under the old man’s tutelage, he’s finally learning the teachings of the Seven Drums.

As many as 40 worshipers now meet Sundays in a Lapwai shack that doubles as the tribe’s longhouse, or church. Ironically, the makeshift longhouse is just a stone’s throw from the site where the Rev. Henry Spalding began preaching his uncompromising brand of Presbyterianism in 1836, which changed the tribe forever.

Some Nez Perce, like Pinkham and Horace Axtell before him, are slowly changing back.

“In our traditional life, our elders were the teachers. They taught us the meaning of why we do the things we do,” Pinkham says. “That’s why Horace is so important. He’s teaching us things about our culture we haven’t been raised up with.”

In “A Little Bit of Wisdom,” Axtell remembers a childhood incident when one of his own uncles was teasing him. It made him mad.

His uncle just laughed, telling Axtell he teased him because he loved him. It was like a trial, his uncle said. A test.

“Throughout your life, you’re going to be teased in many different ways,” his uncle said. “Now you’ve got to make yourself strong so you can take all this.”

That uncle was right, Axtell admits. Life has teased him. It’s also made him strong enough to leave the bad parts of his past behind - to accomplish what he dubs in his book “getting back to my plan.”

Getting back to Axtell’s plan has included a 33-year marriage to his third wife - still going strong - and his 36-year career at the Potlatch sawmill in Lewiston. He retired 10 years ago.

Axtell remains as adamant as ever about keeping all those Native American traditions separate from each other - the ceremonies from the gatherings, the war dance from the longhouse.

To preserve their meaning.

It is important to note, however, that Horace Axtell - once a man so divided from the ideals his grandmother taught him long ago on the Idaho prairie - is now inextricably entwined with them.

That is his own weyekin.

“I’ve had a few downfalls here and there,” Axtell says, with just a hint of sadness. “But I think it’s been all right.”