Spirit of 1776

For the several thousand people who lived in this area in 1776, King George and the Redcoats were not the issue. Getting enough to eat and trying to raise children who would amount to something probably commanded much of their attention. “When I think of that era, I think that they were just people like we are today,” said David Matheson, a Coeur d’Alene tribal leader. “They had feelings and fears and hopes and aspirations and they tried to live life the best they could.”

It would be decades before the first recorded local contact with white people.

“But if you think that all the activity was happening in Philadelphia, you’re wrong,” said Robert Carriker, professor of history at Gonzaga University. “This was a rock ‘em, sock ‘em era here.”

By 1776, change had come in several forms to the native people living in and around what we now call Spokane.

The horse was a relatively recent arrival. “Not only could you go get buffalo, but your enemies could come to you,” said Carriker.

The gun was another new variable in the social equation.

Devastating infectious diseases, possibly traceable to Spanish exploration of the mouth of the Columbia River around this time, were part of the picture.

And a volcanic ash fall – variously estimated to have taken place around 1770 or 1791 – is said by some historians to have prompted apocalyptic prophecy

In a sense, the doomsayers would be proven right.

But in 1776, freedom and independence were working realities hereabouts.

“Our people were here,” said George Hill, Wellpinit-based heritage/culture coordinator for the Spokane Tribe. “They had been here for thousands of years. We had a lifestyle that was centralized around the salmon.”

Other sources of food included roots, berries and game.

If you have been to Riverfront Park or Mount Spokane, you stood on ground that once had more to do with survival than recreation.

There are no photographs from that time, of course. Our sources of information on that specific era are as disparate as centuries-old archives in Madrid and interpretations of Inland Northwest rock art.

It’s thought that area tribes spoke slightly varying dialects of the Salish language.

And the people embraced a sense of spirituality in which man was just part of a sacred whole that included animals and the natural environment.

But you knew that already.

What was life really like here in 1776?

To get your arms around that might require being open to Indian ways. And not everyone is.

“People want evidence,” said Michael Holloman, director of the Center for Plateau Cultural Studies at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. “They want to back things up with the artifact.

“They want to have something that goes beyond fanciful stories and mythical tales.”

One reason for this is that the master narrative of the West is told from the perspective of the white man.

But in 1776, in Spokane and environs, there were no white men.

So shouldn’t native people get to tell their story the way they see fit?

Why can’t coyote stories be viewed as a version of the truth?

Even if you agree, there’s a problem. The oral history handed down from generation to generation has had gaps, some of them recent.

Francis Cullooyah, director of cultural programs for the Kalispel Tribe, has an office in a community center near Usk, Wash. In the center’s main room, one wall is adorned with photographs of tribe members who served in the U.S. military – many in World War II.

Nodding toward those pictures of uniformed young men frozen in time, Cullooyah said alcoholism took a toll on a generation of adults who should have become respected elders.

“In the last 50 years, we have lost so much information,” he said.

Which doesn’t mean he isn’t able to take a stab at describing life in 1776.

“Each designated person has his job,” he said. “You’re the hunter. I’m the root digger. Everybody has something to do.”

Sure, it was a hard life. Romanticizing it with visions of limitless game and blissful social harmony would be misguided.

Still, for native people, it was a better time than modern days, said Cullooyah.

“Do you know of a happy outcome from a Native American perspective?” he asked. “Maybe if you watch the movie ‘How The West Was Won’ backwards.”

The era preceding the first direct encounters with white people is more than historical curiosity.

“We look at the pre-contact era in trying to define who we actually are,” said Hill of the Spokanes.

In time, the Indian experience would be shaped by a tidal wave of settlers, miners and soldiers shoving them aside. But 229 years ago, before any of the ridges and lakes had English place names, the people who thought of this area as their home inhabited a landscape inextricably linked to who they were.

The MAC’s Holloman, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, looked back in time.

“The rivers connected everything. We were a people that moved. …Those rivers were our highways.

“We were never a static people. …We spent different seasons in different places and not always together at the same time.

“We would be berry picking; we would be gathering roots. We would be gathering bear grass or different plants for weaving. We would be hunting. We would be out collecting flints and things for arrowheads.

“…Wintertime would be our ceremonies, where we would come together and share, where we would really come together culturally.”

There is evidence that an extensive intertribal trading network existed at that time. So it’s conceivable that the native people who lived here had heard about the ever-increasing European immigrants decades before Lewis and Clark and David Thompson came knocking on the teepee door.

“There were people in the tribes who foresaw what was coming,” said Lynn Pankonin, a cultural collections specialist working with the Spokane Tribe.

Sometimes nightmares really do come true.

Anyone who spends time talking with Indians eventually encounters a story. The details vary. But basically it involves the speaker being with an elder and hearing that relative or friend express a powerful, almost eerie sense of connection to, say, a stream or hillside.

It can all seem a bit out there. Until, that is, you stop thinking about it and just try to feel it.

“Our people didn’t see spirituality in man alone,” Hill said. “They saw it in everything that surrounded them. Everything. Right down to the rocks.”

When some in our midst say that their families have been here for a long time, they aren’t talking about 75 or 100 years.

Members of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, for instance, call themselves the Schitsu’umsh. It means “The ones who are found here.”

The year 1776 was huge in American history. In our relatively young corner of this country, that can seem like a long, long time ago.

Unless your roots go back to ancestors the mountains and rivers still remember.