Native American historian Josephy dies

Alvin M. Josephy Jr., a prolific historian on Native American affairs who also was a war correspondent, screenwriter and government consultant, died Oct. 16 at his home in Greenwich, Conn. No cause of death was disclosed. He was 90.

While picture editor at Time magazine in the early 1950s, Josephy often journeyed to the American West. He was struck by what he considered the disastrous results of President Eisenhower’s policy ending the autonomy of reservations, but he had trouble appealing to publisher Henry Luce to do a large spread on American Indians.

Josephy wrote in his 2000 memoir, “A Walk Toward Oregon,” that Luce called the Indians ” ‘phonies’ because they refused to give up their reservation and live like everyone else.”

During the next several years, he conducted interviews on his own time with members of the Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest. “They were happy to talk to you as long as you weren’t a dope,” he once said.

He bought a retreat in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon, the ancestral home of the Nez Perce, and used that as a base for his research. He was particularly drawn to the story of the 19th-century Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, whose negotiated surrender with the U.S. Army culminated in his stirring concession: “From where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever.”

Herbert Mitgang, reviewing that last title in The New York Times, called Josephy the “leading non-Indian writer about Native Americans.”

Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Diane Josephy Peavey of Carey, Idaho; three children from his second marriage, Allison Wolowitz of Old Greenwich, Conn., Katherine Josephy of Enterprise, Ore., and Alvin M. Josephy III of Olympia, Wash.; a brother; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandson.