Elder honored for role in sustaining culture
Nez Perce leader’s award comes with $20,000

LEWISTON – One day after working a night shift at Potlatch Corp., Horace P. Axtell was asleep at home when the doorbell rang, and his spirituality came calling.
“Some elder ladies and a couple of men came to see me who wanted me to go and learn this way of life,” says Axtell, 83, about traditional Nez Perce religion. “That was because of my ability to speak the language fluently. I did not agree right away.”
Axtell’s mother and grandmother were Christians and had raised him that way. It was a difficult decision, he says. But eventually he became a spiritual leader in the Seven Drum religion. And this fall he’ll go to Washington, D.C., to accept the National Heritage Award for preserving the folk arts, which comes with a $20,000 prize.
“I’m really honored by this award I’m getting. To myself I assume all this is coming to me for being dedicated to my tribe. I guess I’d have to say that makes me a proud Nez Perce to represent my people like that.”
Translator from an early age
Axtell was born Nov. 7, 1924, on a ranch outside of Ferdinand where he was raised by his mother and grandmother. As a child he thought Nez Perce was the only language. His grandmother, Jane Moody, could read the weather in the hoot of an owl. She never learned to speak, read or write English. While growing up he would translate for her and witness her signature, an X.
Axtell’s father, also raised Christian, left when he was a baby.
“He had a hard struggle with life,” Axtell says, because of alcohol and diabetes. In later years, relatives told him he should take his father in. Axtell went to Kamiah and got him and took care of him for 20 years. Like him, his father spoke Nez Perce.
“So we talked in this way, and I found out a lot of things about my ancestors. My great-grandfather was a warrior in the Nez Perce War. He was a spiritually strong warrior. He didn’t survive the war. He died at Bear Paw Battlefield, the last war. That helped me decide who I wanted to be, to follow his footsteps.”
A tribe divided
It was not an easy path in a tribe divided by religion during the 1877 war when those who wanted to follow the old ways split from those who followed the teachings of missionaries.
Axtell devoted himself to teaching the Nez Perce language and ways to tribal members. He goes to youth camps, college seminars, prisons, wherever he is called.
The songs, stories and traditions, like his specialty, drum making, are passed on person to person. “There are no books. It all comes from the heart. Everything we learn about our ways is put there.”
As an elder on the council for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a highly educated group of top-notch students from all tribes, Axtell counsels American Indians from all tribes to not forget their roots.
“The main thing I tell them is not to back away from language. Each tribe has a different language. I tell them not to ever stick to your one name. You gotta have an Indian name.”
Name and identity
This is basic to identity, he says. “Because in most of our spiritual beliefs you’ve got to have an Indian name to get into the happy land.”
His last name – Axtell – was the last name of the secretary who worked in the survey office when his grandfather claimed a land allotment in 1885. His Indian name – Isluumts – belonged to the same man. A grandaunt, who was a medicine woman, gave it to him the day he was born. Its meaning is lost to time.
Name-giving ceremonies are coming back strong, Axtell says. Sometimes students come to him and say, “ ‘I got an Indian name now.’ And they’re proud,” he says. “I think a lot of this has to do with that award I’m getting.”
The award will join others beside family photos on the living room wall in the Lewiston Orchards home he shares with Andrea, his wife of 45 years. He sits in his favorite recliner there, his hair in two long braids, wearing a belt buckle beaded with the name Axtell.