Visit to Yakama Nation

               Yesterday Hands for a Bridge and Roosevelt’s Native American Club climbed aboard a bus before seven in the morning. We’d return just before ten that night. The bus driver, Marvin, knew he was taking us to the Yakama reservation and mistakenly thought he could leave us and return at the end, but Polly disabused of him of this as we rolled away from the building: he’d be with us all day, through the numerous stops she and Lucy—the director of the Yakama Nation Peacekeepers—had planned for our group of thirty students and seven adults.

              Hands for a Bridge students were nervous. I’d passed along Lucy’s concerns that our group would come with stubborn preconceptions: she said she didn’t have time or energy to sooth feelings of guilt or discomfort. And Polly had told the group Monday that she was spending family status, bringing this group onto the reservation for a cultural tour.

              I’d prepared students with readings about the confederated tribes and bands, the 1855 Isaac Stevens treaties and the Land Allocations Act, the Fish Wars of the 1970s, some cultural values of Yakama peoples as told by a grandma, the Indian Child Welfare Act returning to the Supreme Court, missing and murdered Yakama women and children, the story of the Inaba family farms sold to Yakama Nation, and quick tours of and questions from tribal websites.

              Ultimately, students on the way home last night spoke of learning more on this day than in years at school—about the history where we live, about our relationship to food and land and people, about sustainability and stewardship, and about community and resilience.

              Our first stop was at fisheries in Cle Elum, where the Yakama Nation flag proudly waved. We learned that this fishery, among the several others run by the Yakama Nation, is funded in part by the Bonneville Power Administration—as a form of reparations to replenish the flow of salmon that suffers the seven dams constructed down the Columbia on traditional Yakama villages and fishing and spawning waters, including the Dalles dam that turned the sacred Celilo Falls into a lake.

              This first fishery was devoted to the Spring Chinook, and the second we saw, a newer facility, to Coho. Both were fed by well and river water, but the newer one used a sophisticated technology to re-oxidize water recirculated to draw less from the river. One of the students noticed the fry would excite near the surface when our guide stood near the tanks. Owen’s astute observation was correct: At the Coho facility, they drop feed on top of the water though it habituates fish to rise to the surface where they’re more vulnerable to hunting birds and other predators: in the Spring Chinook facility, fish are given their food from a belt that runs the bottom instead.

              Charlie wanted us to know, despite conceptions we may have had about Native Americans in harmony with nature, that he was a scientist, too. A student reflected afterwards that if settlers hadn’t encroached on traditional ways, we wouldn’t need fisheries to replenish and protect the salmon.

              On the bus, we discussed this close connection to the food that went in the body while we snacked from colorful plastic Costco pouches filled with snack cookies and processed fruit shapes not really recognizable as anything we see grow in the world.

              We thought more about our foods as we visited Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms. In the twenties, when people of Japanese descent were outlawed from leasing land, Yakama families invited them to farm on the reservation; and in the forties, before the Inabas were sent to an internment camp in Utah, Yakama held their land in trust. The Inabas returned; and over half a century later, they had a thriving farm. Now, just last year, the Inabas sold the farm back to the Yakama Nation—a joyous story of peoples’ resilient support of each other. And what we learned from Jonalee is that it is also a story of food sovereignty: when so many on the reservation have relied on commodity food, especially through Covid, access to healthy foods was scarce; and here, on this farm, they have a steady source of good produce, providing to the food bank Northwest Harvest before they ship it to market.

              Central to the whole visit was our stop at the Toppenish longhouse, where we ate a feast prepared by five cooks, in a place we were pointedly told was a sacred home to the people. We ate a chicken barley soup, and fruit and vegetable salads; we were told how the women gather root vegetables during parts of the year, and Polly told us of the day or two each year that the military war-games land is re-opened to women elders for gathering—despite toxic leaching from artillery. Here we were served potatoes and camas bulbs and bitterroot, the latter of which was unpleasant going down but full of nutrients; we ate salmon and fry bread and elk, and finally huckleberry sponge cake. Before we started, Diane offered a prayer that welcomed us and awakened our gratitudes. She told us the most valuable thing we can give someone was their time, and we had come to them openly giving that; she told us if we take care of our relatives, they will in turn take care of us. She said that we must be humble before our creator, who has brought us to this place today. And she hoped that we will take what we experience into our hearts and be changed by it, and to be blessed by the laughter at our tables, because laughter is nourishing too.

              While we ate, Mersaedy spoke to us in a steady, unstopping flow of story and speech, of pain and resiliency, and of what these longhouses mean as churches to the people for gathering, and dance and prayer. People dress in ribbon shirts and often in regalia, formerly requiring moccasins to be permitted on the wash—the sacred earthen grounds running the length in the center of the carpeted walk of the longhouse. There was an unblinking intensity to Mersaedy’s manner and teaching, as she told us we were welcome, even when the Yakama people had come to harm by outsiders; how there were foods they’d share with white people, but not the bitterroots which were nevertheless ribboned across our plates; and how, in the sacredness of a longhouse, a community had to face each other.

              Perhaps this is why, when men lined up on one side of the longhouse and women on the other, and when we walked around each other —counterclockwise, Polly said, to rebalance the energy of the mechanistic clockwise—to shake hands twice with everyone in the tall room, we faced each other, very literally. We were told that if someone is hurting by someone else in the community, shaking hands is a way of bringing things close: if it is time to speak, it is time to hear—we look each other in the eyes and don’t escape those things that trouble our community but give them voice. A community faces and honors each other.

              Fort Simcoe is a place of pain and scarring. So when Diane gathered us in front of the captain’s quarters built not long after Isaac Stevens’ aggressions, and she gathered up in the blanket her son had earned as a dancer and wrapped herself in her son’s protection and began playing a wood flute, we took comfort and grief from the music. She introduced her sister, Robyn, who told us how long women, children, and people have gone missing or been murdered from the reservation—from the start, from the moments white men came to denude the lumber and mine the land, and mistreated the population left vulnerable by it; and then, ever since, as white and Native men continue to take advantage of the jurisdictional muddle that exists between Yakama and the feds, especially when the feds for these 150 years haven’t chosen to care. Robyn and Diane’s grandfather went missing. Their cousin went missing. And these cold cases have simply remained cold. Now Robyn and Lucy produce the War Cry podcast, exploring “stories, issues and historical connection about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Men and LGBTQ 2 Spirit community members.” Robyn told us this: I’m here to tell you we have, as a people, gone through it. I as a woman have gone through it. I can wear my son’s protection but also know I wouldn’t want to burden him if something happened, and that I carry my fear around me like a blanket. But I am not a conquered woman. I have community, and friendship, and family, and our people and our land. I come to you in strength. I am not conquered.

              She was soon sitting beside her sister, laughing.

              Accompanying Robyn and Diane was a man in a large face mask who’d kept himself small. We hadn’t yet heard about the boarding school that was also on this site, though Robyn had explained how her grandparents had attended such schools, and had their practices ripped from them. Suddenly Mike emerged from his mask, telling us he wanted to play a game: These are cards. They’re what? Cards. Oh, they’re cards. These are scissors. They’re what? Scissors. We were to pass the questions and answers down our two separate lines in a race. Then he circled us up, began the cards and the scissors down two different directions, and then, dramatically, they both reached Makayla, who became lost in the four chains of communication she needed to speak and send two suddenly opposite directions. This, Mike said, was like the cultural demands being made at boarding schools. Then he asked us if we trusted him, as he snapped on two blue surgical gloves; he said if we trusted him, to close our eyes, leave them open if we didn’t. Then he started around with scissors: behind our heads, loudly, near ears and closed eyes, he’d SNIP SNIP!, and move on to the next person. When done, he said, This is a small hint of the boarding school experience. Finally, he told us the story of skunk, who lived in a city suddenly beset by fire. On his way fleeing the city, he saw the smallest of them all, hummingbird, flying off to the river and returning with a drop of water in his little beak. Skunk said, You can’t put out a fire with a drop of water! Hummingbird said, I’ll do what I can, because I don’t know what else to do. And skunk decided to join in, soon recruiting the other animals, who in turn, put out the fire. Mike asked us to process the story. Some spoke of the hopeful message of our small part; others spoke of the importance of coming together. My favorite response was from Olive, who said that we often celebrate the first leader, but the first follower is just as important.

              At our final stop, Yakama Forest Products, Polly introduced us to Steve, her youngest brother. When he spoke about being rejected as a half breed, one student, Theo, felt this especially deeply, and thought back to a Hindu story about Krishna choosing between the god of thunder and the mountain: he chose the mountain, because it was always there, a home. Steve reinforced the idea of what a sacred careful thing it is to take a life—a tree, or a plant, or a fish, an elk. We must care for our relatives as they sacrifice for us. We have a duty to those who nourish us.

              In the end, this was resounding message: replenishment, sustainability, responsibility, and care, Students realized they’d walked in with preconceptions about reservation life looking like alcohol and despair; but what they were shown was embracing community and industry, spirituality, strength, and welcome.

              Marvin our bus driver accepted a dinner from us at the burger joint where we’d stopped, and in the end, accepted too the pendant a student made for each of our speakers, tamarack bark against cedar in a resin, holding the piece of life precious against the skin.

With thanks to our hosts: Thank you to Charlie and Simon of Yakama Nation Fisheries; to Jonalee of Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms; to our gracious cooks at Toppenish Longhouse, and to Mersaedy, Diane, Robyn, and Mike; and to Steve of Yakama Forest products. Special thank you to Janine of Hands for a Bridge, Lucy of Peacekeepers, and Polly of the Burke Museum, for the planning, coordinating, and wrangling that made this event possible. And a resounding thank you to Polly for sharing so deeply and with such pride, and guiding us through the experience towards our own reflection and heart.