Josephy Library at Fishtrap

Bobbie Conner new Board Chair at NMAI

2012-02-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

Some of you might have already heard, but it is worth repeating! Roberta “Bobbie” Conner is the incoming Chair of Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has been on the Board since 2008, co-facilitated a Tribal museum directors meeting at NMAI in January, and will chair her first Trustees meeting February 9 and 10 in Washington D.C.

I have known Bobbie primarily through working on the Nez Perce Homeland project in Wallowa, where she and I are still board members. But she also gave a lecture on "Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes" at Fishtrap, and she was in fact one of the writers in Alvin’s last book, the one he and Marc Jaffe edited called Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes. And I had the great good fortune to work with Bobbie, Alvin, Cliff Trafzer, other historians and Tribal elders and editor Jennifer Carson on Wiyaxayxt / Wiyaakaaawn / As Days Go by: Our History, Our Land, Our People: the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla.

I’ll put in a plug for that book while I’m at it. Each section paired an elder with a recognized historian, and each section had an outside reviewer. My role was as reviewer, but meeting with the “team” of elders and historians to discuss the project in its beginnings, and meeting again to review progress were privileged experiences. The project started in 2000--largely, I am sure, because of Bobbie's vision and hard work--and the book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2006.

Bobbie is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla. Her maternal great grandparents were from the Columbia and Snake Rivers and their tributaries. She is a graduate of Pendleton High School, the University of Oregon, and Willamette University's Graduate School of Management. She left a fast-rising career at the U.S. Small Business Administration--among other positions, she directed the Sacramento District—to become the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in April 1998. (And if you have not visited that marvelous place, please put it on your must see list. Check the web site at http://Tamastslikt.com/ .)

Of course what completes this circle is that Alvin was the founding board chair at NMAI. Some of that tale is told in A Walk Towards Oregon, how it started with the Heye Museum in New York City, and went through twists and turns that landed the greatest collection of indigenous American artifacts—the Heye collection is said to have numbered a million such—on the Mall in Washington D.C. You can feel Alvin’s hand in the way the museum is a living thing, with history from the Indian point of view and contemporary portrayals of Tribal culture and activities. Visit it if you are ever in the District. I see by my emails that a celebration of chocolate, one of the West’s great contributions to world food and culture, is in the works this February.

And congratulations of course to Bobbie for this well deserved honor. And good luck in the job!

Josephy and David McCullough—the narrative historian

2012-02-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

Always, for Alvin, “story” was the important notion in “history.” He insisted on accuracy, trusted the testimony of individuals, and was disgusted by some of the stilted prose and arcane argument of the academics. He loved the idea of history permeating our lives. And capturing its excitement and making it available to the greatest number of citizens was done by writing clean prose and telling good stories.

In 1961, Alvin left Time Magazine for an upstart hard cover magazine called American Heritage. In 1964, he hired a literature major from Yale who had worked for Sports Illustrated and the Unlisted States Information Agency to join him. Multiple Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards later, David McCullough would say that American Heritage was his “graduate school.”
…

In the fall of 1984, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to sit in the audience as the Snake River Institute honored Alvin Josephy with a weekend of readings, speeches, films and discussions about "The Next Hundred Years in the American West." It was an august crew—George Horsecatcher and Terry Tempest Williams, Hal Cannon, Teresa Jordan, Jack Loeffler, Ed and Betsy Marston, Tim Egan, Bill Kittredge, Drum Hadley, Gary Snyder, David McCullough and more rose to say a few words about Alvin and read a poem or tell a story or think aloud about the West to come.

McCullough began with a story about American Heritage. He and Alvin were in the office during the big east coast power failure and resulting “blackout” of 1965, and the two of them carefully walked all of the office secretaries down flights of stairs and to their homes or safe stopping places. I think Ed Marston’s picture of Alvin and Teresa Jordan, later printed in High Country News, was their reaction to that story.

Alvin and David were obviously old friends, men who shared a notion of history, the importance of history, and the telling of it. McCullough went on to talk about history, and a Disney effort to own and control some Civil War sites—could history become commercial property in the next 100 years?

What McCullough didn’t detail that day was his transition from history editor and history lover to historian. I found the answer in a 1999 Paris Review interview.

He had grown up in Pennsylvania with stories of the Johnstown Flood, had later found a trove of photos of the flood at the Library of Congress, and gone back to read books. They didn’t match what he knew about Pennsylvania and Johnstown, and he resolved to write the story himself. But how to begin?

“One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.”

David McCullough left American Heritage and went on to become the leading writer of popular, well researched narrative history books of our time, books on the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal, and Pulitzer Prize winning books on presidents Truman and Adams. He became a popular host of American Experience programs on Public Television, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.

And throughout this distinguished career, McCullough has promoted and maintained the values of narrative history. In the Paris Review interview, he said that “The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track—this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next… No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.”

On receiving a National Book Award, he put it this way: “There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: ‘Tell stories.” The pull, the appeal is irresistible, because history is about two of the greatest mysteries—time and human nature.”

Alvin Josephy couldn’t have put it better.

# # #

Alvin and Hollywood--what stuck!

2012-01-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

My New Years Resolution is to be more consistent with blogs and make them shorter while ranging widely over Josephy material and Josephy interests. I want to do this without being “gee whiz, look what Alvin wrote/did/said/ this time!” But to soberly address narrative history, Western history, Indian history, environmental history—Alvin’s things and the things Alvin leads us to.

But this week his cousin sent me most of a manuscript dated 1952 for a proposed television program about the first man to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I got an email from a grad student researching a WW II Marine named Peter Ortiz. Turns out there was a movie—“Operation Secret”—and, you got it; Alvin wrote the screen story….

Alvin came home from Iwo Jima to “sell the war.” The public was distressed that we’d lost 7,000 Marines taking a small bunch of rocks in the Pacific. Alvin, Indian flag raiser Ira Hayes, and a few others traveled the country explaining the lives saved, those of airmen flying to Japan on bombing sorties who now had a safe landing strip and fueling station to ease their work. Alvin and company fully expected to be back in the Pacific and part of the invasion of Japan when the Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the course of the war.

So he stayed home, wrote his first book, The Long and the Short and the Tall, a non-fiction account of Marines in battle, abandoned a novel, and went back to Hollywood to try his hand at screenwriting again (he had spent time there as a “junior screenwriter” in the 30s). Although he picked up a few film credits, there were no major successes, and veterans’ organizations and a gambling scam he uncovered while writing on the side for a Santa Monica weekly were more rewarding. Hollywood was skewed to the entertainment side and he wanted real stuff—he’d just been through a real war.

Time Magazine made a better offer in 1951, and the movie chapter of his life—and Betty’s; she was his biggest Hollywood find—came to an end. In the bibliography he prepared in 2001, Hollywood and the years 1945-51 get this:

"Red Clay,” “Something for the Birds,” Captive City,” part of “Beginning or the End,” and other movie treatments for MGM, Warner Brothers, United Artists.”

I don’t think “Red Clay” was produced—and think it was a disappointment for Alvin. “Something for the Birds” was California Condors and the oil companies. “Captive City” was based on the true story of Alvin and Betty dodging the mob after his gambling disclosures, and “Beginning or the End,” for which I can find no Josephy credit, was the story of General Groves and the Atom bomb. I am somewhat curious at the omission of “Operation Secret,” because this story of an American who spoke 10 languages, fought with the French Foreign Legion, the US Marines, and as a behind the lines OSS operative in France, was a Josephy natural.

“The First Man To Walk Across Brooklyn Bridge”—a TV treatment never produced—is a slower story, but it too grabs a big piece of history—the bridge when completed in 1883 was “hailed as the greatest wonder of the western hemisphere.” Alvin weaves a family story and New York ward politics into the piece—who knows why it didn’t get produced, or how many other treatments he tried out on Hollywood.

What I do know, and have said before, is that when Alvin discovered the Nez Perce Story—the deep history, broken treaties and dramatic War, the miracle of survival and confidence in the long future—he found his true subject matter and life work, the American Indian. His time as a Marine Corps journalist in the heat and heart of war, and the frustrating years at the edge in Hollywood—the dramas chased and the ones Hollywood left behind—honed and shaped the historian and activist he would become.

# # #

Google the movies above for a trip through the mid-twentieth century American drama.

Alvin and Grace: Nez Perce and settlers in the Wallowa Country

2012-01-17T07:42:00.000-08:00

Grace Bartlett left Reed College in 1932 to marry a Wallowa Country rancher. She worked on the ranch, raised children, and apprenticed with Harley Horner, the unofficial county historian at the time. With Horner and on her own, she wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the Wallowa County Chieftain, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, and once, on the sockeye salmon, for Sunset Magazine.

When Alvin’s big Nez Perce book came out, Grace quibbled with his descriptions of early people and events in the Wallowas. Alvin told her to “write it,” and she did. In the wonderful and, I am beginning to believe, unique, The Wallowa Country 1867-1877, published in 1976, 11 years after The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, Grace detailed the 10-year transition of the Wallowa Country from Indian to white occupation.

We learn about the early “open” winter (much like this one) when the whites first brought stock into the valley. They didn’t feed all fall and early winter and the news went to Union County newspapers and then to the Oregonian and the rest of the West that the Wallowas was a “Stockman’s paradise.” It was the first of many misunderstandings.

The settlers soon did learn from the Indians to move cattle to lower canyon ground in winter months. The Indians were not in the upper valleys in winter months—or even spring months. They generally arrived in August and hunted, fished, and gathered foods through the fall. There were meeting places—the forks of the rivers above present day Wallowa, where Old Joseph was originally buried; Indian Town on Chesnimnus Creek, and Wallowa Lake for the sockeye salmon harvest. They kept their own herds of horses and cows in the canyons, and moved there themselves after their summer-fall upper valley sojourns.

In general, Indians and settlers got along with each other. There were a few “Indian haters” among the settlers, and, according to Grace, they were known by their neighbors and not much appreciated. There was also a rabble rousing newspaper in Union County. But most of the settlers—even as war loomed with a conflict over horses and a white man killing an Indian, with subsequent “councils” of Indians and whites, movements of soldiers from Walla Walla, and meetings of Indians, generals, and Indian agents in Lapwai—were busy planting and harvesting crops, dealing with their livestock, arranging schooling for children, and going to the Walla Walla Valley to work for cash during the earlier harvest time there.

There were attempts to reconcile the treaty of 1855, which left the Wallowa Country to the Indians, and which the Joseph or Wallowa band Nez Perce had signed, with the 1863 treaty, which took away the Wallowas, and which they and several other bands had not signed. These attempts involved Washington D.C. and the Indian agency in Lapwai.

Without going into details, a division of the valley was envisioned, but Lapwai Indian agent Montieth, Washington authorities and the settlers could not seem to pull it off, because they could not get the “roaming Nez Perce,” as they called them, to agree to settle down. In other words, if Joseph and his people had just agreed to “become white” in their culture and
agriculture, they might not have been expelled from the Wallowa Country.

Alvin said many times that from the beginning of the European adventure in the Americas, we killed Indians with war and disease, but, more importantly, we overwhelmed them with Euro-centered culture. Often, it was the best intentioned who tried to assimilate them, and kill what he called “Indianness.”

Grace Bartlett’s book, written with Alvin’s strong encouragement, gives a blow by blow account of the way that played out in the Wallowa Country.

Josephy blog in 2012

2011-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

First off, thanks to all who have followed and responded to postings on the Josephy Library blog this year.

The deeper into Josephy I dig, the more I learn, and the more prescient his early writings in Western and Indian history become. I guess if I had to distill a year’s reading and digging to a sentence, it would be that Josephy learned and declared in the 1950s that Indians have, against all attempts to kill them and/or to assimilate them, survived; that Indians have history that has been ignored and maligned; and that Indian history and culture have things to teach us still.

Alvin gathered Indian writers and scholars and produced America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing. My favorite read this year was Charles Mann’s recently published 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, which picks up the argument.

Alvin’s writings on Indians and salmon, Indians and the Kinzua Dam, Indians and the Four Corners, Indians and water rights, Indians and sacred sites, played their roles in moving public policy and perceptions at the time—and they are still timely.

So long-time publisher and friend of Alvin’s, of mine, and of Fishtrap, Marc Jaffe, and I are working on an anthology of Josephy writings—published and unpublished—that could move beyond this blog and contribute to the current idea exchange. We will keep you posted.

And I am, with friends at the U of Oregon Library and Cliff Trafzer at the U of California, Riverside, trying to find an unpublished Josephy manuscript on the Sioux. It might be publishable still.

And a weekly, three minute radio program, “From the Archives,” will begin running on KPBX, the public radio station in Spokane, in January.

And our amazing volunteer librarian, Shannon Maslach, continues to put books and interesting ephemeral material on the shelves and into the SAGE Library cataloging system. I will have a piece on the ephemera and manuscripts out soon. This is material that some of you will find useful.

I wish you the very best in the New Year, in your vocational and avocational work in history and Indian affairs, and in your personal lives. I wish friends in Indian country continued success in bringing your stories and contributions to all of America.

Most of all, I wish you—and me too!—good luck in dealing with a world that is often overwhelming. Remember that Alvin kept harping on those 1950s themes till the end, often in the face of indifferent audiences and Indians who felt defeated, but he kept after it, and we are here to say that his words mattered then and matter still.

Happy New Year!

Alvin and the occupiers

2011-11-18T07:04:00.001-08:00

This might be dangerous. Many of you—Alvin Josephy’s friends and followers—might not be political at all, or are primarily interested in Alvin as a historian and advocate for Indian peoples, and don’t care about his politics outside of Indians. But I am reading Alvin material every day, and he was so bound up in the major issues of his times—from the Depression through World War 2, from dignity and self-determination for Indians to a concern for the physical world that he learned from Indians and carried with him to the pages of Audubon Magazine and Congressional Testimony—that it is impossible to look at Alvin Josephy without thinking about politics.

I am going to lean on material from interviews with Alvin’s friend, Jack Loeffler. Most of the interviews occurred in 1995, but there is some later material too, from 2001. In their rambling conversations Alvin recounts some of the major events in his life—in 1995 he was deep into writing the memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon—and reflects on the condition of Indians, the country, and the world in 1995 and 2001. All quotes below are from the interviews. (We have both audio cd and 56 page printout at the Library.)

Alvin was born in 1915, went to public school through his first eight years, where he learned “reading , writing, arithmetic, regular courses that were turning people of all backgrounds into Americans and making them all feel like they were members of the same country and patriotic about it.” And he continues: “we split at the end of eighth grade into long lines of inequality.”

Alvin went on to get a fine education at Horace Mann School, and then to Harvard for two years, before a bank failure in New York and the death of his grandfather, Samuel Knopf, depleted all college money for Alvin and his brother. Even though his family had been one of means, at Harvard he learned that the “Cabots and the Lowells and the Calloways and so forth... knew each other because they had all gone to the same prep schools—St. Paul’s and Milton and Groton,” and they were the “kings of the class.” He called them the “snobs.”

But this crew went through the Depression and through WW 2, and “by the time of our 25th reunion, these guys who had been snobs were Democratic as hell... They had become the type of people who were the great leaders of our war effort…” And then, “By the time of our 50th reunion, these people were fighting mad liberals. I mean they were environmentalists… They were people giving to causes... They were like the cabinet members of Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower, that decent type of Republicanism that’s vanished or almost vanished. It’s very hard to find in either party.”

Alvin was proud of his classmates and his generation. And of the people he served with during the War. David Rockefeller, whom he met at Harvard, served with him on the original Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian Board, and Alvin served on the board of Friends of the Earth with others from this generation that had beat back the forces of Fascism and Imperialism and were trying to bring that energy to domestic problems in America.

Alvin and his generation had a good long fight, but by 1995 he was expressing discouragement as the corporations and the wealthy seemed to be bringing the country back to where he had picked it up as a young convert to Roosevelt’s New Deal. For him, the lessons the country had learned through the Depression, the New Deal, and World War 2 were being lost—especially by the new corporate and political class.

“When the Republicans say today the American People want the government off their backs, they’re lying. What they’re really saying is the corporate giants, the CEOs of this country, want the government off their backs. Sure, so they can abuse the rest of us…. The whole thing is being delivered into the hands of the cartels and a smaller number of people.”

Words that could be a quote from one of today’s occupiers!

Although there was deep political sadness in Alvin those last years, he found some reason for optimism. First the resilience of the American people, who had come back from a terrible Civil War and made it through the Depression.

And secondly, the continuing presence of the American Indian. Indians, Alvin often said, can still think for the tribe. I believe his greatest wish, and maybe even a deep final faith, held that the country would find its way back to Indian ideas of sustainability, and of living with the earth and with each other in closer harmony...

At the edge of the rez

2011-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Pam Steele’s first novel, Greasewood Creek, will come out from Counterpoint Press in November. I just finished reading a galley copy, and it is a fine book, set at the edge of the rez in eastern Oregon in recent times. But more about Pam and Greasewood Creek in a moment.

Reading it reminded me of Alvin Josephy and the beginnings of Fishtrap. In 1986 and 87, Alvin was lamenting the loss of a series of interdisciplinary seminars and conferences in Sun Valley put on by the Institute of the American West? It was there that he met Bill Kittredge and Annick Smith, the fine Indian novelist Tom King, and a raft of poets, novelists, and moviemakers who were making new sense of the West.

Now, as I go through his books and the books and manuscripts sent to him by friends and people looking for blurbs and critiques, I realize that Alvin had a long history with fiction writers, poets, and movie makers. He had written a few radio and movie scripts himself, had an unpublished and unsubmitted WW II novel on the shelf, and had a long history with writers of all sorts, but importantly Indian writers like Scot Momaday and Leslie Silko. Throw in post-retirement winters in the Southwest consorting with Jack Loeffler, Drum Hadley, Ed Abbey and company, and you start to get the flavor of Alvin’s intellectual milieu.

In those early Fishtrap years he was concerned with the misinformation about the American West among East Coast publishers (the theme of the first Fishtrap Gathering was “Western Writing, Eastern Publishing”), and the narrow range of attention among academic historians. I(ndian elders and amateur historians—history buffs, he called them—were keeping the real stories of the West alive, and novelists were turning them into credible stories for contemporary audiences. They were creating and re-creating the West that was and is a West made up of men, women, and children, Indians, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, French trappers and their Métis heirs, Black cowboys, Chinese miners, and Japanese farmers.

The East—and most Americans—thought cowboys were white and “Indian” meant Sioux on a horse somewhere on the Midwest plains. They knew nothing of the range of Indian culture and agriculture, and had no notion that the horse had found its way into North American Indian life in the seventeenth century, late by historical standards. And the Sioux had not always lived on the plains.

Until the 1970s and 80s, when books of settlers’ diaries were published, and civil rights movements gave colored voices credence, Western women’s voices and Indian voices—other than treaty words often dictated by white men, had been absent. The Irish miners in Butte, Japanese farmers in Hood River, Chinese laborers on railroads, Finnish fishermen in Astoria, were mute. History concentrated on Indian wars and range wars, treaties, gold rushes, and territorial and state governments—the goings on of white men. (The Negro Cowboy, published in the 60s, claimed that African Americans had been erased from the West by Manifest Destiny and Anglo-American superiority notions.) Sacagawea and Charbanneau were the exceptions that showed the rule—and we know little of their real lives.

Fishtrap followed, joined, and promoted the new writers, often novelists—Ivan Doig, Molly Gloss, Craig Lesley, David James Duncan We brought new, more inclusive historians, Richard White, Patti Limerick, Sue Armitage, Charles Wilkinson, Erasmo Gamboa. And Indians. Writers like James Welch, Linda Hogan, and Debra Earlring, and elders from the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Colville reservations.

Back to Pam Steele, a women from West Virginia who came to Wallowa County as a small child with a mine-sick father seeking health in clean air and joining a pod of relatives and Appalachian neighbors who had made the journey a generation earlier. He died, and Pam rode with his coffin on a train back across the country, then returned to West as an adult.

Greasewood Creek's protaginists are hard scrabble people from Appalachia and their heirs mucking out a living in harsh country at the edge of Oregon reservations. Whites and Indians interact, even intermarry, and it is as natural and hard as we who live in these Western places know it is. Work, alcohol, reputation, family ties, and family tragedies are woven into stories that engage, that make us cheer for one, cry with another, and occasionally pull out a laugh.

And the prose is poetry—Pam’s first book, Paper Bird, was a nominee for the Oregon Book Award in poetry. I was reminded of Molly Gloss, whose groundbreaking Jump Off Creek gave voice to forgotten single women homesteaders. Pam’s women are a few generations removed, but they still chop wood, feed cows, and live stories as complicated and important as those of fathers, husbands, and sons.

Alvin and Betty Josephy would have loved it.

Mohave Indian Band

2011-10-10T12:34:00.001-07:00

So after the last post friend Bill Yakes sent this photo of the Mojave Indian Band, circa 1915. Bill's grandfather was in Needles taking pics at the time, though this is not one of his.

Here are some details Bill picked up about the band:

-- the marching band was established in 1906 by "Professor Albert J. Eller,
who taught music at the Fort Mojave Indian Boarding School." It later "fell
under the directions of both Ned White and Jack Jones [both Mojaves] at
separate times between 1910 and 1952."

-- they played at the dedication of Hoover Dam (1930) and the reception for
Gov. Earl Warren (1950), as well as numerous other occasions.

-- There is a photo dated 1924 of "Jack's Mojave Jazz Band". I assume this
was Jack Jones.

-- The band was also known as the C. A. Simon's Indian Band "in the early
years, played every Saturday evening for over 25 years on Front Street in
Needles, California, for Liberty Theatre owner C. A. Simon."

NOW. Does anyone else have stories of Indian bands in early nineteenth century? Does anyone know how much Carlisle had to do with training Indian musicians, or if there was some overall program that put music into Indian schools?

Would be good to use this blog as a place to trade research notes.

best for today,
rich

Josiah Red Wolf: Nez Perce War vet--and musician

2011-10-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

I was digging through the small—and often most interesting—pieces of literature that Alvin collected along the way to his books and work as an advocate for Indians and the earth. Among the conference reports, ethnographic studies, newspaper clippings, and student papers was an article from Westways magazine, September 1977 by M. Woodbridge Williams, “Legacy of Survival.” The piece recounts a 1970 meeting with Josiah Red Wolf, at that time the lone survivor of the Nez Perce War. (When Alvin began his research in the early 50s, there were three: Red Wolf, Albert Moore, and Sam Tilden.)

Angus Wilson, one-time tribal chair and a good friend of Alvin’s, accompanied Woodbridge. Josiah was 98 at the time, but he and Wilson soon had an animated conversation going in Nez Perce—Wilson had to get him off an agitated rant on the treaties.

Red Wolf had been just five years old during the War, had spent a year at Leavenworth and five in Indian Territory. He may have been among the first 29—all widows and orphans—to return to Lapwai, under the care of James Rubin.

From Lapwai he went to the Chilico Indian School in Oklahoma, and from there, in 1890, to the Carlisle Institute for Indians in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he learned the cobbler’s trade, and he learned to play the saxophone and cornet. In fact—no small irony here—he marched with the Carlisle school band in a Columbus Day parade in New York City.

Red Wolf eventually came back west,”became a cobbler for the North Idaho Indian Agency and also directed a prize winning band.” He married in 1896, farmed in the Stites area, and played in an orchestra for Saturday night dances.

All this music sent me in two directions. First, I have talked at length over the years with Anne Richardson and her husband, Dennis Nyback, about early jazz and blues singers. Dennis has written about a woman named Lee Morse, who grew up in Kooskia, Idaho, and who he thinks is the first recorded woman jazz singer. Morse went to New York and Broadway in 1923. Richardson and Nyback want to know where and how she started singing jazz in Kooskia in the early 1920s. Player pianos? Maybe?

And Indian dance bands. I happen to have a picture of “Chief White and his Five Redskins” from Lapwai, Idaho on the wall here at Fishtrap. I don’t remember how it got here, but the band is on a flatbed truck, circa 1920. I have heard other stories of Indian dance bands in the early part of the twentieth century. (Beth Piatote, who was our Fishtrap writer in residence a dozen years ago or more, is enrolled at Colville where her Nez Perce grandfather or great-grandfather left the reservation to play music in 1919!)

Could it all have started at Carlisle, with Indians from across the country pulled and pushed to Pennsylvania, taught to be seamstresses and cobblers, but allowed music and then returned—some of them; many never made it back to their home reservations—to put together dance bands which played the hippest white music their white neighbors—who had not been to New York or Pennsylvania themselves—had ever heard? Chief White looks to be a novelty act from the picture, but if the band played “every Saturday night” they had to be good musicians. I wonder how many of these Indian bands there were across the country.

And whether the Nez Perce and Idaho gave Lee Morse, the “first female jazz singer,” back to New York! Nyback is still doing his research.

###

Alvin Josephy, Cornplanter, and the Kinzua Dam

2011-09-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long time between Josephy Library blog postings. Now that kids are back in school, I plan to get back with some kind of regularity!

Did anyone hear the recent NPR interview with the Seneca Nation’s new president, Robert Odawi Porter? I had been digging through Josephy speeches and writings looking towards an anthology of his work that is still relevant today. And looking especially at articles and speeches that had to do with environmental issues. Alvin came to these concerns through Indians, of course. I remember him saying that he first learned that Peabody Coal was strip mining coal and wreaking havoc on Hopi and Navajo lands in the southwest—and went on to see the havoc that the strip mining and coal fire emissions were wreaking on everyone in the Southwest.

But back to the Seneca. The NPR interview sent me to Alvin’s December 1968 piece in American Heritage Magazine, “Cornplanter Can You Swim,” republished in Now That the Buffalo’s Gone in 1982. After two decades of Indian opposition, the Kinzua Dam had been built in 1965. Villages had been condemned, houses had been burned, and the remains of 300 Seneca Indians, including Chief Cornplanter—Alvin had a great talent with titles—had been moved by the Army Corps of Engineers to higher ground so that thousands of acres of Indian Lands could be inundated by the Alleghany Reservoir. The Corps was also running over, or abrogating, the oldest active treaty agreed to by the United States of America, one signed by Cornplanter and 58 other Seneca sachems and chiefs in 1794!

Fast forward to 2011, and a new Seneca Chief with a Harvard law degree, to a Seneca nation made wealthy by three casinos and a thriving tobacco business, and then to 2015, when a 50 year lease on the Kinzua Dam expires (the dam provides power to Pittsburgh!). Chief—or President—Porter thinks the Senecas should run the dam, and he and his tribe are marshalling their legal forces to make the case. I don’t know whether Alvin’s early work will be part of the case—but maybe….

And here is the link to the NPR interview. Googling Kinzua Dam and Seneca will get you much more.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/18/139746162/seneca-nations-new-chief-seeks-to-change-course

p.s. For the Southwest, check “Murder of the Southwest,” Audubon Magazine, July 1971, and “The Hopi Way,” American Heritage Magazine, February 1973.

Learning--and teaching--Indian history

2011-06-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

“The realization has finally begun to dawn that American society as a whole has suffered from ‘forked tongue’ history books… Year after year, the distortions, misrepresentations, and failure to tell the whole historical story foster erroneous and stereotyped thinking about Indians, and lead to still further misrepresentations, prejudice and contempt.”
Alvin Josephy, Learning Magazine, 1973

“…for the most part these revelations—the great antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the public… Why don’t intelligent non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about stem cells and read contemporary literature, already know something about how researchers think of the Americas before Columbus?... Why isn’t this material already in high school textbooks?”
Charles Mann, Afterword to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2006

In Charles Mann's brilliant 2005 book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, he scans the results of hundreds of recent ethnographic, linguistic, archeological, anthropological, and biological studies. He calls and visits noted field scientists, travels with them along the Amazon and atop the Andes, and paints vivid pictures of what we now know about the pre-Columbian Americas. There are stories of monumental architecture, glyph writing systems, complicated leadership patterns, and information about the size, depth, and breadth of major agricultural settlements and civilizations. Importantly, there are many stories about the extent to which indigenous peoples managed their environments. They used fire, built soil, and found and adapted plants--corn, squash, legumes, etc.--to a wide range of climatic conditions--Mesoamerican corn taken all the way to northeastern North America, for example. .In an afterword to the paperback edition, Mann laments the fact that this knowledge—of digs, studies, discoveries—and new interpretations of pre-Columbian history have not penetrated textbooks and popular culture. At one university appearance, an American history professor innocently asks Mann where he can find all of this information. Mann is happy that he asks, but sad that the historian fails to realize that his answers are in the room with him—the archeologist in the next building, the anthropologist down the hall.

In the past, Mann says, it would have been easy to blame institutional racism for our limited and distorted views of the ancient Americas, but in an era of ethnic and gender studies, this seems unlikely. The “culprit,” he conjectures, is disciplinary boundaries. Charles Mann is a journalist, not beholden to any one academic discipline and anxious to learn from all of them. In this he is a direct descendent of Alvin Josephy, who was also a journalist, who cited linguistic and archeological studies as leading tools for learning about the past in his award winning 1968 book, The Indian Heritage of America. In my mind, Mann’s 1491 reads like its sequel.

Mann, and Josephy before him, says that we—most Americans—have settled on an archetypical North American Indian. He is a Plains Indian on a horse—though horses arrived very late in the history of human habitation of the continents. And hunting and gathering were the economies of some but not all indigenous western hemisphere civilizations. And he has disappeared, vanished into myth and story. Or he—and she—should have got on with it and become totally assimilated by now.

Mann, like Josephy before him, thinks that Indian history reaches back to antiquity, but lives in the present. And that Indian cultures—especially the ways they have and still do deal with agriculture, societal organization, and the “two-leggeds” place and roles in the whole of the world—have much to teach us today.

# # #

Amateur Historians

2011-05-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

Alvin Josephy loved amateur historians. When I opened the Bookloft in Enterprise in 1976, he was still working full time at American Heritage in New York City, writing his big history books and newspaper and magazine articles in the midnight hours. He and his wife, Betty, would come west each summer, she for the summer, he for a few weeks before he went back to the job.

And the Bookloft was always one of his first stops. He would comb the western and local history shelves for new books like 35 Years on Smith Mountain and Hells Canyon of Snake River, make a big stack of them at the counter, and ask about more. Were there new novels, books or pamphlets, diaries, books of letters, anything on the Nez Perce, fishing the Columbia, on Lewis and Clark and the Indians.

He would talk about academic historians missing out on the West because they confined themselves too much to official documents—treaties, proclamations, occasionally the newspaper article, although journalism was suspect. And Indians didn’t have much written history of their own. There were the treaties and the accounts of military officers in campaigns against them, but their own stories, carried from generation to generation by families and tribal storytellers, were invisible to most academic historians.

Stories of women and accounts of the Chinese and Japanese, the people whose written records were in different languages and scripts, were likewise invisible or hard to find in standard texts—although in the 70s, the women’s movement and women historians like Sue Armitage at Washington State University were finding and publishing women’s diaries and letters. But, in the 1970s and 80s, most of these things were still mostly found in small, local, often self-published editions, the things Alvin had made a habit of collecting since he heard and was captivated by the Nez Perce story while a journalist at Time Magazine.

According to him, amateurs kept the stories of the West alive. Here in the Wallowas, “Pioneer Society” stalwart Harley Horner assembled a “History of Wallowa County” in big scrapbooks in alphabetical order by names and places, with letters, news accounts, and his own reportage pasted in. When Grace Butterfield, whose father was a newspaper man, moved to town, she worked with Horner and transcribed his scrapbooks into a typed document that has had an amazing journey of its own. Fortunately, the "Horner papers" are now back in the Wallowa County Museum--but that is another story!

When Alvin wrote his book on the Nez Perce, Grace differed on some local matters, and Alvin encouraged her to get the details straight. She did, in The Wallowa Country: 1866-76, a fine locally published book about the ten years of White settlement leading up to the Nez Perce War.

Later, Josephy worked with Grace and her Nez Perce husband, Harry Bartlett, to get the true history of the Appaloosa horse to the public. Alvin wrote a piece and helped publish one by Harry and Grace about the spotted horses in the Brand Book a magazine published by a group of artists, writers, librarians, and aficionados of the West who called themselves “Westerners.” This New York posse would meet monthly for dinner and discussion of Billy the Kid, General Custer, and, as Alvin once wrote, “which side of the river Lewis and Clark traveled on.” Famed writer Mari Sandoz was a member of the New York posse, and there were brother or sister posses in Chicago, Denver, London, and Los Angeles.

I don’t believe any of the articles in these magazines were written for PhD theses—but there their contents must have been used by many later candidates for the degree.

Who was Gwen Coffin?

2011-03-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

Gwen Coffin grew up poor in Colorado, made his way through college and law school in Chicago, married a teacher named Gladys, and, in 1941, moved to Wallowa County to buy a newspaper and practice law. He never got around to the law practice, though he did make some law while serving briefly in the Oregon Legislature. He was still going newspaper strong at the Wallowa County Chieftain when I got here in 1971, taking on Johnson and Nixon and the Vietnam War, promoting conservation and wilderness.

Oh—and Gwen was the man Alvin Josephy called, and the Coffin House in Enterprise was the house that Alvin came to on his first trip to see Joseph’s Nez Perce homeland. They ate lunch and Gwen gave Alvin his first tour of Wallowa County. That would have been mid-1950s, shortly after Alvin came upon the Nez Perce story that changed his life--and in turn has changed many others.

Fishtrap lives in the house now. It was purchased with generous help from the Coffin daughters, Nancy Ormandy and Gail Swart, who grew up in it and like all the things that tied their parents and this house to writing and living in Wallowa County (Gladys had become a Fishtrap regular in her 80s!)

This editorial, which appeared in the April 8, 1943 edition of Gwen’s Chieftain, at the height of the Second World War and just 48 years ago next week, says a lot about Gwen Coffin. He supported the war efforts in Europe and the Pacific, but, as you will see, he questioned the conduct of business and government at home....

April 8, 1943

When historians sit down to write the history of the present war we venture a guess that the government’s treatment of the Japanese in this country will come in for some pretty severe criticism. There is very little to be said in favor of what has been done so far.

In the hysteria of the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor the army decided that the presence of thousands of Japanese in the Pacific coast region constituted a threat to the safety of the country and a policy of wholesale deportations to concentration camps was decided upon. No effort was made to determine who were loyal Japanese and who were disloyal or potentially so. All were given short notice to dispose of their homes and their businesses preparatory to being moved to hastily improvised camps where thousands were crowded into barracks with few facilities for maintaining life on anything like a normal basis.

The whole business is foreign to our conception of fair play and orderly process. Had the procedure adopted been necessary the picture of families being torn from their homes and mode of life and sent to distant internment camps would not have been quite so pathetic. But it is highly doubtful whether the policy was ever really necessary.

We have not felt obliged to send German and Italian nationals to concentration camps in wholesale batches, although it would e exceedingly difficult to make out anything like a convincing argument in favor of a more lenient policy toward these people than toward the Japanese. There are no doubt disloyal and traitorous Japanese in this country but probably they represent no greater a proportion of the total Jap population of the U.S. than the proportion of disloyal Italians and Germans in the total population of those tow national groups. It should have been possible to have segregated the Japanese known to be loyal to this country from those who were known to be disloyal or about whom there might be doubts. The loyal Japanese should have been given every chance to contribute toward the successful prosecution of the war instead of being immediately branded as outcasts and thrown in with the know traitors and shipped off to detention camps.

Besides being an undemocratic process the whole business is unsound economically a Senator Chandler of Kentucky has decided in introducing a bill in Congress calling for the release of loyal Japanese form detention camps so that they may return to useful occupations furthering the war effort and cease to be charity wards of the Untied Sates government. Senator Chandler estimates that more than $50,000,000 a year would be saved if this segregation were made. Much of the resentment on the West Coast toward the Japanese was not the outgrowth of the war but arose during peacetime as the Japanese achieved some success and prominence in their pursuits of agriculture and trade. Many employers preferred to see the Japanese remain in the ranks of low paid wage earners. Others were resentful at the sight of Japanese prospering better than many Americans.

It is foreign to our conceptions of democracy, however, to distinguish between peoples on the basis of color or nationality. There should be only one test for the right to share in the opportunities which this country provides and that is the test of belief in our democratic ideals and government, and a willingness to work with other Americans to further those ideals and to support this government.

Gwen Coffin, editor and publisher, Wallowa County Chieftain

(1986 photo of Gwen Coffin, Senator Bob Packwood, and Wallowa County Chamber President Gerry Perrin at Toma's Restaraunt in Enterprise.)

How do we keep learning from Alvin?

2011-03-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Alvin Josephy died in 2005. I read something that he wrote—or that was written to or about him—almost every day. And I am continually amazed by what he said and when and where he said it.

In Life Magazine in 1971, Josephy wrote that the US government interpreters were telling visitors at the Custer Battlefield that Custer was a hero and the Indians were savages; in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1973, just weeks after the FBI-Indian confrontation at Wounded Knee, he said that the Indians were justified, and published photos of Custer’s troops being buried with high ceremony and Sioux Indian survivors of the battle being slaughtered and buried in a mass grave. In 1992 he reminded—in speeches and a book, America in 1492—that Columbus came to a land of some 75 or 90 million people, over 2000 mutually unintelligible languages, and cities larger than any in Europe at the time. And that the learned clerics and academicians in Spain began an immediate “solemn intellectual discourse” concerning the Native peoples of the “so-called New World,” to determine whether its inhabitants were “human” or “sub-human” beings.

I wonder every day how we keep Alvin’s work and legacy alive—more importantly, how we use it to inform contemporary conversations about history, government, Indian affairs, and environmental issues that are on the table today.

The problem is that Alvin was a scrupulous researcher who used the latest research in archeology, ethnography, linguistics, etc. Many of his journalism pieces reflect the best knowledge of the time, which might not be up to date today (DNA was just coming on as Alvin’s career wound down). His books still attract an audience—but there are new writers saying similar things today. Why go back and read what Alvin had to say?

I think it has to do with vision—with a vision of US History and Indian history and how they were intertwined and distorted by the lack of acknowledgement that Indians HAD a history before Euro-Americans. It has to do with honoring personal interview, stories and legends, the pieces of culture that were discarded, or were pushed out of the “history” bin and into the “natural history” bin (along with dinosaurs and bugs, as Alvin said). It has to do with what he called “Eurocentrism” which devalues indigenous knowledge and non-Judeo-Christian religious traditions.

In the “Oklahoma Lecture in the Humanities” presented in Tulsa in 1992, Alvin quotes a textbook, American History: A Survey, published by his publisher, Knopf, in 1987! “For thousands of centuries, centuries in which the human faces were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works…The story of this new world… is a story of the creation of civilization where none existed.”

He reminded his audience that the learned historians were not alone, that few Americans knew about American Indians’ contributions of food, language, and law to the world, and that most Americans still thought that American Indians were all pretty much the same—spoke one generic language, had one religion, and had had one economy, stereotypically that of the post horse plains Indians. They didn’t—and I would add that we still don’t—know where the Cherokees and Navajos and Blackfeet live, and how their pre-Columbian migrations and post US national government wars and treaties got them there.

This speech was given in 1992. Alvin’s words, which can I think drive us still, are that “For the Quincentenary to have more than surface meaning, finally, for ourselves and our children’s children, we ought to recognize and understand, also, not alone what Indians have contributed to the world, but what they could have contributed if they had been allowed to do so, and what they can, and may still, contribute. All in all it is a much bigger assignment than merely acknowledging that Indians, rather than Columbus, discovered America.”

Alvin Josephy is a burr in our historic hides. I want to make sure that he continues to rub.

(photo; Jonathan Nicholas and Alvin Josephy, probably 1989, at Summer Fishtrap at Wallowa Lake Methodist Camp)

A reflection on Winona LaDuke’s visit to Fishtrap

2011-03-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

Small world—and invisible Indians

Winona LaDuke was at Winter Fishtrap this weekend. She is an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg on the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota and a global activist on behalf of Indian rights and sustainable natural resource use.

Winona is not bitter or self-pitying, but straight forward, proud, realistic, rational, and spiritual all-together. Seven of the eight million dollars spent on food on her reservation go immediately off-reservation, she said. Some huge percentage of electrical energy is spent in the mining and transportation of fuels and the transmission across far distances. On her reservation they will grow and produce more of their own food; they will build wind turbines and develop wind energy.

People hovered after her talk. I approached slowly and introduced myself as having been born and partially raised in Fosston, Minnesota, at the edge of the White Earth Reservation. “My father was born in Fosston, in 1929,” she said. (He later went to California where he was an Indian in the movies—“an extra $25 if you fell off your horse”—and where Winona was born.). I said that an uncle had a small fishing resort called the “Hideout” on Island Lake right after the War. “That would have been off county road #4,” she said.

There were no Indian kids in school—my guess was that they went to small country schools on the reservation. “Probably until eighth grade,” she thought, as that was as far as her father had gone. Only now I think that some of the Indian kids must have been hustled off to boarding schools in other places. I didn’t think to ask her about boarding schools.

Indians were invisible to us. We didn’t know any Indians. On county road #4 we saw a few shacks and big cars. We thought that when Indians got money they bought Cadillacs and got drunk. We didn’t know about the kids, though our parents pitied them.

Then I remembered trips to Itasca State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi River—“that’s on the Reservation,” Winona chimed—and that for a quarter I had my picture taken sitting on an Indian chief’s lap (why do I remember the quarter?). I don’t know what happened to the picture, but I remember that the Indian had a large feathered headdress and wore buckskin. “That was probably my grandfather,” said Winona.

This is all sixty years ago, and it pains me to write it. I’ve gone to good schools and traveled far, lived for 40 years in Nez Perce country in Oregon—land the Indians were driven from with broken treaties and threats of war. I spend some of my time now going through the books and articles written by the late Alvin Josephy, my mentor still.

Americans have always tried to do away with Indians, Alvin said. We killed them first with diseases, wars, and broken treaties. And for the last hundred years have worked hard at killing “Indianness,” the Indian in them. This has been called assimilation, integration, termination.

Oh, we love them too—love what they were or we imagined them to have been. Alvin called these ideas “Nobel Savage” and “Vanishing Indian.” Indians were idealized by Rousseau and other European intellectuals, and captured in ethnographic studies of language and culture as the same languages, dances, and songs were outlawed on the reservations. They were photographed, most famously by Edward Sheriff Curtis, in regalia they no longer wore. He would pay them a few dollars for changing from regular clothes—often rags—into regalia.

Most importantly, Alvin said, they have often been “omitted” from history. The many languages—over 2000 mutually unintelligible at time of European contact, diverse cultures, arts and artifacts that display skills in engineering, math, and trade, Indian contributions to world agriculture from potato to tomato, and the very way they strove—and strive still—for harmony within the natural world have for the most part been absent from histories and textbooks.

Maybe the books are better now, but I wonder how far we have really come from the days of Winona’s father and grandfather and me in northern Minnesota, when Indians were Tonto on the radio, a photo chief at a state park, and invisible where they lived....

Paul VanDevelder, Salmon, Josephy, "dominionists,"...

2011-02-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

Al Josephy shot me an email last week with a link to an op ed piece in the Oregonian by Paul VanDevelder. It was called “The reckoning: A looming decision on endangered salmon will set the stage for momentous battles over the future.”

“Sometime this spring,” it begins, “a federal district court judge in Portland will render a decision based on the federal Endangered Species Act that will determine the fate of two dozen endangered salmon stocks that spawn in rivers from Sacramento to British Columbia....

“Judge James A. Redden's decision promises to be as momentous as any court-ordered environmental remedy in our lifetimes, the Dred Scott of environmental law. Of the many battles waged in the wake of the Endangered Species Act, no other beast, fish or fowl has created a more politically charged -- or more expensive -- fight than West Coast salmon.”

VanDevelder goes on to give a concise blow by blow of Salmon politics, which I thought was good. So I found his web site and wrote to him, telling him so and apologizing for not knowing his books–Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation, and Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory. I told him that I am working with Alvin Josephy’s books and legacy and that I am increasingly struck by Alvin’s finding the path to environmental issues and concerns through Indians.

And that I had just read a speech Alvin made in Oklahoma in 1992, one of many times he commented on Columbus and the 500 years since his arrival, in which he talks about euro-centrism and “dominion” over the rest of creation that Columbus and his followers brought to the Americas. (Paul refers continually to “dominionist” views in his op ed piece.)

Paul immediately shot back “You just identified the fork in the road that changed my life.” He said that Sierra Magazine had asked him to do a story on Indians and Environment in 1993, that Alvin had been an important influence in his early writing career, and that “Alvin would have LOVED Savages...in many ways, it’s a story he told in his own way many times. That said, I do think there's a lot of new stuff in there...” So the books will soon be in the Josephy Library, and I am going to read them. Oh– Savages and Scoundrels has just been nominated for an Oregon Book Award!

The exchange continues–with Paul having lived in Mexico City and having a godfather who was the prosecutor in the Trotsky murder case (Alvin’s interview with Trotsky in 1937 was just months before the assassination) and some mutual friends named Jackson.. It is a small world.

Here's the Oregonian piece:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/02/the_reckoning_a_looming_decisi.html

Josephy, Indians, and the Environment

2011-01-27T13:55:00.000-08:00

This is from the transcript of an interview that Jack Loeffler did with Alvin in August 1995, File 3, page 37, 38, 40 in the Josephy Library at Fishtrap archives.

Several times in the interview Alvin refers to subjects that he will or will not address in his memoir (A Walk Toward Oregon, published in 2000). Here he describes his conversion from being a "pro-development guy," who wanted to see the West--the "other half of the country"-- developed as the East had been, to seeing the country in an ecologically sounder and more sustainable way. You have to read A Walk Toward Oregon and know something of his extensive work on Indians to get the whole picture, but here is the shorthand: companies and government agencies were screwing the Indians--and oh, they were screwing a lot of other people too in the name of development and profit. At least some environmentalists were taking a longer view of things, did not have private selfish motives in it. So I will join the fight....

And he did. The first piece one on the Seneca and the Kinzua Dam ("Cornplanter, can you swim?" American Heritage Magazine, 1968), and then on to the Four Corners in the Southwest, and to the Garrison Diversion Project in the Dakotas. Here, in the interview with Loeffler, he is reflecting on it all, on his personal journey in Indian Country and post WW II America, as he begins writing the memoir.

"...this is why I've devoted so much of my life, once I began to make the turn to redeem myself so to speak from having been a pro-development guy, writing about it and urging it in the pages of Time magazine and the radio and all the rest, various things began to happen to turn me around to see the light. And they all really had to do with Indians. I began to meet and know Indians and then see how they were being screwed and how the whites were putting their culture higher than that of the Indians and really what they were doing is saying the Indian must go or Indianness must go. We're not out to kill you anymore. We're out to kill your Indianness...

"I saw Indians being victimized by development projects; large scale things happening. It wasn't one episode or one incident that changed me. I saw for instance what the army engineers were doing to the Iroquois, the Senecas, in building Kinzua back in western New York state in 1960 and '61 and breaking the oldest existing treaty in the United States. Historically I knew about that. It was an historic episode. Morally and ethically it was revolting to me what went on, and I went up to do a story on it, to find out everything going on. It was worse than I thought. I was finding real estate people who were conniving against the Indians with the Army Engineers, and the way the BIA was treating the Indians and so forth....

"I got to know Udall and he sent me off to represent him in a number of things. I'm going to go into a lot of this in the book. This is really the theme of my book: how I changed. It didn't take me too long, because by the time you [Jack Loeffler, who worked with Alvin on Hopi and coal issues in the Southwest] and I met I was pretty much already on the side of those who were trying to protect the environment. Why? Because there was justice there and decency. You weren't rooking people. The companies were rooking people. I'll never forget going down to New Oraibi, sitting in Banyacya's home with that Peabody Coal Company vice president that I yanked along. Remember he had his plane and flew me over there to Black Mesa? And then we went to Tom's house and met a bunch of Hopis. There was (sic) a couple of blind old men and there was a young—Carlotta Shattuck, I think her name was—crying and so forth. It shook up this guy from St. Louis, vice president for public relations or something.

"When we left and drove back to where his plane was, he said to me, and this is in the lead of my story, 'We have one hell of a community relations job to do here.' That was the way he viewed it, you see, as a corporate thing. In other words, really we've got to fool the people. We've got to find a way to get them on our side here and we can't do it honestly. We've got to find the devices because we've got to have that coal mine whether they want it or not."

###

a recollection from Tom Hutchison

2011-01-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Alvin...

I think few people knew of his affection for Hawai'ian music. When I had the bookstore (that brief interlude!), Kathy would bring him into town from the ranch, drop him at the store and take off. I'd play slack key guitar and he'd tell stories in that inimitable manner: charming and self-effacing. He was never a "character" in these anecdotes; he was simply a witness to events that were sometimes earthshaking, always fascinating. I would put a sign on the door- "Back In One Hour." After an hour, I'd change the sign-"Back in Half Hour." And keep changing it accordingly. Finally, Alvin said,"Why don't you make it read 'Might Be Back'?" I said, "Oh yeah. Thanks." Wrote that on the door, turned and said,"Now where were we?"

Tom

Josephy, Thorndike, American Heritage, & the business of memoir

2011-01-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Rick Bombaci stopped by to bring me a Sun Magazine, August 2010, with an article by John Thorndike about caring for his aging father, Joe Thorndike. Rick mentioned that Joe must have overlapped with Alvin, as Thorndike senior edited the Harvard Crimson in 1934, worked for Time, Life, etc. I thought I remembered the name, and on checking, he is of course mentioned in Alvin's A Walk Toward Oregon:

"My old Harvard friend Jim Parton, who had returned to New York after liquidating the daily newspaper he had tried to start in Los Angeles for Henry Luce, weaned me away from Time and over to his newest--and, this time, sensationally successful--venture, the American Heritage Publishing Company. Its major product, American Heritage magazine, dedicated to popularizing American history by good writing as well as sound scholarship, had been founded after the war by a group of eminent historians, led by... Allan Nevins. but had floundered financially until Parton and two friends with whom he was running a custom publishing business--Joseph Thorndike, a former managing editor of Life magazine, whom I had known on the Crimson at Harvard, and Oliver Jensen, a former Life text editor--bought and restyled it."

Parton's first overtures were turned down, but Alvin began writing for their magazine--the pieces that led to Patriot Chiefs appeared in AH first--and in 1960 did go to American Heritage's book division to produce a large illustrated history of American Indians. He stayed for 19 years, retiring in 1979 as Vice President and Editor in Chief.

In my quick look, I didn't find anything else on Thondike in Alvin's book, but reading the son's Sun piece brought A Walk Toward Oregon to mind in many ways. Back to Joe Thorndike: He was "managing editor, then president, of the Crimson,.... In 1934 he took a job at Time under Henry Luce, and twelve years later, at thirty-thee, he became Life's third managing editor. He founded a pair of hardcover magazines, American Heritage and Horizon, edited dozens of books and wrote three himself, the last when he was almost 80." I learned from googling his biography that Thorndike was a journalist in Europe and North Africa during WW II. And am sure that he and Alvin worked together on many projects at American Heritage--try googling Alvin along with American Heritage and you can go on forever!

The parallels in life and career are many. Thorndike and Josephy both went to Harvard, both worked as journalists during the War, both worked for Luce, and then ended up at American Heritage. They were also close in age--Thorndike was born in 1917; Alvin in 1915, and they were lifelong journalists who found it hard to write in the first person. I remember Alvin telling me how hard it was to do that as he wrote Walk--and, unfortunately, I did not read The Long and the Short and the Tall, his personal account of Marines in the Pacific, while he was alive, so could not counter that "you used first person then!"

In the Sun piece, Thorndike's son cares for his father and tries to get personal stories out of him as dementia advances, lamenting that "All his life my father has talked easily and eloquently about history, economics, art, archeology, literature, and politics. What he has never talked about are his private thoughts and emotions." The son wants such talk, and doesn't get it.

Reading A Walk Towards Oregon, we learn about Alvin's amazing cruise through the major events of the 20th century. We learn about his politics, and his passionate concern for Indian rights. But he--and many in his generation--were much more guarded about strictly personal matters. Compare that with many recent memoirs, which make their hay on private traumas and exploits, rather than on being a part of larger history.

(On Tuesday, January 11, at noon at Fishtrap, we will have a brown bag discussion of A Walk Toward Oregon. Open to all!)

The "Westerners"

2010-11-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

It's been a while since I posted anything new on the blog. Apologies. Still getting used to this new technology. And I am going to pass on the heavy lifting this time to Jo Tice Bloom and the Western Historical Quarterly for a marvelous little introduction to the "Westerners." This is interesting to us right now because our new Josephy Library Reading Group will be looking at Alvin's pieces--and the rebuttal by Francis Haines--on the Appaloosa Horse, which were all published by the New York Westerners in their "Brand Book." We meet at noon Monday, November 15, at the Fishtrap House to discuss.

Alvin had recieved another version of the Appaloosa story--one that did not credit it as the Nez Perce War Horse--from local author Grace Bartlett and her Nez Perce horseman husband Harry. Alvin was involved with the New York Posse of Westerners, so took their story and his own historical research to the Brand Book in 1967.

Alvin loved amateur historians, "history buffs," he called them. And the Westerners across the country--and in England too!--were certainly that. Here's the story from Western Historical Quarterly. Well, the first 600 words or so of a 2800 word piece. I imagine they won't mind my posting it here, as I will encourage you to go to their site, and possibly to enroll so that you can get the whole story.

"Hello Joe, You Old Buffalo: Skulls, Brand Books, and Westerners"

JO TICE BLOOM

For more than sixty years, Westerners have been researching, writing, sharing, and having fun with the history of the American West. Westerners were among the founders of the Western History Association. This article discusses Westerners and Westerners International, the umbrella organization

FOLK HEROES AND THE ROMANCE OF THE WILD have always stirred minds and imaginations—consider Greek mythology or Robin Hood or the Nordic sagas. In our American history, the folk traditions have often been obscured by the written histories of our past. Thus, we have few folk heroes from the early colonial period. The new nation, however, blossomed with Daniel Boone, Simon Girty, George Rogers Clark, and Major Robert Rogers. Consider the homage being paid to William Clark and Meriwether Lewis these days. We love our heroic figures who moved through the West, generating stories of their adventures, the land, and the people they encountered.

Out of this heritage came the Westerners. Founded in 1944 in Chicago by Great Plains natives inhabiting a foreign urban society, the Westerners sought to evoke the romance and the heroes—the Jules Sandozes, the Kit Carsons, the cowboys. But they were also devoted to accurate and unprejudiced history.

Those founders, journalists Leland Case and Don Russell, and professors Ray Allen Billington and Elmo Scott Watson, among others, decided to meet once a month over dinner and to have a paper or talk about the American West. For them, as for us, it was to be an evening of good history, good conversation, good food, and good camaraderie. As the Chicago group organized, they named themselves a corral and elected a sheriff, a deputy sheriff, a keeper of marks and brands, etc., to lead them. A trail boss would roundup new members. There would be no constitution, no bylaws, just a posse to run affairs. When incorporated to conform to Illinois laws, the corral stated their purpose was simply "Fun and Scholarship." Early on, the corral acquired a buffalo skull from the Great Plains, and today members still open in the evening with the unveiling of the skull, named Joe, and a toast, "Hello, Joe, you old buffalo." When the skull is covered and saluted with "Adios, Joe, you old buffalo," the meeting ends.

Naturally, other men heard about the Chicago Corral. Soon, corrals popped up in Denver (1944), Los Angeles (1946), New York, (1952), Washington, DC (1954), London (1954), and other places. As the informal organizations grew, each adopted its own traditions. As David Dary wrote in 2003, the Denver Posse "established the principle that each group of Westerners was to be independent of all other groups." And this has been the case ever since.

By 1958, when Westerners International was born, corrals were active in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York City, Tucson, Laramie, Kansas City, and Spokane, along with the Black Hills Corral, the Potomac Corral, the English Society, and the French Corral. Leland Case, who played father, mentor, and overall sheriff to these groups, conceived the idea of an umbrella organization that would keep corrals in touch, help new corrals get started, and offer prizes for outstanding historical contributions by corral members. Thus was born Westerners International (WI).

Case lived in Stockton, California, and established the Home Ranch there. Later the Home Ranch moved to Tucson with Leland and then, after his death, to Oklahoma City, where it is housed in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. The Home Ranch is WI's "headquarters." Dedicated volunteers keep the Home Ranch running

This story is from the Summer 2008 edition of Western Historical Quarterly. For more info:

http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whq/39.2/bloom.html

Oregon is Indian Country

2010-09-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

This is a regular "Main Street" newspaper column for the Wallowa County Chieftain, a column that I have been writing every other week for about 24 years. It will also appear on the Oregon Days of Culture web site (OregonDaysofCulture.org). As you will see in the column, dealing with political issues in Indian Country can be tricky--waters run deep. I hope I have done justice to all parties, but especially to the Nez Perce.
rich

The “Oregon is Indian Country” exhibit currently showing at Stage One in Enterprise was put together by the Oregon Historical Society and the “nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon.” Fishtrap and its Josephy Library, the local hosts, have invited elementary student groups for special programs, and are bringing in speakers to address issues suggested by the exhibit.

Most of the young students have quickly identified the Indians who once lived here, in the Wallowas, as Nez Perce. Few could name other Oregon tribes—even our close neighbors on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla. But even adults are surprised to learn that the Nez Perce are not a “federally recognized tribe OF Oregon.”

We’ve hung a good map of the Nez Perce War of 1877 on the wall at Stage One. The retreat starts in the Wallowa valley, crosses the Snake at Dug Bar, and becomes a fighting retreat as it meanders through parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. It stops at Bear Paw in Montana, just 40 miles short of the Canadian border and freedom. A few Nez Perce did, in fact, make it across the border, but most surrendered, and this is where Joseph made his famous speech, asking leave to look for his scattered, hungry old and young.

The map does not show what happened then to the Nez Perce: the trip to Leavenworth Prison and the years in Indian Territory—land the Nez Perce still call the “hot country”; the eventual return by train to the Northwest and the split at Wallula, where the old and Christian were allowed to join Nez Perce from other bands on the much reduced Nez Perce Reservation at Lapwai, and the young, and specifically the followers of Joseph, were sent to Nespelem in north central Washington to live among Indians of different cultures and languages. Oregon and Idaho were afraid of another uprising by Indians wronged by the broken treaty of 1855, which had left the Wallowa Country to the Nez Perce.

Joseph came back to the Wallowas in 1904, with money in his pocket, but newspapers railed against Indians and locals would not sell him land.

Alvin Josephy, the late dean of Western American and Indian history, and part-time Wallowa County resident for over forty years, explains the “conviction,” from colonial days, “among settler-invaders and their descendents that Indians in their native state and Whites could not live together in peace… If the Indian submitted, cut his hair, dressed like a White, lived like a White, became a Christian—in short, was assimilated and no longer an Indian—he might survive. Otherwise, he was to be pushed a safe distance away from White society [onto reservations], isolated and rendered harmless…, or he was to be annihilated.”

According to Josephy, “these three options ran thereafter like threads through the course of Indian-White relations…” The assimilationist urge reached its zenith when the Eisenhower Administration decided to solve the “Indian question” once and for all by “terminating” all tribes with cash buyouts of old treaties. Ironically, according to the “Oregon is Indian Country” exhibit that now celebrates our tribal neighbors, Oregon led the way nationally, with 62 of 109 terminations—all of the Western Oregon tribes—between 1954 and 1961. Fortunately, the policy was reversed, and Oregon tribes have been reinstated, though now “confederated” into one or another of the nine “recognized tribes.”

Our young students were surprised to learn that there were thousands of Indian tribes and bands living in the Americas when Columbus landed—Josephy says that there were probably more than 2500 mutually unintelligible languages spoken, as many as 90 million people, and cities larger than any European cities of the time. Oregon alone must have been home to over 100 tribes and bands.

For the moment, as evidenced by the Oregon exhibit, Indians and Indian culture enjoy more favorable attitudes from the general population. Indians are allowed to dance and drum openly—things once legally outlawed in attempts at assimilation and Christianization—and we go to see them. We applaud their efforts in bringing the salmon back to the rivers.

Locally, we welcome Indians at Chief Joseph Days, and at the Homeland Project in Wallowa and its annual powwow and Nez Perce Art in the Wallowa show. Although Nez Perce Tribal government is headquartered in Idaho, (and the exiled Nez Perce are governmentally part of the "confederated" tribes at Colville, Washington), the tribe owns land in Wallowa County, and, possibly of more importance, its Fisheries and Wildlife departments work IN Oregon under federal recognition of “usual and accustomed” places acknowledged in the 1855 treaty and in subsequent negotiations.

And, in fact, a 1999 Oregon Legislative Assembly joint resolution offers an apology for the Nez Perce removal, and says that “The people of the State of Oregon welcome the Nez Perce Nation in their return to stewardship in the Wallowa Mountains.”

We are Indian country too.

###

Alvin at War

2010-09-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

Alvin at war

Being a direct participant in World War II was a choice for Alvin Josephy—but not much of one. Born in 1915, he came of age in the depths of the Depression as fascist regimes were gaining power in Europe. He’d been involved with student groups and national politics—meetings and debates on Huey Long, socialism, communism, and the New Deal—while at Harvard, traveled to Mexico to interview Trotsky and President Cardenas in 1937, and was working as news director at WOR Radio in New York on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

Soon after Pearl Harbor Alvin headed to Washington D.C. and Archibald MacLeish’s Office of Facts and Figures—the government propaganda arm. It wasn’t close enough, and connections, contacts, and events soon had him at Perris Island Boot Camp, and then a Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Guadalcanal mop-up, and at the landings and occupations of Guam and Iwo Jima.

He waded ashore at Guam, talking into a condom-covered microphone tethered by 40 feet of wire to a recording machine buried in a landing craft. Most of the men he walked ashore with were hit before they made the beach, but securing the Island and taking Japanese prisoners was every bit as dangerous and as important in Alvin Josephy’s growth as a man and writer. On Iwo he hopped from unit to unit, place to place, often traveling by ambulance—he said ambulance drivers knew the current score on the ground better than anyone else.

Alvin and a few others were called back to the States from Iwo to explain to the American public why over 4,000 Marines gave their lives to take an 8 square mile island a million miles from home. The answer was B-29s. In the first 100 days after the Iwo airfields were opened, 851 planes, coming back crippled from air strikes on Tokyo, unable to make it back to their take-off points in the Marianas, landed safely on that 8 square mile island.

Then came the Atom Bomb—and Alvin did not have to return to battle in the Pacific and the anticipated invasion of Japan. A trunk arrived from Guam with carbon copies of the dispatches he’d sent to ships to send to home town papers across the land—interviews in fox holes, stories of courage, camaraderie, and thoughts of home. He took a month of leave, went to North Carolina, and wrote his first book, The Long and the Short and the Tall.

It was published in 1946, when he was 31 years old. I’d never read it while he was alive, though I’d heard some of the stories as we traveled the Northwest to readings and signings with his memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon. And watched and listened as old Marines came to have books signed and talk about Guam and Bougainville, Tarawa and Iwo Jima.

Some of them cried, as I cried last week, 65 years after the events and the writing about the events, cried at the horror, heroism, dumb luck and tragedy of a war so huge and so different as to make it almost inconceivable now. Today’s wars are their own kind of horror, heroism, dumb luck, and tragedy, but the concept of 800 ships and thousands of men attacking 30,000 enemy soldiers on a tiny island with bombs, shells, and bayonets is a hard one to get around today. But it made the “survivor’s guilt” that Alvin sometimes talked about and that the vets who came to our readings talked about palpable.

And I think I found an understanding of something else that he brought back from that War. On Guam they had launched an effort to take Japanese prisoners, and although most of the defeated Japanese committed suicide or fought to their deaths, some did surrender, and Alvin found hope in that. He thought, as he lay in a ship’s hold with a handful of prisoners and fellow Marines after an evening of conversation, that maybe minds could be changed, that Japanese soldiers who thought suicide more honorable than surrender could learn “bigger ideas,” and that the world might embrace” freedom and democracy and justice and truth.”

He spent the next 60 years chasing and embracing those ideas.

p.s., used copies of The Long and the Short and the Tall can be had for five dollars and up. “New” copies—I would guess that means mint condition copies—of the 2000 paperback edition from Buford Books, with a new foreword by the author, are $100 and up!

Alvin Josephy at War

2010-09-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

Alvin at war

Being a direct participant in World War II was a choice for Alvin Josephy—but not much of one. Born in 1915, he came of age in the depths of the Depression as fascist regimes were gaining power in Europe. He’d been involved with student groups and national politics—meetings and debates on Huey Long, socialism, communism, and the New Deal—while at Harvard, traveled to Mexico to interview Trotsky and President Cardenas in 1937, and was working as news director at WOR Radio in New York on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

Soon after Pearl Harbor Alvin headed to Washington D.C. and Archibald MacLeish’s Office of Facts and Figures—the government propaganda arm. It wasn’t close enough, and connections, contacts, and events soon had him at Perris Island Boot Camp, and then a Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Guadalcanal mop-up, and at the landings and occupations of Guam and Iwo Jima.

He waded ashore at Guam, talking into a condom-covered microphone tethered by 40 feet of wire to a recording machine buried in a landing craft. Most of the men he walked ashore with were hit before they made the beach, but securing the Island and taking Japanese prisoners was every bit as dangerous and as important in Alvin Josephy’s growth as a man and writer. On Iwo he hopped from unit to unit, place to place, often traveling by ambulance—he said ambulance drivers knew the current score on the ground better than anyone else.

Alvin and a few others were called back to the States from Iwo to explain to the American public why over 4,000 Marines gave their lives to take an 8 square mile island a million miles from home. The answer was B-29s. In the first 100 days after the Iwo airfields were opened, 851 planes, coming back crippled from air strikes on Tokyo, unable to make it back to their take-off points in the Marianas, landed safely on that 8 square mile island.

Then came the Atom Bomb—and Alvin did not have to return to battle in the Pacific and the anticipated invasion of Japan. A trunk arrived from Guam with carbon copies of the dispatches he’d sent to ships to send to home town papers across the land—interviews in fox holes, stories of courage, camaraderie, and thoughts of home. He took a month of leave, went to North Carolina, and wrote his first book, The Long and the Short and the Tall.

It was published in 1946, when he was 31 years old. I’d never read it while he was alive, though I’d heard some of the stories as we traveled the Northwest to readings and signings with his memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon. And watched and listened as old Marines came to have books signed and talk about Guam and Bougainville, Tarawa and Iwo Jima.

Some of them cried, as I cried last week, 65 years after the events and the writing about the events, cried at the horror, heroism, dumb luck and tragedy of a war so huge and so different as to make it almost inconceivable now. Today’s wars are their own kind of horror, heroism, dumb luck, and tragedy, but the concept of 800 ships and thousands of men attacking 30,000 enemy soldiers on a tiny island with bombs, shells, and bayonets is a hard one to get around today. But it made the “survivor’s guilt” that Alvin sometimes talked about and that the vets who came to our readings talked about palpable.

And I think I found an understanding of something else that he brought back from that War. On Guam they had launched an effort to take Japanese prisoners, and although most of the defeated Japanese committed suicide or fought to their deaths, some did surrender, and Alvin found hope in that. He thought, as he lay in a ship’s hold with a handful of prisoners and fellow Marines after an evening of conversation, that maybe minds could be changed, that Japanese soldiers who thought suicide more honorable than surrender could learn “bigger ideas,” and that the world might embrace” freedom and democracy and justice and truth.”

He spent the next 60 years chasing and embracing those ideas.

p.s., used copies of The Long and the Short and the Tall can be had for five dollars and up. “New” copies—I would guess that means mint condition copies—of the 2000 paperback edition from Buford Books, with a new foreword by the author, are $100 and up!

The picture at top of the page

2010-08-31T12:04:00.001-07:00

I thought that I should briefly explain the banner at the top of the page. The picture at the left is the one that appeared on the cover of Walk Toward Oregon, Alvin Josephy's memoir. It must be Alvin in his early forties, after he had found the Nez Perce story and country of Idaho and northeast Oregon.

The one in the middle was taken at Wallowa Lake Lodge in October of 1965 at the publication party for The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Alvin is standing at the left. His wife, Betty, and elder Gilbert Conner from the Umatilla Confederate Tribes (Tamastslikt Cultural Institute Director Bobbie Conner's grandfather!) are seated. Standing behind them is Chester Kerr, President of Yale University Press, publisher of the Nez Perce book.

Alvin had worked on the Nez Perce book for ten years, taking time out to write the book, Patriot Chiefs, and several articles about Indians, including an early one on the "Naming of the Nez Perce" in the autumn 1955 edition of Montana magazine, and a 60 plus page entry on "American Indians" in the 1963 Colliers Encyclopedia. The latter eventually grew into the award winning Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968.

Oh -- on the right is an architect's rendering of a remodeled Coffin House--Fishtrap's headquarters in Enterprise--with a new Josephy Library wing at its left.

Alvin Josephy in Mexico--1937

2010-08-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

Alvin Josephy Taluca, Mexico, 1937

Doug Erickson, Special Collections Librarian at Lewis and Clark College, just sent me a PDF file of Alvin Josephy’s 1937 Ken Magazine interview with Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.

Which brought a rush of memories and sent me back to the pages of Alvin’s memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon. I first heard the story the second year of Summer Fishtrap, when Alvin was on a panel with Herb Mitgang of the New York Times and Jonathan Nicholas, then at the Oregonian. The panel was about fact and fiction, and, after listening to the two journalists talk, Alvin rose to recall the long ago trip to Mexico.

"When I interviewed Trotsky in Mexico in 1937," he began, and we in the audience looked at him and each other with small gasps and big smiles. Here we were in a meeting room at a Methodist church camp at Wallowa Lake, Oregon in 1989, being thrust back to major events in Twentieth Century history—to the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and a man who was a prime player in the first and a sideline jockey maybe looking for a role in the second.

His interviewer, Alvin Josephy, was a 22 year old Harvard dropout with a stint as a junior screenwriter in Hollywood and a few months coordinating high school essays and WOR radio interviews with newspaper employees for the New York Herald Tribune. At the end of the school year, Alvin had talked his way into a Herald Tribune press card and arranged a trip to Mexico with the intention of interviewing the new President of the country, Caesar Cardenas, and Trotsky. Using political skills he’d picked up in student politics with a national bent at Harvard, and writing skills he’d begun honing as a high school student at Horace Mann, Josephy scheduled an interview—sending several written questions ahead—with Trotsky and began making the connections that would allow him to meet the new President.

Josephy wanted to know whether Trotsky would support a “liberal front” alongside Stalin in Spain, what Trotsky thought of the eventual outcome of events there and in Germany and Italy, where Hitler and Mussolini were on the rise, and whether he was engaged still—or his partisans were engaged still—in battle with Stalin. He came away thinking that Trotsky was “muddled” in his thinking, but that he was also sincere, and saw himself as the true practitioner of Marxism waiting for the proletariat to rise and throw out all despots and capitalist masters.

Ken Magazine later printed Trotsky’s contentious reply to Josephy—he had not included all of his (Trotsky’s) written answers to questions, and he incorrectly asserted that there was a rift between Trotsky and his host, the great muralist Diego Rivera—and noted that they had already heard from the “communists,” who thought the article was biased toward Trotsky. “Ken gets it both ways,” they announced alongside Trotsky’s reply.

A train trip with one of Cardenas’ cabinet members and a brief interview with the President followed. In his memoir, Alvin remarks that he was unable to get an interview with dissident General Cedillo, who had resigned and retreated, and was reportedly conspiring with American oil interests to overthrow the populist and anti-clerical Cardenas. The great novelist Graham Greene, ascribing his success to his Catholicism, managed the interview with Cedillo a few months later—before Cedillo was assassinated.

The mind boggling thing about all of this is that Alvin was 22 years old, and smack in the middle of his century’s history! The portents of things to come are the incredible amount of research and preparation he did before the trip—about the Russian Revolution, current events in Europe and the U.S., and the history and culture of Mexico, his firm belief in democracy, and his interest in fair play and justice for all citizens, and especially for the indigenous peoples who had been swept aside by European conquerors.

###

picture of Alvin in Mexico courtesy Al Josephy; photo of Trotsky from Ken Magazine article.

and, check out Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Lacuna, a historical novel which follows events in Mexico City in the Rivera-Kahlo household in the time of Trotsky!

Loeffler, Abbey, and Josephy

2010-08-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends of the Josephy Library,

Welcome to the first Library Blog! Actually, I am sending the text in a regular email, as I have been doing for the past year or so, but it will now be posted on the the Josephy Library blog, where you are now!

This is all new ground for me, so patience please—and I will appreciate your suggestions.

Best,
rich

Jack Loeffler comes to Fishtrap

Jack Loeffler celebrated his 74th birthday in a hotel room in Baker City on his way to Fishtrap this July. He’d been as far as Joseph before, sat on Alvin Josephy’s deck and interviewed him, but he had never made it as far as Wallowa Lake. He was thrilled with the first sight of it..

On Monday morning we began a conversation that seemed like it had started ages ago, and the time between the phantom conversations of the past and today melted away. From time to time Jack would say that he needed to interview himself about Josephy, and I would think that I should have a damned recorder going while we talked.

Neither happened, but I’m hoping they will.

Jack brought us a disc with a couple of hours of interview time with Alvin, and he brought stories: the time he read Alvin’s testimony defending the Hopis in a fight with Peabody Coal; the camping trip with Alvin sleeping under the pickup until a thunderstorm woke him thumping into the bottom of the pickup bed and scrambling inside. And on and on…

At Fishtrap, in a brief afternoon session, Loeffler played short snippets of interviews—most done for radio programs in New Mexico—on environmental issues with Stewart Udall, author John Nichols, Earth Firster Dave Forman, Sierra and Friends of the Earth’s David Brower, Ed Abbey, Alvin Josephy, and a host of others. There was no name dropping—just 20 second blurbs from here and there to make a point..

Later, I asked him about the Abbey and Josephy exchange about grazing on public lands.. Abbey was of course dead set against grazing; Alvin, informed by friendships and hours on horseback with Wallowa County ranchers like Jack McClaran and Biden Tippett, took a different point of view. Developers were the real problem; ranchers and environmental thinkers should be in league.

It was a friendly dialog, according to Jack. His eyes sparkled with the thought of his old friends, Ed Abbey and Alvin Josephy, in a long-ago conversation that could still stir emotions today. I’ll have to send you that picture of Ed and Alvin on the rim of the Grand Canyon.” But he didn’t need to—it’s in his memoir about Abbey, Adventures with Ed. Clean shaven Alvin between bearded Ed and long-haired Jack, with a small group of anthropologists and photographers all looking very much 1971. I’m sure Alvin had to catch a plane soon to an editorial board meeting at American Heritage or a session with some Indian tribe or government committee redesigning the BIA.

But he looks happy and not completely out of place with this band of 1970s renegade thinkers in the thin Southwest air.

p.s. I found another picture of Ed and Alvin—In Alvin’s memoir! And I am posting it here.

About the Josephy Library at Fishtrap

2010-07-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

The Alvin M. and Betty Josephy Library of Western History and Culture at Fishtrap promotes the exploration and understanding of Western and American Indian history and culture. It honors the lives and legacy of the Josephys--Alvin’s work as a historian and Betty and Alvin’s advocacy for Indians and desire that the voices of all Americans be heard and honored.