Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

In the beginning, before the coming of the La-te-tel-wit (human beings), the world according to the legends of the Nez Perce people was inhabited by animals that were endowed with the qualities of humans and behaved like them. In that mythical age, the principal character was Coyote, a trickster and transformer. At times Coyote was a silly rascal who got himself into ludicrous scrapes. At other times he was super-human and able to change himself and others, as well as the forces of nature, into different forms and to accomplish wondrous deeds.

One day Coyote learned that all the animals were being devoured by a fearsome Monster who dwelled near present-day Kamiah on the Clearwater River. Tricking the Monster into swallowing him also, Coyote started a fire inside the Monster’s belly and slew him by severing his heart from his body with stone knives, setting free the imprisoned animals. Carving the dead Monster’s body into pieces, Coyote flung them throughout the lands where they became the different Indian tribes of today. But he had forgotten the region in which the Monster had lived. When Fox reminded him of his oversight, Coyote sprinkled that part of the country with the Monster’s blood, and from it sprang the brave and intelligent Ne-Mee-Poo, "the people." Today they are also known as the Nez Perce Indians, and southeast of Kamiah, in the center of their country, one can still see the mounds of the heart and liver of the slain Monster.

This tale is part of a huge and rich treasury of legends that countless generations of Nez Perce grandparents and parents have told their children to instruct and educate them in the backgrounds, cultural ways of life, and codes of conduct of their people. The legends convey moral teaching and practical information about familiar things and deal generally with notable landmarks of the Nez Perces’ terrain. . . . In effect, the legends have not only bound together the families more tightly from one generation to the next but helped to maintain and strengthen the deep spiritual ties that join the Nez Perce people to the rugged and inspiringly beautiful part of the North American continent that is their homeland.

Nez Perce Country lies within what anthropologists have called the Plateau cultural area of the Northwest, a large inland region from the Rockies to the Cascade Mountains and from the great bend of the Fraser River in British Columbia in the north to the edge of the Great Basin in southern Oregon and Idaho. Within that Plateau area, sharing many of the Nez Perces’ cultural traits and lifeways, are numerous other tribes. They include to the north and northeast such Salish-speaking peoples as the Coeur d’Alenes, Spokans, and Flatheads and to the west and northwest the Wallawallas, Palouses, Umatillas, and Yakimas—who with the Nez Perces spoke closely related Sahaptian tongues of the Penutian language family—as well as Cayuses and Molalas. . . .

At its greatest extent, before the coming of the white men, the territory of the Nez Perces is estimated to have covered approximately 70,200 square kilometers (27,000 square miles), extending from the eastern slopes of the Bitterroot Mountains on the present Montana-Idaho border across almost all of the southern half of Idaho’s panhandle, from the area of the Palouse River in the north to the Payette River in the south, and westward across a large part of what are now southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon. Falling within two major physiographic provinces, the Northern Rocky Mountains in most of northern Idaho and the Columbia Plateau in the west, it is a spectacularly majestic country of vast, and often abruptly changing, differences in elevation. The terrain encompasses a mosaic of forested mountains, some with elevations above 3,048 meters (10,000 feet); high plateau prairies and huge, undulating hills; steep, grassy ridges and escarpments of rimrock; and awesomely deep valleys and canyons that, in the area of Lewiston, Idaho, descend to as low as 229 meters (750 feet) above sea level. . . .

The Ne-Mee-Poo have occupied this "big" country of uniquely diverse topography for many millennia. . . . [P]eople of a big-game-hunting cultural tradition who existed on both sides of the Rocky Mountains were in all zones of Nez Perce Country—the canyons, plateau, and mountains—at least 10,000 or 11,000 years ago. Evidence of their presence has been found at several archeologically explored sites, particularly at Hatwai and Lenore in the lower Clearwater Valley above Lewiston, and on the higher reaches of the Clearwater’s North Fork. . . .

It is assumed that by the end of the Cascade stage of development some of the foundations of the historic Plateau culture, including that of the Nez Perce people, were becoming established, with minor variations being devised and adopted by different local groups. The development of the Nez Perces’ culture certainly quickened and broadened during the Tucannon Phase, which began about 4,500 years ago and lasted for some 2,000 years. For the first time, evidence of this period shows the establishment of Nez Perce winter villages of circular, oval, and rectangular semisubterranean pit houses, particularly along the Clearwater River. . . .

By about 500 B.C. there were numerous villages of Nez Perce ancestral groups in various parts of the southeastern Plateau. Most of the settlements were small, containing from one to three structures. It appears that the people had intensified the hunting and use of bison, which are normally associated with the Great Plains east of the Rockies but which seem to have been present in large numbers in the Columbia Plateau at least until the 1770s and in northern Great Basin areas until the 18th century. . . .

On the whole, relatively little is yet known of how the Nez Perce culture evolved until the last few hundred years. After 500 B.C., improvements in technologies and equipment permitted a greater utilization of the rich seasonal food supplies and led to a continued growth of population. In the 1,000 years prior to A.D. 1700, the greater numbers of people living in an increasing number of villages along the main streams and tributaries of the Clearwater, Salmon, Snake, and other major rivers intensified their use of salmon and other fish. With improved fishing gear and methods, in fact, fish eventually constituted at least 50 percent of the diet and the bounteous fish supply supported the growing population. . . .

The Nez Perce villages were democratic and egalitarian and possessed a relatively simple social and governing structure that recognized the freedom and equality of the people. The basic social and economic unit in each village was the family. Through marriages many families had relatives in other villages and even in certain other tribes.

In each village, the people chose a council that named and advised a headman. Often that position was hereditary, but the council could substitute an abler man for an ineffectual son of a previous headman. Sometimes the headman was also a shaman, or religious leader, possessing strong spiritual powers. Also of importance, however, were such characteristics and qualities as his wisdom, reputation for generosity, abilities at diplomacy and oratory, bravery, experience, and age. Frequently he was the village’s oldest capable man. His duties were to arbitrate disputes, act as spokesman, oversee the well-being of the villagers, and provide an example of outstanding and generous conduct, sharing his wealth with the needy. In return, the people often gave him food, clothing, and other goods, especially for settling arguments. Occasionally he was assisted by prominent younger men, and through marriage ties he sometimes became the headman of two villages.

Although he was the most influential person in a village, he could not overrule the council. That body, which included the male heads of the families and sometimes other elderly prominent males, was a deliberative one that discussed village issues and made decisions only by general agreement. It planned the details of fishing, gathering, hunting, and other village activities, decided on relations with other groups, and took steps necessary to preserve the people’s peace, welfare, and harmony. Women took little or no part in council discussions, but they were often able to influence male relatives on the council.

The council’s authority, like that of the headman, was strictly limited. Neither could enforce compliance with their decisions. Both ruled by persuasion and influence, and dissenters within a village were free to go their own way. But their respect for the headman and council, and agreement that the decisions were necessary or good for the people, usually kept them from doing so. Those guilty of conduct that offended or harmed a village, or of a serious crime, were generally punished by relatives or, in some cases, banished from the village by the council.

Some villages ranged along the rivers in clusters, and some were widely separated. Each village was independent, but those along the same stream or in the same general locality were united in bands and were identified by name with the principal village, the stream, or the locality. Representatives of the different villages composed a band council, which elected a band leader, usually the headman of the largest village or the ablest male in the band. Generally, that office, too, was hereditary, but the council could make another selection. The bands unified the villages for group undertakings, including the building and maintenance of facilities at fishing stations, food-collecting trips, and seasonal ceremonies, as well as for mutual defense and attacks against enemies.

For much the same purposes, various neighboring bands were unified, in turn, into bigger regional groups, sometimes called confederacies or composite bands, with overall leaders selected by councils made up of the headmen of the member bands, as well as prominent warriors. The headman of a composite bands was usually a man of outstanding prestige and abilities, often in hunting or warfare. . . .

The composite band—important in understanding later Nez Perce history—was as high as political unification went among the villages. The people as a whole comprised an ethnic entity because of cultural and linguistic similarities, a common background, and blood and marital interrelationships. But there was no head chief, permanent council, or political organization that could speak for all of them, and even the leaders of the bands and composite groups could not force individual members to go along with the majority. Though unity on important matters was often achieved, the autonomy of each village and of each band was paramount. . . .

The riverine villages, nestled in narrow valleys beneath high hills that provided warmth, were mostly winter residences. The people lived in lodges and double lean-tos, semisubterranean longhouses covered with mats of reeds and grasses. The longhouses, a few of which were up to 30.5 meters (100 feet) in length, housed a number of families and sometimes the entire village membership. The fires of individual families were placed in rows down the center, with the smoke going up through an opening at the ridgepole. The people slept along the inner walls of the structure. Villages also contained menstrual huts set apart from the other buildings; small, dome-shaped sweathouses used by both sexes for physical and spiritual purification and cleansing; and semisubterranean dormitories, which sometimes also were used for sweat baths. In other season, when the villagers moved to fishing, gathering, and hunting camps or various interband or intertribal meeting places, they dwelled in temporary, tipi-like shelters, usually covered with portable woven mats of bark or reeds.

By the 18th century, garments were being fashioned from the dressed hides and furs of many animals, particularly mountain sheep, deer, and elk, but also antelope, mountain goat, bison, wolf, bear, coyote, and smaller creatures. . . . Clothing included breech-cloths, double aprons, leggings, poncho shirts, belts, robes and blankets, moccasins, mittens, neckpieces, and occasionally fur or animal-head caps for men and belted dresses, long shirts, skirts, aprons, leggings, poncho shirts, blankets, knee-length moccasins, and mittens for women. Women also wore fez-shaped hats of twined grasses and hemp cordage, and both sexes wore fur strips in their braided hair. Young children wore little or no clothing in warm weather, and babies were carried in wooden cradleboards to which were usually attached charms and a small bag containing the infant’s umbilical cord, the destruction of which, it was believed, would bring bad luck.

Daily dress was mostly unornamented, but for special occasions people donned clothes decorated with polished elk’s teeth, beads and discs of stone, bone or shell (the last was traded inland by coastal Indians), dyed or natural-color porcupine quills, feathers, beaver teeth, paint, or other materials. . . .

. . . [T]he Nez Perce appreciated beauty and cleanliness and took great care with every detail of dress. Ornamentation usually was meant to please both the wearer and observer and be an expression of one’s identity, special status, or rank. "Medicine" objects provided protection to the wearer or symbolized a personal story or the spiritual source of one’s power. Headmen, shamans, and warriors often added extra details to denote their status. . .

The aboriginal Nez Perces practiced no agriculture, and much of their existence was occupied in seasonal food-collecting activities. In late May and early June, the rivers filled with eels, steelhead, and chinook salmon. The villagers crowded to communal fishing sites where they had built weirs of brush and poles to trap the fish, or rock and wood platforms from which the men and boys could haul in fish with large dip nets. Spears, harpoons, seines, hooks and lines, and dugout canoes also were employed to bring in the fish that were fighting their way upstream from the coast to spawn. The first fishing of the season was accompanied by prescribed rituals and a ceremonial feast known as ka-oo-yit. Thanksgiving was offered to the Creator and to the fish for having returned and given themselves to the people as food. In this way, it was hoped that the fish would return the next year. The catches were divided among the people by shamans or specially-designated individuals, and what fish were not eaten were split open, cleaned, and smoked or dried in the sun to be stored for trade or later use. Fishing took place throughout the summer and fall, first on the lower streams and then on the higher tributaries, and catches also included blueback salmon, sturgeon, whitefish, suckers, and varieties of trout. Most of the supplies for winter use came from a second run in the fall, when large numbers of sockeye, silver, and dog salmon appeared in the rivers.

Kouse and other early root crops were gathered during the spring while the people were still along the lower streams. But after the snow melted in the higher country, the bands left their riverine villages and, with dogs helping to carry the baggage, traveled to favorite root-gathering grounds on the plateau, like Musselshell and Moscow meadows and the Weippe and Camas prairies, where they established camps. With the people again observing "first-fruits" thanksgiving ceremonies and feasts, the women used crutch-shaped digging sticks and turned up a succession of ripened roots, including camas and bitterroots. . . .

During the warm months there sere also wild plants, berries, pine nuts, and sunflower seeds to be gathered. In the meadows of the foothills were wild onions, carrots, and other plants, and among the underbrush of the plateau draws and forested mountainsides were hawthorn and serviceberries, chokecherries, thornberries, blackberries, and huckleberries. . . .

The camps were lively communal meeting places for the different bands, each of which set up at a separate site. While the women gathered roots and berries, the men and boys hunted, fished, played games, or competed in wrestling or foot-racing. Relatives visited each other’s camps and made new friendships. In the evenings, and often lasting well into the night, there were interband rituals and feasts, gambling at the stick and other guessing games, celebration dances, drumming and singing, and courting. Food was prepared by being ground with stone pestles and mortars of wood, stone, or basketry and baked in earthen ovens, boiled with hot rocks in watertight baskets, or broiled on sticks or wooden frames inserted into the ground around fires. Spoons, bowls, and drinking cups were made of wood or the horn of a mountain sheep. Other utensils and tools, such as knives, wedges, axes, scrapers, and clubs, were fashioned from antler, bone, stone, and wood. Hemp was used for flat wallets or pouches. Later, these distinctive Nez Perce bags, decorated with colored geometric designs, would be woven from corn husks.

Game animals and birds provided, besides food, material for dress, implements, and other objects of daily life, so hunting went on almost constantly except at the height of salmon runs. The principal big game included deer, elk, mountain sheep and goat, moose, bison, antelope, and brown, black, and grizzly bear. Birds included grouse, sage hens, ducks, and geese. . . .

Spears, bows and arrows, and other weapons were used in the hunts. The bows were usually made of yew, syringa, cherrywood, or thornbush, backed by sinew, but, until mountain sheep became scarce in their country in the early 19th century, the strongest bows were made from that animal’s horns, which were straightened by being boiled or heated and backed with layers of sinew. Other tribes, on the plains and elsewhere, admired these bows and were often anxious to trade the Nez Perces for them. . . .

Much of the food was stored against winter starving times, which were frequently serious. The villagers stretched supplies but sometimes ran out of them before spring and had to forage for anything edible, including moss and the inner bark of pine trees, which they roasted or made into a mush or soup. Sharing was mandatory, not only within a village, but among bands and even members of other tribes. Stinginess was a vice and, as was customary among peoples throughout the Plateau area, guests were treated hospitably and were even permitted to share the use of fishing stations and gathering and hunting grounds. . . .

The Nez Perces not only visited frequently and intermarried among themselves but traveled widely and had social and economic relationships with many different tribes. In the spring, before the salmon reached them, Nez Perces often went down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the rapids at Celilo Falls and the Dalles, where the fish had already arrived from the coast. This was the home territory of Wishram, Wasco, and other peoples, but the area also teemed with additional groups that had come to fish from elsewhere in the Northwest, including Wallawallas, Yakimas, Umatillas, Klikitats, Wanapums, Palouses, and Cayuses. . . . The Nez Perce were closely related by marriage with many of the Palouses and Cayuses, who lived immediately to their north and west, but they socialized, fished, and traded with all the different groups and had relatives among a number of them. . . .

Closer to home, Nez Perce bands journeyed to annual intertribal trade gatherings at such places as the Yakima Valley, the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers, and the area of present-day Moscow, Idaho. Farther north, they fished at Spokane and Kettle Falls and visited with Spokans, Coeur d’Alenes, Colvilles, and Kalispels. In the spring, when the snows had gone, large parties also crossed the mountains to the east, joining Flatheads and Kutenais in buffalo hunts on the northern plains. . . . Still other hunting and trade trips were made to southeastern Oregon and southern Idaho, the territories of Northern Paiutes, Western Shoshonis, and Bannocks. . . .

The relationships were not always peaceful. In the north, Nez Perces sometimes feuded with Spokans or Coeur d’Alenes over real or imagined insults and rivalries, and on the plains intertribal hunting groups of Nez Perces, Flatheads and Kutenais clashed with Blackfeet from Canada. In the south, warfare with the Shoshonis, Bannocks, and Paiutes was so frequent that peaceful trade meeting with them were little more than truces. . . .

The Nez Perces were family oriented and were raised, educated, and influenced by close relatives. Before giving birth, an expectant mother was instructed and helped by elder female relatives, who also assisted a midwife or shamaness, as well as the girl’s mother, when the baby was born. After children were weaned, they usually were cared for by their grandparents, who taught them the basic arts and skills of the people and spent long winter hours telling them myths like those of Coyote’s Fishnet and Ant and Yellowjacket. The myths, about creatures that were turned to stone for their misbehavior, entertained and instructed the children in Nez Perce customs and values. They generally emphasized themes of proper conduct and attitude, including bravery, justice, generosity, repression of emotions, self-discipline and self-reliance, individual freedom, opposition to centralized authority, and dependence on supernatural forces to determine one’s destiny—all of them values that would be reemphasized all their lives in their upbringing, in rituals, and by the exhortations of their leaders. . . .

. . . Children often were named after notable ancestors, with the hope that the child would develop similar qualities, and name-giving ceremonies, with the giving of gifts, marked the event. Nicknames also were given, and later in a person’s life, new names might be acquired to recognize an important deed, a personal attribute, or the guardian spirit. Names were considered private possessions of the person or the family.

Between the ages of three and six, girls learned to use toy digging sticks and boys were instructed in the use of small bows and arrows. Special ceremonies celebrated a boy’s first game kill and a girl’s first root-digging and berry-picking. About the same time they received a serious formal lecture from a prominent elder about correct conduct and morals. As they approached adolescence, they were instructed by their parents and a shaman about religious beliefs and practices.

Like most other Native Americans, the Nez Perces were animists; they believed that everything in creation—animals, birds, fish, rocks, trees, stars, planets, and all natural phenomena —had spirits, or a supernatural side, that appeared to humans in visions and could influence them for good or harm. Through vision quests, humans acquired personal guardian spirits, sometimes called tutelary, or teaching, spirits, who conferred on them certain powers, or spiritually supported abilities, that had a separate existence from the individual. . . .

In a vision, the spirit might appear as a human, but with the attributes of its animal or other natural form. The spirit would explain the nature of its powers and instruct the vision-seeker in things that he or she must and must not do to receive the spirit’s support through life. The individual also received a personal spirit song to be used with proper rituals to summon the spirit. If a person abused his power or broke a taboo before seeking the spirit, the power could cause bad luck, an accident, illness, or death.

Sometimes after reaching the age of nine, youths were left alone at a remote place, often on a mountaintop, to seek a vision and acquire a guardian spirit, a wey-ya-kin. They went without food, perhaps for days, until they either had a vision that revealed the spirit or until they could no longer maintain the vigil. Failure to receive a vision usually meant a mediocre or difficult life, and some youths went on vision quests more than once. A person who received a very strong power recognized by the shamans would be trained by them to become a shaman. Pretense at having had a vision was avoided for fear of punishment by the offended spirit.

The youths would reveal the identity of their guardian spirits by singing their spirit songs for the first time at a special dance ceremony, presided over by the shamans and lasting from five to ten days in the winter. Thereafter, they would use a name and wear and carry objects symbolic of their wey-ya-kin, whose aid they would seek throughout their lives. The shamans, known as tewats, were wise and respected people. Besides being in charge of most rituals, which in effect kept the people loyal to the ongoing society, they served as doctors, or curers, foretellers of the future, locators of game, controllers of the weather, and advisers. They acquired their authority from their ability to communicate with the spiritual world and often had many guardian spirits, but much of their power and success came from their knowledge of the curing power of plants, their understanding of human nature and of how to deal with people, and their skill at sorcery. They included both men and women and often had an association of their own within a large band.

When they reached puberty, Nez Perce girls were isolated for a week in special menstrual lodges, and at a marriageable age they were courted if they had not previously been betrothed. Marriages usually took place between members of families of equal prestige and personal wealth. Relatives—even distant cousins—were not permitted to marry each other. . . . A husband might also take his wife’s sister as a second wife; in any case, he usually was expected to marry her if his wife died. Conversely, a widow usually married her deceased husband’s oldest brother. Divorce was easy to obtain, and the individuals returned to their respective kin groups.

Besides spirits, humans, as well as natural objects, were believed to have souls, without which they died. If a Nez Perce properly observed rituals during life, his soul would successfully reach an afterworld where life continued. The Nez Perces did not believe in a better "happy hunting ground" or a hell. When a soul departed and a person died, female relatives set up a wailing, or keening. The corpse was ritually bathed and buried with some of the dead person’s possessions that might be needed in the afterworld. Shamans performed rituals to keep the ghost of the deceased from returning to haunt the village, and relative distributed the departed one’s remaining property. The surviving spouse went into mourning for a year and was then able to remarry. . . .

Because of their numbers and organization, their wide-ranging habits, their large and varied food supply, which gave them many things to trade, and their geographical position between the peoples of the Plateau region and those of the northern plains, the Nez Perces by 1700 were perhaps the most influential people of the Plateau. . . . (pp. 17-36)