The Bitterroot mountains huddle around the Clear Creek River in Idaho, hugging the sides of Route 12 and the history, tears, and the betrayals of the Nimipu or Nez Perce. We take in beauty and tragedy of the territory as we drive for winding miles beside that sparkling water.
These Natives have lived here for 11,000 years before white maurauders invaded the forests, streams and mineral rich hills with their entitled “every man for himself” ethic. The Nez Perce offered to act as guides across the vast territory of which they would later be robbed. Initially, they presented Lewis and Clark with food and shelter, information and safe passage. Over time when pressures for land increased, they asked to be left alone. They signed on to treaties in good faith. Then they were slaughtered and herded into a tiny, unsustainable fragment of their former land.
The man in front of the teepee doesn’t chastise us for being on land exclusively once the home of the Nez Perce. In fact, he wears a baseball shirt and speaks American English rather than Nimipu as he tells of the Native ways disappearing from the Bitterroot.
“Check out the camas down the road,” he offers the blue field where once the tubers were harvested for food that surpasses the protein content of a trout, and are now a periwinkle sea of entertainment for tourists. He casts no looks of resentment our way.
Nor is he the only reminder of things passed. Things that have changed. On the fringes of the parking lot we find another marginalized group, a prairie dog village, relegated there by virtue of the great necessity to have asphalt blanketing three sides of the Visitor Center so that people can park their cars and RVs next to information. The quest for entertaining information has taken the place of the quest for live things to kill. It seems harmless enough until you see the prairie dogs sticking their cute little heads out of one or two burrows where once a robust native community of thousands scampered. “Our people were warned,” the tall brown man says looking wistfully at the prairie dog as it disappears down its tunnel. “We were told not to over-hunt them. Or they would be gone.” He sighs: “Then that’s what happened.”
I wish that I could mirror his reflection of complicity. The time in this powerful place is short on my own journey, but meaningful. As I reflect, I brought my whole self to his earnest sharing. I didn’t let an ounce of my presence or awareness trickle away. The feather of the pheasant, I bought that from him too. These were not acts of reparation, just a paltry stab at acknowledgement. I mean to convey that I see and hear. I can’t claim to understand.
What I did not do, was say how sorry I was. I would have liked to look at him in the eye, as a privileged white woman and tell him of the sadness that we inherit as oppressors with no way to make amends. No way to even know what a repair would look like, or the words that would connect.
I did not know how to say what was in my heart, without being either condescending or emotionally invasive, maybe even verbally disrespectful or violent. Nor do I wish to eclipse his intergenerational losses and triumphs with my own sadness. So I smiled and asked if I could take a picture. I wanted to say instead that I feel a heavy teariness for the long flights through the wilderness, for those who died from exhaustion, starvation, mishap and fear, for the betrayal of trust and broken promises, the theft of homes, land, horses and peace, for the camas, and even the prairie dogs. And of course all that I have inherited by way of privilege and influence from those invaders.
“For whatever residual pain has made its way to you,” I want to say, “it has leaked also into me.” All I can say is that I will try to make something beautiful of it from far away and from close up.
