Friday, September 21

    Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

     On this day in 1904, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce died on the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington. He was 64. Joseph is famous for resistance to the forced removal of his people from their ancestral lands. We all understand now that the U.S. treated the Indians unfairly, but to quote President Kennedy, "Who said life was fair?" or something to that effect.
    Chief Joseph has become an icon wrapped in myth, and buried beneath  a pile of dramatic reenactments. Joseph had the misfortune to live during the coming of the farmer. White traders and explorers had been passing through his lands for over a century. They were not a problem. In fact they brought valuable products of civilization: guns, iron pots, whisky.... But the farmers lusted after  the land of the aborigines. They ordered their congressmen to relocate the Indians somewhere out of sight.
     As tribes around him were forced onto reservations, Joseph was able to negotiate treaties allowing his band to stay where it was. But in 1876, Custer got himself killed, and General Sherman back in Washington abrogated the treaty and ordered the Nez Perce to the reservation in Idaho. The general on the ground was O.O. Howard, who had lost an arm at Gettysburg and who had founded Howard University for freed slaves after the war. He certainly should have been sympatheic to Joseph's pleadings.
     But misunderstandings in translation led to Howard giving Joseph and his band 30 days to move  to the reservation. The arrival of the Nez Perce would have meant displacing Indians and whites already on the land, which Joseph would not do this. He decided to seek refuge in Canada where Sitting Bull had gone. Joseph led the U.S Army on a merry chase all over the west, engaging in battles as they went.
    This went on for about three months till cold weather and lack of food forced Joseph to surrender. But instead of going to Idaho, Joseph and the 400 remaining people of his band were taken on unheated rail cars to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Eight months later they were moved to a reservation in Oklahoma where they languished for seven years. Joseph meanwhile travelled to Washington to plead his peoples' case. Witnesses were more interested in his headdress than in his case. To easterners, he was the 'Red Napoleon' who had fought the army to a standstill. Historians state that while Joseph was a great leader and diplomat, he was not himself a warrior.
     Finallly, in 1885, Joseph and his band were given land on the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington. The other unrelated bands already there were angry that land was taken from them to make room for Indians who had "fought against the Great Father." Joseph remained head of his band for the rest of his life. He traveled around the country, educating Americans about the injustices perpetrated by their government and meeting with hisorians who were trying to get both sides of the story.

To become a great icon, find a great photographer.

    

         On an etymological note, it's the birthday, in 1919, of the Argentinian physicist, Mario Bunge. I immediately surmised that he was the inventor of bungee jumping.  Who better than a physicist to determine exactly how far a rubber band could stretch before the skull of a drunken college student cracked against the rocks just below the surface of an Andean river.
        But it turns out Bunge was more of a philosophical physicist. He described himself as a "left-wing liberal" and took off for McGill University in Montreal in 1966. The Canadian air must have agreed with him, because Professor Bungee is celebrating his 99th birthday.
       No one really knows where the term bungee comes from. Some say it's from the late 19th century British schoolboy term for rubber eraser, but that's a bit of a stretch.