Origin Stories
The Heart of the Monster on the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) Reservation
What started as a day to trace the Lewis & Clark Route became an exploration of the Nez Perce Trail, which chronicles this sovereign nation’s culture and history. It was an unexpected but welcome turn of events.
The day gave me an important reminder. Every culture has an origin story, sometimes it gets erased and other times it is passed down.
Layers upon Layers
The Nimiipuu, as they call themselves, (the French fur traders gave them the moniker Nez Perce) welcomed and traded with the Americans after helping Lewis & Clark. In time, they lost most of their homeland and went to war in 1887 against the US Army. Refreshing my memory of these facts challenged my perspective of the day’s adventure.
Origin stories matter and the Heart of the Monster was a sacred stop on my journey today. This is where according to Nimipuu traction where humans came to be. I listened to the old tale of coyote helping slay a monster and bring the different First Nations people into existence.
It reminded me of the stories my grandfather would tell me which he had learned from his summers traveling among the Ojibwe in the Boundary Waters and from his longtime friend and Lakota Medicine Man, Chief Al Fasthorse. He did not descend from those nations, but he made sure his grandchildren would hear and appreciate those stories for what they represented to those who did.
Responding in the Present to the Past
None of us alive today were part of those events directly. However, as the Irish like to say, the past is never in the past. We see the reverberations of the culture clash between European and Asian empires and indigenous people around the globe.
We’re seeing these reverberations in every country today, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the legacy these clashes and erasures have for all of us who inherited this system. It is up to us to determine how to carry it forward.
Do we continue to gloss over these facts or do we put names to them? Do we begin to see the “others” as “brothers and sisters” or do we continue to treat them like “things” and “its”? We cannot control the past but we can shape the future.
What origin stories do you carry around with you? How do you share them?
