Pacific Northwest Indian White Conflict
Native American History In Eastern Washington State
May 7, 2009
Initially, Native Americans and Whites in the Pacific Northwest interacted with oneanother on an equal basis. They each had something that the other one wanted. The English and Americans wanted furs and the Indians wanted metal, whether that be in the form of guns, knives, copper, pots or pans. Trade was conducted and everyone except the poor animals benefited. The fur traders did not come to establish permament settlements, yet their interactions with the natives, together with the Indians early contact with the missionaries laid the groundwork for the eventual dispossession by the Native Americans of their homelands.
Native Americans and Epidemics
It was not guns and steel that defeated the Indians but the diseases of the white man, especially measles, smallpox, influenza and malaria. Prior to the arrival of a substantial number of settlers entire villages were wiped out, with the survivors, if any, so demoralized and filled with grief and despair that they had no will to resist the encroachment upon their traditional lands. This was a collapse of their entire society; their gods no longer protected them; their family structure devastated.
Spokane Indians Prophesy of Epidemic
Prior to the arrival of any settlers to the Spokane, Washington area, a smallpox epidemic, which had started around 1782, and spread west along the trader routes, had decimated the Spokane Tribe. According to an oral tradition, Yureerachen (The Circling Raven), a prophet of the Spokane Tribe, whose son died of the disease, is said to have had a vision after four days of fasting on top of Mt. Spokane of the coming of the whites. Yureerachen first told his people of his vision after Mt. St. Helen's erupted in 1790, an eruption which blanketed the Inland Northwest with ash in a similar manner to the 1980 eruption. Yureerachen prophesied that from the direction of the rising sun there would come a "chipixa", (a white skinned man), a man unlike any that has ever been seen, who will bring with him a book of strange symbols, and who would teach new ways. After his arrival the world of the Spokane Indians, the Children of the Sun, will fall apart.
Spokane Indian Religious and Spiritual Beliefs
The Indians of the Columbia Plateau believed in a doctrine of resurrection and of end times which would begin with the coming of the "white skinned ones." This legend or versions of the legend, or other similar prophecies, were repeated among the other tribes of the Inland Northwest and are similar to the prophecies of the Aztecs and Maya Indians about the bearded strangers who would arrive from the sea in the direction of the rising sun and who would initiate the beginnings of the end times.
Initial Native and White Contact Predicated Upon Religious Beliefs
So it is within this context, of the religious beliefs of the natives, and of the devastating consequences that contact with the whites had already had, that any discussion of the source of white-native conflict must be predicated. By the time of the arrival of the first settlers in the Spokane area in 1874, the native population had already been greatly reduced and the native resistance to white encroachment reduced to token resistance. Behind all conflicts or wars were two major factors, the desire by the whites for land and precious metals.
Source:
Robert Ruby and John Brown, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986)
