Lapwai

But in the rugged and remote mountains, they managed to always remain one step ahead of their pursuers.

On July 15th, 1898, in Lapwai, on the Nez Perce reservation, John King ran into the streets shouting, "Murder!" After authorities got him calmed down, he related the following dreadful tale.

"As near as I can tell, about 10 o'clock I was sitting in a chair about 15 feet from the back door of the store."

"Throw up your hands."

I always think it's a good reminder that our, you know, traditional seasonal round has always followed the rhythms of the land, so gathering when it's time to gather, harvesting when it's time to harvest, and preparing for winter, because it's on its way.

As the day comes to an end, I'm now in Lapwai, another part of the Nimíipuu reservation, and a place that looks and feels just a little different from where I started upriver.

Here, the landscape is more open, it's a little hotter, there are fewer pine trees, and as the evening settles in, the hills surrounding the valley catch the last bit of sunlight.

The sunset fills the sky with golden orange, light pinks.

But this whole area, too, is also an important part of Nimíipuu homelands.

Walking through these different landscapes today reminds me of just how connected we are as a people to this entire, this land.

From the rivers and forests upriver in Kamiah, to these open hills and valleys downriver in Lapwai, there's a sense that the land is changing.

For, for my Nimíipuu relatives, that relationship with the land continues through every season.

Chief Joseph took these words as a sacred responsibility.

Under the Thief Treaty, the Nez Perce bands who signed the treaty were relegated to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho.

Those who didn't signed lived a precarious existence on their ancestral lands, and this included Chief Joseph and his band in the Wallowa Valley.

However, ranchers and settlers now viewed their presence in the valley, where they had lived for centuries, as illegal squatting.

Eventually, the government ran out of patience with the non-signatory Nez Perce living outside the reservation.

In May of 1877, General Oliver O. Howard, acting on behalf of the United States government, summoned the non-signatory chiefs to a council on the Lapwai Reservation.

During that meeting, he presented the rogue chiefs with an ultimatum.

Howard mandated that the bands had thirty days to round up their families, thousands of cattle, and horse herds, abandon their homes, and relocate within the Lapwai Reservation boundaries.