Portraits from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation
Family/Home
Mother and daughter at the Pi-Ume-Sha Powwow encampment.
“If I didn’t think I could take care of my kids, I wouldn’t have had them.”
“I guess she’ll just learn from watching us.”
Tribal Councilwoman and longhouse leader with her husband and some of their eleven children on laundry day.
One-time community whiplady, the first on the reservation to wear silk stockings and own and drive a car.
Kussa is a child’s way of saying katla, the Sahaptin word for mother’s mother. “I’m everybody’s grandma!”
“A damn tough cowgirl” who grew up and raised her family at a time when most everything was made from scratch without electricity or running water.
Former Confederated Tribes General Manager and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, at home along the Deschutes River. “You know, if things got real bad around here, the only ones that would survive are the elders because they know how to provide for themselves.”
“One day at a time” at the Tribes’ Recovery House.
Grandmother: “Someday the land will be our eyes and skin again.” Granddaughter, in a poem: “Her creped fingers…grew together as snowy stones scratching themselves sleepily.”
A lifetime of service to the country and the reservation. In his Air Force career, “since I was Indian, I had two strikes against me. I felt I had to prove to my superiors that I could do the job better than anyone else.”
