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| 7/22/2010 11:02:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article
Comment on this article | MAIN STREET: Homecomings - it takes time to make tradition
 | By Rich Wandschneider
For the Wallowa County Chieftain
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It's Chief Joseph Days in Wallowa County this week-a kind of homecoming celebration that began in 1946 with cowboys and economics in mind.
It takes time to make something a homecoming, to make tradition. It's having 65 years of rodeo queens and princesses mounted and riding in a Saturday parade, stories of past glories-and defeats, parties and hangovers, rodeo announcers and their patter, local stalwarts who can now be honored for years and years of service as grand marshals, queens and princesses who are the daughters of queens and princesses, riders the sons and daughters of past riders, and now, for the past 20 years or so, members of the Nez Perce Indian band that once lived here camped and dressed, drumming and dancing, celebrating with the rest of us who, in many ways and for many reasons, call this place home.
In Turkey, where I lived for almost five years a long time ago, the common question of where you are from is answered with the name of a town or a region and the letters "lu" or "li." If you are from Istanbul, you are an "Istanbullu," from the Black Sea, a "Karadenizli." But it means much more than being "from" a place.
In fact, one might not have been born in Antalya to be an Antalyali, but if Antlaya is the dirt that nourished your family for generations, you are part of it.
We're a restless lot in America, especially in the West. We're born in one place, grow up in another, drift from place to place and scatter our seeds in still further directions. We have uncles we don't know and cousins who are distant memories from childhood gatherings.
We-most of us at least-live in suburbs and exurbs that didn't exist 50 years ago, and we might have moved several times from one of these places with cul-de-sacs and the names of flowers or geographic character-often in Spanish-to another.
Small towns and cities across the West have had rodeos and celebrations forever. Some of them-Cheyenne Days, Pendleton's Round-Up, St. Patrick's Day in Condon, and Chief Joseph Days-gain traction and tradition. Other attempts, especially conscious ones to establish tradition, have a harder time. Does our own "Jazz at the Lake" or whatever it was called, survive?
What it takes, it seems to me, is a place that is loved by many for different reasons, people who still live in the place and those who have an aged aunt who once lived there and baked fine apple pies on the Fourth of July for an annual family gathering, people who grew up in the place and let their Western restless itch take them across the world, and others who never lived in the place but hunted elk in the same camp with the same favorite crew of family and friends for years or even generations. It takes people of different ages and talents, stories and storytellers.
There is a special hunger for these homecoming events now. A couple of generations of rapid change and suburban dwelling have left many people wanting for things to hold onto. Reunions-high school, college, family-help, but they are limited in their dimensions. Homecomings bring it all-old friends and foes, different generations, poets and ballplayers, teachers and students.
And they tie it to a special place, one that hasn't been dozed and built to some unrecognizable extent, that has physical characteristics admired by people who don't even admire each other!
I love working the Rotary booth at Chief Joseph Days, love especially seeing men and women who are parents and even grandparents now who used to come into my bookstore, play on my baseball team, go to school with my kids. Some who couldn't wait to get away from here, and now find coming home like putting on an old shoe?
And I love to see and hear the Nez Perce, many of whom I am now privileged to know and call friends. I remember an old woman in Wallowa some years ago who was coming to the Wallowas for the first time but remembered the stories her aunties had told and remembered the place in her bones so well that being here brought tears.
One of my biggest Wallowa lessons-I've now been here for 39 years-is that Indian relationship to land, pre-ownership, pre property rights, is something different, and that our Euro-American homecomings, emotional and rewarding as they are, are but echoes of somethingdeeper that my Nez Perce friends know.
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Reader Comments
Posted: Friday, July 30, 2010
Article comment by:
Andrew
That was a great article by Rich. Being here in Savannah -- that was just what I needed.
Posted: Friday, July 23, 2010
Article comment by:
David Liberty
Thanks Rich, it is always wonderful, however rare, when a non-ndn begins to understand our relationship to place. Thank you. I was unable to make it over to Tamkaliks this year but there is no doubt I will be back. Best wishes to you and yours.
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