Oral History Program Dr. Curtis Jackson & Marcia Galli Interviewed by John Jaques 13 February 1973 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dr. Curtis Jackson & Marcia Galli Interviewed by John Jaques 13 February 1973 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Jackson, Curtis Dr., Galli, Marcia, an oral history by John Jaques, 13 February 1973, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an interview between John Jacques, Dr. Curtis E. Jackson, and Marcia J. Galli, conducted at Marcia Galli's office, Weber State College. Time 3:30 p.m. 13 February 1973. This is a Weber State College oral History project. JJ: I understand from our data that you have worked extensively for the government on Indian reservations. You're really not a reservation Indian yourself; you're an urban Indian. But this could give us quite an insight into Indians- reservation Indians and such—if you could tell us something about your work with the Government, what you did. CJ: I went to the University of Utah and graduated from there, and I obtained a job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Fort Hall, Idaho. At Fort Hall there was a community irrigation project, and this project delivered water not only to the Indians, but also to a great number of white-owned lands, land that used to be Indian reservation before Pocatello was established, and that part of the reservation was withdrawn. JJ: It seems like very often, especially lately, people like Jack Anderson, or the Indians themselves, have brought out the fact that very often the white man gave Indians the reservations and supposedly water so that they could irrigate, and then they seemed to have stolen their water away from them. Have you found this to have happened? CJ: Stolen water rights? You're bringing up a question that has to have a lot of investigation. On some reservations, I think that this is true. I think this is true particularly in Washington State they claim that the water rights have been appropriated. The problem goes back to, "Who owns the water?" I'm recounting this from some of my studies on the 1 water rights in the early history of the West. Let's say that you came to the West in the early days and you settled on a piece of land, and if you appropriated water onto your land and you became the owner of that water, everybody who wanted water would have to come to you because you owned that well. The problem with some of these Indian water rights that we're talking about is that the Indians claimed that they used it before the white man, and the white man says, "No you didn't; it was just running down the river," and the legal part of it is to decide who was first to use the water. This is what I remember from some of the things. I'm not sure that it is all legally correct, but generally this is what I have found. JJ: So a lot of this just gets to be a matter of what was legal and what wasn't legal. CJ: Yes. And then if you want to go further, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early history was trying to get the Indians to move off the reservation, they had various policies and programs to force them off, for example, to diminish the reservations. And then they sold the land and probably sold the water rights with it, and this is another thing. You have to look further into the history for an answer to this question. JJ: I can see that you would. Maybe you could tell us—when the early anthropologists went out and studied, say, the American Indians or another culture, very often they looked at a culture and said, "This is what they're doing" from their own viewpoint, and sometimes it was completely wrong. For instance, the early shows they had on T.V. about the cowboys and Indians really don't seem to hold up as being quite how things were. Could you tell us anything along that line that you know about Indian history and how the white man has made it look different than it was? 2 CJ: You're talking about the early history, and what made the early West famous was the cowboy, and the cowboy was made famous by a particular newspaperman who had a friend who became a Westerner, so to speak, and he said, "I'm going out there with you, and I'll made you famous." And he did it in such a way that he made him very famous, but what you see in the old cowboy shows, for example Gary Cooper pulling out his gun and shooting somebody, from all my research at least, I cannot come to the conclusion that that was true. JJ: It really wasn't the shoot-'em-up type of thing that we see then. CJ: You carried a gun, as I understand it, for protection. The country was wild at that time, and you had to protect yourself. JJ: Being a Shoshone, would you tell us something of the Shoshone history that you might know that has been handed down to you, or maybe that you studied. CJ: This is such a wide field that I don't know how to approach it or begin it. JJ: For one thing, the Shoshone are probably one of the earliest people in this whole area, at least the Shoshone-speaking tribes were. MG: They were originally very primitive, even much more so than almost any other group in the whole United States. And they were not tribal units, but rather followed the patriarch of the family. I don't know what kind of a clan system that is called, but that was the family pattern; and it was just the immediate family that stayed together. They roamed all over the whole area and were not confined to any one area. When the early explorers, traders, and trappers came through, I think they nicknamed them "diggers" because much of their lifestyle was digging for their food. And then later that became a 3 very derogatory term, and they applied it to those Indians who were very, very dirty; it just had a very negative connotation. But those are the anthropological beginnings, I believe. JJ: It was probably very often just the extended family, rather them a tribe or a band? MG: It wasn't even the extended family. It was just the immediate family, and they stayed together and just roamed all over— the father, mother and children. I don't know what happened to the old people or the aunts and uncles. I suppose they did the same thing, but it was not a very strong, cohesive family unit. JJ: Now let me ask you a different kind of question: Today, very many of the minority groups such as this are being told by their leaders and other people that they should preserve their cultures. How do you feel about that? Is it a good thing to preserve your heritage and past, or isn't it? MG: I think you cannot possibly return to what was. There is no way that you can bring back the continent as we knew it. And I don» t think that is what is meant, but the way the Anglos interpret it is that we want to go on with our hunting and fishing economy and live the "child of nature" myth, roaming half-naked through the woods. I don't think this is what is meant by the Indian when he said, "I want to maintain my culture." There are some very, very good values within the Indian cultural system, and I think this is what should be retained. The longing for the past thing is really a dead issue, but the value system that we can pass on to our children- let me just cite one, for example—their particular love of nature and their compatibility with nature. I'm not saying that all Indians were not polluters and that all Indians were reverent with nature, but for the most part, 4 most tribes strongly believe in this reverence for nature, and the living with nature and letting nature help you rather than using nature for your own gain. This is one very important value system. JJ: Then the arts are pretty good, too. MG: Well, the art forms, yes, but I think if you dwell too much on that, that's one of the things that everybody thinks of when they think of American Indians, besides the war bonnet and breechcloth kind of stereotype, then the other one comes in, the really artsy and craftsy kind of group that can make all kinds of things with the very minimum of materials. And it's true, American Indians do have a very distinct art pattern, but I think we dwell too much on that and forget about the value system. This is far more important and I think far more far-reaching in its effect. CJ: I think the same thing, that what she's talking about is right. I would not be one to say that I would like to live in the old days and track buffalo and that sort of thing. I'd rather go down the street in a modern automobile and do my hunting in the grocery store, and not out in the fields someplace, but I think that the Indian finds his own identity by the things that we can say are in his culture, like his war bonnet and so forth, and I never thought there was anything wrong with an Indian wearing a war bonnet on certain occasions. I think the trend of white America is to permit that sort of thing, and this is a great reversal of what it used to be when the Indians were first rounded up. One example of this was in 1949. The Department of Interior was created in .1849, and the Indian Department was created in 1832, and 1949 was the 100-year centennial for the Interior Department, and Fort Hall decided to hold an Indian pow-wow. In 1949 there were some people who were brought up under the old regimen where war bonnets and 5 such were suppressed, but the Administration of Indian Affairs could not outlaw this stuff because it was born in them, and it was part of them. So what they did was put their war bonnets and their beaded work in a suitcase and hid it so they wouldn't get in trouble, and all these years had gone by, and these Indians had never used the war bonnets and such because they were afraid that they would be mistreated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel. But in 1949 they decided to have this celebration. The program, I might add, was done entirely by the Indians themselves; and the administration, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, got kind of upset because the Indians were doing it themselves and leaving the Bureau out of it. So the day that this was supposed to happen, I forget the particular day the department was created, March 3, I think, they had a big parade, and the old people from the reservation that you never saw anyplace but on the reservation, came into the agency, and they put on their war bonnets, beads and breastwork and proudly paraded down the street, and they paraded around there twice. There was this old-timer who lived in Pocatello who was a white man, and ne was always interested in the Indians and was always- trying to get them to bring out their beadwork and let him see it. He had to do this on the quiet, apparently, the way he explained it, and go out to the Indians and ask them if they had anything that he would like to see. And at this particular event, he said, "never in my life," and I imagine that he was about 60 at the time, "Have I seen such beautiful work and feathers and regalia come out?” And it was beautiful in that parade. JJ: But this late in our history the white man was still trying to suppress and keep this away from them, then? 6 CJ: Well, this marked some kind of a change, and I'm showing that there was a change and that there was more acceptance. So I think now you see, for example, in Brigham City the Indians get together and they participate in the Peach Days Parade and dress up in their costumes. MG: And in Fort Hall they have an Indian Day every year in August. CJ: And so you see they have a change. This is what I'm saying that this is part of being an Indian, and I don't see anything wrong with it. I was never in favor of the policy that existed before it happened, before this change occurred, when they tried to suppress all this stuff. As you read about it, you hear of the Indian being robbed of his identity. JJ: Is it quite an easy and natural thing for Indians who work for the government, like yourself or others, to just go along and do what they tell them to do and don't ever buck them? When they see that something should or could be done, but the government says no, they just sit back and write it off? MG: Do Indians who work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, seeing what could be done, do they indeed try to set out to do some-thing, even realizing that it could be at the risk of their job, or do they just do what they're told to do and just forget about anything that could be done that could be misconstrued as being militant? CJ: I don't want to make a blanket statement for sill Indians everywhere, but it's natural for most people to follow, not to lead; and if you feel that something is going wrong and you want to right this wrong, you're not in the majority. You've got to calculate that you're going to take a risk. 7 JJ: So it's natural that you do want to take care of yourself, and that everybody does this. I'm a Mormon, and I'd like to know what you might know about how the Mormons fit in with the Indians when they came out here and how they treated them, or anything along that line. CJ: Well, you and I know that the L.D.S. believe that the Book of Mormon is about the ancient occupants of America who are supposedly the forbearers of the present Indians, so the Mormons called the Indians Lamanites, the name given to the people in the Book of Mormon. When the Mormons came out here, when Brigham Young came out here and settled Salt Lake City, Pioneer Park was virtually a fort. JJ: The present Pioneer Park? CJ: Yes, they had a fort. When anybody came out here, they would establish a fort. This way they had Fort Hall, Fort Bridger, Fort this, that and the other. The forts were made for one thing—to protect themselves from the Indians, because they thought the Indians were kind of wild. And the Mormons did that too. Brigham Young had a very good policy toward the Indians. The reservation here in Utah, Washakie, was established by the Mormons. They wanted to do the same thing that the federal government wanted to do—take the Indians that were roaming around here and in Wyoming and stick them in one place. JJ: Was their purpose to get them away from them, or was it because they wanted to Christianize the Indians or bring them into the Church? It was probably to get the Indians away from them, then? 8 CJ: Because the line of communications was right there, and they didn't want the Indians or anybody messing up their communications, tearing up telegraph poles and raiding the caravans full of white people, so what you do is take these Indians and stick them on this piece of land out here where they can't do anything, keep them penned up there for a while. I don't mean to say these things in a sarcastic manner; I just want to make it impressive that this is actually the treatment that the white man gave to the Indians. MG: So religious tenets didn't make it any different. JJ: One thing that gets me about Mormonism—right now they do a lot of work with the Navajos, and it seems to me in some ways kind of cruel, because you bring them up here, keep them for about a year, teach them our ways, and then turn around and expect them to go back when they have to go back and live the same way they were originally, and it seems to me that it's a little cruel. Do you feel that way? Where is it good to bring them up here? MG: Everybody has their own feelings, and I think that we could probably get in a hassle right here and now between the three of us as to what good it does and what good it doesn't do. JJ: Each of you have a little different idea on it, then? MG: Yes. I for one am very opposed to any program that takes the Indian children away from their parents. I think there are better alternatives. We don't do it to anybody else. JJ: That's how it kind of seems to me. MG: That is my opinion. Maybe Dad has a different one, I'm sure. 9 CJ: Well, I have a different one in this sense, that, Marcia, you speak of a reservation life, the Navajo reservation. No matter where you locate a school, you're going to have children away from their parents because there are not the metropolitan centers down there. Your next door neighbor may be two miles away. Now where are you going to locate a school where you have scattered people like that? You see that you couldn't, but you could make them stay with their parents all the time. You send a bus out, and by the time it gets to the school, it's time to send them back again. JJ: In other words, they're so far out that it's just impractical a lot of times to educate them. MG: I think those problems can be worked out, though. Cindy worked with a Headstart Program in Gallup, and there was this problem of gathering children up from distances and bringing them in, but there wasn't a big hassle about it. We just started early in the morning for the bus drivers and ended late, late at night, but the children were benefitting. CJ: But you're taking the children away from their parents, because they don't see them anyway. They're too tired when they come home at night; they just go to sleep. Another thing that I was trying to bring out in relation to this, if I may just continue this for a minute, supposing that we did establish schools right on the reservation. What is there that is any-thing representative of a modern city? See what I mean? These children who come to Intermountain School, which is located in Brigham City, I think are much greater advanced in terms of today than the people who are staying on the reservation and getting their schooling there. There isn't this social atmosphere and this business atmosphere and so forth, down there. If this is the thing that you're after, you can't get it any other place. You can't get it on the reservation. 10 JJ: You'd say that 100 years from now, historians might look back at the Intermountain School and say this was a good thing for the Indians. CJ: Yes. JJ: In the last year there seemed to be quite a controversy, different groups saying, "Oh look, this is the wrong way," and others saying, "Yes, this is the right way." But in 100 years from now, a historian will be looking at it from a different viewpoint, maybe. Take our presidents for instance. The people who lived while they were in office were against them and others for them, naturally. And after their time is past, the historians seem to be able to pick out points that the people living then never even saw. So that might be the case here. MG: And I think it might make a difference too if the historian is Indian or if he's Anglo. JJ: I think that definitely would make a difference. MG: The Indian might see it entirely differently than an Anglo working out there, in the educational worth. JJ: We have just a few more minutes. Is there anything that you think you would like to mention as far as any of the history you know? Is Fort Hall still a big Indian reservation now? MG: There are two tribes of Indians on there now, Shoshone and Bannock. JJ: Weren't the Bannock originally a Shoshone-speaking Indian? MG: I think they were enemies, weren't they? JJ: Well, this was enemies as far back as our history is recorded. 11 MG: Well, especially when they put them on the reservation, they were enemies. JJ: But I think the anthropologists supposedly traced them back to being the same culture, originally. I've really appreciated the opportunity to talk with you and get a little insight into what you know about the history of the Indians. CJ: Thank you very much. JJ: It was my pleasure. 12