Palus Erotic

The Palus are named for a place, not the other way around: a village at the mouth of the Palouse River, where it empties into the Snake in what is now southeastern Washington. The rolling wheat country that borrowed the name is far better known today than the people who were living on it. They were a river people first. Villages sat along the Snake, the lower Palouse and the Columbia, sited for salmon, and the year turned on the fish runs and on the root harvest up on the plateau: camas, bitterroot and cous, dug in spring and dried for winter. Three bands are usually distinguished, upper, middle and lower, which describes position on the river rather than rank.

Their language was a dialect of Sahaptin, close to Yakama and Walla Walla speech and a cousin to Nez Perce, with whom Palus families intermarried constantly. Horses reached the plateau in the early 1700s and the Palus became formidable breeders and traders; the spotted horse called the Appaloosa carries a worn down version of their country's name. Most Palus headmen declined to sign at the Walla Walla Council in 1855, and their land was assigned away regardless under treaties signed by others. Kamiakin, the Yakama war leader whose father was Palus, is the name that survived from that period. In 1858 Colonel George Wright's campaign through the region ended in summary hangings and in the shooting of some eight hundred captured horses on the Spokane River, aimed squarely at the mobility that made resistance possible. In 1877 the Palus leader Husishusis Kute went out with the Nez Perce on the long flight toward Canada and into exile in Indian Territory.

Less often told is the refusal that followed. Palus families stayed on at the old villages for decades, declining enrollment and declining to move. Many kept Washat, the Seven Drums faith taught by the Wanapum prophet Smohalla, which held that the earth was not to be plowed, sold or broken: a religion of refusal as much as of observance, and still kept in longhouses on the plateau. The four lower Snake River dams finished in the 1960s and 1970s took the rest, drowning village sites, fishing stations and the ground around Marmes Rockshelter, one of the oldest excavated human sites on the continent. Descendants are enrolled today with the Yakama, the Nez Perce, the Colville tribes and the Umatilla. There is no separate federally recognized Palus tribe, which is an administrative fact and not a statement about who is still here.