Yakama Erotic

The Yakama are a confederation before they are a single people. The treaty signed at Walla Walla in 1855 folded fourteen tribes and bands, among them the Klickitat, the Wishram, the Palus and the Wenatchi, into one legal body, and the name of the largest of them went onto the document. More than a century and a half later the arrangement holds. Enrolled membership runs around ten thousand, and the reservation covers more than a million acres of south-central Washington, from the irrigated floor of the Yakima Valley up through sagebrush and ponderosa to the eastern slope of Mount Adams, which they call Pahto. The federal government spelled the name Yakima for generations. The Nation changed its own spelling back to Yakama in 1994 to match the treaty, and left the city and the county to keep the old form.

Their language is Ichishíkiin, written Sahaptin in older linguistic work, a branch of a small Plateau family whose only close relative is Nez Perce. It has no relation to the Salish languages spoken north and west, or to Chinookan, which some of the confederated bands actually spoke before the treaty put everyone under one roof. Fluency now sits mostly with elders. The recovery effort is unusually institutional: Ichishíkiin is taught for credit at Heritage University in Toppenish, on the reservation itself, in large part because Virginia Beavert, a Yakama elder and linguist, spent decades assembling the dictionaries and grammars nobody else was going to write.

Religious life centers on the Washat, the longhouse practice also called Seven Drums, and its calendar is organized around food rather than doctrine. Ceremonies mark the return of the salmon, then the roots, then the huckleberries, and the longhouse meal is served in that order every time, water first and water last. Catholic and Indian Shaker Church membership tends to overlap with it rather than displace it. The salmon half of that calendar took a direct hit in 1957, when The Dalles Dam drowned Celilo Falls, a fishing site Columbia River families had worked for thousands of years. The treaty right to fish at usual and accustomed places survived the flooding, and Yakama fishermen spent the following decades defending it in court and, in at least one well-known case, from a federal prison cell. The huckleberry half has fared better. A 1932 handshake between a Yakama leader and a Forest Service supervisor reserved part of the Sawtooth fields, in what is now the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, for tribal picking alone, and families still make the drive every August. Pahto itself came partly back in 1972, roughly 21,000 acres returned by executive order.