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The Nez Perce Indian Tribe:
LOCATION: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana- From the Bitterroot mountains on the east, the divide between the Snake and Salmon rivers in the south, the Blue mountains in the west, and the low divide between the Snake river and the Palouse in the north. DRESS: The costumes of both sexes were plains style, with the single exception of the fez-shaped basket-hats of the women. The usual material for clothing was deerskin, but the dresses of women were frequently of mountain-sheep skin. DWELLINGS: Houses were mat-covered lodges of the tipi form, or more commonly a development of this type in which material of several or many of these circular lodges were used to build a lodge, wedge-shaped communal structure. LANGUAGE: Shahaptian RELIGION /CEREMONIES: The Nez Perces believed that it is possible to secure by fasting and physical purification the help and a measure of the power of the supernatural creatures which they vaguely identified with the animate and inanimate objects of the universe. They believe also that "Tamuluit," by which they mean the creative power placed them on the earth. The principal ceremony was the "Waiyatsit" (Guardian Spirit chant) in which those who had received visions in their fastings sang their revealed songs with dramatic presentation of the underlying thought. HISTORY:The Nez Perce originally lived in three of the most rugged river canyons in the Northwest--the canyons of Idaho's Clearwater, Salmon, and Snake Rivers. The Snake's Hells Canyon, with its staircase rapids rushing through a chasm deeper than that of the Grand Canyon, contains more than 112 pictographs left by the Nez Perce ancestors, in addition to well-worn trails down the canyon's steep walls. The Nez Perce also lived on the Oregon side of the canyon, in a valley in the shadow of the Wallowa Mountains. More than 75 Nez Perce village sites have been identified along the Snake and its tributaries. Some have been carbon-dated to 11,000 years, or about 500 generations; there are also indications of far older settlements. The Treaty of 1855 ordered the Nez Perce to relinquish their ancestral territory and move to Oregon's Umatilla Reservation with the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla Tribes. However, all the tribes so opposed this plan that Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens granted the Nez Perce the right to remain in their own territory, on the condition that they relinquish nearly 13 million acres to the U.S. government. After gold and other metals were discovered in Nez Perce country, the U.S. government negotiated a new treaty with the tribe in the 1870s. Often called the "steal treaty," it stripped the Nez Perce of the Wallowa and Imnaha Valleys and the land at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers--the site of the present-day towns of Lewiston and Clarkston. CHIEF JOSEPH: A YOUNG NEZ PERCE: NEZ PERCE WARRIOR:
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