I’m working on a project to order my notes on the indigenous peoples who lived along the Deschutes and Crooked Rivers in north central Oregon; the Wadikishitika. For this project I will convert my notes from lists and references into a readable story. Hopefully writing them as a story will help me remember details. The story will document my understanding of the material culture and life-ways of these people at a point just prior to European contact.
Some time in the late 18th century, two interconnected events forever changed life in the Great Basin and Columbia River plateau (as well the rest of the North American Continent). The first was the people’s acquisition of the horse. Whether a particular tribe adopted it or not, the horse irreversibly altered life in this region. The second was the arrival of European diseases. The loss of life, variously estimated to be between 40% and 80% of the region’s population, changed these people’s life-ways as much as the horse. I will set my story in the period just prior to the known epidemics–sometime around 1750 to 1780.
The location of the story is north central Oregon, southeast of Mt Hood along the Deschutes and Crooked Rivers. According to Wikipedia, the occupants of the area were known to adjacent Paiute tribes as the Wadikishitika or Juniper-Deer eaters. The Wadikishitika were hunter gatherers who spoke a Numic language. Numic languages are part of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The Wadikishitika, along with the rest of the Paiute, were known to the early European settlers as the Snake Indians and are now known as a band of the Northern Paiute.
I think it generally agreed upon that Paiute means “true Ute” or “water Ute.” However, at least some Paiute bands, call themselves Numu, meaning “People.” The region used by the Paiute at contact extends from the crest of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada Mountains in the west to the Sawtooth Mountains and the Rockies in the east, and from the northern reaches of the Ochoco Mountains of Oregon in the north, southward to the Las Vegas valley and the Colorado River in Arizona and into Southern California.
Linguistic Groups
According to Catherine Fowler, Paiute bands exhibit three main linguistic groups: the Northern Paiutes of northwest Nevada, northeast California, eastern Oregon, and southwest Idaho, the Owens Valley Paiutes, of the Owens River watershed in southeast California, and, the Southern Paiutes of southeast California, southern Nevada, northwestern Arizona, and western Utah.
Interestingly, the Paiute as a whole do not share a mutually intelligible language; and their material culture also varies considerably between groups. This has long complicated my research, but it also means the Paiute had no central chief, or even central political structure. And the language complication means that I’m going to be rather limited on replicating the actual words used by the pre-Contact Wadikishitika.
Bands and Families
Within each linguistic group were bands. That is, assemblages of individuals and families living and travelling together. Among the norther Paiute, band membership was constantly changing. It was typical for different groups of families to gather together from season to season, and year to year. Individuals and families moved freely between bands.
So, my use of the appellation Wadikishitika should not be read as reflecting actual families or persons collected together in a specific band at a specific time, nor can my story document the use of particular lands during any one year. That information is likely lost to history. However, since there was a tendency for families to frequent the same hunting and gathering grounds from year to year. This resulted in families keeping pretty much to the same marginal limits in their seasonal migrations [1].
To the extent possible, I will use archaeological evidence for the setting for the villages I describe. Since over the ensuing centuries things have changed, I’ll be describing the landscape as it is today, not then. I’ll use a bit of artistic license to create a fictional world that I hope bears a close resemblance to the Wadikishitika’s.
In her doctoral dissertation on the role of sorcery in social control, Beatrice Blyth observed that the Northern Paiute referred to bands based upon their primary food resource or their location. As you might imagine, this system is limited by the fluidity of band membership, but it gives the general idea and constitutes a model around which to organize thoughts on the diversity of Paiute life.
Northern Paiute bands generally consisted of multiple family and friendship units. These units consisted of two or three families not necessarily closely related to one another. The family or small group was the basic political unit, and nearly the only social or cultural unit. According to Don Fowler[3], kinship living arrangements were bilateral–that is, the married couple chose their residence on the basis of what was most feasible–where was the food, and where were their friends.
The Wadikishitika did not build permanent structures in fixed towns or villages. They moved about their territory at the whims of the band leaders; meaning, not all areas of the group’s territory were continuously occupied. This also means that archaeological evidence of villages is sparse.
Each tribe or band selected their own leaders who served only as long as they had the support of the people. When the composition of the band changed, new leaders would be selected. Bands occupied partially overlapping territories, generally centered on a major food reservoir, such as a lake or wetland. Neighboring bands would come together to cooperate in communal hunt drives for rabbits and pronghorn antelope.
During the period of interest, the people traveled on foot and came together into larger-groups only for short periods in a location where a resource was especially abundant. Wilbur Davis [2] suggests that, given no specific reason to cross barren wasteland, these units would only travel within their particular drainage system. This would imply that there was no appreciable band movement over time.
In her thesis on the forage practices of the Harney Valley Paiute, Marilyn Couture[1] suggests that to understand Paiute culture, “one must comprehend the Indian concept of being attached to a commonly held piece of ground without the concept of private ownership to the exclusion of others.” This also would tend to keep particular units in the same location over many years.
This outlines the background of my project. Hopefully it will serve as a reminder of the limits to what I’m proposing to accomplish. I hope that the rest of the series will be in a narrative form.
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[1] Couture, Marilyn Dunlap, “Recent and contemporary foraging practices of the Harney Valley Paiute” (1978). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 480.
[2] Davis, Wilbur A., 1966. “Theoretical Problems in Western Prehistory,” in d’Azevedo, Warren L., Wilbur A. Davis, Don D. Fowler, and Wayne Suttles (eds.), Current Status of Anthropological Research in the Great Basin, 1964, Reno: Desert Research Institute, pp. 147-165.
[3] Fowler, Don D., 1966. “Great Basin Social Organization,” in d’Azevedo, Warren L., Wilbur A. Davis, Don D. Fowler, and Wayne Suttles, (eds.), Current Status of Anthropological Research in the Great Basin, 1964, Reno: Desert Research Institute, pp. 57-74.