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Abstract

Native American writers whose ancestral homelands include and are now claimed by Oregon are part of a long game of Indigenous defense of homelands and waterways. This essay addresses two of these writers—Elizabeth Woody and Beth Piatote—whose place-based writing activates memories of language, land, and literary antecedents. Members of Columbia River Basin Tribal Nations (Wasco; Warm Springs; Yakama; Nez Perce), Woody and Piatote remember homelands—and waters—that endure despite generations of removals, loss, and occupation. Through poetry, essays, and mixed-genre work, they foster ongoing relationships with ancestors, ancestral lands, and landmarks. They do so notably through beadwork, emblem of intergenerational continuance through cataclysmic change. Woody and Piatote find beadwork a powerful metaphor for their writing, and more broadly, for their respective aims to transmute losses into seemingly improbable forms of Indigenous abundance. In doing so, they refuse the terminal plot of absence allotted by US settler colonialism, instead imagining abundant futures beyond the settler present.

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1Across generations, Native American writers in the United States have reckoned with the task of word-making out of the wreckage of settler colonialism’s genocidal violence. Crucial to this task is memory: memorializing and bearing witness to what Kim Tallbear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) calls “enduring the long apocalypse of the Americas.” Such literary acts of memory, as Simon Ortiz (Acoma) demonstrates in his book-length poem, From Sand Creek, are also, paradoxically, acts of Indigenous futurity. Beckoning us to “look now, / there are flowers / and new grass” (9), Ortiz invites an affirmation of improbable abundance, signaled by that spring wind rising from Sand Creek, site of the US cavalry’s massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people on November 29, 1864. In a related refrain, Heid Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe) affirms both the proximity of the past for Indigenous writers and the fortifying presence of Indigenous ancestors and antecedents:

Why is it, I have always wondered, that non-indigenous people seem to think the past is so far away? Did they not have grandparents or the stories of their great grandparents? Our generations are with us. We live within our elders’ memories and bring those who brought us into the world along with us as we go. We are not stuck in the past or anachronisms or dead cultures, but we do not forget, either. Our literature comes out of our remembering. (“Guest Editor Preface” n.p.)

  • 1 The federal administration’s white supremacist campaign of erasure entitled, “Restoring Truth and S (...)
  • 2 Crenshaw notes, “the chronic failure to confront the monsters of our past is not destiny; it’s a da (...)

2As a key analytic in Native American literature, remembering historic trauma exists in dynamic relationship with imagining abundant Indigenous futures beyond the current settler state. The Trump regime’s second term crusade to demonize, erase, and whitewash what it deems “anti-patriotic” history—whether in university curricula or national park signage—underscores the imperative of Native American writers’ assertions of presence over absence, futurity over foreclosed pasts.1 The United States, after all, has hurtled headlong into a waking nightmare of its own making, its “monsters of our past”—to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s phrase—overtaking the present, eviscerating the seeming gains of recent decades in racial justice, gender equity, and environmental stewardship.2

  • 3 Definitions vary, but the Pacific Northwest typically includes Oregon, Washington, far northern Cal (...)

3Native American writers also remind us that Trump’s America is, after all, neither news nor new. For example, in Oregon, where this article was written, most tribal nations were “terminated” by the Klamath and Western Oregon Termination Acts of 1954. This catastrophic federal legislation was designed to eliminate tribal sovereignty, tribal lands, and tribal existence. In turn, reservation lands were “opened up” for massive resource extraction, including logging and mining. Yet after decades of determined legal action by Tribal Nations, they won back “restoration” of federal recognition, starting in 1977 with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and continuing until the Coquille Indian Tribe’s restoration in 1989. Each year, Restoration Day celebrations remember this victory of Indigenous persistence against seemingly impossible odds. Native writers whose ancestral homelands include and are now claimed by Oregon are part of this long game of Indigenous defense of waters, lands, and peoples. This essay addresses two of these writers—Elizabeth Woody and Beth Piatote—whose place-based writing offers frameworks for seeing continuance amid calamity, presence amid precarity.3 Speaking to and from a region undernoted in Native American literary studies, Woody and Piatote’s writing activates memories of language, land, and literary antecedents. Members of Columbia River Basin Tribal Nations (Wasco; Warm Springs; Yakama; Nez Perce), Woody and Piatote remember homelands—and waters—that endure amid generations of removals, catastrophic loss, and settler occupation. Woody’s poetry and essay collections—Hand into Stone; Seven Hands, Seven Hearts; Luminaries of the Humble (1988; 1994; 1994)—and Piatote’s The Beadworkers: Stories (2019) foster active, ongoing relationships with ancestors, ancestral lands, and landmarks. They notably do so through their attention to beadwork, preeminent emblem of intergenerational Indigenous continuance through cataclysmic change. Small in size but large in meaning, beads serve as both mnemonic and messenger, tangibly connecting Indigenous families, communities, and nations across time. Woody and Piatote find beadwork a powerful metaphor for their writing, and more broadly, for their respective aims to transmute losses into seemingly improbable forms of Indigenous abundance. In doing so, they refuse the terminal plot of absence allotted by US settler colonialism, instead imagining abundant futures beyond the settler present.

1. Falling into Memory

  • 4 For the text, see: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/stopping-radical-environ (...)
  • 5 For an extended Indigenous Studies analysis of Columbia hydropower and Celilo Falls, see Lindsey Sc (...)

4In a June 2025 presidential memo entitled, “Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin,” Donald Trump withdrew from a historic agreement signed under the Biden administration entitled, “Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement” that had brought together “federal agencies, States, Tribes, and conservation, fishing, and clean energy groups.”4 The decades-long effort by Tribal Nations in the Columbia River Basin to restore long imperiled salmon runs is itself imperiled. The Pacific Northwest is synonymous with salmon: its rivers were once teeming, including the storied Columbia River, whose massive waterway Lewis and Clark followed on their historic expedition at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and whose watershed is the lifeblood of the region, draining nearly 419 kilometers. Separating the states of Oregon and Washington, the Columbia is the fourth largest river in the United States by volume. In the twentieth century and especially mid-century, dams were built in the Columbia River watershed to capture, contain, and control the water for cheap hydroelectric power. Dams fueled the city of Portland, including its World War II industries, as well as agricultural development of the Columbia River plateau. Today, a booming AI data center industry has sprung up along the river, further depleting water resources. The era of hydroelectric dam construction in the American West was cast as the technological mastery of “untamed” and “wild” rivers. The damming of the Columbia River was even mythologized by folk music hero Woody Guthrie (of “This Land is Your Land” fame) who was commissioned to produce an album by the federal agency created to sell hydroelectric power.5 His song, “Roll, Columbia, Roll,” was later adopted as Washington State’s official folk song. Its lyrics position hydroelectric power within a heroic history of territorial conquest:

Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
Tom Jefferson's vision would not let him rest
An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest
Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

  • 6 The transcript of the Treaty of 1855 is available at the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs webpag (...)
  • 7 Woody currently serves as Executive Director of the Museum at Warm Springs.

5Celilo Falls, or Wyam, was a spectacular series of cascading falls about 130 kilometers east of Portland with abundant salmon runs. One of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in what is now the United States, the Falls were a significant fishing, trading, cultural, and ceremonial hub for Tribal Nations throughout the region. Yet in 1957, Celilo Falls was inundated and erased from sight upon completion of The Dalles Dam by the US Army Corps of Engineers. It would be hard to overstate the magnitude of this loss, not just in the dam’s abrogation of Indigenous fishing rights on the Columbia that were codified in the Treaty of 1855, but in its act of ecocide, causing the near collapse of salmon runs.6 In her essay, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” included in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, former Oregon poet laureate Elizabeth Woody (enrolled member, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, also Yakama, Wasco, and Diné) writes that “the unconscionable drowning of Wyam … rent a multi-millennial relationship of a people to a place” (63).7 For the Tribal Nations that trace relationships spanning thousands of years with Celilo Falls, 1957 is not, as Heid Erdrich reminds us, that far in the past. Many people still remember fishing at the Falls; stories abound about Celilo Falls as do tribal histories, regional documentaries, and commemorations.

  • 8 Wind from an Enemy Sky (published posthumously in 1978) follows the catastrophic consequences for m (...)

6In her essay, “What Do We Owe the Rivers?” Lindsey Schneider (descendant, Turtle Mountain) notes that The Dalles Dam had “far-reaching effects on Tribal communities because of the way fishing has always been tied up in Indigenous forms of kinship, governance, and land relationships” (16). The “far-reaching effects” of dam construction for Tribal Nations and homelands have been central to concerns of Native American writers, including Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy); Eric Gansworth (Indian Summers); and Linda Hogan (Solar Storms). D’Arcy McNickle’s Wind from an Enemy Sky, a foundational novel of Native American literary history, shows how a worldview that “killed the water” (210) and viewed dam construction as “beautifully simple” (154) is interlinked with acts of cultural genocide. As McNickle’s character Bull exclaims upon first seeing the dam that has destroyed “a holy place, this mountain-locked meadow” (5): “Who is this creature who built that thing of rock and stopped the water? Is he two-legged like other men? Or is he a monster first-man, who decides things in his own way?” (7).8

7In her essay, “By Our Hand, through the Memory, the House Is More than Form,” Woody measures the distance—in miles and years—from the Columbia River that started with her maternal grandparents as the “first of several generations to be born within the reservation boundaries after the Treaty of 1855” (Circle of Nations 83). In succinct terms, she communicates the immensity of loss that shaped her upbringing in the high desert of central Oregon:

My childhood home was fourteen miles from the Warm Springs Reservation, in the town of Madras, Oregon. We were some 160 miles removed from the Columbia River and the pathways of the salmon that my mother’s people cherished, celebrated, harvested, dried, and incorporated into their lifeways for over 14,000 years. Few will understand how we came to be so far removed from our ancestral homeland of the Columbia River system, which carries large volumes of water inexorably to the Pacific Ocean. (82-83)

8In “Recalling Celilo,” Woody further delineates a geography and genealogy of ancestral belonging to Celilo Falls and Columbia River Basin unknown to most newcomers to the region:

The original locations of my ancestral villages on the N’ch-iwana (Columbia River) are Celilo Village and the Wishram village that nestled below the petroglyph, She-Who-Watches (or Tsagaglallal). My grandmother, Elizabeth Thompson Pitt (Mohalla), was a Wyampum descendent and a Tygh woman. My grandfather, Lewis Pitt (Wa Soox Site) was a Wasco, Wishram, and Watlala man. But my own connections to Celilo Falls are tenuous at best. I was born two years after Celilo drowned in the backwaters of The Dalles Dam. My grandfather fished at Celilo with his brother, George Pitt II, at a site that a relative or friend permitted, as is their privilege. They fished on scaffolds above the white water with dip nets. (“Recalling Celilo” 10)

  • 9 This essay has been reprinted in collections such as Circle of Nations and Reinventing the Enemy’s (...)
  • 10 “She Who Watches” is a foundational inspiration for other major artists including Woody’s aunt, Lil (...)

9Out of this traumatic multigenerational absence, Woody activates a poetics of return and remembrance.9 In naming her relations, she also names their relationships with this place, both seen and now-unseen. Further, she identifies a place-based literary genealogy, locating and linking ancestral villages through their proximity to the famous petroglyph, Tsagaglalal, or “She-Who-Watches.”10

  • 11 In “The Story as Primary Source: Educating the Gaze” artist Joe Feddersen (Okanogan) and Woody desc (...)
  • 12 Louise Erdrich also locates petroglyphs and pictographs within a long Indigenous literary history. (...)
  • 13 In her essay, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” included in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, Woody situates (...)

10This enduring visual icon, carved and painted on a cliff overlooking the Columbia River (and now located in the Columbia Hills Historical State Park in Washington) places Woody’s poetry within a long history of making meaning in, on, and from the Columbia River.11 As Woody observes: “Books are not new to us, or limited in form. The petroglyphs on rock in the Columbia River Gorge are part of my literary heritage” (Luminaries xi).12 Tsagaglalal similarly watches over Woody’s poetic work, serving as a guidepost of continuance through catastrophic change. For example, the persona in Woody’s poem “She-Who-Watches … The Names are Prayer” is the title figure who “with a sad, stone grief and wisdom” (Hand into Stone 7) watches over Celilo, where the “Falls sank unwillingly” (8). She bears witness to the small Indigenous community overseeing the Falls: “there is Celilo, / dispossessed, the village of neglect” (7). From Tsagaglalal’s perch high above the river she also bears witness to the railroad tracks paralleling the river whose visible imprints of settler colonization mirror the “invisible” impacts of the dam. The poem’s fraught balancing act between endurance and erasure is telegraphed by the poem’s dedication to David Sohappy, a well-known Wanapum fishing rights activist in the Columbia “fishing wars” of the 1960s-1980s who was imprisoned for several years for “illegally” selling salmon caught from the Columbia River.13 In naming him, Woody surfaces the continuing story of both Indigenous resistance and resilient kinship with the Columbia River. The poem, like much of Woody’s oeuvre, thus serves to extend the vantage-point of “She-Who-Watches”: bearing witness to settler colonial devastation of homelands and waters but also affirming an unbreakable belonging to them.

11Although her “own connections to Celilo Falls are tenuous at best” (“Recalling Celilo” 10), Woody repeatedly returns to watch the Falls through her writing, and more broadly, to watch over the interconnected world of human and more-than-human relatives in the Columbia River Basin. At the same time, she also seeks the soundings of what has been silenced. In the artist statement that introduces her poetry collection Luminaries of the Humble (1994) she declares that:

my concern in this volume is to give voice to those who are not often heard from, like the salmon, forest trees, our little relatives that nourish us, the edible roots, berries, deer …. My conceptual return is to imagine ‘the echo of falling water,’ Celilo Falls, inundated in a dam’s backwaters in 1957, and the collective voice of the many people who struggle to make small gains in renewal. (xiv-xv)

  • 14 This is an early excerpt from Meanus’s autobiography, My Name is LaMoosh (2023), published in colla (...)

12In “Celilo Falls and the Power of Water,” Linda Meanus (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs) remembers that the Falls “had a roar so loud you could hear it from miles and miles away …. It was an echo that you could feel in your heart” (6).14 Despite a legacy of loss and absence from having been born “two years after Celilo drowned in the backwaters of The Dalles Dam” (“Recalling Celilo” 10), Woody can hear Celilo Falls speak through the stories and memories shared by family and community. Woody’s poetry further extends their reach by affirming for audiences, both those familiar with the story of Celilo Falls and not, a living kinship with homelands and waters no matter their current state of being.

2. Bead-Words

13With her poem “In Memory of Crossing the Columbia,” Woody reclaims the river as ancestral, familial, and elemental: “my bed is inside the River / In the beads of remembrance, / I am her body in my father’s hands” (Hand into Stone 1). In her poetics of reparative return and insistent presence, beadwork, like the river, holds archives of Indigenous memory. In Indigenous Currencies, Ashley Cordes (citizen, Coquille Nation) notes that “beads remind us to live right: to practice, engage, and remember our culture” (79). Woody similarly calls beadwork a “mnemonic device” (Luminaries xi), an affirmation explored by artist and art historian Sherry Farrell-Racette (Timiskaming First Nation) whose work engages with historical Indigenous arts held in museum collections. She redirects the ontological status of “storied objects” (Farrell-Racette 41) as inanimate, removed in time and space from their communities of origin. Instead, she emphasizes their interactive, ongoing relationships with the communities that created them: activating memories of ancestors and antecedents, knowledges and stories of how “forms and materials are narrative accounts of struggle, innovation, and continuity (41). Whether objects of “great collective significance” or “everyday life” (baskets, clothing, tools), they “provoke memory and are animated by human gesture” (42). Even “neglected or unused items” (for example, the countless Indigenous cultural belongings still held in museum storage) are encoded with meaning and presence: “They remember. They remember us. They remember for us” (42). Similarly, Cordes states that “while seemingly dead from Western perspectives, beads are alive and communicating in many ways for Indigenous Peoples” (72).

14In Woody’s poem, “Rosette,” a term referencing the circular beadwork worn on regalia, she compares the craft of writing to beading or weaving:

Beading a story
is like a weaving,
a spiral, a space making itself in the light
and colors pick up
what one loves on the needle
like a song. (Luminaries 31)

15It’s fitting that Woody sees kinship between writing and beading since both serve as powerful forms of replenishment and world-making. In a world unstrung, beadwork—both the practice and finished form—reaffirms Indigenous community, creativity, and continuance. Cordes situates beads “within animated kinship networks of meaning, intergenerational pride, Indigenous epistemologies, and Indigenous mnemonics” (73). Whether strung or stitched, created using dentalium, wood, stone, bone, trade or seed beads, beadwork enacts relationships with ancestors and homelands, with histories of adaptation and ingenuity. In the throughline of Indigenous survivance, beadwork communicates coded cultural strategy, an arts practice of resistance and persistence, one bead at a time.

  • 15 This work was purchased by the Portland Art Museum. See an image of this work and brief curatorial (...)

16Woody asserts that “the life span is a string of patterns, as when I make beadwork, poetry, story or art—simplifications of complex life-patterns arranged into a comprehensible shape” (Luminaries xiii). The cover of Beth Piatote’s 2019 mixed-genre work, The Beadworkers: Stories gives visual shape to complex tribal-life patterns through the beadwork of acclaimed Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman who lives on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho.15 Called “The Gathering,” this fully-beaded panel memorializes a historic meeting of Nez Perce leaders at Umatilla in eastern Oregon, but places these leaders in the foreground of a multi-layered setting that includes the cityscape of downtown Portland in the middle distance, and in the back, the iconic, enduring presence of Mount Hood, the 3429-meter high, over 500,000-year-old volcano east of Portland which towers above the Columbia River. A signature example of Amerman’s aesthetic that he calls “photobeadalism,” this piece draws on traditional Plateau geometric language but innovates on it with pictorial realism. This high-profile work on display at the Portland Art Museum serves as a fitting visual entryway to Piatote’s mixed-genre debut collection. If viewed as three images in one, or triptych, “The Gathering” stages interactive engagements across time and space: asking viewers to situate the chiefs, Portland, and Mount Hood in dynamic relationship with one another. Far from an anachronistic move, Amerman’s placement of Indigenous leaders from generations past in front of the contemporary Portland skyline refuses linear notions of settler time. Instead of being relegated to a distant past, a forgotten time, an elegy of worlds lost, the Indigenous leaders in Amerman’s work direct viewers to see their centrality to present-day Indigeneity. They make visible Heid Erdrich’s affirmation that “the generations are with us” (“Guest Editor Preface” n.p.). Like Woody’s efforts to activate memory and to make present the now-invisible Celilo Falls, Amerman’s piece engages with the past as living history. In doing so, “The Gathering” confirms Plains Cree (member, Siksika Nation) curator Gerald McMaster’s observation that “Native heritage is marked with memories of events that newcomers seldom remember and Indians never forget” (74). Or, as Piatote comments in an interview, “The past is very much alive in our everyday interactions in Native America (Lee).

  • 16 Piatote’s description of her book as a beading table calls to mind Joy Harjo’s iconic poem, publish (...)

17Piatote’s book cover also signals that her focus is on the Pacific Northwest. Piatote, a member of the Chief Joseph Band of the Nez Perce Tribe (Nimiipuu) and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, is a professor at University of California, Berkeley. She has shared that writing The Beadworkers was “a way of “bringing myself closer to home … this book very much has its heart in the Pacific Northwest” (Wright). Piatote’s academic scholarship has centered on the relationship between foundational federal Indian law and foundational literature by Indigenous women, and on how, as she frequently puts it, “Indian wars are wars on Indian families” (Domestic Subjects 173). With The Beadworkers, Piatote brings this focus home with characters in the Pacific Northwest shaped by “the reverberations of violence from the past and displacement” and with stories that explore “the theme of living with loss and how to live with loss” (Lee). With the book’s title, Piatote also signals a thematic focus on the generative powers of creativity, community, and continuance enacted by and through beading. Like Woody, Piatote finds affinity between beading and writing, with beadwork providing her with abundant metaphors for questions of narrative design and thematic patterns.16 From comparing her book to a beading table—a gathering place for stories, creativity, collaboration—to considering her own experiences at the beadwork table, and “wondering how it is that Indian people have survived” (Levin), Piatote fosters and fortifies community through beadwork’s organizing principles.

18Using words as her beads, Piatote designs stories that epitomize Muscogee scholar Laura Harjo’s formulation of Indigenous futurity as “space, place, and temporality produced socially by people, including relatives located in the past, present, and future. It invokes many other temporalities, other spaces, and yet-to-be imagined possibilities” (Spiral 30). As with the three dimensions of Amerman’s beaded panel, “futurity” here is neither separate from past nor present, but rather, right “now” (Invited Talk). Harjo further explains, “In terms of the past, it’s activating the possibilities of our ancestors. For the present, it’s looking for the future that we wish for right now. In terms of the future, it’s putting the condition in place for our relatives that will be in a future temporality” (qtd in Burchell).

19Harjo’s sustaining question—“how do we keep relations alive across time and space and difference” (Invited Talk)—is variously answered across the four-part design of The Beadworkers. Except for “Indian Wars,” each section heading carries both a Nez Perce and English title. Piatote beads poems, short stories, vignettes, and a Nez Perce reimagination of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Narrators and narrative viewpoints are likewise diverse, spanning generations and lived experiences. Patterns can be hard to discern in a collection that defies easy categorization and ready cohesion. If beadwork is the organizing principle of the book, it can be difficult to identify how individual beads, or stories, are arranged to create a single work. Piatote acknowledges the unconventionality of her mixed-genre format by noting that “diversity of form is itself a connecting thread, in that it reflects something of what it means to live as a Native person in America—one is constantly moving through forms and structures and re-making them” (Mullins). By describing her stories as individual piece of beadwork “each with its own form and pattern: (Mullins), Piatote reframes gaps in legibility, context, and translation. Bead by bead, word by word, she strings patterns of Indigenous survivance that connect the collection. After all, beadwork, like other Indigenous art forms, has “survived everything: wars, boarding schools, loss, displacement, everything …. they are a testament to our ongoingness” (Wright).

3. Feasts and Futurity: Lessons in Indigenous Abundance

20In the Pacific Northwest, the making and gifting of beaded necklaces is part of a sustaining protocol of hospitality and honoring. It’s appropriate then that The Beadworkers opens with a three-part work entitled “Feast I, II, and III.” First published in The Kenyon Review, “Feast” was parenthetically titled “triptych,” an invitation to think relationally across the individual pieces: a poem; nine short passages whose titles repeat the order of the poem’s nine bold-print words in Nez Perce; a short story set in or near the 1920s. Although the word “triptych” is not included in the book, the title along with the section’s bilingual heading, “wé·tes wax̣ waqí·swit / land and life,” suggests community, kinship, and reciprocity. Across its three iterations, “Feast” offers a poetics of abundance that recognizes but ultimately refuses absence. Structurally and thematically, the triptych is a feast, a collective honoring of abundant relations. Modeled on Nez Perce feasts and similar Salmon or First Foods ceremonies elsewhere in the Columbia River region which honor the spring return of salmon and edible roots, “Feast I, II, and III” re-enact original instructions for living in “a very specific geography,” including “the order in which animals presented themselves to humans … in which roots and berries appeared in the landscape” (Piatote, “Berkeley Book Chats”). The order in which foods are presented at the feasts reaffirms, even today, foundational relationships with homelands and waters, with more-than-kin such as salmon, elk, huckleberries and camas. As the first section in the book, “Feast 1” fittingly starts at the beginning: of the world, of human life, of seasonal rounds and cycles. Like the beginning and end of Nez Perce feasts, the first and last word in each of the iterations of “Feast” is kú·s (or water). Akin to the river waters that animate Woody’s poetics of return and remembrance, “Feast II” declares that “all life begins and ends with water: our mothers, the rivers, the rain” (11). In language as fluid as water, “Feast I” celebrates salmon’s deep memory of return from distant ocean waters “to the cold river of your origin / upriver to give life” (3). The collective narrative voice offers gratitude to and for this abundant world, addressing their relatives such as ʔímes (deer): “we bring you in, carry you / adorned in beadwork and beauty” (3). The speakers’ songs “flow from our throats a / fine rain, the water cycle /gives qá·ws [type of root] in spring / first feast of our green / returning” (4).

  • 17 Piatote, an adult language learner, is very active in Nez Perce language revitalization and centers (...)

21Feast II shifts in tone, structure, and voice, offering a series of unnamed speakers, points of view, and textual forms: first-person memories and meditations; an excerpt from the Treaty of 1855 on fishing and gathering rights; a Coyote story in Nez Perce and English. Each of the nine more-than-human relatives named in “Feast I” reappear in the same sequence as titles of the passages in “Feast II.” As such they not only invite connections across time, but also activate shared memories, stories, and struggles. For example, in the first passage, entitled “kú·s,” the unnamed first-person narrator recounts a dream about learning to speak their language, a sign of return that echoes the elemental return of the salmon in “Feast I.” In an era when dammed rivers such as the Columbia have disappeared the salmon, the repeated final lines of the passage invoke a reparative vision: the return of languages violently taken from generations of boarding school students: “I am coming. I am coming back” (5).17 Feast II elsewhere deepens its attention to improbable returns and cultural continuance amid so much loss and fragmentation: a story about a man who continued the Salmon Ceremony by himself after his tribe was terminated, and over time drew people back; a family reminiscence of stopping by the roadside to pick from an abundant bush of chokecherries. Yet in the stunning passage entitled “qém̓es” (camas), Piatote measures what cannot return:

After World War II, advances in astrophysics allowed humans to see their planet from space. In 1972, the Apollo 17 took the most famous photograph of Earth, the blue planet. It might be fair to say that since the mid-twentieth century, humans have seen things that were never within their visual grasp before. But do we have better dreams? Have we seen better things? I think I would give up my fridge magnet of Planet Earth, every glimpse of snowy mountain folds from the window of a plane, the glittering view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower on New Year’s Eve—I would give up all of these things to see what our ancestors saw, to dream their vivid dreams, to come over a mountain with my mothers and sisters and suddenly see, in the wide open, an enormous blue meadow of blooming camas, an endless, unbroken field of periwinkle, lake, and lapis, that today you could barely imagine, a land breathing and rolling with blue, a land so beautiful that you would wonder how to find your voice, find your offering, draw out a song on your breath and press the strength of your body to the earth, into the earth, into the deep wide blue. (8-9)

22The brilliant purple and blue camas plant has a bulb full of nutrients. Camas is both a cultural and ecological keystone species that once flourished in the Pacific Northwest. Archaeologist Molly Carney notes that camas is “the plant equivalent of salmon, it is one of those species that really holds up greater ecosystems, a fundamental species which everything is related to” (qtd. in Rosbach). In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, “Camas flowers were once so prolific … that the green hills became seas of purple in the spring. Now, the flower is found in sparse patches, many of them cultivated by hand” (qtd in Hale). Today, camas revitalization efforts are well underway in Oregon, an effort to redress generations of habitat loss, suppression of cultural [Indigenous] fire and related stewardship practices. However, the feast of words animating this powerful vision of “unbroken” abundance is not an elegy; rather, it’s an honor song for ancestors “across time, space, and difference” (Laura Harjo).

23The title “Feast III” initially seems like a misnomer: this short story sketches a life of privation, dispossession, and loss. Mae is a survivor of Carlisle Indian School; mother of a daughter at Chemawa Indian School in Oregon; a recent widow; and migrant laborer working seasonal harvests on ancestral homelands. A few generations after the Treaty of 1855, “the Indians begged the agents for passes to follow the harvests all summer. They were migrant workers in their own land, a fact they accepted by day but questioned in their sleep” (14). Nearing the first anniversary of her husband Jim’s unexplained death in town “where he had been playing the fiddle” (16), Mae is abundant with memories. Some come unbidden, such as the childhood memory of laughing in the face of “Miss Lunsford” at Carlisle and subsequent laughter with her “school chums” after receiving her punishment. Others she tries to push away, such as remembering Jim in the morning singing. In this story of grief, both deeply personal and writ large, Piatote beads lessons of Indigenous ingenuity, continuance, and community. From the women who nourish Mae with tea and “small dry cakes made of ground roots” (17) to friends who “brought her offerings of smoked salmon and dried venison” (15), a community cares for her with sustaining first foods. When Jim dressed up to play fiddle in town, he’d put on a “pair of elaborately beaded floral cuffs—red tulip motif, green leaves, and white background, with copious fringe” (17). Such a display of exuberant artistry offers a beaded expression of resistant abundance in contrast to the privations of a migrant labor camp. Finally, a noisy crow catches her attention, directing her to feast her eyes on the world beyond the valley:

She allowed her gaze to shift, to move to the sky beyond, cloudless and bright, and in the distance she could see the snow-tipped blue mountains. The valley had changed, she thought, but the mountains were the same. In the mountains, the qém̓es was filling the meadows; the huckleberries were opening their leaves, drinking the sun. In the mountains, butterflies were massing in brilliant crowds beside the creeks, whose sparkling waters sang and skipped down the hillsides, finding a way, again, to the river. (18)

24This concluding paragraph of the “Feast” triptych serves up a powerful lesson of continuance in a world of grievous loss and change. Even in the most challenging of times, the feast continues. As Piatote notes: “we believe our structures and way of being are so stable; it doesn’t matter if the language changes, if other things change, as long as we are still investing in the structure of the world. And that is what is eternal, what endures” (“Windfall”).

  • 18 Note both spellings Okanogan and Okanagan are used, typically the former in the United States and t (...)

25This story also quietly celebrates intergenerational literary kinship, offering an honor song of sorts for Christine Quintasket (pen name, Mourning Dove) who, like Piatote, was an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. In 1927, Quintasket published the novel Cogewea, one of the first novels by a Native American woman, and later Coyote Stories (1933) a collection of Okanogan ancestral stories. In an interview Piatote says, “I always wanted to write a piece about Mourning Dove, an Okanagan woman who was working in the field … I actually went to Washington State University and sat in the archives and read all of her letters. I was so full of her” (Lee). Quintasket worked as a seasonal migrant laborer in the Pacific Northwest; her letters recount writing when she could at night in her canvas tent. Quintasket’s legacy—a storied life of Colville activism, leadership, and creative brilliance—is a feast for Native writers and literary studies.18

26In 2007, the Army Corps of Engineers did an underwater sonogram of Lake Celilo, the reservoir created by The Dalles Dam, revealing that the rocky outcroppings and channels are still intact from Celilo Falls. Lindsey Schneider states that the flooding “did not accomplish what it was supposed to do …. It did not eliminate the social and kinship connections created by the falls .… Most importantly, submerging Celilo did not erase Indigenous relationships with the river” (“Land Back” 459). Woody and Piatote recognize this truth and extend it through insistent Indigenous presence and belonging, through abundant feasts of memory and imagination. In the story of Indigenous futurity, Celilo Falls and the Columbia River will continue beyond the devastation wrought by settler colonialism. One need only look north to the Elwha River in Washington, restored in 2014, and south to the Klamath River. After decades of Indigenous and ally activism, the 414-kilometer Klamath River stretching from southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean in northwestern California was recently freed of its dams. The restoration of the Klamath River is to date the largest dam removal project in US history. Less than a month after the last of four dams was removed in 2024, salmon appeared in the upper Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon for the first time since 1912. In summer 2025, a group of Indigenous youth from the Klamath River Basin’s Tribal Nations were the first to kayak the entire length of the freed river. At the conclusion of their descent from headwaters to the sea, former Yurok Tribal Chair Susan Masten stated: “The river remembers. The fish are coming back to spawn where they haven’t been able to be in a hundred years plus. The fish remember. We, as this river system, are healing” (qtd. In Werk). Relatedly, through their poetics of enduring kinship with homelands and waters, Elizabeth Woody and Beth Piatote imagine a future beyond the monstrous present of the US settler state. They bead stories across time of Indigenous continuance, word by word.

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Bibliography

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Cordes, Ashley. Indigenous Currencies: Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age. The MIT P, 2025.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Eternal Fantasy of a Racially Virtuous America.” The New Republic, 22 March 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161568/white-supremacy-racism-in-america-kimberle-crenshaw. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026.

Erdrich, Heid. “Guest Editor Preface.” Yellow Medicine Review, Winter, 2007, n.p.

Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors. Harper Perennial, 2014.

Farrell-Racette, Sherry. “Encoded Knowledge: Memory and Objects in Contemporary Native American Art.” Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2012, pp. 40-55.

Feddersen, Joe, and Elizabeth Woody. “The Story as Primary Source: Educating the Gaze.” Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by W. Jackson Rushing III, Routledge, 1999, pp. 174-183.

Guthrie, Woody. “Roll on Columbia.” Rounder Records, 1941.

Hale, Jamie. “How One Tribe’s ‘Flower House’ is Re-Seeding Oregon with Native Plants.” The Oregonian, 22 Aug. 2025, https://www.underscore.news/land/outdoors/how-one-tribes-flower-house-is-re-seeding-oregon-with-native-plants/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Harjo, Joy. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Norton, 1994.

Harjo, Laura. “Invited Talk.” Western Literature Association Conference, Oklahoma City, 21 Sept. 2025.

---. Spiral in the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. U of Arizona P, 2019.

Lee, Frances S. “Loss and Wholeness: An Interview with Beth Piatote.” Spark: The Magazine of Humanities Washington, 29 Sept. 2020, https://www.humanities.org/spark/loss-and-wholeness-an-interview-with-beth-piatote/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2026.

Levin, Sam. “Language is a Casualty of War: A Conversation with Beth Piatote.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 Apr. 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/language-is-a-casualty-of-war-a-conversation-with-beth-piatote/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

McMaster, Gerald. “Borderzones: The Injun-uity of Aesthetic Tricks.” Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995, pp. 74-90.

McNickle, D’Arcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. U of New Mexico P, 1978.

Meanus, Linda. “Celilo Falls and the Power of Water.” Voices of the River, vol. 1, 2022, p. 6.

---. My Name is LaMoosh. Oregon State UP, 2023.

Mullins, Carrie. “We Need a Continent Full of Indigenous Stories.” Electric Lit, 21 Jan. 2020, https://electricliterature.com/we-need-a-continent-full-of-indigenous-stories/. Accessed 10 Jan. 2026.

Ortiz, Simon J. From Sand Creek. U of Arizona P, 1981.

PBS News. “Citing Orwell’s ‘1984,’ Judge Orders Trump Administration to Restore Slavery Exhibit It Removed in Philadelphia.” Public Broadcasting Service, 17 Feb. 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/citing-orwells-1984-judge-orders-trump-administration-to-restore-slavery-exhibit-it-removed-in-philadelphia. Accessed 20 March 2026.

Piatote, Beth. The Beadworkers. Counterpoint, 2019.

---. “Berkeley Book Chats Podcast.” Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, 26 Feb. 2020, https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/beth-piatote. Accessed 15 Jan. 2026.

---. Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature. Yale UP, 2013.

---. “Windfall Reading: Writers Ann Stinson and Beth Piatote.” YouTube, Lane Literary Guild and Eugene Public Library, 18 Apr. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LchPyWM_Apo.

Rosbach, Molly. “Legacy of Indigenous Stewardship of Camas Dates Back More Than 3,500 Years, OSU Study Finds.” Oregon State University Newsroom, 20 May 2024, https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/legacy-indigenous-stewardship-camas-dates-back-more-3500-years-osu-study-finds. Accessed 15 June 2025.

Schick, Tony, and Julie Sabatier. “Salmon Wars Bonus Episode: Celilo Memories.” Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), 24 Apr. 2024, https://www.opb.org/article/2024/04/24/salmon-wars-bonus-episode-celilo-falls-village-memories/. Accessed 15 Jan. 2026.

Schneider, Lindsey. “‘Land Back’ Beyond Repatriation: Restoring Indigenous Land Relationships.” Gender and the American West, edited by Susan Bernardin, Routledge, 2022, pp. 452-464.

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Werk, Jarrette. “Indigenous Youth Complete 310-Mile Klamath River Journey.” Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), 16 July 2025, https://www.opb.org/article/2025/07/16/indigenous-youth-complete-310-mile-klamath-river-journey/. Accessed 10 Jan. 2026.

Woody, Elizabeth. “By Our Hand, through the Memory, the House Is More than Form.” A Circle of Nations: Voices and Visions of American Indians, edited by John Gattuso, Beyond Words Publishing, 1993, pp. 82-90.

---. Hand into Stone. Contact 11 Publications, 1988.

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---. “Recalling Celilo.” Salmon Nation: People, Fish, and Our Common Home, edited by Edward C. Wolf and Seth Zuckerman, Ecotrust, 2003, pp. 9-15.

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Wright, Samantha. “A Look at American Indian Life with Beth Piatote.” Boise State Public Radio, 9 Oct. 2023, https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/show/idaho-matters/2023-10-09/a-look-at-native-american-life-with-beth-piatote. Accessed 15 June 2025.

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Notes

1 The federal administration’s white supremacist campaign of erasure entitled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” extends to all national parks, museums, and monuments. For example, the national parks have had to remove signs that document their violent founding and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples as well as any documentation of climate change impacts. Notable examples include the removal of signage referencing George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people at the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia and the removal of the LGBTQ Pride Flag at Stonewall National Monument in New York City. In February 2026, a federal judge ordered the return of slavery exhibits, quoting from George Orwell’s novel 1984: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not” (PBS News).

2 Crenshaw notes, “the chronic failure to confront the monsters of our past is not destiny; it’s a daily choice to accept American myth in the face of so much countervailing evidence.” Crenshaw posted this on Twitter February 20, 2021; it has been published in her article “The Eternal Fantasy of a Racially Virtuous America.”

3 Definitions vary, but the Pacific Northwest typically includes Oregon, Washington, far northern California, Idaho, western Montana, and British Columbia.

4 For the text, see: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/stopping-radical-environmentalism-to-generate-power-for-the-columbia-river-basin/. For more on the historic agreement to broker renewable energy and salmon recovery, see https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/18/what-the-end-of-the-columbia-river-agreement-will-mean-for-tribes-ag-industry-groups/. In February 2026, a federal judge in Oregon ordered federal agencies to change dam operations to support salmon survival in the Columbia River. See: www.opb.org/article/2026/02/25/judge-orders-protective-measures-for-columbia-river-salmon-after-canceled-historic-deal/.

5 For an extended Indigenous Studies analysis of Columbia hydropower and Celilo Falls, see Lindsey Schneider’s chapter, “‘Land Back’ Beyond Repatriation: Restoring Indigenous Land Relationships.” My understanding of what she calls “rivers as an archive of survivance” has been deeply informed by her work.

6 The transcript of the Treaty of 1855 is available at the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs webpage: https://warmsprings-nsn.gov/treaty-documents/treaty-of-1855/. For information on the “Columbia River Treaty Tribes,” see: https://plan.critfc.org/vol1/tribal-restoration-plan/cultural-context/the-columbia-basin-treaty-tribes/.

7 Woody currently serves as Executive Director of the Museum at Warm Springs.

8 Wind from an Enemy Sky (published posthumously in 1978) follows the catastrophic consequences for members of a fictional tribe in Montana fighting the construction of a dam in a sacred location in the early twentieth century. The deadly aftereffects of dam construction are entwined with the Tribe’s futile efforts to reclaim their medicine bundle which had been held in storage in a museum and later found to have been destroyed by mice.

9 This essay has been reprinted in collections such as Circle of Nations and Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Also see the special issue, “Remembering Celilo Falls” in Oregon Historical Quarterly 108.4 (2007), co-edited by Elizabeth Woody and Eliza E. Canty-Jones.

10 “She Who Watches” is a foundational inspiration for other major artists including Woody’s aunt, Lillian Pitt, an award-winning artist known for her sculptural masks and related clay and glass work. For an account of the first time she saw “She Who Watches,” see: https://www.confluenceproject.org/library-post/lillian-pitt-my-ancestors-are-tough-people/. She says: “when I first saw her it was such a transformative emotion, and it gave me such a tremendous sense of power of self, that no one can ever take away. Not power like the politicians, but just this wonderful sense of being.”

11 In “The Story as Primary Source: Educating the Gaze” artist Joe Feddersen (Okanogan) and Woody describe petrographs as artworks that “serve the land and indigenous history by providing a greater connection to the story of how we came to be, how we have learned to become human, and what prophetic visions we have inherited” (Feddersen and Woody 175).

12 Louise Erdrich also locates petroglyphs and pictographs within a long Indigenous literary history. In Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors (2014) Erdrich writes that the Ojibwe words for “book” and “rock painting” share the same root. She observes, “Books are nothing all that new. People have probably been writing books in North America since at least 2000 B.C.” (5).

13 In her essay, “Wyam: Echo of Falling Water,” included in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, Woody situates David Sohappy’s arrest and imprisonment amid wider struggles in the region over treaty-fishing rights exacerbated by the flooding of Celilo Falls, barriers to fishing access, and depletion of salmon populations.

14 This is an early excerpt from Meanus’s autobiography, My Name is LaMoosh (2023), published in collaboration with the Confluence Project. The roar of the Falls was said to be deafening. See interviews at Tony Schick and Julie Sabatier, “Salmon Wars Bonus Episode: Celilo Memories.” Schick says, “It’s hard to overstate how spectacular Celilo Falls was.”

15 This work was purchased by the Portland Art Museum. See an image of this work and brief curatorial statement: https://portlandartmuseum.org/blog/daily-art-moment-marcus-amerman/.

16 Piatote’s description of her book as a beading table calls to mind Joy Harjo’s iconic poem, published in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, “Perhaps the World Ends Here” (1994) which begins with the line, “The world begins at a kitchen table” and closes with, “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and / crying, eating of the last sweet bite (14).

17 Piatote, an adult language learner, is very active in Nez Perce language revitalization and centers Nez Perce story structures and traditions in her work, as in Antíkoni.

18 Note both spellings Okanogan and Okanagan are used, typically the former in the United States and the latter in Canada. Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan), writer, educator, and founder of En’owkin, an educational, language, and cultural hub, has spoken of Quintasket’s contributions to Okanogan literature and honors her familial and literary kinship with her.

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References

Electronic reference

Susan Bernardin, Words like Beads: Elizabeth Woody’s and Beth Piatote’s Poetics of AbundanceEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 21-1 | 2026, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 07 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/26146; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166ga

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About the author

Susan Bernardin

Susan Bernardin is Professor and Director of the School of Language, Culture, & Society at Oregon State University. A settler scholar, she has published widely on foundational and contemporary Native American authors and Indigenous mixed-media, visual arts, and comics. A former president of the Western Literature Association, she is a two-time recipient of its award for best article in the field. More recently she reckons with legacies of gendered colonialism as editor of Gender and the American West (Routledge).

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