Plateau Indian

Plateau Indian
Any member of various North American Indian peoples that inhabited the high plateau between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Cascade Range on the west.

The Plateau culture was not stable. By AD 1200–1300 the "classic" phase had emerged, characterized by permanent winter villages with semi-subterranean earth lodges along the main rivers and by summer camps with mat-covered conical lodges in the meadows. During the centuries that followed, the Plateau area was influenced by cultural elements from the highly specialized Northwest Coast culture. Part of this diffusion was possibly brought about by a Chinook group, the Wishram, who migrated from the coast into the Cascade Mountains. During the 18th century there were influences from the east. The Shoshone had acquired horses by that time and furnished their closest neighbours on the Plains and the Plateau with horses. Other elements of Plains culture, such as beaded dresses, warbonnets, and tepees, came with the horse. Among this group were the Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Klamath, Kutenai, Modoc, Nez Percé, Spokan, Thompson, and Salish.

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people
Introduction
 member of any of the Native American peoples inhabiting the high plateau region between the Rocky Mountains and the coastal mountain system.

      The Plateau culture area comprises a complex physiographic region that is bounded on the north by low extensions of the Rocky Mountains, such as the Cariboo Mountains; on the east by the Rocky Mountains and the Lewis Range; on the south by the Blue Mountains and the Salmon River (excepting a narrow corridor to present-day California); and on the west by the Canadian Coast Mountains and the Cascade Range. It includes the watersheds of the Columbia and Fraser rivers.

      The climate in which the Plateau peoples live is of the continental type. Temperatures range from −30 °F (−34 °C) in winter to 100 °F (38 °C) in summer. Precipitation is generally low and forms a snow cover during the winter, particularly at higher altitudes. There are three different provinces of vegetation in the region. The Middle Columbia area is a steppe of sagebrush and bunchgrass fringed by yellow pine on higher levels. The Upper Columbia consists mainly of wooded areas, although grassland is found in river valleys. The Fraser area is a semi-open coniferous forest interspersed with dry grassland and a partly maritime flora.

      The southern boundary of the Plateau ecosystem gradually merges with the northern reaches of the Great Basin; the boundaries between the corresponding culture areas are equally imprecise. Anthropologists sometimes refer to the Plateau and Great Basin jointly as the Intermontane culture area (see Great Basin Indian).

Traditional culture

Language
      The peoples of the Plateau belong mainly to four linguistic families: Salishan, Sahaptin, Kutenai, and Modoc and Klamath. The majority of Plateau groups speak Salishan and Sahaptin languages.

      The tribes that speak Salishan languages may be conveniently divided into Northern Plateau and Interior Salish; there are also Coast Salish among the Northwest Coast Indians (Northwest Coast Indian). The Northern Plateau Salish include the Shuswap, Lillooet, and Ntlakapamux (Thompson) tribes. The Interior Salish live mostly in the Upper Columbia area and include the Okanagan, Sinkaietk, Lake, Wenatchee, Sanpoil, Nespelim, Spokan, Kalispel, Pend d'Oreille, Coeur d'Alene, and Flathead peoples. Some early works incorrectly denote all Salishan groups as “Flathead.”

      Speakers of Sahaptin languages may be subdivided into three main groups: the Nez Percé, the Cayuse and Molala, and the Central Sahaptin, comprising the Yakima, Wallawalla, Tenino, Umatilla, and others (see also Sahaptin).

      The Kutenai and the Modoc and Klamath language families include the Kutenai and the Modoc and Klamath peoples.

Trade and interaction
      Its geographic location in the midst of four other culture areas—the Northwest Coast (Northwest Coast Indian), the Plains (Plains Indian), the Great Basin (Great Basin Indian), and California (California Indian)—made the Plateau a crossroads of cultures. An expansive trade network enabled the exchange of goods, ideas, and even people, as slavery was common in the region. The Northwest Coast cultures contributed innovations such as mat-covered houses and pit houses, the carving of animal motifs in wood and bone, and cremation and scaffold burials. Part of this diffusion undoubtedly occurred through trade-based interactions, while other ideas arrived with the Wishram, a Chinook group that migrated from the coast into the Cascade Mountains.

      During the 18th century, influences from the south and east grew in importance. The Great Basin's Shoshone had acquired horses by this time and furnished their closest neighbours on the Plains and the Plateau with the new animals. The Plateau tribes placed such a high value on horses that European and Euro-American traders testified that the Nez Percé, Cayuse, Wallawalla, and Flathead had more horses than the tribes of the northern Plains from the early 19th century onward.

 During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the peoples of the Middle Columbia area adopted several kinds of material culture from the Plains. Sahaptin women, for example, made and wore Plains-inspired beaded dresses, men began to wear feathered headdresses and other war regalia, and tepees (tepee) became popular. Similar innovations occurred on the eastern periphery of the Plateau, especially among the Flathead and the Kutenai. The northwestern Salishan peoples, however, rejected these changes in favour of maintaining Plateau traditions. The military ethos common among the Plains peoples was not found uniformly among residents of the Plateau. The Ntlakapamux, Shuswap, Sahaptin, and Klamath did make occasional war raids, dressed in elk hide or wooden slat armour and armed with bows and clubs. Other groups chose to avoid conflict, however; the Flathead in particular were well regarded by visitors for their courtesy, hospitality, honesty, and courage.

Settlement patterns and housing
      Traditionally, the Plateau peoples resided in permanent villages during the winter, with the remainder of the year divided between those villages and a variety of semipermanent camps conveniently situated for hunting and gathering. As soon as horses were adopted, some groups became more nomadic, using mobile camps as they traversed the Rocky Mountains in order to hunt buffalo on the Plains.

      A village was home to between a few hundred and a thousand people, although the community could house more than that during major events. Villages were generally located on waterways, often at rapids or narrows where fish were abundant during the winter season. Communities owned the fishing sites and surrounding area in common. Each village also had an upland for hunting; in contradistinction to the fishing localities, upland territories were mostly open for people from other villages as well.

      Village houses were of two main types, the semisubterranean pit house and the mat-covered surface house. Pit houses were usually circular and typically had a pit 3–6 feet (1–2 metres) deep and a diameter of 25–40 feet (7.5–12 metres), with an interior space of approximately 500–1,260 square feet (45–115 square metres). The roof was usually conical and was supported by a framework of wooden posts, beams, and stringers—long saplings that had been stripped of bark and were used to bridge the area between the beams or from the beams to the ground. The smoke hole in the top was also the entrance to the house; the interior was reached by climbing onto the roof, through the smoke hole, and down a ladder or notched log.

 Pit houses were common throughout the Plateau region at one time, but they were eventually supplanted in the southern Plateau by the mat-covered surface house. These homes used a conical or A-frame design that was formed by leaning together stringers or timbers and covering them with mats made of tule, a type of reed. As the availability of Euro-American goods increased, Plateau peoples often covered surface houses with canvas instead of reed mats, which were time-consuming to produce.

      Conical houses had one hearth in the centre of the floor and generally sheltered one nuclear or three-generation family. These tepeelike, lightly-built structures were used in summer when families were engaged in nomadic foraging activities; they averaged perhaps 15 to 30 feet (4.5 to 9 metres) in diameter, with an interior space of approximately 175–700 square feet (16–65 square metres). In contrast, A-frame houses were used as communal winter residences, so they were very large, heavily built, and thoroughly insulated. Early visitors to the Plateau report houses as much as 150 feet (45 metres) long. More typical were houses between 25 and 60 feet (7.5 and 18 metres) long and perhaps 12 to 15 feet (3.5 to 4.5 metres) wide, for an interior of approximately 300–900 square feet (28–85 square metres). Hearths were placed at intervals down the central aisle and were usually shared by two nuclear families, one on each side of the aisle.

      Housing at foraging camps could take a variety of forms, ranging from small conical mat lodges to simple windbreaks. Groups that traveled to the Plains to hunt bison typically used the tepee during those expeditions; as they became increasingly nomadic, many of these groups adopted the tepee as a full-time dwelling.

Subsistence and material culture
      As members of hunting and gathering cultures (hunting and gathering culture), the peoples of the Plateau relied upon wild foods for subsistence. Salmon, trout, eels, suckers, and other fish were abundant in the rivers, and fishing was the most important source of food. Fishing was accomplished with one- or three-pronged fish spears, traps, and nets. Communities also built and held in common large fish weirs—stone or wooden enclosures used to “corral” the catch. Substantial quantities of fish were dried on elevated wooden racks and preserved for winter consumption. The region's fauna included deer, elk, bear, caribou, and small game; hunters used a bow and arrows and sometimes a short spear in their pursuit of such prey. In the winter they wore long and narrow snowshoes to facilitate the tracking of animals.

 Wild plant foods were another important source of nutrition. Roots and bulbs were especially important. The major source of starch was the bulb of the camas flower (Camassia esculenta). Bitterroot, onions, wild carrots, and parsnips were also gathered and were generally cooked in earth ovens heated by hot stones. Berries—serviceberries, huckleberries, blueberries, and others—were harvested as well.

      The earliest European explorers in the region reported that Plateau clothing comprised a bark breechcloth or apron and a twined bark poncho that fell a little below the waist; during the cold season men wrapped their legs with fur, women had leggings of hemp, and robes or blankets of rabbit or other fur were used. By the 19th century, however, clothing had become similar to that seen on the Plains: men wore breechcloths, leggings, and shirts, and women wore leggings and dresses. Hair was generally braided, and hats, headbands, feathered battle and ceremonial regalia, and other headgear had also become common.

 The Chinook, who traded in slaves, molded the heads of freeborn infants with a device attached to the cradleboard (see head flattening). Despite their name, the Flathead did not engage in this form of modification; some early ethnographers speculated that the apparent misnomer derived from the group's squareness of profile relative to the triangular form seen in skulls that had been altered. Many historic paintings that purport to depict Flathead individuals are actually portraits of members of neighbouring tribes.

      Dugout or bark canoes were useful forms of transportation, although long-distance water travel was limited by the many river rapids in the region. Items that were small or could be manufactured by one or two people were typically the property of individuals. Groups whose territory neighboured that of the Northwest Coast Indians engaged in a variety of redistributive events (gift exchange) similar to potlatches (potlatch). Decorative art consisted of pictographic designs with a symbolic content, referring to supernatural beings and cosmic things.

      The general ethos emphasized material equality and the sharing of necessities. Food resources, for instance, were generally shared. The Klamath, however, held wealthy persons in greater esteem than others, an ethos that may have derived from the tribe's proximity to the hierarchical societies of the Northwest Coast and California.

Political organization
      In traditional Plateau societies the village formed the key sociopolitical unit, although the political hierarchy used in governing each village varied from tribe to tribe. The Ntlakapamux, for example, used a fairly informal consensus system. The Sanpoil, on the other hand, had a more formal political structure: the village had a chief, a subchief, and a general assembly in which every adult had a vote—except for young men who were not married. The Flathead were perhaps the most hierarchical group, with a head chief of great power and band chiefs under him; the head chief decided on matters of peace and war and was not bound by the recommendations of his council.

      In many Plateau societies, chiefs and their families played a prominent role in promoting traditional values. Among the Sinkaietk, for instance, chiefly office was hereditary; while conferring a level of decision-making power, the office also obligated the chief and his family to act in ways that exemplified virtuous behaviour. For this group such behaviour included the placement of a female relative among the chief's advisers. Similar positions for highly respected women also existed in other groups, such as the Coeur d'Alene, and bear witness to the independence of women in many Plateau tribes.

      Social control was, as a rule, achieved through social pressure and public opinion rather than force. People were not coerced into following the advice of a chief or the decisions of a council meeting; those who did not agree with a given course of action could simply move to another village or another band and did so fairly frequently. However, a number of groups allowed chiefs, village councils, or a combination thereof to arbitrate or punish transgressions against the community such as murder or stealing. Arbitrations generally involved a settlement of horses to the injured party, while corporal punishment was usually administered by a delegated village “whipper.” Slaves were compelled to follow their owners' wishes.

      In some cases, as with the Nez Percé's transition from settled village life to a more nomadic existence, political organization was adjusted. The Nez Percé were originally a village-centred people. Each village had a male chief whose office was hereditary, although poorly qualified sons were generally passed over for the privilege; the chief was advised by a council and was primarily occupied with mediating disputes, displaying exemplary behaviour, and seeing to the general good of his people. By the early 19th century, however, families from different villages had begun to coalesce into mobile bands in order to undertake autumn hunts on the Plains. While the hereditary authority of the village chiefs continued, leadership in the new tasks associated with this change in lifestyle—notably travel, defense, and raiding—came under the authority of skilled hunters and fighters.

      Bilateral descent systems prevailed in most Plateau groups; in these systems descent is traced equally through the lines of the mother and the father. The average Plateau kin group consisted of a nuclear family and its closest lineal relatives. This was the case among, for instance, the Tenino. Their kinship terminology revealed the close connection between family relatives of the same generation, so that all one's female cousins were called by and treated in the same terms as those used for one's sisters; one's male cousins, likewise, were all one's “brothers.”

      As notional siblings, first cousins did not marry (marriage). Other than this constraint, marriage and divorce were informal affairs. Newlyweds generally resided near the groom's family, and in case of divorce the wife simply returned to her parents' home. No particular grounds for separation were necessary, and at a later date both parties usually undertook new marriages. polygyny, a form of marriage in which several wives share a husband, was an approved but not especially common practice throughout the culture area.

      Some Plateau kinship systems included “joking relationships (joking relationship).” These could be informal mechanisms for expressing social disapproval or deflating puffed egos, as with the ribbing and practical joking encouraged by the Tenino between a father's sister's husband and his wife's brother's child. The butt of a joke was expected to respond gracefully. Joking relationships could also be ribald, permitting sexual innuendo between a man and his sister-in-law; notably, these individuals were potential marriage partners under the polygyny system.

Childhood and socialization
      The life cycle of the individual was marked by fixed ritual acts (rite of passage) that opened the gateway to the different social roles he had to enact. These rituals began before birth. Among the Sinkaietk, for example, a pregnant woman was supposed to give birth in a lodge that had been constructed for this purpose. A newborn spent its day strapped in a cradleboard. Naming practices varied among the tribes. The training of the child was left to the mother and grandmother, but even as a small boy a Sinkaietk could accompany his father on fishing and small-game hunting trips, while small girls helped their mothers about the house and in gathering wild foods. Children learned to be hardy through activities such as swimming in cold streams; such exertions were generally supervised by grandparents. Disobedience was rare. When it did occur, it was sometimes met with corporal punishment; some groups allowed parents to call upon the village whipper when children misbehaved.

      At puberty a boy undertook a vision quest. This rite of passage usually involved spending some days fasting on a mountaintop in hopes of communicating with a guardian spirit. A girl who had her first menstruation was taken to a location some distance from the village and provided with living quarters. During this time she was seen as extremely powerful in the spiritual and supernatural senses and so observed a number of ritual taboos (taboo) that were meant to protect her and the community. Among other actions, her hair was bound up in rolls that she touched only with a small comb, her face was painted red or yellow, she wore undecorated clothing, and she used a drinking tube rather than taking water directly from a well. After the flow, she ritually purified herself in a sweat lodge. Her seclusion might continue for one or several months, during which time she might undertake a vision quest. She finished her seclusion with evening prayers on a hill. When she returned to the village, she was treated as an adult.

      Certain rituals were carried out after an individual's death (death rite). To prevent the dead from lingering among the living, some groups demolished homes where death had occurred. Grave sites were often located at riversides, though the specific form of burial—whether the body was intact or cremated, placed on the surface or in the ground, covered with soil or a rockslide, and marked with stones or wood—varied from one tribe to another. For about one year after the death, the decedent's spouse (or spouses, in polygynous marriages) was expected to demonstrate grief by wearing old or ragged clothing and was also expected to delay remarriage during this period.

Belief systems
      Religion was, like the rest of the culture, closely intertwined with the region's ecology. Plateau religions shared several features with indigenous North American religions in general, most notably in their emphases on animism, shamanism, and individual communion with the spirit world.

      The main rituals were the vision quest; the firstling, or first foods, rites; and the winter dance. The vision quest was compulsory for boys and recommended for girls. The spirit-beings who engaged with humans were thought to guide individuals to particular vocations, such as hunting, warfare, or healing. Both boys and girls could become shamans (shamanism), though it was seen as a more suitable occupation for the former. They cured diseases by extracting a bad spirit or an object that had entered the patient's body. On the northern Plateau they also brought back souls that had been stolen by the dead and were known to publicize their feats through dramatic pantomimes (see soul loss). Because their work included healing the living and contacting the dead, shamans tended to be both wealthy and respected—and even feared.

      Firstling rites celebrated and honoured the first foods that were caught or gathered in the spring. The first salmon ceremony celebrated the arrival of the salmon run. The first fish caught was ritually sliced, small pieces of it were distributed among the people and eaten, and the carcass was returned to the water accompanied by prayers and thanks. This ritual ensured that the salmon would return and have a good run the next year. Some Salish had a “salmon chief” who organized the ritual. The Okanagan, Ntlakapamux, and Lillooet celebrated similar rites for the first berries rather than the first salmon.

      The winter or spirit dance was a ceremonial meeting at which participants personified their respective guardian spirits. Among the Nez Percé the dramatic performances and the songs were thought to bring warm weather, plentiful game, and successful hunts.

      As in much of Northern America, folklore in the Plateau generally emphasized the creator, trickster, and culture hero Coyote. The subject of innumerable trickster tales (trickster tale), Coyote (or alternative trickster figures such as Bluejay) undertook exploits that reflected common foibles and reinforced the social mores of the people.

Cultural continuity and change
      The cultures of the Plateau changed with time and place. The most dynamic period of cultural change occurred after the arrival of the horse in the early 18th century. Horse technology inspired innovations in subsistence, political organization, housing, and other aspects of traditional life. It could also displace people: pressure from the nomadic Blackfoot in approximately 1800 forced the Flathead and Kutenai to withdraw from their home quarters on the plains of western Montana. They resettled in the intermontane valleys of the Rockies and from there made occasional buffalo hunts on the Plains in the company of other Plateau tribes such as the Coeur d'Alene and Nez Percé.

The 19th century: syncretism and disenfranchisement
      Other innovations arose from different causes. Direct contact between indigenous groups and Euro-Americans were relatively brief at first and included the provision of boats and food to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which traversed the region in 1805 and again in 1806. Early in the 19th century the fur trade brought Native American and Euro-American trappers from the east into the country, particularly to the northern Plateau. These groups included a relatively large number of Iroquois men who had adopted Roman Catholicism; they propagated Christianity among the Flathead, who thereafter visited St. Louis to call on missionaries. Proselytizing missionaries were a strong force in the area from the 1820s to the '50s.

      By the 1830s Plateau peoples were engaging in syncretic religious practices through millenarian movements that came to be known collectively as the Prophet Dance. The major impetus for the movement appears to have been despair over the devastating loss of life caused by the epidemic diseases that had accompanied European colonization. The eponymous prophets were charismatic leaders who were said to have received supernatural instructions for hastening the renewal of the world and the return of the dead. The Prophet Dance movement appeared before that of the Ghost Dance; like the Ghost Dance, variations on the Prophet Dance persisted into the 21st century.

      By the 1840s the United States was subject to a burgeoning Homestead Movement that inspired thousands of emigrants to move to the Willamette valley and other parts of what would become the Oregon Territory. Many of these settlers traveled through the Plateau, often trespassing on tribal lands. Native peoples also noted with consternation that disease seemed to follow the Euro-American missionaries and settlers. Conflict ensued, and by the 1850s the United States had begun to negotiate treaties with the resident tribes. For the most part these involved setting terms for regional development and delineating specific tracts of land as belonging to either the tribes or the government. The treaty process was disrupted in 1857, before completion, when the discovery of gold on the Thompson River spurred a great influx of settlers and miners. Gold strikes were soon found on several other rivers in the region. Tensions rose; crowded mining camps bred infectious diseases, and the men drawn to such enterprises were often corrupt and predatory.

      The remainder of the 19th century was a turbulent period during which many Plateau tribes struggled economically. The United States and Canada invoked a series of public policies to assimilate indigenous peoples: tribes were confined to reservations (reservation), subsistence practices were forcibly shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and children were sent to boarding schools where they were often physically abused. The region was also affected by placer mining, a technique in which water from high-pressure hoses is used to strip soil from hillsides into rivers; this greatly increased the sediment load of waterways and depleted crucial salmon stocks. Fisheries were further decimated by industrial harvesting at the mouths of the great rivers. Used to supply a burgeoning cannery industry, the new techniques not only caught enormous quantities of fish but did so before the salmon could reach their spawning grounds and reproduce.

      As subsistence became increasingly difficult, some indigenous groups became more resistant to government policies. In the early 1870s a band of Modoc, dissatisfied with farming life and the suppression of their religious practices, left their assigned reservation and returned to their original land near Tule Lake. The Modoc War (1872–73) comprised the federal government's attempt to return this band to the reservation; unable to apprehend the group, the military finally used siege tactics to force its surrender.

      The Nez Percé War of 1877 resulted from two otherwise unrelated events: a shady treaty negotiation that ceded some tribal lands and a raid in the Wallowa valley in which several settlers were killed. Following the raid, the United States ordered all bands of Nez Percé off of the ceded lands, including the Wallowa valley. The band that had remained resident there was led by Chief Joseph (Joseph, Chief) and comprised more than 500 individuals, many of them women, children, or elders. Fearing disproportionate reprisals from the military, the band fled. The group was eventually captured, but only after a chase of more than three months during which the people traveled some 1,600–1,700 miles (2,575–2,700 km).

      In the 1880s, in a process known as “allotment,” the common title to land that had been conferred to each tribe was replaced with individual titles to farm-sized acreages; the remainder was then sold, severely reducing indigenous landholdings in the Plateau. Although legal safeguards were put into place to protect indigenous landowners from exploitation and corruption, such laws were poorly enforced. As a result, allotment initiated a period of increasing poverty for many Plateau tribes.

The 20th century: regaining sovereignty
      In the 1930s, after decades of paternalism, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs engaged in a series of policy revisions that authorized tribes to create governments and corporations and to take charge of other aspects of community life, such as the administration of schools. Many tribes chartered constitutions or similar documents, elected councils, and engaged in other forms of self-governance during this period.

      In 1954 the federal government terminated its relationship with the inhabitants of the Modoc and Klamath reservation, stripping the tribe of federal recognition and the benefits and protections associated with that status. Termination was a national policy; its hope was that the elimination of the special relationship between the federal government and indigenous peoples would encourage economic development on reservations. The reservation land that had survived allotment was condemned and sold, with the proceeds distributed among the former residents. The loss of federal support for health care and schools devastated the community. The Modoc and Klamath people sued to regain federal recognition, which they achieved in 1986, but they did not regain their former lands.

      As the 20th century progressed, many tribes sued the governments of Canada and the United States in order to reclaim territory, generally claiming illegal takings due to treaty violations or unconscionably low compensation. A number of these suits were successful and resulted in awards in the tens of millions of dollars. Most of the monetary awards were distributed among all members of a tribe rather than held as common assets, however, and so were not available for reservationwide improvements. Treaty-ensured fishing rights were also the substance of legal action, especially after major dam construction on the Columbia and other rivers abrogated those rights by destroying traditional fishing sites; again, the tribes were generally successful in gaining compensation for their losses.

 In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many Plateau tribes had regrouped from the economic devastation of the previous 100 years or more. Several had added tourist resorts and casinos to their extant timber, ranching, and fishing operations (see Native American gaming (gaming, Indian)). Funds from these enterprises were used for a variety of community purposes, including education, health care, rural development, and cultural preservation. See also Native American: History (Native American); Native American: Developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Native American).

Elizabeth Prine Pauls

Additional Reading
Although there is no broad synthesis of traditional Plateau cultures, essays considering the cultures and history of the region may be found in William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 12, Plateau, ed. by Deward E. Walker, Jr. (1998). Classic texts on the archaeology of the region include Earl H. Swanson, The Emergence of Plateau Culture (1962); and B. Robert Butler, The Old Cordilleran Culture in the Pacific Northwest (1961).Monographs on single tribes include James A. Teit, The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (1900, reprinted 1975); Herbert Joseph Spinden, The Nez Percé Indians (1908, reprinted 1974); Leslie Spier, Klamath Ethnography (1930, reprinted 1976); Verne F. Ray, The Sanpoil and Nespelem: Salishan Peoples of Northeastern Washington (1933, reprinted 1980); and Leslie Spier (ed.), The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington (1938).Historical analyses of Plateau peoples and cultures include Deward E. Walker, Jr., Conflict and Schism in Nez Percé Acculturation: A Study of Religion and Politics (1968, reissued 1985); Larry Cebula, Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700–1850 (2003); and Lillian A. Ackerman, A Necessary Balance: Gender and Power Among Indians of the Columbia Plateau (2003).

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Universalium. 2010.

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