Submitted by Lee Ann Ufford.
The Friends of Steilacoom Library (FOSL) present Dr. Trevor Bond from Washington State University and his interesting discussion of how the Nez Perce reclaimed lost artifacts of their heritage. Hosted in the Steilacoom Historical Museum Association (SHMA) Building Education Room at 1801 Rainier Street in Steilacoom at 4:00 pm Saturday, May 18, this Humanities Washington lecture will illuminate a little-known part of Washington History.
Appaloosa horses, colleges, a Midwest historical society, a missionary, the National Park Service, and even the grunge band Pearl Jam all play rolls in this story of the Nez Perce tribe and their allies regaining the largest and oldest collection of the tribe’s material culture. In 1836 missionary Henry Spalding arrived on the Columbia Plateau with the belief he was divinely appointed to convert the “heathens.” Spalding gathered tribal cultural items and sent two barrels of “Indian curiosities” to a supporter, Dr. Dudley Allen. In 1942, after many moves, the collection was loaned to the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) and was placed in storage, but over years it couldn’t be located. With the help of the National Park Service, the collection was found and loaned to the Nez Perce National Historical Park. But in 1963 OHS recalled the collection and agreed to sell it to the Nez Perce if they could raise over $600,000, in just six months! With the help of over 2,000 donors, bake sales, MTV and grunge bands the tribe raised the funds with one day to spare.
Trevor J. Bond, co-director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and associate dean at Washington State University Libraries, first heard of the Nez Perce’s story at a graduate seminar in 2007. Six years later he took a writing seminar and focused on the story, which became his dissertation and then his book, Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: the Nimiipuu Campaign and to Repatriate Their Exploited Heritage. The book was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award. He tells this amazing story through interviews with Nez Perce experts, historical records and media. As part of his research, Bond commissioned photographs of the collection.
In 2021, 25 years after the Nez Perce collection was purchased and returned, the Spalding-Allen Collection, as it was known, was renamed by the tribe. The name they chose is “wetxuuwiitinin,” meaning “returned after a period of captivity.”
The SHMA Museum will be open at 1:00 for and will extend hours to 6:00 P.M. for attendees. If you are interested in the book, Dr. Bond will have a limited number of copies of his book available for sale and signing the day of program.
