Mondo's NAT #629

Native American Tribe series.

Wishram

The Wishram were a Plateau group with many cultural attributes of Northwest Coast Indians. They were culturally similar to the neighboring Wasco people. Wishram Indians lived along the north bank of the Columbia River, several miles above and below the Dalles. Today, their descendants live on local reservations, especially the Yakima, and in regional cities and towns. The eighteenth-century Wishram population was about 1,500. A 1962 census listed 10 Wishrams in Washington. The contemporary population is part of the Warm Springs and Yakima Reservation communities.

Owing to their physical location at the Dalles, the most important trading area in the Northwest, the Wishram traditionally enjoyed favorable trade relations with many neighboring tribes. In the early nineteenth century, however, non-Indian traders threatened this position while at the same time the Wishram population was declining rapidly due to disease. Conflict with traders was one result. Ongoing intertribal warfare also took a population toll.

In 1855, the Wishram and Wasco were forced to sign treaties ceding most of their land (roughly 10 million acres); the treaties established the Warm Springs Reservation in north-central Oregon. Wishram Indians also became part of the Yakima Indian Nation on the Yakima Reservation. A key treaty provision allowing the Indians to fish "at all. . . usual and accustomed stations in common with the citizens of the United States…" served as the basis for a landmark legal ruling in 1974 that protected the Northwest Coast Indian fishery. In the 1860s members of the Warm Springs Reservation organized informally into linguistic and cultural divisions: There were Sahaptian-speaking people ("Warm Springs Indians"); Upper Chinookan-speaking Wascos and Wishrams; and Northern Paiutes after 1879.

Wishram Indians observed the system of social stratification typical of Northwest Coast Indians: There were nobles, middle-class, commoners, and slaves; the slaves were acquired in war or trade. Slavery was also hereditary. Marriage was formalized by an exchange of gifts and family visits.

Infants were occasionally betrothed for purposes of creating or cementing family alliances. Corpses were wrapped in buckskin and interred in plank burial houses. Remarriage to the dead spouse’s sibling was common. Fishing areas were privately owned and inheritable by groups of families.

Wishrams probably built plank houses characteristic of the coastal style. Beginning about the eighteenth century, they also built circular winter houses, holding between one and six families. These were built of a pole framework over a six-foot pit, covered with mats of grass and dirt or cedar bark. Entrance was through the smoke hole. Bed platforms were located around the walls. In summer, people built gabled-roof mat lodges with several fireplaces. Hunters and mourners purified themselves, and the sick healed, in sweat lodges.

The Dalles, or Five Mile Rapids, in Wishram territory was the most important trading location in the Northwest; several thousand Northwest Coast and Plateau Indians traded there during various trade fairs. Wishram and Wasco people acted as intermediaries in the trade of a huge amount and variety of items, including blankets, shells, slaves, canoes, fish and animal products, dried roots, bear grass, and, later, horses. Trade connections stretched from Canada to Mexico and from the Rocky Mountains west to the ocean.