What I know of my Spokane family goes back four generations, to Great-great-grandfather Moses. Moses was a Kalispel Indian who moved from Cusick and settled in the Spokane valley with Great-great-grandmother Sophy. When white settlers moved into the area, my Great-great-grandparents were pushed off their land and again relocated, this time to Ford, on what is now the Spokane Reservation. It was there that they had their family, of which Joseph Moses was my great-grandfather. Joseph had seven children. My grandmother Nancy Moses, the youngest girl was born February 2, 1900. Much of what I know about my culture and family has come from my grandmother, who encouraged my first attempts to learn beadwork and speak fragments of our language. Like many of her generation, she was a storyteller. In my own storytelling , "Nancy, born at the turn of the century" is my reference in time and my link to earlier ancestors.

Our original homelands extended from the Cascade to the Rocky mountain ranges. The Columbia River, which brought us the Salmon people (tribes whose lives depended upon and thus whose iconography included the salmon; those tribes also referred to the fish themselves as Salmon people), sustained us spiritually and physically. Salmon was to the plateau nations what the buffalo was to the Plains nations. Life consisted of fishing, hunting, gathering, and the preparation of foods and medicines. Our ceremonial life revolved around the natural cycles of life in the enviroment. The Plateau people were knowledgeable about the land and the resources that came from the enviroment.

The end of the 19th century brought great change to the enviroment and to the First People of the Plateau region. Within one generation, treaties were written and broken. Within one generation, entire villages succombed to smallpox and other deseases. Electric power dams were built on our rivers, which interupted the salmons journey just short of the Spokane reservation and other Native nations on the Plateau region. Cities were built on top of aboriginal village sites. As the Plateau people were confined to the reservation, sometimes by vigelante groups, they could no longer gather traditional medicines and foods, and starvation became their reality.

The boarding schools that followed were designed to destroy the family unit and, thereby, the culture and Native nations. Great-grandfathers and mothers alike witnessed their children gathered up, sometimes by force, and taken far away to places where they greatly suffered and many died. This trauma broke traditional support systems apart. So when I think of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather holding in their arms my grandmother Nancy, born at the turn of the 20th century, I wonder whether it felt like the end of the world to them. Certainly, it was the end of the world as they knew it.

As my grandmother grew from childhood to adulthood, European-Americans referred to Native people as the "Vanishing Americans." They did so because they thought Native Americans had been defeated. It was believed that, through the work of boarding schools, Native people would soon be assimilated into the dominant society and that those who refused would soon die and take with them the old teachings. But through all the aggression and destruction, the First People survived - not just physically, but culturally. They found ways to keep the original teachings alive and, for that, I am grateful to the strength of those ancestors.

As I reflect on the beginning of the 21st century, an the great changes that have occurred between my grandmother's generation and my children's generation, I've been thinking about future generations. I too will probably become a reference in time for my great-grandchildren. They may refer to me as that ancestor an artist in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a first generation college graduate who went on to receive a master's degree from a university that used our culture for half-time entertainment at sporting events. In my artwork and in my life, I address how our culture is misappropriated in mainstream America, how dehumanizing it is for Indians and how harmfully confusing it is for non-Indian people. My great-grandfather and grandmother could not have imagined how our culture and spiritual items would be used for harm, instead of healing. And they could not have imagined this legacy for their great-granddaughter either.

As told by Charlene Teters

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