Abstract:
Through a multi-character narrative approach, this paper tells of several specific
struggles for cultural retention, leadership, and survival along the Northern Paiute’s
“trail of tears” from the Malheur reservation to the Yakima reservation in 1879, following
the end of the Bannock War. This narrative style and the use of multiple, individual
histories all speaking to the same swath of time in 1879, challenges the current way
history is often read and acknowledged. Voice is given to oral stories, life is given to
family histories, and the reader feels the tangible humanity of day-to-day existence
during a shared trauma in society. I mainly utilize primary source materials including
oral histories, memoirs, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews about Paiute
language and culture with tribal elder and Oytes descendant Myra Johnson Orange. I also
incorporate multiple secondary sources, including the work of visiting scholar James
Gardener, and multiple articles written about the Bannock War, Sarah Winnemucca, the
medicine man Oytes, Northern Paiute spirituality, and the march to Yakima. This paper
contributes to the recorded history of the Northern Paiute, especially regarding Oytes,
who is rarely portrayed as the powerful spiritual leader his descendants know him to be.
This paper also contributes an alternative historical experience, giving equal weight to
oral histories, personal recorded histories, and scholarly works.