Indigenous Women's Leadership on the Columbia Plateau: Community Activism, 1900-2000

The Columbia Plateau has been an Indigenous space for far longer than it has been an American one, and until the Indian boarding school era of the 1880s, oral tradition centered Native cultural practices and knowledge sharing. As European and American immigration to the region disrupted cultural practices, and particularly as U.S. federal Indian policies sought to fully assimilate Native Americans into an idealized American identity, Indigenous women protected tribal languages and cultures. Christine Quintasket, also known by her pen name Mourning Dove, wrote detailed accounts of the shift from being a young Indigenous woman trained in traditional ways to living a bicultural life in a Catholic boarding school in the early twentieth century. Throughout her life as an author and as a seasonal laborer, she retained her cultural practices and her Salish dialect, and she recorded them for future generations. In the face of U.S. attempts to terminate its federal relationship with the Colville Tribes in the mid-century, Lucy Covington led a resistance against this policy and succeeded by applying traditional community-centered ideals in a thoroughly modern venue. In 2000, as the Colville-Okanagan dialect of the Salish language was designated as critically endangered in both the U.S. and Canada, Indigenous women on both sides of the border collaborated to protect, preserve, and revitalize it. These women practiced community activism in service of their languages and cultures; we need more studies of the historical impact.   They have been seen as victims but a closer look shows their expertise and mastery.