Bonus Episode - The Armchair Explorer

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode! I’ve got something a little different—and very exciting—for you. Today, I’m sharing a powerful episode from The Armchair Explorer, hosted by my good friend Aaron Millar. It is called "IMMERSION: Homecoming: Chief Joseph’s Promise and the Flight of the Nez Perce" from the Hidden Trails of Oregon Series.

The episode is called Homecoming, and it tells a moving story about the Native American tribes of Eastern Oregon—specifically, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla. It uncovers a nearly forgotten chapter of history involving two chiefs and a sacred promise to bring their people home.

The Armchair Explorer is a phenomenal travel podcast that blends immersive audio, rich storytelling, and a deep sense of human connection and adventure. It’s a huge inspiration to me, and I think you’ll find yourself transported by the vivid way these stories are told. I am absolutely delighted to share this episode today, as quality content is the most important aspect, and Aaron has that in abundance with his podcast.

See the shownotes below for all the links to the Armchair Explorer Podcast and everything mentioned in the episode. You have to check in to Aaron's podcast like I do every week!

So sit back, relax, and let this journey take you somewhere unforgettable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Shownotes

Welcome back to the Hidden Trails of Oregon! In the first episode of our new season, host Aaron Millar heads to the eastern edge of the state, far from the bustle of coastal cities and the craggy heights of the Cascade Mountains.

We're going on location in the traditional lands of the Nez Perce to uncover a piece of history unknown to most outsiders. In the late 19th century, the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce tribe were driven from their homeland. 200 warriors, protecting hundreds more women and children, fought for five days against 520 US soldiers. Their leader, before surrendering, promised his people that one day they would come home. After nearly 200 years, his promise may just be starting to come true.

This is a unique story of generational resilience, cultural preservation, and the ongoing work for recognition and ancestral lands.

RESOURCES

To plan your next Oregon adventure:traveloregon.com

Adventure Along With The Hidden Trails of Oregon - https://traveloregon.com/plan-your-trip/destinations/lakes-reservoirs/adventure-along-with-the-hidden-trails-of-oregon-podcast/

Visiting the Nez Perce Homeland and the Tamkaliks Celebration powwow:wallowanezperce.org

Local and cultural history at the Josephy Library: library.josephy.org

Thank you to our guests: Bobbie Conner, Rich Wandschneider, Jacey Sohappy, and Nancy Crenshaw.

CREDITS

This series was produced by Armchair Productions, the audio experts for the travel industry. Find out more at armchair-productions.com

Brian Thacker: pre-production

Charles Tyrie: assistant audio editing

Jason Paton: writing, recording, mixing, sound design

Aaron Millar: host, writing, executive producer

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Voyascape: Travel Podcast Network - https://voyascape.com/

Winging It Travel Podcast - Website

Please leave a review and rating wherever you get your podcasts!

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Winging It Travel Podcast Credits

Host/Producer/Creator/Composer/Editor - James Hammond

Contact me - jameshammondtravel@gmail.com 

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Thanks for supporting me and the podcast!

Cheers, James.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode and I've got something a little different and exciting for you this week. Today I'm sharing a powerful episode from the Armchair Explorer hosted by my good friend Aaron Miller. This episode is called Homecoming and it tells a moving story about the Native American tribes of Eastern Oregon, specifically the confederate tribes of the Umatilla. It covers a nearly forgotten chapter of history involving two chiefs and a sacred promise to bring their people home.

My favorite part of the powwow is also at the arbor at night. If you're just outside of the arbor, you can see it's like the arbor is glowing from all the lights and the dancing. And it's like, you know, when you see your family from outside a window and they're inside laughing, like having game night or something and they're cracking up and you're like.

Today we're on the eastern edge of the state, far from the bustle of coastal cities and the craggy heights of the Cascade Mountains. Here you'll find the ancestral homeland of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce tribe. The tribe calls itself Nimipu, or the people, and today we're going to be hearing their story from that early history and the influx of white settlers to broken treaties and eventually to exile.

The Armchair Explorer is a phenomenal travel podcast that blends immersive audio, rich storytelling and a deep sense of human connection and adventure. I love this podcast. It's a huge inspiration to me and the podcast and I think you'll find yourself transported by the vivid way in which these stories are told. So sit back, relax and let this journey take you somewhere unforgettable and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Do you love spontaneous adventures, travel tips and stories?

that will inspire you to pack up and go? Well, welcome to the Wigging It Travel Podcast. I'm James, your host, and each week I bring you travel tales, practical advice, and interviews with travelers from around the globe. Whether you're planning a big trip or just dreaming about one, you'll find everything from hidden gems to epic fails, because travel is not perfect, and that is what makes it beautiful. So grab your backpack and let's wing it. New episodes every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

and on YouTube too. You can find Winging It and more fantastic travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. The link is in the show notes. Let's go and explore the world. ⁓ Welcome to the hidden trails of Oregon. It's been a minute, so I'm excited to be back here in the Beaver State, boots in the dirt and stories around every corner.

Ready for views to drop your socks? In our last series, we took a big picture road trip exploring the nature, culture and adventure on offer here. This time we're zooming in, spending more time with experts in their own space. And as before, we're bringing you into the field with us combining full on immersive recording with genuine conversations.

Today we're on the eastern edge of the state, far from the bustle of coastal cities and the craggy heights of the Cascade Mountains. Here, where the northeast corner of Oregon nearly merges with Washington and Idaho, rim rock bluffs fall into grassy valleys on either edge of the Wallowa River. Here you'll find the ancestral homeland of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce Tribe. The tribe calls itself Nimipu, or the People.

Nez Perce, or pierced nose, was a title given by French trappers referring to another tribe entirely, the Chinook. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Nez Perce were a tapestry of interconnected villages. They traded with other tribes across the entire Pacific Northwest. And today we're going to be hearing their story from that early history and the influx of white settlers to broken treaties and eventually to exile.

but we'll also be looking ahead at the legacy of two chiefs named Joseph and modern efforts to create a reunited homeland.

But first off, just a quick note, we're going to be discussing sensitive topics in this episode and there's no easy way to do that. So we've decided just to present the words as spoken by the guests themselves.

We might think of them. And so the idea that we welcomed and took care of strangers and travelers who were pitiful 219 years ago. I that's what our people thought of Lewis and Clark is that they didn't know how to be here. Well, we're hauling in thousands and thousands of pounds of fish and hanging it out to dry and pounding it into a lush, rich flower. They're buying dogs from us to eat. And our elders

that met the expedition thought that they were kind of precarious travelers and that we should just help them so they could get home where they belonged.

And Stevens decides that maybe the Nez Perce get their own reservation. They're that strongest tribe in the inland Northwest. They get all of this Wallowa country, big chunk of Washington and a lot of Idaho. The Nez Perce had already seen decades of enormous change. And old chief Joseph reasoned that against this seemingly inevitable onslaught of settlers, it was smarter to make a deal now.

in order to preserve the most important and sacred parts of their land. But the treaty wouldn't last more than a few years.

The treaty stipulations were disregarded and trampled underfoot. The new agreement would have forced Joseph's entire tribe to a small reservation in Idaho. In attempting to peacefully resist, he built a series of monuments here in defiance of the government's saying, inside this boundary all our people were born. And to his son, he said, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father's body.

Never sell the bones of your father.

The young chief tried to negotiate for time and patience, but General Howard had neither, declaring any delay an act of war. Joseph made his choice and told his people, I said in my heart that rather than have war, I would give up my country. I would give up my father's grave. I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people. And so in sorrow,

The forced exodus of the Nez Perce from their homeland began.

gathered up with their horses and their cows and they crossed the Snake River in spring flood. They didn't lose a person, they lost some livestock. They got to the other side. They're at Tolo Lake in Idaho. Some young Indians from another band start taunting each other about settlers who had killed Indians and they go and kill some settlers.

and Joseph still tries to avoid war, he's going to take his people to that Lapuey reservation. The army comes in, attacks another village who didn't want any conflict, and the Nez Perce war is on. Nez Perce war is five months, 1,200 miles. The Nez Perce cross and recross rivers, lead armies astray.

goes through Yellowstone, which is a national park already at this time, capture tourists and make it to 40 miles from Canada where it's cold and it's October, it's snowing. 200 Nez Perce warriors, protecting hundreds more women and children, fought for five days against 520 US soldiers. Joseph later wrote, we could have escaped from Bear Pole.

if we had left our wounded old women and children behind. We were unwilling to do this. We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering while in the hands of white men.

And Joseph stops and says, from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. Joseph was never a war chief. He was a domestic chief and a diplomat. Then his people were promised a return to Idaho. That didn't happen. Instead, the survivors were sent on unheated rail cars to a POW camp in Kansas.

Many of my people sickened and died and we buried them in this strange land said Joseph. The great spirit chief who rules above seemed to be looking some other way and did not see what was being done to my people.

Joseph's surviving followers spent the next seven years in what would later become Oklahoma. He headed east to lobby for their cause.

So he learns the telegraph and he immediately starts using it. He goes to Washington DC, he makes a famous speech at Lincoln Hall, meets President Hayes, tries to make the argument that he could come back to the West. People are dying. 60 people died in the first three weeks. They were in what they call still the hot country. Joseph's message spread and he became something of a hero across the East.

Eventually his tribe was able to travel west again, but not to Oregon. Half of the exiled tribe was sent to Washington and half to Idaho, but Chief Joseph never gave up on his homeland.

Chief Joseph spent decades advocating for his people's reunification and return to their homeland. But he would be buried in a strange land, not of his ancestors. The 19th century activist Helen Hunt Jackson wrote, Joseph has never made a treaty with the United States and has never surrendered to the government the lands he claimed to own. These Indians were encroached upon by white settlers.

When these encroachments became intolerable, they were compelled to take up arms. As he swore to his father, Joseph never gave away this land. And just up the trail, you can find proof of another promise kept.

So you can notice from here, note the monument, note everybody feels like they've got to leave something here for the old chief. And there's a lot of offerings been left there too, know, coins and pens and painted rocks. We're at the final resting place of old chief Joseph, a stark snowy peak named for his son keeps watch above the monument, the ribbon of Wallowa Lake stretching south into the horizon.

This country holds your father's body, he told his son. And there it stays, where visitors come from all over the world to pay their respects. And you'll see people, when they hear how the Nez Perce were hounded out of here, they shake their heads and they say, how could we do that to the Nez Perce? How could we do that? It's easy to tear up just thinking about it, you know? But... ⁓

People have over the years talked about reburying young Joseph here. And ⁓ there have been movements in that direction. And ⁓ the people up at Nespelum on the Colville reservation said they didn't want him alive. They can't have him dead. So he has not moved down here.

And so that's a of a poignant aspect of that. And people go to his grave at Nez Pelum in Washington to pay reverence to.

The story is not all happy endings, right? The story is not all over either. And the story is not all over. You're right. Thanks Rich. Thank you Aaron.

Taz came here 30 some years ago and he had the dream to invite the Nez Perce back to their homeland. We're sitting with Nancy Crenshaw and she's referring to Earl Taz Connor, descendant of old chief Joseph. He didn't grow up here because none of his generation did. He was in the Navy. He was very proud of his service to the country and had a huge sense of humor.

and he loved to tease. He had diabetes. They told him he wasn't going to live very long and he went through a red light and so he didn't bother to go to court or do anything. And so then he made a revival and he said, you know, so then he had to go back and get his license from the court. he just, you know, he was.

very special person and he was the driver of this original project here. And I remember when he first started, you know, saying, oh yeah, we're gonna have an interpretive center, we're gonna have a junior college here and we're gonna have, you know, this, that and the other thing. And I was like, yeah, well, that's a big dream, you know, and I just didn't believe it myself. And he said, you know, to develop this, let's have a powwow. That's where it started.

What was that first powwow like? Getting ready for it? It was at the high school. And I can just remember, you we thought, well, aren't any Indians going to even come? But no, they came. Carload would come and another carload. And that was our first year. And it just came together in a beautiful way, I thought. And the music bounces, you know, the drums echo off the mountain and you can feel them, you know.

You can feel them, just the people coming home. And to me, it's very joyful. I mean, quite often it just brings tears to my eyes almost every year.

The event was named after the location, Temkalix, from where you can see the mountains.

There's a trail that you can walk up over the top. It's very quiet. I really like to be there by myself sometimes because I just feel the power and often there's hawks that fly over. Are you familiar with the sound that a hawk makes? It's kind of that whistle. And I always think maybe that's Taz or Terry and my husband down there, you know, flying over. And I love it when

When our friends come every year for the powwow or if I see native people camping down there, that's what it's meant to be.

King Paoao Taz said,

It's weird when you grow up and you become this person to share knowledge when I still feel like I'm the kid. I'm still the student. This is community engagement director, J.C. So Happy. I was a nosy little kid that liked to ask lots of questions. And so this job in me just happened to meet up at the same right time. And I got to pour all of my love into making sure that other people.

like me can build a bond with people in Malawa and how to get more kids there and to get elders there that haven't been there in a long time because it fills your cup when you're there. It's like a welcome home.

My favorite part of the powwow is also at the arbor at night. If you're just outside of the arbor, you can see it's like the arbor is glowing from all the lights and the dancing. And it's like, you know, when you see your family from outside a window and they're inside laughing, like having game night or something, and they're cracking up and you're like, man, what a beautiful family, you know, and you get to see your family from the outside looking in. That's what it's like on the outside of the arbor.

And then you can hear the bells from their outfits and the drumming and the drumsticks and like you can hear the pounding. It like hits the mountain and then it like bounces back and it's like you can feel it at night. It just feels like not real. I used to think that when I was little. So every time at the powwow for the past 30 years, I always take a step out and stand there for a few minutes.

And you get to stand in the same spot that these strong ancestors that fought for your existence stood. You know, people fought for my people not to be here. And they fought to keep my grandparents quiet. And I don't have to be quiet anymore. I'm here to continue fighting their fight and make sure that...

I'm fighting for love. I'm fighting for the love of the land, not to say that this is mine. This is all of ours and we can love it together, but I need you to love it correctly. I need you to know that the land is trying to show you things that it's not well and how can we pour our love into it to make it be better. So it's yearning for us to talk to it because I think that people forget that it's alive too, that it's its own entity.

and that we can respect it. We went on a snake river trip with middle schoolers and we took this hike and then we got to the top of the hike and you can see way down the river this way and this way. Yell out your Indian name if you have an Indian name or if you have you can yell out your name and you tell this place who you are so they can remember you. And so we're out there war hooping around and yelling our Indian names and

telling it who we are so that when our kids come back and they share our Indian name, that they'll be like, this is that family, they were here before. So it's really cool that I get to be part of the story to instill that into other people or to open their eyes in a different way and see the way that I see because I didn't know that people didn't see the way that I seen. If we listen with other things than our ears,

then we can hear the signs from the creator and the people that passed on behind us and they'll show you where to go. But you have to listen in a different way.

So we've just made it to the top of the hills that overlook the Nez Perce homeland here and it's an amazing moment actually because we just startled a hawk and who knows maybe that was Taz looking over us. We're not that remote up here I can look down at the town of Olawa and everyone's waking up you can see the lights.

turning on and the tractors in the distance beginning to rumble but it feels remote it feels completely different here. JC told us that when we get to this homeland what we should do is we should close our eyes and just listen just see if we can feel something and so that's what I'm going to do now I'm going to close my eyes I'm going to turn off all my other senses and let's just listen to the sounds of this homeland

When you learn the stories of a place for me as a visitor, it always changes the way I see it. It's like those stories become woven into the landscape somehow, bringing out new contours and colours I hadn't noticed before. And what I felt as I stood there listening to the sounds of nature was a realisation that the silence I was listening to wasn't empty, it was full of hope.

Chief Joseph once said, let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and I will obey every law. Whenever the white man treats an Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike, brothers of one father.

one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us, that all people may be one people. The chief never saw his dream come to fruition, and there is much work still to be done. But at least here in Temkalix, from where you can see the mountains, his descendants are finally beginning to come.

Thanks for joining me in the Nez Perce homeland. And remember, you can visit that exact powwow this year and see it for yourself. Just go to walauanezperce.org to find out more. And you can actually stay on site as well. They have a historic house, there's hiking trails, lots of things to see and do. So highly recommend that. And if you'd like to take these hidden trails yourself, you can find out how to do that by going to traveloregon.com. There's lots of great info up there about this trip.

and everything else you need to know to plan that next Oregon adventure. So thank you to all the guests who featured on today's show. Rich Wanschneider, Bobby Connor, JC So Happy, and Nancy Crenshaw. And we are not leaving Eastern Oregon for our next few episodes, so buckle up, and I mean that literally, hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you get your shows. You're not gonna wanna miss any of this.

This series was produced by Armchair Productions, the audio experts for the travel industry. Find out more at armchair-productions.com. Brian Thacker led our pre-production, Charles Tyree assisted on audio editing, and the episode was recorded by Jason Patton who also wrote and co-produced it along with me, your host, Aaron Miller. We'll see you next time.

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