About twenty years ago, these were the very first words I ever heard from a Warm Springs Indian:

‘‘You want some ice to cool your balls off?’’

This was a warm evening in June, and I was somewhere not far from Trout Creek, tying leader sections together with blood knots and waiting to be picked up by a guide in a drift boat. The guide and I would be fishing the Deschutes River for two days, and I was on assignment fromSports Illustratedto do an article on the experience.

(In late spring stone flies hatch on the Deschutes,...

So begins ‘‘The Sun Box,’’ one of the ancient sunlight myths of the Warm Springs Indians collected by Jarold Ramsey inCoyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country. The story explains, at least on one level, the daily cycle of light and dark. It identifies Eagle as a powerful entity, designated by the Creator to be the keeper of the light.

The tale goes on to explain that in this primordial time, other mythic animal people besides Eagle know about sunlight and long for it because, occasionally, Eagle opens the lid of the sun box and illuminates...

A man named Frederick K. Kramer was there when, at 10 a.m. on Sunday, 10 March 1957, the Army Corps of Engineers closed the gates of The Dalles Dam to form the pool that would drown the falls. He reports that, ‘‘Later that day I drove past Celilo. The fast water was gone, with a few rocks protruding yet above the nearly stilled waters. An ancient and historic fishery passed away and a great era on the Columbia—the great River-of-the-West— had come to an end. The Indians at Celilo with their long braids, and black, wide-brimmed hats, were watching...

Brent grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation and is currently enrolled as a theater arts major at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. In his forties, he lives in town with his wife and daughter. He is a good-looking man with a strong, compact build that once served him well as a competitive wrestler. His mother was Wasco; his father, Filipino.

The salmon runs are about shot. I had some friends that were down at Sherars Bridge about a week ago. They opened it for a little while to hook-and-line fishing, but they weren’t getting any. I talked to my...

A map of the state of Oregon (96,981 square miles) appears on an atlas page as an irregular rectangle. In the northwestern quarter of this rectangle is a small and irregular square (about 1,000 square miles) which constitutes the Warm Springs Reservation. In a spirit of obvious symbolism, color the reservation red and the rest of the state white. As a visual aid, this will serve to adequately suggest the relative size and power of two very different cultures, and to demonstrate why many of the people of Warm Springs are acutely conscious of being quite literally surrounded. To look...

Dr. James Hall graduated from Harvard Medical School, taught at Stanford Medical School, and practiced internal medicine in Medford, Oregon, for twenty years before retiring in 1994 to concentrate on hunting, fishing, and writing.

My understanding of alcoholism is based primarily on the fact that I’m an alcoholic. I’m personally convinced of the scientific data that show a strong genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Both my grandfathers, who were very successful men in their time, died in their early sixties of alcoholic liver disease. Studies show that in an alcoholic, the liver enzymes metabolize in a somewhat different manner. As I...

In 1972 Sue Terran helped found the Siskiyou Health Clinic in Josephine County. In those days, the primary purpose of the clinic was to serve the area’s large ‘‘hippie’’ population. Today, with Sue’s partnership, it has become the primary health care provider for tens of thousands of rural Oregonians. As part of a program at the University of Washington focused on training rural primary-care Physician Assistants (she was the top student in her class), she lived for half a year on the Warm Springs Reservation and worked in the clinic there.

There’s some racial tension at Warm Springs. A lot...

Wilson Wewa Jr., a Northern Paiute, served for several years as director of the Culture and Heritage Office at the Warm Springs Reservation, an office housed in a red brick building near the elementary school in the town of Warm Springs. In the reception area is a conspicuous sign that reads:They are young once but Indian forever.

On 10 August 1997, the PortlandOregonianreported that two twelve-year-old Warm Springs boys had squirmed through a small window in a double-wide trailer that serves as part of the reservation’s Culture and Heritage compound. The young vandals smashed computers, poured sugar into...

Avex D. ‘‘Stoney’’ Miller, born and raised on the reservation, was recently named chief of the Warm Springs Police Department. The interview was conducted in his office. (At a few minutes before 10 a.m., in the waiting room outside near the green metal door to the jail, a mother arrived with clean underwear for her son in his cell. Underpants were allowed in, but tthe T-shirts she had brought were turned away by the secretary in charge. As the mother left, a young man arrived to check on his stolen rifle, which hadn’t been recovered.)

I’ve worked fourteen years with...

Lillian Brunoe, 39, is the proprietor of Sidaikba Native Collectables at Warm Springs Plaza. (‘‘Sidaikba’’ translates into ‘‘special place,’’ ‘‘precious place,’’ or ‘‘something sacred.’’) She has lived on the reservation since 1986. Her husband Cecil is Wasco and a Warm Springs tribal member.

In 1985 I was up in Washington at a place called Port Angel selling Ford cars. Then I met a friend from Warm Springs who had heard I was up in Washington. He went up there to ask me if I would come down to Warm Springs and check out the place where he lives. He was...

Dawn Smith, a Klamath Indian, has lived on the Warm Springs Reservation and worked there as an educator for twenty-three years. Her husband is a tribal member, as are her two children.

I came here twenty-three years ago, right out of college. I was at the University of Northern Colorado studying deaf education, and the college had a program going with Oregon State. The Confederated Warm Springs Tribes, the School District, and Oregon State University had a partnership recruiting Indian students who were in their final year to come here and intern in the district, and then they were promised...

For four years, Helena Jackson has served as the liaison between the Warm Springs community and their elementary school.

I’ve lived in Warm Springs all my life, except for four years I spent on the Umatilla Reservation with my first husband. I’m a tribal member, although my dad is Yakama and my mom is Warm Springs, so I’m half Warm Springs myself. I’ve seen a big change on the reservation since I was a child.

I’m forty years old, and I have three children. Sharon, my oldest, just reached the magic age of twenty-one. I think I was lucky that...

Before placing education at the Warm Springs Reservation in the context of institutionalized Indian education in America, it helps to recall the kinds of schooling that existed for Indian people for thousands of years prior to Euro-American contact.

For the people who formed the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, teaching children and young adults traditionally occurred as part of everyday life, a process actually far more complex than the Euro-American model for Indian education. Tribes lived by the seasonal round, so all healthy adults and adolescents were involved in the necessary work of sustenance and survival. Older children were enrolled...

Foster Kalama serves as the liaison between Warm Springs and the public schools in Madras.

When I grew up on this reservation, it was a real rough time. I grew up in an alcohol environment. I was just about a mile and a half, two miles up the creek from the community here. My grandfather was part Hawaiian and part Wasco. My great-great-grandfather was named John Kalama. His parents were King Kamehameha and Queen Kalama. He came into Kalama, Washington, when he was sixteen, seventeen years old, and they named the town after him. He had a son named Peter...

Anyone who cares about North American Indians knows a fair amount of the history; and because much of that history is bleak, so is most of the honest writing that recounts and analyzes it. A well-known representative example is Dee Brown’sBury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, which is a cataloguing of shocking examples of human cruelty.

The past few decades have seen the emergence of a number of notable American Indian poets and writers of both fiction and non-fiction: Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Hyemeyohsts Storm, James Welch, Adrian Louis, Louis...