Robert H. Ruby - Böcker

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) physician Robert H. Ruby arrived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to oversee the health needs of the Oglala Sioux tribe during a period of significant transformation and change in federal Indian policies. As Ruby came to know the individuals living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and as he grew more acquainted with the stories, traditions, and cultural systems of the Sioux, he was compelled to collect his observations and opinions on this tribe, considered at the time one of the most resistant to white culture and BIA “civilizing” efforts.Originally published in 1955, Ruby’s book The Oglala Sioux presents a vibrant picture of the ways in which the lives of these American Indians were altered under the influence of the U.S. government, and it details the deep and in many ways heroic struggle of the Sioux to recover and maintain their culture and sovereignty. Through Ruby’s work as a doctor on the reservation and through this compelling and informative narrative, he advocated understanding, compassion, and, in keeping with the tenor of the times in which he both lived and labored, change.

In 1953 young surgeon Robert H. Ruby began work as the chief medical officer at the hospital on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He began writing almost daily to his sister, describing the Oglala Lakota people he served, his Bureau of Indian Affairs colleagues, and day-to-day life on the reservation. Ruby and his wife were active in the social life of the non-white community, which allowed Ruby, also a self-trained ethnographer, to write in detail about the Oglala Lakota people and their culture, covering topics such as religion, art, traditions, and values. His frank and personal depiction of conditions he encountered on the reservation examines poverty, alcoholism, the educational system, and employment conditions and opportunities. Ruby also wrote critically of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, describing the bureaucracy that made it difficult for him to do his job and kept his hospital permanently understaffed and undersupplied. These engaging letters provide a compelling memoir of life at Pine Ridge in the mid-1950s.

The Chinook Indians, who originally lived at the mouth of the Columbia River in present-day Oregon and Washington, were experienced traders long before the arrival of white men to that area. When Captain Robert Gray in the ship Columbia Rediviva, for which the river was named, entered the Columbia in 1792, he found the Chinooks in an important position in the trade system between inland Indians and those of the Northwest Coast. The system was based on a small seashell, the dentalium, as the principal medium of exchange.The Chinooks traded in such items as sea otter furs, elkskin armor which could withstand arrows, seagoing canoes hollowed from the trunks of giant trees, and slaves captured from other tribes. Chinook women held equal status with the men in the trade, and in fact the women were preferred as traders by many later ships' captains, who often feared and distrusted the Indian men.The Chinooks welcomed white men not only for the new trade goods they brought, but also for the new outlets they provided Chinook goods, which reached Vancouver Island and as far north as Alaska. The trade was advantageous for the white men, too, for British and American ships that carried sea otter furs from the Northwest Coast to China often realized enormous profits.Although the first white men in the trade were seamen, land-based traders set up posts on the Columbia not long after American explorers Lewis and Clark blazed the trail from the United States to the Pacific Northwest in 1805. John Jacob Astor's men founded the first successful white trading post at Fort Astoria, the site of today's Astoria, Oregon, and the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company soon followed into the territory.As more white men moved into the area, the Chinooks began to lose their favored position as middlemen in the trade. Alcohol; new diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and venereal disease; intertribal warfare; and the growing number of white settlers soon led to the near extinction of the Chinooks. By 1&51, when the first treaty was made between them and the United States government, they were living in small, fragmented bands scattered throughout the territory.Today the Chinook Indians are working to revive their tribal traditions and history and to establish a new tribal economy within the white man's system.

More than one hundred Indian tribes in fifteen language groups inhabited the area of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana in the nineteenth century. This important work, the first composite history of the region's native inhabitants, covers the period roughly from 1750 to 1900, from the first white contacts to the aftermath of the Dawes Act. It is a valuable resource both for the serious scholars and general readers.The cultures of the Pacific Northwest tribes were as diverse as their lands. Coastal peoples, such as the Makahs, hunted whales in huge wooden canoes thirty-five feet long. Near Puget Sound they developed an advanced technology and a stylized art in carved wood. Whites were shocked by the head flattening practiced by some coastal peoples and by the potlatch ceremony, in which they gave away their possessions. Farther inland, along the Columbia River, tribal economies centered around the salmon. The smoked fish was traded all over the region. On the east the horse transformed the way of life of the Shoshonis, Nez Percés, Kalispels, and Blackfeet. Each spring they crossed the Rockies to hunt the buffalo and fight for control of the hunting territory.The first whites to enter the Pacific Northwest were Spanish mariners from the south and British and American traders stopping for furs on their way to China. Later the British North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company established trading posts. The whites brought gimcracks, guns, molasses, tobacco, alcohol, and disease. They took the pelts of the sea otter, seal, beaver, and buffalo in return.Missionaries and settlers followed the traders. Catholic black robes and Protestants in buckskins competed with mixed success for the Indian's souls, while at the same time native religions held sway. Indian religious leaders, such as Spokane Garry and the Dreamer prophet Smohalla, were almost as important as the fighting chiefs.By the 1840s epidemics had cut the Indians' numbers by two-thirds,. The few who survived were too weak to drive out the white settlers. Only truly extraordinary individuals could resist the changes introduced by the whites: the appropriation of traditional food-gathering and hunting grounds formerly held in common, the introduction of a cash economy, the demands of Christianity, confinement on reservations and farms and in schools, and allotment.Many extraordinary individuals are portrayed in this history. The authors have written their account colorfully and movingly from the Indian point of view, and they effectively present the special identity of Pacific Northwest Indians.

Chief Moses (Sulktalthscosum or Half-Sun) was chief of the Columbias, a Salish-speaking people of the mid-Columbia River area in what is now the state of Washington. This award-winning biography by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown situates Moses in the opening of the Northwest and subsequent Indian-white relations, between 1850 and 1898. Early in life Moses had won a name for himself battling whites, but with the maturity and responsibilities of chieftainship, he became a diplomat and held his united tribe at peace in spite of growing white encroachment. He resisted the call to arms of his friend Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés, whose heroic campaign ended in defeat and exile to Indian Territory. Yet their friendship persisted, and after Joseph's return to the Northwest, the two lived out their lives on the reservation, sharing their frustrations and uniting their voices in complaint.

Oh God, here comes Esther Ross."" Such was the greeting she received from members of the U.S. Congress during her repeated trips to the Capitol on behalf of Stillaguamish Indians. Tenacious and passionate, Esther Ross's refusal to abandon her cause resulted in federal recognition of the Stillaguamish Tribe in 1976. Her efforts on behalf of Pacific Northwest Indians at federal, state, and local levels led not only to the rebirth of the Stillaguamish but also to policy reforms affecting all Indian tribes. In this rare, in-depth portrait of a contemporary American Indian woman, Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown document Ross's life and achievements. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Stillaguamish tribe, located on the Puget Sound in Washington State, had all but disappeared. With no organization or system of communication, tribal members dispersed. Desperate for help, surviving members asked Ross, a young, well-educated descendant of Stillaguamish and Norwegian heritage, to assist them in suing for lost land and government services. For fifty years, she waged a persistent campaign, largely self-staffed and self-funded. Despite personal problems, cultural barriers, and reluctance among some tribal members, Ross succeeded, but she was eventually forced from tribal leadership.

Seekers after wisdom have always been drawn to American Indian ritual and symbol. This history of two nineteenth-century Dreamer-Prophets, Smohalla and Skolaskin, will interest those who seek a better understanding of the traditional Native American commitment to Mother Earth, visionary experiences drawn from ceremony, and the promise of revitalization implicit in the Ghost Dance.To white observers, the Dreamers appeared to imitate Christianity by celebrating the sabbath and preaching a covenant with God, nonviolence, and life after death. But the Prophets also advocated adherence to traditional dress and subsistence patterns and to the spellbinding Washat dance. By engaging in this dance and by observing traditional life-ways, the Prophets claimed, the living Indians might bring their dead back to life and drive the whites from the earth. They themselves brought heaven to earth, they said, by ""dying, going there, and returning,"" in trances induced by the Washat drums.The Prophets' sacred longhouses became rallying points for resistance to the United States government. As many as two thousand Indians along the Columbia River, from various tribes, followed the Dreamer religion. Although the Dreamers always opposed war, the active phase of the movement was brought to a close in 1889 when the United States Army incarcerated the younger Prophet Skolaskin at Alcatraz. Smohalla died of old age in 1894.Modern Dreamers of the Columbia plateau still celebrate the Feast of the New Foods in springtime as did their spiritual ancestors. This book contains rare modern photographs of their Washat dances.Readers of Indian history and religion will be fascinated by the descriptions of the Dreamer-Prophets' unique personalities and their adjustments to physical handicaps. Neglected by scholars, their role in the important pan-Indian revitalization movement has awaited the detailed treatment given here by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown.

In this book, Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown tell the story of the Cayuse people, from their early years through the nineteenth century, when the tribe was forced to move to a reservation. First published in 1972, this expanded edition is published in 2005 in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the treaty between the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Confederated Tribes and the U.S. government on June 9, 1855, as well as the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's visit to the tribal homeland in 1805 and 1806.Volume 120 in The Civilization of the American Indian Series

This tribal history of the Spokane Indians begins with an account of their early life in the Pacific Northwest central plateau region. It then describes in harrowing detail the U.S. government's encroachment on their lands and the subsequent enforced settlement of Spokane people on reservations. The volume concludes with a presentation of twentieth-century developments.This edition of The Spokane Indians features a new foreword and introduction, which provide up-to-date information on the Spokane people and their most recent efforts to recover and strengthen their historical and cultural heritage.

The Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest inhabit a vast region extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and from California to British Columbia. For more than two decades, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest has served as a standard reference on these diverse peoples. Now, in the wake of renewed tribal self-determination, this revised edition reflects the many recent political, economic, and cultural developments shaping these Native communities.From such well-known tribes as the Nez Perces and Cayuses to lesser-known bands previously presumed ""extinct,"" this guide offers detailed descriptions, in alphabetical order, of 150 Pacific Northwest tribes. Each entry provides information on the history, location, demographics, and cultural traditions of the particular tribe.Among the new features offered here are an expanded selection of photographs, updated reading lists, and a revised pronunciation guide. While continuing to provide succinct histories of each tribe, the volume now also covers such contemporary - and sometimes controversial - issues as Indian gaming and NAGPRA. With its emphasis on Native voices and tribal revitalization, this new edition of the Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest is certain to be a definitive reference for many years to come.

This detailed, well-documented history describes the life of the Squaxin spiritual leader John Slocum and the growth in the Pacific Northwest of his Indian Shaker Church (not to be confused with eastern Shakerism). Students of Native American religion and Christianity will find this a moving story both of assimilation and of the curing that is the Shaker Church's reason for being.The Indian Shaker movement began in 1882 when the charismatic but dissolute Slocum had a vision after a near-death experience. Later his church was led by his wife, Mary Thompson, and early-day leaders such as Mud Bay Louis and Mud Bay Sam. Today church members continue to combine Native American styles of singing, body movement, and verbal declarations with bell ringing, songs, burning candles, and shaking in a unique curing tradition that is honored outside the church particularly for its success in teaching against the use of alcohol. Intense community support, for both leader and patient, is a focal point in the lives of Shaker Church members. Their tradition has endured despite the important differences in members' tribal backgrounds and religious viewpoints chronicled in this up-to-date account by veteran scholars Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, the first outsiders to have access to church records.

Oh God, here comes Esther Ross."" Such was the greeting she received from members of the U.S. Congress during her repeated trips to the Capitol on behalf of Stillaguamish Indians. Tenacious and passionate, Esther Ross's refusal to abandon her cause resulted in federal recognition of the Stillaguamish Tribe in 1976. Her efforts on behalf of Pacific Northwest Indians at federal, state, and local levels led not only to the rebirth of the Stillaguamish but also to policy reforms affecting all Indian tribes. In this rare, in-depth portrait of a contemporary American Indian woman, Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown document Ross's life and achievements. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Stillaguamish tribe, located on the Puget Sound in Washington State, had all but disappeared. With no organization or system of communication, tribal members dispersed. Desperate for help, surviving members asked Ross, a young, well-educated descendant of Stillaguamish and Norwegian heritage, to assist them in suing for lost land and government services. For fifty years, she waged a persistent campaign, largely self-staffed and self-funded. Despite personal problems, cultural barriers, and reluctance among some tribal members, Ross succeeded, but she was eventually forced from tribal leadership.