CHEWELAH — In the 1990s, writer/historian Jack Nisbet took part in a Forest Service walk from Chewelah to Kettle Falls, where participants discussed the history of the area’s tribal people – and highlighted the cultural and spiritual importance of the land.
On Saturday, those conversations were revisited at Mistequa Casino in Chewelah for the Fort Colvile Summit. Nearly 200 people took part in discussions about the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Colvile and the fur trade that shaped the region.
The event was organized by Joe Barreca of The Heritage Network and moderated by Nisbet. It aimed to help Indigenous communities reclaim their history and preserve local stories. The summit is part of a series celebrating the 200th anniversary of Fort Colvile.
“There's a lot of heavy duty work that has to be done to preserve information, but being thrown into this has made me realize that you also need to get out there and educate people,” said Barreca during the event.
Barreca, The Heritage Network’s president, told Spokane Public Radio he became involved with the project three years ago and admitted he knew almost nothing about Fort Colvile at the time. After working with historians and Native community members, he wanted the summit to offer something valuable to everyone who came. He says he relates to the experience of having to uncover your own history after learning little about it growing up.
Barreca said he learned about the Hiroshima atomic bomb while sitting in his family’s basement bomb shelter. He says he was unaware that his father had been on Tinian Island maintaining B-52 radar used in missions over Japan.
“If I had known that, I would have had a totally different view of what World War II was like. We learned all of World War II in one day in eighth grade,” he said.
The little Emperor
Nancy Anderson, the great granddaughter of Alexander Caulfield Anderson, who was the chief trader in charge of Fort Colvile from 1848 to 1852, joined the event. She said she wrote her first book after researching his life.
Now she’s writing about George Simpson, a key figure in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his travels through the Columbia District.
She said, in 1825, Simpson closed the fur-trading post Spokane House and ordered the construction of Fort Colvile, a new trading site.
During a journey from 1828 to 1829, Simpson traveled up the Columbia River, stopping for a brief stay at Fort Colvile. He was focused mainly on the Snake River trappers, who were independent fur traders operating in the region, she said.
In 1841, Simpson crossed the Canadian Prairies from Red River, a fur-trading hub in what is now Manitoba, to the Rocky Mountains and was accompanied by a group of “interesting” men.
“One of these men was a Russian; an officer heading for Sitka by an arrangement between the governor himself (Simpson) and the Russian American Fur Company,” Anderson said. “From the mountain Simpson arrived at Fort Colvile on August the 17th with their clothes all shattered and their hats broken.”
“It's hard to imagine Simpson not looking and dressing like the little Emperor he was, but he certainly did not on this occasion,” she continued.
Anderson emphasized each of these journeys made significant changes to the territory and is the reason why she is exploring this history.
“This complicated regional history is keeping me very busy, and will do so for a few more years, I think,” she said.
Andrew Perkins also spoke at the event, sharing his personal and family history and how it shaped the book he co-authored. Perkins, who’s a superintendent in Washington’s Thorp School District, said he was born and raised in Walla Walla. His father was a Colville tribal elder from Chenexta Sinixt, Arrow Lakes.
Growing up, Perkins said he spent much of his time listening to the elders in his community, absorbing their stories and wisdom. He joked that he also spent plenty of time fishing or trying his luck at the casino.
However, after tragedy struck his family, he helped finish a book called, “Shadow Top of Doc Perkins.”
In it, Perkins mentions Peter Perkins, his great-great-grandfather, who served as a translator for Chief Hawkin during the period when the Colville Tribe lost the northern half of its land to the U.S. government in 1892. That cut the reservation’s size in half and opened the land to non-Native settlement.
“I decided to put it in the book so that it wasn't lost for my kids, because it's being lost,” Perkins said.
At the Fort Colvile Summit, several other historians gave presentations and shared insights into their family histories.
Nisbet emphasized the importance of preserving and passing down historical memory.
He recalls when he went on his walk 30 years ago, multiple elders took part, including Pauline Flett, the late Spokane Tribal elder and linguist celebrated for her vital work in preserving and revitalizing the Spokane Salish language, and Charles Quintasket, a Sinixt elder who helped preserve his people’s stories and language.
All the stories that live on between the people in the room, he said, is why this was needed.
“(The walk from Chewelah to Kettle Falls) was an amazing event, but I didn't understand at the time how it would resonate with all these descendants and everybody that’s here today,” Nisbet said.
