Suffering from heart disease and pneumonia, Josephine was skeletal, an 85-pound shadow of the once fearless Nez Perce. It wasn’t until JoAnn was about to lose her mother that she came to know her best. We had to pluck chickens and iron clothes.” When she was present and in the home she was very loving and engaged. She worked multiple jobs to support us, including waiting tables and folding sheets in the basement of Seattle’s Frye Hotel- all cash jobs with no Social Security. “Through all their own problems they never stopped loving those kids.” JoAnn agrees: “She was a great mom-an excellent mom and someone I was very proud of. “I think there was a lot of love that the parents had,” says JoAnn’s husband, Tom. Yet hardships only describe certain chapters of JoAnn’s childhood, like a half-drawn picture. JoAnn would tell me about not having a lunch to bring to school, but preparing a sack anyway to make it look like she had a lunch.” The absences were so constant that the parents divorced and remarried in the early 1960s with little notice from the kids, Hattie Kauffman writes in her memoir, Falling Into Place. “Their real mission was to fly under the radar and stay away from the social services people. “SHE REALLY FELT there were periods in which she and her siblings raised themselves,” says her longtime spouse, Tom Keefe. For six years, Lizzie bounced from the famous boarding school in Pennsylvania to the backroom pantries of upscale white households where she learned to bake most anything and cook elaborate dinners.Ĭherished memories from Clarkston, Washington. Her childhood unfolded in an America determined to “kill the Indian and save the man.” By 14 she was thrust into white culture at Carlisle Indian School where she wore a Victorian uniform and pinned her long dark hair in a bun. Lizzie’s life spanned the clash of cultures between whites and Indians. Grandma Lizzie was a strict Christian, an orderly homemaker and a proud Nez Perce Indian who could singlehandedly erect a tipi or pound venison into pemmican, a powder so fine it would melt in your mouth. You could spot her racing off with a towel to find the sweltering heat of a sweat lodge or with a digging stick prying camas root from the landscape. You could find her up near Mason Butte at Talmaks, where Nez Perce Presbyterians have camped for more than a hundred years.
Yet Grandma Lizzie remained equally proud of her Christian beliefs and her Nez Perce culture all her life. “Because of that, there remained a schism and a mistrust between Christian and traditional practice until only very recently, which was sad and unnecessary.” “Maybe it’s a feather maybe its beadwork maybe it was a buckskin shirt that was handed down.” The movement split the tribe in two: Christians versus non-Christians, or as the missionaries called them, “Heathens.” “Terrible damage was done by dividing the Nez Perce people this way and vilifying non-Christian Nez Perce,” JoAnn continues. “So if you had some things that are sacred to you, it’s not sacred anymore,” JoAnn says.
Raised at the epicenter of the movement to convert Nez Perce Indians into Christians-where America’s first Indian Presbyterian church opened in 1871-Grandma Lizzie told stories of missionaries who ordered the Nez Perce to bury all things Indian in their backyards, never to be seen again. “That was important-the opportunities to go and engage in traditional activities like food gathering. “My grandparents’ home was very much a Nez Perce home,” JoAnn says. Grandma Lizzie with Willie Moody, her longtime spouse. Laundry hangs behind her on a clothesline. In a wooden frame, great-grandmother Hattie Axtell appears stoic on her front porch. The faces of her ancestors greet you from the living room. JoAnn often returns here to repair the old gray home she inherited from her grandparents on an original Indian allotment issued in 1887. It’s “like driving down a postcard,” one writer wrote of the majestic route into Kamiah, Idaho. The legends of the Nez Perce Indians, the Ni Mii Puu, live on at sacred landmarks. Here, Lewis and Clark once tramped their way across the West. 12 ALONG the Clearwater to a timber-dependent town in Nez Perce Country. “‘You must have had a great upbringing.’ Children respond differently to chaos.”įOLLOW U.S. “People always say, ‘You’re all such overachievers,’” JoAnn says. “The competition with her siblings alone would have propelled her to success!”
“How can you come from such an amazing family?” asks longtime Seattle Indian Health Board member, chuckling in admiration.