Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums

Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums is published under Reverie, a sectionalized division under Di Angelo Publications, Inc. REVERIE

Reverie is an imprint of Di Angelo Publications. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress

Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums ISBN: 978-1-955690-43-0 (hardback) / 978-1-955690-46-1 (paperback)

Words: John Roskelley

Cover Artwork: Cover Design: Savina Deianova Interior Design: Kimberly James

Editors: Cody Wootton, Ashley Crantas, Willy Rowberry

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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1. Fiction --- Indigenous

2. Fiction --- Crime

3. Fiction --- Small Town & Rural

Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums

John Roskelley

For my son Jess Fenton Roskelley July 13, 1982 – April 16, 2019

A bright light and adventurous spirit whose brilliant and humorous one-liners kept all who knew him in touch with reality.

A Note From the Author

In the 1855 Treaty with the Yakama signed by Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens, the name of the tribe and reservation was spelled “Yakama.” For 139 years, misspelling and misuse by non-Indians resulted in the common use of “Yakima” in reference to not only a river, county, and city, but the tribe, its people, and the reservation as well. This wrong was officially corrected by the Yakama people in 1994. It is my decision to use “Yakama” in this book for the name of the tribe, tribal members, and reservation, so historical misuse is not perpetuated.

-John Roskelley

Preface

I grew up in eastern Washington, hunting and fishing with my dad, an outdoor writer for the local Spokane newspaper. There were few places within a day’s drive that we didn’t walk a weedy draw or fence line for pheasants and quail, cast a line for a trout or salmon, or sit quietly, overlooking an expanse of treed canyon and hoping to catch a glimpse of a deer or elk. Many of my favorite haunts were on national forest land surrounding the Colville Indian Reservation, a sparsely populated, 2,100-square-mile, rectangular block of ponderosa pine forests, high sagebrush deserts, and basalt canyons north of the Columbia River. On the occasional trip through the reservation villages, like Nespelem and Inchelium, in the late 1950s and 1960s, I realized there was a disparity between the life I had in middle-class America and that of someone living in poverty on the reservation.

On a late Friday afternoon in mid-August, 1967, a friend and I, both in our late teens, were hitchhiking from our construction job in Winthrop, Washington, back to Spokane. It was a sweltering hot, windless day in the deep gorge of the Columbia River, a few miles east of Brewster. Traffic, other than a few farm vehicles, was non-existent. As we waited at an abandoned truck weigh station at the intersection of two state highways, we heard a car coming, then spotted it a mile off as it came over a rise through the apple orchards at the speed of a meteor. Neither of us thought it would stop, but we stuck our thumbs out anyway.

The beat-up, robin egg blue Oldsmobile skidded to a stop alongside us, raising tire-ground dust like a smoke signal from the gravel parking lot. Inside were four Native American men in their late teens or early twenties. All of them had a beer in their hands.

“Wanna ride?” the passenger in the front seat asked through the open window.

I leaned in and looked inside the car. The four looked harmless enough in their old blue jeans and rumpled t-shirts. “Where you headed?” I asked.

“Omak Stampede.”

“Yeah? What’s going on there?”

“It’s a rodeo and powwow. You wanna ride or not?”

I looked at my friend. We weren’t headed that way, but this was the only car that had bothered to stop since we’d been dropped off several hours earlier. Spokane was 150 miles to the east; Omak was twenty-five miles to the north. He nodded and said to me, “Might as well.”

We squeezed into the back seat, one of them handed each of us a cold beer, and the driver took off at the speed of light, the center line weaving under the car like a rattlesnake winding its way through the brush.

The Omak Stampede wasn’t like any rodeo I’d been to as a kid. The Stampede not only had a nationally ranked rodeo and a carnival that rivaled Barnum and Baily’s, but also the Colville Reservation’s powwow and Indian encampment—fifteen acres of tipis, a dance arbor, and an open-sided longhouse along the south bank of the Okanogan River. We arrived just as the sun, a fiery red ball barely visible through the dense fog-like dust rising above the parking lot, touched down on the foothills of the Cascades. As we walked through the carnival toward the rodeo arena, there were so many cowboys and cowgirls walking through the crowd, I could have just as well been on the movie set of Oklahoma than in Omak.

The carnival crowd was as thick as cotton candy, so we left the midway for the Indian encampment and open-sided longhouse along the river. The crowd at the longhouse was almost as thick, as hundreds were gathered around an evening contest of slahal, the stick game. We watched as two teams of Native Americans sitting opposite each other sang tribal songs and deftly passed the marked bones to their teammates. The betting among the tribal members and bystanders was intense.

Tired of the crowd and noise, we left the longhouse and entered the tipi encampment. Ambient light filtered through the trees from the rodeo grounds, but otherwise, it was dark among the fifty or more tipis and eerily quiet compared to the longhouse and carnival. Some of the owners of the tipis were outside sitting on logs, drinking and talking; several were cooking on an open fire, and many could be heard talking inside

their tipis. The encampment teemed with traditional Indian life and the inhabitants were in their element.

I realized as I watched and listened to those in the camp that my knowledge of the local tribes could be put in a sentence, but my misconceptions could fill a book. My trips through the Colville Reservation with my dad had been a snapshot of Native American life, an outsider’s view that failed to understand the daily struggle they had to retain their customs and traditions. The Omak Stampede was their opportunity to live as their ancestors did, even if just for a long weekend. Yes, Indians drove trucks and lived in houses, held jobs, and went to school, but they were more comfortable riding a horse or living in a tipi, hunting deer and fishing for salmon, and learning about their spirit animals, medicines from plants, and traditional values. They went to the many powwows to gather with family and friends and pass on the traditions of their people to the younger generations.

In the past fifty-five years, since my first Stampede, the world has changed from night to day socially and economically for non-Indians, but not as dramatically for those who live on the Colville Reservation. Poverty, prejudice, addiction, and unemployment—the Four Horsemen of reservation life—still prevail. The tribal council of the twelve bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation works hard to revive their culture and language, educate their kids, create business opportunities for tribal members, and clean up the reservation environment. As a result, the council’s work has, in some respects, helped reverse the effects of poverty, addiction, and unemployment. But it’s up to us outside the reservation to stop one horseman we are responsible for—prejudice.

About four years ago on a calm fall day, my wife, Joyce, and I drove a remote road on the Colville Reservation that wound its way through ponderosa forests and passed close to the Columbia River. We stopped at a pull-out near a high bluff that was bursting with the yellows, oranges, and reds of fall foliage and overlooking the river. My thoughts were of a story I had wanted to write for over fifty years about the Colville tribes, reservation life in the 1950s, and the poverty and prejudice faced by minorities in central Washington as this region developed and flourished for the rest of us. I knew at that moment it was time for me to write this novel.

In August, 2019, I traveled to the confluence of the San Poil and

Roskelley

Columbia Rivers to celebrate the Colville Confederated Tribes’ release of thirty large summer Chinook salmon into Lake Roosevelt, a fish not seen above Grand Coulee Dam since it blocked the Columbia River in the spring of 1938. Two hundred people gathered there to laugh, sing, and enjoy the celebration. All who attended glowed with pride as three generations of tribal members and a few visitors passed the bagged fish, some weighing ten pounds or more, hand-over-hand down a conga line to the water to be set free.

Releasing the salmon was a leap of faith for the tribes in their quest to preserve a culture that so many through the years have tried to erase. Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums is just a small step in that same direction.

John Roskelley September 2022