PASS IT ON

115      Jewell Praying Wolf James: Personal interviews with Jewell James. 

115      the Lummi Nation: Learn more at https://www.lummi-nsn.gov/.

116      Jewell had another name: As Jewell told me, and as other Lummi fishermen echoed, the Lummi had it much easier than other Washington tribal nations during the height of the Fish Wars. The Nooksack River itself is incontrovertibly Lummi territory, and no one messed with them fishing the river. But whenever Lummi sought to fish in Bellingham Bay, at the river’s mouth, they would face harassment.

116      Jewell, who also goes by the Lummi name: The Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum has produced a lovely short video about Jewell and his artworks. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LU0Fq9PY3Q

116      He is the master artist: For more on Jewell’s life and work, see Lynda V. Mapes, “Lummi Nation carvers and allies to embark on national to D.C., give totem pole to President Biden,” The Seattle Times, April 12, 2021, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/lummi-nation-carvers-and-allies-to-embark-on-national-tour-to-d-c-give-totem-pole-to-president-biden/

117      A Lummi collective that specializes in creating massive totem poles: Like the term “Indian,” “totem pole” is an Anglo-European concoction, as Gregory P. Fields reports in A Totem Pole History (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), a book about the Lummi carver Joe Hillaire written by Pauline Hillaire. The term comes from the Anishinaabe word ototeman, which pertains to the idea of kinship. In that sense it’s not entirely inappropriate.

118      Jewell told me at that time: See my contemporaneous write up of Jewell’s 2021 story pole campaign: “A Postcard from the Red Road to DC,” Sierra, July 26, 2021, available at: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-4-fall/notes-here-there/postcard-red-road-dc.

119      Jewell’s capsule version: This is a distilled version of what Jewell told me on the riverbank. Like all oral histories and creation myths, there are various versions of the Salmon Woman story—which, as I will get to explaining later in this chapter—is precisely what makes them durable over the centuries. In 1992, Jewell put to paper a longer, more richly evocative version of the story that can be found here: https://www.lummi-nsn.gov/userfiles/190_Story%20of%20Conservation%20of%20the%20Salmon(1).pdf. You can listen to a shorter version at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOHIHXnUh2E

119      “telling us children’s stories”: For a non-Native journalist, this cuts a bit close. As Lynne Kelly writes of Indigenous legends in The Memory Code (Pegasus Books, 2017), “The reason these stories appear simplistic is that they are usually the version told to children—and to cultural outsiders.” There are, undoubtedly, many other Lummi tales of salmon that I will never know, being among the uninitiated.

120      a vast wheel of life: This phrase was inspired by the estimable Lynda V. Mapes’ story, “Salmon People: A tribe’s decades-long fight to take down the Lower Snake River dams and restore a way of life,” Seattle Times, November 19, 2020, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/salmon-people-a-tribes-decades-long-fight-to-take-down-the-lower-snake-river-dams-and-restore-a-way-of-life/. Lynda writes: “Salmon feed more than 130 species of animals, and their spawned-out bodies bring tons of nutrients from the sea back to the land, in a great gyre of life, begetting more life.”

121      as well as by scent memory: As the USGS helpfully explains the biology in a nifty primer available at https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-do-salmon-know-where-their-home-when-they-return-ocean. As Ben Goldfarb puts it in Crossings (page 183), “They return to their natal rivers, attuned to magnetic fields and familiar smells.”

121      “The country before us exhibited”: As quoted by Steve Yates in Orcas, Eagles & Kings (Primavera Press, 1992), page 60.

121      British navigator George Vancouver wrote: In The Good Rain, Seattle-born Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan notes (pages 88–89) that the Cascadian vistas seemed to have a liberating effect on Vancouver. He was a humorless man who was fond of flogging his sailors, “but when he entered Puget Sound something happened, as if he’d tossed his old spirit overboard in a rush of spring euphoria.” He gave the crew a holiday and “his journals started to sing.”

121      John Muir called the sea: As quoted Dorothy Powell and Fran Hilen in Shaw Island: Earliest Known History to 1994 (Shaw Island Library and Historical Society, 2021) from the Introduction.

121      When Lewis and Clark: See The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto (Mariner Books, 1997). This is Captain Clark’s description of October 17, 1805, when members of the expedition came upon a village of Yakima people not far from the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers where the “large Mat Lodges of Indians were drying Salmon … the number of dead Salmon on the Shores & floating in the river is incredible to say –and at this Season they have only to collect the fish Split them open and dry them on their Scaffolds on which they have great numbers.”

121      In the 1840s, a pioneer: See Timothy Egan, page 181. 

121      “June hogs,” they were called: See Bruce Brown, Mountain in the Clouds (University of Washington Press, 1995), page 85.

122      The largest salmon-processing facility in the world: Daniel Boxberger, To Fish in Common (University of Washington Press, 2000), pages 62 and 63. 

122      Concrete curtains descended: I’ve borrowed the term “concrete curtains” from Egan (page 189), but tried to give the sentence a more Churchillian echo. For a detailed account of twentieth century dams’ impact on the salmon of the Northwest, see Brown chapters four, five, and six, and also Egan, chapter 10.

122      The Pacific salmon population collapsed: See Bruce Brown, page 25. 

123      in “the state archives”: ibid, page 63. 

123      placed on the endangered species list: NOAA is the primary federal agency responsible for monitoring salmon populations listed as endangered or threatened. See https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/pacific-salmon-and-steelhead/esa-protected-species.

123      Thirty years later: See Rafferty Baker, “Quite dire: Fraser River sockeye salmon run expected to be the worst ever recorded,” CBC, August 11, 2020, available at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/2020-fraser-river-sockeye-record-1.5682765

123      and then it compounded: I picked up this idea of “history compounded” from Daniel Boxberger, who uses a similar phrasing in his ethnography To Fish in Common. I suspect he got it from the 20th century historian Walter Benjamin. 

123      How else to explain a celebratory: See Lynda Mapes, “Big Salmon Run at Seattle’s Ballard Locks Is Wowing Visitors,” Seattle Times, August 18, 2023, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/a-big-salmon-run-at-seattles-ballard-locks-is-wowing-visitors/.  I should say that Lynda is a friend, and I know that she understands the challenges of shifting baseline syndrome as well as anyone. Blame the headline writers.

123      the Associated Press trumpeted: See: “Snake River Fall Chinook Salmon Make a Comeback,” Associated Press, May 12, 2014, available at: https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/2014-05-12/snake-river-fall-chinook-salmon-make-a-comeback. This is a common tic. See also, “Off the hook: California king salmon rebounds after drought,” Associated Press, August 22, 2019, which describes a “salmon boom.” Available at: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/off-the-hook-california-king-salmon-rebounds-after-drought-2019-08-22?eafs_enabled=false.

123      The latest peer-reviewed evidence: See Russell F. Thurow, et. al., “Wild salmon and the shifting baseline syndrome: application of archival and contemporary redd counts to estimate historical Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) production potential in the central Idaho wilderness,” NRC Research Press, October 2019, available at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs_journals/2020/rmrs_2020_thurow_r003.pdf.

124      In Salmon, Mark Kurlansky spends: Shifting baseline syndrome haunts the pages of Kurlansky’s encyclopedic fish biography. “When you are cheering 4,000 fish in a river that used to produce well more than 100,000, this is what biologists call a ‘shifting baseline,’ ” he writes on page 222, and then after the coda that I cite, dedicates the better part of his appendix to shifting baselines, which he explains as “the problem of the declining faith in nature.”

124      Steve Solomon is one of them: Personal interview with Steve Solomon. 

125      the reefnet being a unique fishing technology: A reefnet works by creating an artificial reef that channels a school of salmon between two boats or floating platforms. As the fish pass the man-made reef, the crews on the platforms pull up a net and haul them in. It’s considered especially sustainable because it has a high escapement percentage—that is, it allows many fish to continue onward to spawn. The reefnet is the heart of Lummi culture. Reefnet sites were carefully guarded and passed along family lines. Jewell told me that the reefnet is “cosmologically female.  The mother gives you a solid foundation for life.” In 2016, the late Lummi fisherman Larry Kinley resumed reefnetting for the first time in decades. “Even our reefnetting is coming full circle,” Steve Solomon said with pride.

126      The Lummi call themselves: For more about Lhaq’temish culture, see the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, https://americanindian.si.edu/environment/lummi/People.cshtml.

126      there is no word for famine: See Kurlansky, page 329. I have also heard this exact same line from Lummi fisherwoman Ellie Kinley (Tah-Mahs). 

127      Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce: Personal interview with Shannon Wheeler.

127      JoDe Goudy, a former chair: Personal interviews with JoDe Goudy. 

127      federal judges have upheld Native treaty rights: Federal courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, have consistently ruled in favor of tribal treaty rights. A century ago, the Supreme Court, in a case over Yakama fishing rights, declared, “The treaty was not a grant of rights to the Indians, but a grant of rights from them” (my emphasis). But all too often these court rulings went unenforced. In To Fish in Common, Boxberger offers an important insight when he writes (page 52), “Indians tend to win in the courts but lose in a practical sense.” 

127      Fish Wars of the 1960s and 1970s: For an Native-eye-view perspective, I highly recommend the 2024 documentary film “Fish War,” produced by the Northwest Treaty Tribes and available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7GOcMQDpbQ.

128      Things got intense: See Jennifer Davis, “Treaty and Fishing Rights Activist Billy Frank: The Fish Wars,” Library of Congress Blogs, November 3, 2022, available at: https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2022/11/treaty-and-fishing-rights-activist-billy-frank-the-fish-wars/. See also this contemporaneous account, “Police and Coast Indians Clash Over Fishing Rights,” The New York Times, September 10, 1970, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/10/archives/police-and-coast-indians-clash-over-fishing-rights.html.

128      In a landmark 1974 decision: For more on the politically seismic impacts of the Boldt decision, see Lynda Mapes, “How the Boldt Decision 50 years ago remade Pacific Northwest fishing,” Seattle Times, January 14, 2024, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/how-the-boldt-decision-50-years-ago-remade-pacific-northwest-fishing/

128      On the Olympic Peninsula: See Lynda Mapes, “Tribe catches coho salmon on free flowing Elwha River, a first since dam removal,” Seattle Times, October 10, 2023, available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/tribe-catches-coho-salmon-on-free-flowing-elwha-river-a-first-since-dam-removal/

128      within weeks of the dams’ 2024 removal: See, “Threatened Coho Salmon Return to Upper Klamath Basin for First Time in More than 60 Years,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife, November 22, 2024, at: https://wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archive/threatened-coho-salmon-return-to-upper-klamath-river-basin-for-first-time-in-more-than-60-years.

129      Oral history is a cultural commons: I think that Native American literature and scholarship confirms this. “Stories are a sacred and integral part of our Indigenous way of life,” Metis and Nlaka’pamux scholar Jennifer Grenz writes in Medicine Wheel for the Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). “It’s memory that prevails still,” Greg Sarris, chair of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, writes in Becoming Story (Heyday Books, 2022). 

129      “These are borrowed words”: This ethical idea is also expressed by members of the Western Apache, as Ken Basso relates (pages 29–30) in his ethnography, Wisdom Sits in Places (University of New Mexico Press, 1996): “Western Apache place-names were created by his ancestors. They were—and are—his ancestors’ very own words.  Whenever one uses a place-name, even unthinkingly, one is quoting ancestral speech.”

129      I have a responsibility to pass it on: I should step carefully here. I am not, it should be obvious, Native American. Cultural generalizations are dangerous, stereotypes are a trap, and as Indigenous scholars have pointed out, “Indian” is a fiction. You can no more describe the hundreds of distinct Native cultures of North America with a single word than you could capture the essence of both the Portuguese and the Russians with only the term “European.” But I’ve listened carefully, and it seems to me that among the common threads linking diverse Indigenous cultures is a reverence for story.

130      the most universal of human arts: In Why We Remember (page 175) Ranganath reports: “According to one analysis, 40 percent of our conversational time is spent on storytelling and on creating and exchanging collective memories.”

130      clay tablets stamped with cuneiform are mere infants: The ancients were suspicious of writing. In Egyptian myth, the god-king Theuth was unimpressed when the god Thamus realized he had invented writing. The crib notes of script, he warned, would atrophy the muscle of memory. That tale comes from one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus, in which Socrates delivers a rant (which can be read as sarcastic) against the perils of the then-novel technology. “If men learn the art of writing,” Socrates cautions, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls.”

130      ecological baselines that stretch to time immemorial: “Time immemorial” is a phrase that comes up frequently in conversations with Indigenous peoples. It’s a bedeviling term, almost koan-like, for it refers to something from beyond the reach of memory or record that nevertheless persists. For a wonderful meditation on this term, see B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster, “What does ‘time immemorial’ really mean?” High Country News, January 12, 2026, available at: https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-1/what-does-time-immemorial-really-mean/.

130      Consider “geomyths”: Much of this overview comes courtesy of Adrienne Mayor’s chapter on Geomythology in the Encyclopedia of Geology (Elsevier, 2005), available at:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347911171_Geomythology.

130      Aboriginal “songlines”: See Kelly’s The Memory Code, pages 2 to 10. 

130      Modern science confirms: See James Bradley, “Is oral history more durable than written history?” The Washington Post, August 6, 2024, available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/06/indigenous-oral-history/.

131      The Zuni people: See Mayor.

131      Oral histories from the Klamath Tribes: ibid. 

131      via canoes on a “Kelp Highway”: See Fen Montaigne, “The Fertile Shore,” Smithsonian, January 2020, available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humans-came-to-americas-180973739/. Kurlansky also floats this hypothesis in Salmon, musing that members of Japan’s ancient salmon-centric culture, the Jomon on Hokkaido, may have been the first human colonists in North American.

132      Rubin explains that one major reason: See David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1995), pages 132 to 136. 

132      plots are usually simple: ibid, Chapter 3. 

132      Alliteration, assonance, and rhyme: ibid, Chapter 4. 

132      oral storytelling is a social experience: On this point Rubin quotes (page 133) the British psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett: “Every storytelling event is a social experience. … In every storytelling event, the participates operate in accordance with a specific set of status relationships. … The storyteller’s duties are to formulate, encode and transit a message in accordance with socially prescribed rules.”

133      “A listener does not hear a song”: Rubin, page 23.

133      A story’s meaning comes from its culture: In an essay that is well known within the discipline of memory studies, a twentieth-century Italian historian, Alessandro Portelli, offers a defense of oral historians as an important resource for history and historiography. “What is really important is that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings.” Those meanings spring, inevitably, from the subjectivity of both speaker and listener. “Subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible ‘facts’.” In this sense, subjectivity is a feature, not a bug, as it puts a spotlight on what is most important to the conversationalists. See Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different.” See also Alistair Thomson, “Memory and Remembering in Oral History,” which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History.

133      Some literary critics complain: If you have a passing familiarity with post-modern literary theory, you’ve heard some version of the critique against the all-too-neat coherence of narratives, biographies, autobiographies, histories. For a capsule, see Parul Sehgal, “Tell No Tales,” The New Yorker, July 10, 2023, available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review.

133      Many writers worry, with good reason: As an author, I’ve often felt this myself, and I think it’s a common anxiety among writers. Lauren Markham confesses to such doubts in Immemorial (page 98), “As a writer, I knew that words could sometimes feel like not only the antithesis of action, but also, worse, mechanisms of concealment for doing nothing at all.” In Earth’s Wild Music (Counterpoint, 2021), environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore confesses in her preface, “I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write.  [One] temptation is to stop writing altogether.”

133      “Native stories are the source”:  See Gerald Vizenor’s essay, “The Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Persistence (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 

134      that responsibility became central: Anthropologist Bruce Granville Miller makes this point in the Introduction to his edited anthology, Be of Good Mind (UBC Press, 2007), when he writes (page 9): “In Coast Salish social networks, the role of elders [centered on] establishing one’s place through honoring one’s ancestors.”

134      In the preface to a collection: See Children of the Setting Sun Productions, Jesintel (University of Washington Press, 2023). 

135      “The ability to retell”: ibid, Acknowledgements. 

135      half the work of oral history is listening: One of the freakish characteristics of modernity—in comparison with the preceding tens of thousands of years human experience—is the way in which the wisdom of elders has been devalued. As Daniel Pauly told me, “Until about one hundred and fifty years ago, it was common to go to the elders in your community for advice and guidance on all sorts of matters.” No longer, of course. The respect for elders’ wisdom could be considered another casualty of the Great Acceleration. With changes happening so quickly, it’s perhaps easy to assume that earlier generations’ life lessons are of limited value. I’m not sure that assumption is a smart one.

135      Raven recalled: Personal interviews with Raven Borsey.

136      Free told me: Personal interviews with Free Borsey.

137      we are hardwired for sharing stories: It’s significant that both Ranganath and Schacter end their neuroscience books by discussing the transmission of memories across generations via storytelling. Ranganath goes even further and makes the point (page 193) that elder-to-youth memory transmission “might not be unique to humans. In orcas (aka killer whales), another species in which lifespan extends well beyond the period of fertility, transmission of knowledge and traditions (hunting preferences, play behavior, even mate preferences) appears to be driven by postmenopausal females.  Orca grandmothers play a critical role in the survival of the pod.” Indeed. The matriarch of the L Pod of the southern resident orcas of the Salish Sea—a female known as L28—is some forty years older than anyone else in the pod, perhaps one hundred years old. She routinely leads the pod all the way back to the San Francisco Bay’s Golden Gate, presumably because she remembers the winter Chinook runs that once filled the rivers of the Sacramento Delta. Aldo Leopold famously urged people to “think like a mountain,” but geological time is a mind-bender. Perhaps, though, we can think like an orca, and in doing so come to better appreciate the role of memory in species survival.

138      According to one study: See: Margaret Orr et. al. “Breaking the climate science: Predictors of discussing global warming with family and friends,” Plos Climate, April 2025, available at: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000538

138      “Listen first”: See Manuel Andreoni, “Here’s a secret about your neighbors,” The New York Times (Climate Forward newsletter), July 19, 2022, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/climate/climate-communication.html.

138      has recorded seven hundred thousand conversations: See https://storycorps.org/about/.            

139      Professors at University of Puerto Rico: See Jen Rose Smith, “Word of Mouth,” Sierra, April 5, 2023, available at: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/1-spring/critic-s-notebook/word-mouth

139      The University of Kentucky: See https://research.uky.edu/news/uk-oral-history-project-documenting-climate-change-empowering-kentuckians.

139      The folks at NOAA: See https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/noaa-voices-oral-history-archives.

140      “The most successful stories”: See https://www.climatestoriesproject.org/share-your-climate-story.html.

140      a woman named Sara recalls: See https://soundcloud.com/climate-stories-project/sara-fiorenzo-lindenhurst-new-york.

140      Betsy in Gainesville: See https://www.climatestoriesproject.org/florida-climate-stories-756090-272479.html.

140      Joseph in the Adirondacks: See https://www.climatestoriesproject.org/adirondack-climate-stories.html.

141      When researchers evaluated: See Madalina Vlasceanu et. al., “Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries,” Science Advances, February 2024, available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778#tab-contributors.

141      DearTomorrow: See https://www.deartomorrow.org/. 

141      Thousands of people have done so: See Michael J. Coren, “Writing to the future is one of the most powerful climate actions you can take,” The Washington Post, April 29, 2025, available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/04/29/climate-action-letter-to-the-future/. Third Act, an elders climate action organization started by Bill McKibben, has also encouraged its members to write letters to the future. See: https://thirdact.org/socal/2025/06/24/write-a-climate-letter-to-your-kids-grandkids-or-loved-ones/.

141      Abby in Montana recalls: See https://www.deartomorrow.org/letters/16856?search=memory&id=16856

142      passion for genealogy is universal: In Time and Water, the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason invites us to a thought experiment (based in his own family history) about how long memories can stretch. Let’s say your grandmother was born in 1924; that she lives to the age of ninety-four; and that, sometime before she passes, she shares her earliest memories with your daughter (her great-granddaughter), who was born in 2008. Now, imagine that your daughter also lives to ninety-four. And imagine that, before she dies, she hands down to her grandkids those stories she heard from her own great-grandmother when she was a child. If someone from that subsequent generation also lives to ninety-four, then the string of oral history would extend out to 2186. “You can touch 262 years with your bare hands,” Magnason concludes. That’s a period older the American Republic.

142      Some 70 percent of Americans say: From the polling firm Ipsos. See https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-think-knowing-their-ancestry-important

142      Darrell Hillaire, a longtime Lummi leader: Personal interview with Darrell Hillaire. 

143      “So the place isn’t just, you know, name of street ”: There’s a world of difference—and a world of meaning—in the distinct ways that traditional cultures create place names. Many Indigenous toponyms are linked closely to the natural processes unique to that one site. So, for example, the Lummi name for today’s village of West Sound on Orcas Island was El e’ley, “the place to cook clams.” In Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso writes (page 23), “What impresses me most of all is the rich descriptive imagery of Western Apache place names.” Tsee Ditl’ige Naaditine means “trail extends across scorched rocks.” Compare these Indigenous place-names with Western ones: Mount Baker, Puget Sound, Mount Rainier. Whereas Western place names are declarative—an act of appropriation via naming—Indigenous place names are descriptive. They seek to convey the essence of place. And even when Western place names are linked to the environment—how many thousands of creeks in North America are named “Bear Creek”?—they are more often linked to one single happening (a settler once saw a bear there) than to a recurrent process (the tide goes out and makes shellfish gathering easy). But go far back enough in time, and you’ll discover that all sorts of preindustrial cultures knew, as the Western Apache still know, that wisdom sits in places. A famous example is Oxford, England—the oxen’s ford, the place where the cattle cross the river.

143      “practical naturalists”: This is from one of his Emerson’s more famous essays, The Uses of Natural History, very first page.

144      the Lhaq’temish national anthem: To learn more, see https://americanindian.si.edu/environment/pdf/04_02_national_anthem.pdf.

146      It was like a sacrament: The Christian intellectual and “crunchy conservative” Rod Dreher makes a similar point in an essay in which he celebrates the mnemonic power of religious ritual. “Rites are ways that societies maintain a living connection with their past, and enter mystically into it.” See “The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting,” The American Conservative, October 15, 2015, available at: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/benedict-option-memory-forgetting/

146      you have to go back to go forward: On this point, see the venerable Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr., who in the preface to The World We Used to Live In (Fulcrum Publishing, 2006) writes, “We need to see where we have been before we see where we should go.”