Thank-You Warm Springs!

This July, people from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and nearby communities came to StoryCorps’ MobileBooth to record their stories and conversations.

We’ve heard from children and elders, cowboys, cowgirls, and ranchers, firemen, teachers, and writers. We’ve heard stories about corralling wild horses and picking huckleberries, stories of journeys and of coming home, of struggles and reconciliation.

HERE ARE YOUR PHOTOS: Feel free to visit StoryCorps’ Flickr album to download and print your portrait, or email your link to anyone you’d like.

Some of these stories will be aired on KWSO, and all will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

From the StoryCorps team: THANK YOU! It has been a pleasure and an honor to hear your stories.

A special thanks goes to our hosts, KWSO and the Warm Springs Fire and Safety Department, as well as our community partners, the Art Adventure Gallery, the Des Chutes County Historical Society, the Jefferson County Historical Society, the Jefferson County Library, Kah-Nee-Ta Resort and Casino, the Latino Community Association, Madras High School, Madras Senior Center, the Tribal Youth Program, the Warm Springs Community Action Team, and the Warm Springs Senior Center.

Person to Person in Warm Springs, OR

On July 8^th, StoryCorps began a new year of the Mobile Tour with its Opening Day in Warm Springs, OR–its first stop on a Native American reservation. The reservation, created in an 1855 treaty, is a confederation of the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute tribes (the latter joined the confederation 1879). In Warm Springs, we partnered with KWSO 91.9 FM Warm Springs Radio, the tribal radio station, with the Warm Springs Fire and Safety Department as our site host. Between fighting range and structure fires, the cadets and firemen and women would often stop by to check out the MobileBooth.

On Opening Day, Sylvester “Sal” Sahme, Director of Business and Economic Development for the tribes, spoke to his friend Adam Haas. He described having two educations: a formal, “white man’s” education, and a cultural “Indian” education.

During his interview, Sal told Adam that he didn’t learn anything at all about his own history until he went to college at the University of Minnesota–his coursework and political activism there inspired him to research the past of his people, and to ask his elders about their history and their religion, the Washat. He said of his religion, and its parameters of behavior: “A lot of that is almost intrinsic. It’s a given that you’re going to grow up with it and be surrounded by it, but there’s no formal process of educating you in it because you’re immersed in the society and the culture…But it wasn’t until Minnesota that I got to really learn about some things that distinctly affect not only me personally, but our people.”
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