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Victoria Howard
Howard in 1919
Howard in 1919
Native name
Wishikin
BornVictoria Wacheno
September 1865
Grand Ronde Reservation, Oregon
DiedSeptember 26, 1930(1930-09-26) (aged 65)
Oregon City, Oregon
Occupationstoryteller
LanguageEnglish, Upper Chinook language, Molala language
NationalityConfederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, American (after 1924)
GenreNative American studies
SpouseEustace Howard, West Linn
ParentsSarah Quiaquaty Wishikin, William Wishikin

Victoria Howard, also Victoria (Wishikin) Wacheno Howard (c. 1865–1930), was a Clackamas Chinook storyteller from Oregon, USA. She was a Molala, Clackamas, and Tualatin citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon.

Howard's songs and stories were dictated, transcribed, and published as Clackamas Chinook Texts.[1] They were used as classroom reading texts for Indigenous school children and are now regarded as a rich record of the Indigenous northwest Oregon storytelling and performance art.[2]

Early life

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Location of Grand Ronde Reservation in Oregon

Victoria Wishikin was born circa 1865 on the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwest Oregon, only a decade after the reservation was founded. The Grand Ronde Reservation held a confederation of more than 27 tribes and bands of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau who had been forcibly moved there by the US government. The tribes from western Oregon, southern Washington state, and northern California were relocated to free up land for incoming white settlers. The multitribal complexity of the reservation resulted in a community that was linguistically and culturally diverse.

Howard was evidence of this, being the daughter of Sarah Quiaquaty Wishikin, herself a daughter of a Molalla tribe chief, and of William Wishikin, a Tualatin (Kalapuyan speaker) who died when his daughter was about ten. Howard gained her knowledge of Clackamas language and culture partly from her maternal grandmother Wagayuhlen Quiaquaty, a Clackamas medical shaman at Grand Ronde with whom she lived after her father's death, and later from her first mother-in-law, Charlotte Wacheno. As a child, she learned basket making and the telling of Clackamas Chinook oral history and myths as well as of Oregon history.[3]

Adult life

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In 1928, Howard was approached by Melville Jacobs, a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington state, keen to document the endangered indigenous languages and oral literature of the area. Jacobs had wanted to document the Molalla language, but as Howard was more fluent in Clackamas and spoke English too, Jacobs spent a year with Howard transcribing the Clackamas vocabulary, songs, myths, folktales, and traditional narratives that she dictated to him in the Clackamas language. He also made audio recordings of her extensive repertoire of Indigenous songs. This repertoire of songs and stories together with their study by Jacobs, Dell Hymes, Catharine Mason, and numerous other scholars sometimes working with Indigenous descendants, gives insights into the daily lives and beliefs of Indigenous women while helping to cast light on the changing landscape of Oregon over time.[4][5][6][7]

Personal life

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Victoria Wishikin married Marc Dan Wacheno, a son of a Clackamas tribal chief at Grand Ronde, at about fifteen. She had nine children with him, many of whom died before her as a result of the disease and poverty at Grand Ronde. In 1903, at the age of 38, Victoria Wishikin Wacheno married Eustace Howard, a Santiam Kalapuyan from Grand Ronde.[7]

Victoria Howard died on September 26, 1930, possibly as a result of a hit-and-run car accident while walking her grandchildren to church.[7] She left her husband Eustace, their daughter and two granddaughters.[2]

Legacy

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Despite the enforced break in the cultural transmission of her people, together with the distress of forced migration, disease, political treachery, and intertribal strife, a record of Howard's creative and artistic expression remains in her songs, poetry, and performances. In a 2021 publication, twenty-five of Howard’s spoken-word performances were edited into verse form. The publication also contains original annotations taken from Melville Jacobs' publications of Howard’s corpus of songs and stories.[7]

Efforts are also being made by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community and others to keep Chinook Wawa, formerly known as Chinuk Jargon, alive.[6][8][9]

A new dictionary too, distributed by the University of Washington Press, draws for its contents on the legacy of many Chinook speakers and story tellers including Howard.[10][11]

References

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  1. ^ "Clackamas Chinook texts., by Melville Jacobs | The Online Books Page". onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2023-12-05.
  2. ^ a b "Victoria (Wishikin) Wacheno Howard (c. 1865-1930)". www.oregonencyclopedia.org. Retrieved 2023-12-05.
  3. ^ Snodgrass, Mary Ellen (2018-06-01). Frontier Women and Their Art: A Chronological Encyclopedia. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-5381-0976-2.
  4. ^ "Meet 6 Badass Dames of Portland Yore". Portland Monthly. Retrieved 2023-12-05.
  5. ^ "Art exhibit shares confederated tribes of grand ronde culture and history". willamettevalley.org. Retrieved 2023-12-05.
  6. ^ a b "Tribes strive to save native tongues". Christian Science Monitor. ISSN 0882-7729. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
  7. ^ a b c d Howard, Victoria; Mason, Catharine; Jacobs, Melville (2021). Clackamas Chinook Performance Art: Verse Form Interpretations. Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians series. Lincoln Bloomington: University of Nebraska Press American Indian Research Institute, Indiana University. ISBN 978-1-4962-2411-8.
  8. ^ "Eugene Register-Guard". Google News. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
  9. ^ Johnson, Kylie N. ""As Our Elders Taught Us to Speak It": Chinuk Wawa and the "As Our Elders Taught Us to Speak It": Chinuk Wawa and the Process of Creating Authenticity Process of Creating Authenticity". Digital Commons. University of Denver. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  10. ^ "Bringing "good Jargon" to Light". studylib.net. Retrieved 2023-12-05.
  11. ^ "Chinuk Wawa". University of Washington Press. Retrieved 2023-12-05.

Further reading

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  • "Victoria Howard" in The Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women 1875-1975 (1989) Eds. Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar. pp 106–9
  • "Victoria Howard's 'Gitskux and His Older Brother: A Clackamas Chinook Myth'" in Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (1983) Hymes, Dell.
  • "Chinuk Wawa" (PDF). English Language Arts. Oregon Department of Education.
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