October 9, 2025 | 6 – 7:30 p.m. | Register here
Join us for an exhibition opening and lecture with Bobbie Conner on the history behind Nez Perce music.
About the Exhibition:
Nez Perce music, like the music of many North American Indian tribes, has always told a story of relationship to land and history. Drums, flutes, and human voices echoed and imitated the sounds of wind, water, birds and the four-leggeds around them. Years and years later, after the missionaries and after the boarding schools, Indian ears would match the sounds of saxophones and trumpets to older sounds—and play jazz and dance music. “Music was always spiritual for us,” says Nez Perce elder and musician Si Whitman. That’s a good place to start thinking about Nez Perce Music.
The next place to think is about assimilation and resistance. From earliest days, missionaries tried to remold Indian beliefs and music into their own versions of Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and other isms of Christianity. They translated books of the Bible and hymnals into native languages. And then, in the 1880s, in pursuit of assimilation—of making Indians white—the missionaries and the government banned languages, sun dances, drums, and regalia and sent Indian children to boarding schools.
At Carlisle, Chemawa, and Sherman boarding schools in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and California, Indian children’s hair was cut, their languages outlawed, and they were put into band uniforms, and made to play John Phillip Sousa and march in parades. They came home to their reservations with their instruments, and the newly minted young Indian musicians, captivated by pop music, dance music, jazz music, and with a thumb to Indian agents and assimilationists, proudly wore their headdresses as they played the new music.
Today, there are Indian rock bands and rappers. There’s a fine Nez Perce jazz singer named Julia Keefe, who co-directs an all-Indian big band that tours the nation, and powwow drums from reservations across the West come to play at the Nez Perce Homeland’s annual Tamkaliks celebration each July in Wallowa, Oregon.
About the Speakers:
Roberta ‘Bobbie’ Conner has been the director of Tamástslikt (Tah-MAHST-slickt) Cultural Institute, the 45,000 square foot museum on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, since its opening in 1998.
Bobbie is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla, and currently serves on the Oregon Historical Society Board of Trustees and Ecotrust, Oregon Community Foundation, and Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland Project Boards of Directors. She is a former chair of the National Museum of the American Indian Board of Directors.
