This work interrogates the 200+ years of erasure and dispossession on the Palouse and the archive's complicity in perpetuating these narratives. It disrupts dominant histories by exposing the absences and silences upheld by public archives, and amplifies the stories of resistance and survivance that have been marginalized. Drawing from personal family archives, landscape studies, and traditional sources, this project explores the complex relationships of accountability, inheritance, and responsibility. As a 6th-generation Palouse farmer and academic, the author reflects on their own inheritances and the broader responsibility to both human and non-human ancestors—land, animals, and flora. Central to this work are questions of material accountability, particularly in the context of "Land Back," and how the archive, by attempting to erase and control, has shaped the future possibilities of land and relationships. Ultimately, this is a messy exploration of how we reckon with the past to imagine different futures.
Cheyenne, a queer activist-scholar, approaches the canoe through decolonial and ecological praxis, reading it as a vessel that disrupts settler heteronormative logics of land, time, and belonging. As a sixth generation settler farmer on the Palouse they also approach this work through a lens of responsibility, gratitude, generosity and relationship to people and to the rivers and watersheds themselves. They approach this work with the humbling knowledge that they have come to be here, doing this work, through their embodied relationships with river and soil as much as their (and their human ancestors) relationships with other humans. They are collaborating with local Tribes and Tribal descendants to support Tribal canoe journeys in the Columbia River basin, alongside river and riparian restoration projects. The debt they owe is not just to the Indigenous communities but to the rivers themselves which have allowed them to be here, doing this work.
This work was produced on the ancestral homelands of the Palouse people, the Nez Perce (Nimíipuu), and other Indigenous peoples of the Columbia Plateau. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations.