Using both military sources and Paiute-Shoshone oral traditions, this presentation will explore the Owyhee River and Canyon as a site of encounter, drawing from both sides of the experience of the Snake War (1864-1868). During the first part of the conflict, the Owyhee River was a place of engagement several times, and accounts of these events vary greatly from both perspectives. Placing these testimonies alongside allows us to compare how history is told in the two cultures.

About the speaker

Dr. Thierry Veyrié is a research associate at the American Indian Studies Research Institute (Indiana University Bloomington), the language and traditional culture manager for the Burns Paiute Tribe in eastern Oregon, and the director of two language revitalization projects for the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. He started conducting fieldwork in Northern Paiute communities in 2012 while earning his master’s degree in sociocultural anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France). In 2014–2021, while he was a graduate research fellow and instructor at Indiana University, he intermittently conducted field research in the oral traditions of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone community, recording new Paiute testimonies and translating existing recordings with elders of the community. In 2017–2018, he spent thirteen months in McDermitt for his doctoral studies. His dissertation, A Historical Ethnography of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone (2021, Anthropology Department, Indiana University), draws both from Paiute oral traditions and from the military correspondence held at the U.S. National Archives to propose an ethnohistory of the McDermitt community. Dr. Veyrié is actively involved in the revitalization and maintenance of the endangered Northern Paiute language and has been since a collaborative workshop he organized with McDermitt elders that produced Wayadeaga Apegan, Language of the Rye-Grass Valley: A booklet containing materials to preserve and transmit the Paiute language (2018).