I do two things in my dissertation. One is to tell the history of academic research on my language from the perspective of a Native person who has been involved in this work as an assistant to non-Native researchers. The other is to explain more about my culture and language and how it works from the perspective of a Yakima person who has spoken and used the language her whole life. My most important task in this dissertation is to explain at more length some of the most basic vocabulary about our ancient culture and way of life. I do this by writing about different important parts of traditional life - life circles, sweathouse, ceremonies, horses, and foods - and explaining the words we use to talk about these and how those words explain the deeper meaning of what we do. I write this dissertation for the Ichishkíin speaking communities in hope that by documenting our lost traditions they will have a resource from which to learn our ancestors' ways and language. Detailing the traditional practices offers a much needed historical and social accounting of each. I include various dialects and practices shared by other Ichishkíin speaking communities. I incorporate texts, songs, descriptions of dances, and practices in Ichishkíin. This dissertation contributes also to the fields of sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics, as well as historical and cultural anthropology. Despite the best efforts of some anthropologists and linguists, all the work done on Yakima Ichishkíin is by researchers from outside the community and is inevitably seen and presented through the lens of the English language, Euro-American culture, and the Western tradition of "objective" scholarship. I am in a unique position to present the research on my language as a contribution to academic scholarship but from a very different perspective, that of a Native speaker and scholar. Implicit in my view of scholarship is the way researchers should work with Native people; therefore, I address how linguists can better work with community members. I discuss the protocols and etiquette expected by Native people in working with non-Natives.

On March 10, 1957, the United States Army Corps of Engineers completed The Dalles Dam and inundated Celilo Falls, the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America and a cultural and economic hub for Indigenous people. In the negotiation of treaties between the United States, nearly one hundred years earlier, Indigenous leaders reserved access to Columbia River fishing sites as they ceded territory and retained smaller reservations. In the years before the dam's completion, leaders, many of who were the descendants of earlier treaty signatories, attempted to stop the dam and protect both fishing sites from the encroachment of state and federal regulations and archaeological sites from destruction. This study traces the work of Wilson Charley, a Native fisherman, a member of the Yakama Nation's Tribal Council, and great-grandson of one of the 1855 treaty signatories. More broadly, this study places Indigenous actors on a twentieth-century Columbia River while demonstrating that they played active roles in the protest and management of areas affected by The Dalles Dam. Using previously untapped archival sources--a substantial cache of letters--my analysis illustrates that Charley articulated multiple strategies to fight The Dalles Dam and regulations to curtail Native's treaty fishing rights. Aiming to protect the 1855 treaty and stop The Dalles Dam, Charley created Native-centered regulatory agencies. He worked directly with politicians and supported political candidates, like Richard Neuberger, that favored Native concerns. He attempted to build partnerships with archaeologists and landscape preservationists concerned about losing the area's rich cultural sites. Even after the dam's completion, he conceptualized multiple tribal economic development plans that would allow for Natives' cultural and economic survival. Given the national rise of technological optimism and the willingness for the federal government to terminate its relationship with federally recognized tribes, Charley realized that taking the 1855 treaty to court was too risky for the political climate of the 1950s. Instead, he framed his strategies in the language of twentieth-century conservation, specifically to garner support from a national audience of non-natives interested in protecting landscapes from industrial development. While many of these non-native partners ultimately failed him, his strategies are noteworthy for three reasons. First, he cast the fight to uphold Native treaty rights in terms that were relevant to non-natives, demonstrating his complex understanding of the times in which he lived. Second, his strategies continued an ongoing struggle for Natives to fish at their treaty-protected sites, thereby documenting an overlooked period between the fishing rights cases of the turn of the twentieth century and the 1960s and 1970s. Charley left a lasting legacy that scholars have not recognized because many of his visionary ideas came to fruition decades later. Finally, my analysis of Charley's letters also documents personal details that afford readers the unique perspective of one Indigenous person navigated through a tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest and Native American history.