“Coming Home to Nez Perce Country” with WSU’s Trevor Bond

About the event

In 1847, Presbyterian missionary Henry Spalding acquired handmade Nez Perce artifacts and sent them from north-central Idaho to his friend and supporter, Dudley Allen, in Ohio in exchange for commodities. This was the fate of many early Native American materials, to be appropriated by non-Natives and removed from the hands and lands that created them. The shirts, dresses, baskets, horse regalia, and more—called the Wetxuuwíitin’ (formerly Spalding-Allen) Collection—would not return to their rightful home until they were purchased by the tribe from the Ohio Historical Society in 1996 for $608,100.

The reclamation of the Nez Perce artifacts is the subject of a WSU Press book, “Coming Home to Nez Perce Country,” published in June 2021 by Trevor Bond, WSU Libraries’ associate dean of digital initiatives and special collections, director of the WSU Center for Arts and Humanities, and co‑director of the WSU Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.

Bond will talk about the book and more during a Sept. 15 presentation sponsored by BookPeople of Moscow, the University of Idaho Department of History, the WSU Press, and the WSU Center for Arts and Humanities. The event is open to the public, and masks are required.