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In Memoriam: Silas Whitman

Oct 3, 2024

The Nez Perce Tribe and the world lost a great leader when Silas Whitman passed on Tuesday, October 1, 2023… and salmon lost the best friend a fish could have.

Silas Whitman (left) and Gordon Higheagle (Nez Perce Commissioner to CRITFC) at a fisheries meeting in Portland, Oregon, 1980s.

As executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, as the Nez Perce Tribe’s fisheries director, chairman of its governing body and, of late, its Circle of Elders. Silas Whitman worked tirelessly to advocate and educate on behalf of the Nez Perce people. He was raised on the Umatilla Reservation and his forebearers hailed from the Wallowas of Northeastern Oregon and the Palouse of Eastern Washington where respect for the lands and all creatures was not only a basis for time-honored cultural traditions but also the means for the peoples’ survival.

Silas Whitman relied on those traditions and extended them to regenerate the legal and cultural sovereignty of his people. He learned those traditions from his elders and, especially, from time at Celilo, where his grandmother’s relation, Chief Tommy Thompson taught him the ways of tribal fishery management.

In 1988, as fisheries director, he initiated an ambitious plan to restore abundant salmon populations to the Nez Perce ceded areas after more than thirty years of federal and state management indifference to lower river and ocean fishery exploitation. The Snake River fall chinook population, once numbering a half-million adult returns, had declined to 78 fish in 1990. In 2013, as a result of the plan, the population was restored to over 21,000 returning adults. (Click here to watch a video on “The Snake River Miracle.”)

He not only used his leadership skills to manage restoration success, but he also showed his personal respect and love for the salmon populations by working directly at the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery and by living and working as field manager for the Lostine Hatchery. The hatchery is located near the site of the Joseph Band’s summer village and Old Chief Joseph’s original gravesite at the junction of the Lostine and Wallowa Rivers.

Silas Whitman extended his cultural knowledge beyond Nez Perce lands. When it appeared that the Nez Perce children of Joe Meek and his Nez Perce spouse, Virginia, were buried at the site of the 19th century Methodist Meeting House in Hillsboro, Oregon that was slated for data center development, he arranged travel with Charles Axtell to identify the graves.

Charles Axtell and Silas Whitman conducting a traditional Nez Perce burial ceremony in Hillsboro, Oregon. Photo: Christopher Oertell, Hillsboro NewsTimes

He then advocated for a memorial on the site and spoke at its dedication.

In a Confluence podcast, he said that his Indian name was Tu’psluk’upsíimey “Governed by the North Star.” In his resolute journey of advocacy and education, Silas Whitman stayed true to the direction laid out for him by his elders and ancestors. He will be greatly missed but his life provides a direction that continues the cultural regeneration that he envisioned.


Special thanks to John Platt for penning this memoriam drawn from his many years of service working with atway* Silas Whitman.

*In Plateau culture, after someone passes they are referred to as “Atway.” Atway can be translated as “beloved.”