Victoria Howard

Victoria Howard, also Victoria (Wishikin) Wacheno Howard (c. 1865–1930), was a Clackamas Chinook storyteller from Oregon, USA. She was a Molala, Clackamas, and Tualatin citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon.

Howard's songs and stories were dictated, transcribed, and published as Clackamas Chinook Texts. They were used as classroom reading texts for Indigenous school children and are now regarded as a rich record of the Indigenous northwest Oregon storytelling and performance art.

Early life

Victoria Wishikin was born circa 1865 on the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwest Oregon, only a decade after the reservation was founded. The Grand Ronde Reservation held a confederation of more than 27 tribes and bands of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau who had been forcibly moved there by the US government. The tribes from western Oregon, southern Washington state, and northern California were relocated to free up land for incoming white settlers. The multitribal complexity of the reservation resulted in a community that was linguistically and culturally diverse.

Howard was evidence of this, being the daughter of Sarah Quiaquaty Wishikin, herself a daughter of a Molalla tribe chief, and of William Wishikin, a Tualatin (Kalapuyan speaker) who died when his daughter was about ten. Howard gained her knowledge of Clackamas language and culture partly from her maternal grandmother Wagayuhlen Quiaquaty, a Clackamas medical shaman at Grand Ronde with whom she lived after her father's death, and later from her first mother-in-law, Charlotte Wacheno.