Day 8 Monday

In the morning we woke up and had another awesome bowl. I'am really getting tired of cereal, but food is food. I would rather eat it than starve. Today we are packing up and leaving to the Umatilla reservation to meet up with the members of the environmental agency. We drove 4 hours from the Nez perce reservation to arrive at the Umatilla reservation. Driving there was a drag because the heat just  made everybody on edge. I fell asleep the whole way there and it felt great. So we arrived at the Umatilla reservation. Wenix Red-elk waited for us to meet at the Department of natural Resources. When there we all sat in the nice meeting room. During the introduction, Wenix Red-elk went over the importance of the food that the people have gathered for many of generations and are now going to be extinct in a couple of years. The foods consisted of water, salmon, deer, roots, and huckleberries. These are the main course during a Umatilla first feast. Also the amount of land that the tribe had lost through the signing of the 1855 treaty. Many of the Umatilla natives have always traveled throughout the land and now they live on a reservation that now is just a small piece of land in the oregon state. After the meeting we left Pendleton and headed for a work site that was in process off being restored. The reason for this was because the river would flood every year. The americans that built the railroads did not like that because the water would tear up the tracks. So the americans built these levees to stop the river. That affects todays river because the salmon cannot survive in the river. After that Wenix Red-elk had accompanied us to her house and that is where we camped for the night and roasted marshmallows.