Native Salem exhibit opens to the Public November 12th 2021
This summer I was approached by the Bush Art Museum to do something for Native American month. Over the period of several months discussion we centered the exhibit…
This summer I was approached by the Bush Art Museum to do something for Native American month. Over the period of several months discussion we centered the exhibit…
The Santiam Forks Band of Molalla is not as well known as the Northern Molalla. We have had a few stories and while there is some information in…
The area of the south bank of the Columbia between the Sandy and Willamette Rivers is of particular interest to the tribes who once lived there. Historically, there…
Joel Palmer’s letters during his superintendency lend themselves to a timeline for the removal of most tribes. Palmer penned orders and received reports from his Indian agents, sub…
In Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs) microfilm are many millions of records of the tribes as they were being managed by federal Indian agents. The M234…
Barely ten years following the stopping of tribes setting fires in the Willamette and Umpqua valleys, signs of the change visited the settlers. Settlers were visited with scourges…
In numerous essays on this blog I have noted that many of the tribes considered the most violent, and those who had participated in the wars in southwestern…
One of the most egregious of acts against the Rogue River tribes in southern Oregon was making them pay for the destruction of the property of the American…
In March 1855 there was formed a temporary reservation for Champinefu Kalapuyans at Corvallis. This was one of over a dozen such temporary reservations, sometimes called encampments for…
An investigation at Grand Ronde and the agent precipitated this meeting of the chiefs. The Indian Agent was asking for them to produce their own food and was…
A letter was delivered in person to Joel Palmer, Indian Superintendent of Oregon, in 1855 of a complaint of Jacob Comegys about his pigs being chased and killed…
In the final 10 months of Joel Palmer’s residency as superintendent of Indian affairs of Oregon, he was under a microscope by citizens of the territory for his…
William John Harris was born in Juneau Alaska March 29, 1884 to Richard Tighe Harris an Irishman, and Kitty a member of the Tlingit tribe. Richard Tighe Harris…
A fellow scholar asked a question about if the decline of the tribes of Oregon could be termed as “gradual,” here is my response. The destruction of the…
Between the time of the formation of the Umpqua Reservation in the Umpqua basin (1854) and the removal of the four tribes to Grand Ronde Reservation, in late…
For more than 166 years the following pages were missing from the history and legal record of the Grand Ronde Tribe. It appears that sometime in early March…
Sometimes I find remarkable letters that sum up all I have been thinking about what was happening in the 1850s between the tribes and the settlers in Oregon.…
Documentation in the Lewis and Clark journals, especially for that of 1806, is of the Cascades tribe seasonal round, the seasonal lifeways of the tribes of the lower…
I have felt this for years now, that we native people are living in the post-apocalypse. Ever since a student spoke up near the end of the term…
Every day of research I stumble upon another act of federal officials to destroy the tribes. Here is a letter documenting the intentions of an Indian Agent to…
Willamette Valley Treaty Origins of the Willamette Valley treaty
The tribes removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation in 1856 never realized the safety and security of a reservation they were promised in seven treaties. They were forced…
Notes transcribed from Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America, Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd edition, Westview press, 1999, Comments are my own. The origins of racism…
In the early nineteenth century, the United States assumed ownership of all of the Oregon Territory through “right of discovery”, first adjudicated in the United States Supreme Court…