Post Indianism
Gerald Vizenor has created the idea of the Post Indian, native peoples who are living a new consciousness beyond the stereotypes of victim-hood about Indians. Post-Indians defy the…
Author: Ethnohistory Research, LLC | David G. Lewis, PhD
Gendered terms in Kalapuyan
This essay began some years ago when I was working on the Kalapuya lessons project with Esther Stutzman and her family. We discussed in our group the lack…
Snowats, Iswukaw and Quartux
The story of Snowats, Iswukaw and Quartux, written down and published by Jesse Applegate in 1907, appears to be a version of one of the four myth ages…
Wapato Canoes
There are several types of canoes for the region which served the purposes of the tribes. The most well know is the Chinook canoe or western style canoe…
My Mankiller Story
Now that I am immersed in native studies, I am finding that everyone has a good Mankiller story, as in a story of working with Wilma Mankiller the…
1851 Treaty with the Tualatin Band of Kalapuyas
The Tualatin treaty was the first to be negotiated in April of 1851 by the Willamette Valley Treaty Commission. The commission was replaced by Anson Dart who took…
Palmer’s Knowledge of the Tribes, 1854
Joel Palmer got his appointment to be the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1853 after the failure of Anson Dart to get some 19 treaties ratified. Palmer already…
Curry’s Volunteers
This letter from General Wool is remarkable for its transparency in revealing the actions and decisions of Governor Curry of Oregon. General George Law Curry was a two-time…
Planning the Reserve on the Sea Coast
The following letters detail one side of the conversation with Joel Palmer, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon, and John Wool, commander of the Pacific Department. (I don’t…
Rector Responds to the Catholic Boarding School Proposal, 1862
In 1862 the Catholic Church of the United States made a proposal to open boarding schools to serve all of the Indian reservations primarily served by their own…
Rogue River People
Rouge is a common enough mis-spelling of the word Rogue. Rouge is a French word that means red, while Rogue is another French word meaning brigand, outlaw, criminal…
General Wool in California
The following is a series of statements by General John E. Wool and his underlings in the 1850s, from their administrative moorings in Benecia, California, the offices of…
Red Caps Murder Patora
In March 1855, Patora a chief of the Yurok tribe was murdered by volunteers on the Klamath River in California. The Yurok at this time were peaceful and…
Dave Yachkawa becomes Tualatin Chief 1864
Information about the inner lives of the tribes in the 1860s is very sparse. A few federal reports exist but not a whole lot of information about the…
Native Details of the Battle of Hungry Hill
As noted by Dr. Mark Tveskov in his 2017 article “A “Most Disastrous” Affair: The Battle of Hungry Hill, Historical Memory, and the Rogue River War” (OHQ Vol.…
Development of Tribal Cultural Identity at the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation
A good number of people have over the years shown some confusion about the identity of the tribal members at the Grand Ronde tribe. Many natives and non-natives…
Cast to the Edge: the Falls View Rancheria in Oregon City
Oregon City, the settlement town, was established by Hudsons Bay company in 1829, but there was already a Clowewalla village in this location for more than 10,000 years.…
Kwalhioqua-Clatskanie-Upper Umpqua
There are two areas of Oregon with athapaskan speaking tribes. Southwest Oregon has a large number of athapaskan speaking tribes that extend as far north as the Upper…
Frog is in the Moon: Takelma Stories
Stories from the Takelma people are great information about how people thought about their world. This is important to me because I have direct ancestry with Takelma and…
Place-naming in the Takelma Homelands
This essay came about due to the present project to rename Dead Indian Memorial Road to something less overtly racist in the eyes of native peoples. There have…
Cattle-Headed People and Round-heads
I am not a linguist, but have a lot of experience researching and using native languages especially Chinuk Wawa, Kalapuyan, and Athapaskan languages. In recent research, I found…
Myths of the Wandering Indians
From at least the 18th century and afterward, for much of the writing about Native peoples, we are written about as being wandering peoples. Explorers, settlers, fur traders…
Rogue River Peoples, Oregon
On a bright summer day I was visiting the Rogue River Valley and stopped at upper Table Rock. I knew about the trail to the top and park…
What can we do to help Native peoples?
I have made a career researching the native peoples of western Oregon. For the past 20 years, I have spent thousands of hours each year researching the tribes.…