J. Ross Browne Investigation as Reported to the SF Herald, 1857
Special Indian Agent J. Ross Browne famously came to the Northwest reservations in 1857 and wrote reports of the conditions of the tribes on the reservations. The following…
Author: Ethnohistory Research, LLC | David G. Lewis, PhD
Tribal Territorial Acknowledgements
Territorial acknowledgments have now become commonplace at most university functions at OSU. I have heard from many that the practice now is in nearly all universities in the…
We Tricked them-We Are All One People
Aunt Pat in a low whispering voice was speaking to me before a Culture Committee meeting at Grand Ronde. Pat Allen was the chair and I was vice-chair,…
Etienne Lucier First Settler in the Willamette Valley
Etienne Lucier (Lussier, Lewis) was a French fur trapper who worked for the three principal fur companies in Oregon. He first arrived after traveling overland in 1811 as…
Catholic Education at Grand Ronde Reservation
The Federal government’s role regarding Indian people was to figure out what to do with them. Tribes were in the way of American expansion and, removal of the…
General Howard Visits Grand Ronde, 1876
In 1874, General Oliver Otis Howard, who had served in the Civil War was the Commander of the Department Columbia took command of any Indian conflicts in the…
Oregon Catholic Indian Education History
The Catholic Indian education program was initially supported by a policy decision by the U.S. Department of War in 1819. Then the USDOW was in charge of Indian…
Chelamela and Chemapho of the Long Tom Watershed
Chelamela and Chemapho Kalapuyans The Long Tom Watershed was the original homeland to two major tribes of Kalapuyan Indians, the Chelamela and Chemapho tribes. The Chelamela occupied the…
Modeste Demers Ethnographic Descriptions of the Tribes, 1839
Modeste Demers was assigned with the Oregon Territory, in 1837, at the same time as Francois Norbert Blanchet and they traveled together overland to their assignment in canoes…
Blanchet’s Mission to Vancouver, 1841
Reverend Blanchet traveled to Fort Vancouver after his mission to the Clackamas. In Vancouver, there was much more orderly town life, the chapels in the fort being served…
Blanchet’s Mission to the Cascades, 1841
Blanchet’s mission to the Cascades is perhaps his first visit to this location. His interactions with Tamakoun, also later called Tomaquin, are quite revealing of the tribe…
Blanchet’s Mission at the Walamette Village, 1841
The following is report from a Notice, Notice No. 4, part of a series of reports of the Catholic missionary Francois Norbert Blanchet (September 30, 1795 – June…
Blanchet’s Missions to the Clackamas, 1841-1842
The following is a Notice, Notice No. 4, part of a series of reports of the Catholic missionary Francois Norbert Blanchet from 1841 to 1842 about his missionary…
2019 Year in Review of ndnhistoryresearch blog
2019 has been a year of many changes for me and the blog. I am now fully employed at OSU in Anthropology and Native studies. This has been…
Petition to Survey the Reservation and to Live in Peace, September 20, 1869
Previous essays have addressed the poor treatment of the tribes on the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation into the late 1860s. In 1869 during his inauguration speech, newly elected…
Nichaqwali Watlala peoples at Blue Lake
The Nichaqwali people, a Cascades/Watlala Chinookan band, lived at the juncture of several cultural groups that lived in the larger region of the lower Columbia and who interacted…
Ka’hosadi Shasta Peoples of Oregon and California
Chief John, Tecumtum, was the leader of the Rogue River Confederacy for over a year in southwestern Oregon. The Confederacy formed when tribal bands on the Table Rock…
All Payments at One Time, the foresight of Chief Crooked Finger
Tribal treaties are said to never have been honored by the United States. Native communities from around the continent will state this, and it is a common enough…
Klickitat and Twality Legal battles Over Land
By the 1830s, right about the time that “fever and ague” a great plague, likely malaria (Boyd, the Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence,1999) hit the tribes of…
Ignoring Tribal History in a Contemporary Exhibit
On 10/26, 2019 I visited the Open house at the Oregon State Archives, Salem, OR, and was supremely disappointed at their new exhibit Rust Rot Ruin. which documents…
La’tiwi, Northern Molalla, Placenames and Housing notes
Phillip Drucker’s field notes from the 1920s and 30s had him questioning many Native people from the region, from Grand Ronde and Siletz. Many of these people were…
Erroneous Tropes in Narratives of Removal to the Coast Indian Reservation
Digging through previously collected digitized documents, I found several accounts of removal of the tribes to the Siletz Reservation. These are worthy of commentary for the historical origins…
Two Schools at Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, 1863
There are a few reports that open the windows wide to a vision of the reservation, its changes, its struggles, and its peoples. In the 1863 Grand Ronde…
The 1867 Manual Labor School at Grand Ronde
In the 1860s the issue of education was at the fore of the duties of the Indian agents at Grand Ronde. Years of letters complained about irregular federal…