Burning over the Columbia Bayou
The area of the south bank of the Columbia between the Sandy and Willamette Rivers is of particular interest to the tribes …
Records of the Cascades Watlala Removal to Grand Ronde
Joel Palmer’s letters during his superintendency lend themselves to a timeline for the removal of most tribes. Palmer penned orders and received …
Palmer’s Ledger of Vouchers for the Willamette Valley Treaty
In Record Group 75 (Bureau of Indian Affairs) microfilm are many millions of records of the tribes as they were being managed …
A Policy of Forfeiture of Rights and Annuities under the Peace Treaty of 1853
In numerous essays on this blog I have noted that many of the tribes considered the most violent, and those who had …
Forced to Pay for the Rogue River 1853 War
One of the most egregious of acts against the Rogue River tribes in southern Oregon was making them pay for the destruction …
Champinefu Temporary Reservation at Corvallis
In March 1855 there was formed a temporary reservation for Champinefu Kalapuyans at Corvallis. This was one of over a dozen such …
Grand Ronde Chiefs Statements About Agriculture, 1862
An investigation at Grand Ronde and the agent precipitated this meeting of the chiefs. The Indian Agent was asking for them to …
The Grand Ronde Reservation Fence
In the final 10 months of Joel Palmer’s residency as superintendent of Indian affairs of Oregon, he was under a microscope by …
Political Cartoonist at Chemawa Indian School, William John Harris
William John Harris was born in Juneau Alaska March 29, 1884 to Richard Tighe Harris an Irishman, and Kitty a member of …
Gradual decline or Catastrophic loss
A fellow scholar asked a question about if the decline of the tribes of Oregon could be termed as “gradual,” here is …
Removal of Four Tribes from the Umpqua Reservation 1855-1856
Between the time of the formation of the Umpqua Reservation in the Umpqua basin (1854) and the removal of the four tribes …
Missing Pages: Additional Signatory Tribes to the Willamette Valley Treaty
For more than 166 years the following pages were missing from the history and legal record of the Grand Ronde Tribe. It …
War of Extermination & Help Planning the Reservation
Sometimes I find remarkable letters that sum up all I have been thinking about what was happening in the 1850s between the …
Cascades Winter Villages in the Wapato Valley
Documentation in the Lewis and Clark journals, especially for that of 1806, is of the Cascades tribe seasonal round, the seasonal lifeways …
Native People Live in the Post Apocalypse
I have felt this for years now, that we native people are living in the post-apocalypse. Ever since a student spoke up …
Starving the Deschutes tribe into submission, 1856
Every day of research I stumble upon another act of federal officials to destroy the tribes. Here is a letter documenting the …
Influenza on the Reservation
The tribes removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation in 1856 never realized the safety and security of a reservation they were promised …
Genealogy of Racism on American Indians
Notes transcribed from Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America, Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd edition, Westview press, 1999, Comments are …
Post Indianism
Gerald Vizenor has created the idea of the Post Indian, native peoples who are living a new consciousness beyond the stereotypes of …
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 …
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 …
Wapato Canoes
There are several types of canoes for the region which served the purposes of the tribes. The most well know is the …
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 …