Tuesday the 14th was the official release date and book launch for Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley.
On Monday the 20th at 4:30pm in the Putnam Center there is a lecture at Willamette University to support and promote it!
They say:
The Willamette Valley is rich with history—its riverbanks, forests, and mountains have been home to the tribes of Kalapuya, Chinook, Molalla, and more for thousands of years. This history has been largely unrecorded, incomplete, poorly researched, or partially told. In these stories, enriched by photographs and maps, Oregon Indigenous historian David G. Lewis combines years of researching historical documents and collecting oral stories, highlighting Native perspectives about the history of the Willamette Valley as they experienced it.
The timeline spans the first years of contact between settlers and tribes, the takeover of tribal lands the creation of reservations by the US Federal Government, and the assimilation efforts of boarding schools. Lewis shows the resiliency of Native peoples in the face of colonization.
Undoing the erasure of these stories reveals the fuller picture of the colonization and changes experienced by the Native peoples of the Willamette Valley, absent from other contemporary histories of Oregon.
David G. Lewis, Ph.D. and member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, is a recognized researcher, scholar, writer and assistant professor of anthropology and Indigenous studies at Oregon State University.
One of the WU groups promoting it is an undergraduate colloquium, "The 1842 Project."
Inspired by the New York Times’ The 1619 Project, “The 1842 Project” explores the beginnings of the institutions we call Willamette University and Salem, Oregon. This colloquium aims to reframe the local history by placing the consequences of colonialism and the contributions of people of color at the center of our local narrative. Foremost to the local story is understanding the nature of American capitalism to the landscapes that have been home to the Kalapuya people since time immemorial. Students will observe firsthand local biodiversity with attention to the colonial history of organisms, profiling people with significant records in climate & biodiversity actions, exploring how local conditions in the past influence us today, and speculating on what they can do to make a hopeful future.
Hopefully this will result in public work products that can better inform our establishment history of Salem and of Jason Lee.
 |
| Camas and Oaks at Bush Park (April 2014) |
Last week the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board discussed a proposal to "Endorse staff recommend designation of an approximately 10-acre grove of Quercus garryana (Oregon white oak) in lower Bush’s Pasture Park." Apparently this is being done in collaboration with tribal representatives. As this winds through the process there may be more to say, and there will likely be a Staff Report at some time with more information.
That conversation also stands in contrast with the historical romance that has seemed to cling at the Meyer Farm, about which a person just this month could shout on social media, "THIS LAND TELLS OF THE KALAPUYA' PLANTING THE WHITE OAK TREES IN A SPECIFIC FORMATION!!" The wish to re-enchant the landscape is strong, and seeing trees planted in a formation is wishful thinking, not any real history.
It will be interesting to learn more about a more sober assessment of the Oak grove at Bush Park and the likelihood of Native cultivation and intervention. Also, fire. I swear the were fewer Camas flowers this year, and in the most recent seasons. Does the grove need an application of cultural fire? This would be a very interesting conversation. Would Salemites tolerate a controlled burn inside a city park and very near housing?
With the time and location, Lewis' talk may be more oriented to campus and not so much to the wider public, and perhaps later the Mill or the Library or some other entity will host a talk in the evening more clearly for the general public. But a more academic focus may be of interest to some readers!
See previously:
2 comments:
(Comment Moderation: An interesting and generally relevant comment thread, but off-topic here, is transferred over to "Reductions on the Commercial-Vista Corridor Sidewalks.")
As interesting general context, Ned Blackhawk's book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, just won a National Book Award.
Yale, where Blackhawk teaches and the publisher of the book, said:
“The Rediscovery of America,” published by Yale University Press, recontextualizes five centuries of U.S. history by putting Indigenous peoples at its center. Blackhawk “rejects the myth that Native Americans fell quick and easy victims to European invaders,” said a New York Times reviewer, and instead “asserts that they were central to every century of U.S. historical development.”
In accepting the award, Blackhawk, a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, said he was “extraordinarily humbled” to be honored for what was a project that was a very long time in the making.
American Indian history, he said, “is a rich and vibrant field that provides uncommon and uncommonly beautiful insights. By example, it is difficult to convey how beleaguered, impoverished, and generally marginalized Native nations have often been in contemporary America.”
“Related,” he continued, “it is similarly difficult to convey how astute, capable and, at times, successful Native nations and their citizens have been in achieving secured protections of their lands, resources and sovereign authority.”
The release of Lewis's book has great timing!
Post a Comment