A few years ago, I received a donation from the Charles Holmes estate in Salem, from the wife of Charles Holmes. The collection, are records from the career of Charles Holmes, a former teacher and staff member at Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. There were some 30 boxes of all sorts of documents that had been stored for about 20 years in the family garage. Some were damaged, some were in very good shape. In all, there were about 3000 photos, along with papers, books, maps, correspondence, and other media and objects related to Charles Holmes work from the 1950s to the 1970s at the school.  He served as the journalism instructor for the newspaper, the yearbook editor, had a role in theatrical plays and cultural events, and taught wood and metal shops, along with other classes.

A fairly large volume collection. The staff of the Cultural Department at the Grand Ronde Tribe  organized the papers initially for further processing. Noting it was an important collection that extended beyond the Grand Ronde tribe, I sought help from local professionals to process the collection. Rebecca Dobkins, Professor of Anthropology from Willamette University contacted me and we worked on a plan for her to use the collection in her anthropology classes. She would teach a class every years where the students processed some of the photos, identified the subjects and people, using the school yearbooks for comparison. Then they would scan their photos and enter the metadata for the collection into the Willamette University library website.  The project was covered in Smoke Signals in 2012.

The project is going very well and about 2500 photos have been processed in this manner. Rebecca has done a great job presenting on the project throughout the state. I helped her at the Salem Library presentation in 2014. This was written up in a Statesman Journal Article. Smoke Signals also covered this project in an update in 2014. Rebecca also made a presentation about the project at the 2nd Grand Ronde History Conference in November of 2014.

Another part of the collection, the bound newspapers of The Chemawa American, from the early part of the 20th century, are also very important. A couple years ago, I became aware of the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project. The project was putting full page digital images of Oregon’s newspaper online through the UO project website. They have a limited scope of paper from the 1840s to the 1920s. As there funding become available they have been adding papers. I approached them about adding the Chemawa Americans that we had, as well as the Smoke Signals Newspapers from the 1970s to the present, and the Klamath Tribune from 1956-1961. These papers have now been all added to the Oregon Digital Newspapers project website. This has been an amazing project that will benefit Oregon heritage for generations to come.

I am happy to have contributed in this way to advancing the development of Tribal heritage in the state.