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. I do this because when I was growing up, for the vast majority of people, no one knew the history of the […]
Chief Kiesno was one of the most powerful chiefs on the Columbia at the time of the fur trade and American settlement. He was related to tribes throughout the lower Columbia region. He is well documented in numerous encounters with a number of explorers, fur traders, and settlers. His time […]
In this new period of “wokeness” there are calls for the elimination of racist names and statues from our institutions. Christopher Columbus statues have been torn from their moorings and thrown into local rivers, while the statues of confederate generals and slaveowner politicians have been defaced and torn down […]
As a native person, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and a descendant of the Santiam, Takelma, and Chinook peoples of western Oregon, I have noted that many of the schools I attended were named for prominent persons in the settler community many of whom had interactions […]
Much has been written about the impact of pandemics on indigenous populations. Columbus and his exploratory contemporaries brought slavery (some tribes had slavery already) and conquest to the new worlds, and that conquest was greatly aided by the fact that the conquistadores passed on numerous illnesses, diseases and viruses, to […]
