Essay about the process of research.
My 2009 dissertation Termination of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde: Community, Politics, Identity was completed at the Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon after about six years of work. For the first few years I was studying tribal history … Continue reading Six Years After, the Impact of My Dissertation
For years now few new details about our allotments at the Grand Ronde tribe have come to light. Our allotment system, created for all tribes in the United States Under the Dawes Allotment in Severalty Act of 1887, rolled out … Continue reading Re-analyzing the Allotments at Grand Ronde
This past year I have spent a fair amount of time researching subjects at Willamette University and Willamette Heritage Center. At the university their collections are very good for the local area and politics. Their Chemawa records are beyond most other archives in the area, especially their yearbook collection and photographs. I have contributed to the collection in a significant way and the availability of the collection to researchers is invaluable. Then, the Marion County Historical Society archives, a part of the Willamette Heritage Center, along with the Mission Mill, has good collections as well. Their mostly volunteer staff is … Continue reading Research at the Willamettes
Updated 4/16/2020
Loren Bommelyn wrote to tell me that there were some corrections needed to the Chronology. I welcomed this because this is the Tolowa’s history and not mine. He provided a detailed and Linguistically corrected series of edits to numerous of the events and corrected a few things about the essay. Loren also responds to comments by Shawn Hostler who had disagreed with my documented assertion that the dance house land was called the Henry Flat. Find Loren’s comments below the original chronology.
In about 1997, I met Loren Bommelyn as he began a Masters degree in Linguistics at the University of Oregon. For his second and last year I was his roommate on in a University of Oregon Moss Street graduate house. Loren and his family were very giving of their time and I grew to appreciate their positivism while I was engaged in my Masters studies (the Masters and PhD studies would eventually lead to me becoming the Cultural Resources Manager at my tribe, the Grand Ronde Tribe). Loren had almost single-handedly built the Nelechundun Dancehouse at Smith River, and preserved their language, brought back dancing and singing in the traditional language and songs. Loren wrote the Tolowa Dictionary and devised a new language preservation technique, which is now called the Master-Apprentice system and was implemented at the University of California, Berkeley, which teams elder language speakers with apprentices who become fluent in the program.
Tribal traditions, languages, ethnography are integral to research on the cultures of tribes. These are part the libraries of tribal knowledge that are somewhat preserves and lost over the past 200 or more years. Elders have stated that whenever an … Continue reading Freely given: Ethnographic collections and their Informants