Tribes have their own holidays. As sovereign nations the events and dates significant to the tribes are dates of their establishment, dates of their treaties and date of restoration and termination,and important people. Some events are not necessarily celebratory, like a termination date, or even a date of removal from our homelands to the reservation, … [Read more…]
This essay is inspired by the title of the book, “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside” by Doris Lessing, I read some years ago. I have to confess I did not read the whole book, but I did not really have to, the title alone is the inspiration. Since the beginning of contact, Europeans and … [Read more…]
The Molalla tribes, North, Santiam, and Umpqua valley (southern), were traders between the Chinookans to the north, the Klamaths to the south and the Paiutes to the east and the Kalapuyans in the west of their territory. Their name is a corruption of the Chinook Wawa word “ulali” meaning berry or huckleberry.
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 … [Read more…]
Working for the past fifteen years on important questions of western Oregon history. I have found that much of what we understand as the history of tribes is in fact mythologies of previous generations of historians and other social scientists. The phenomenon is as yet unstudied comprehensively but time after time I have encountered historic … [Read more…]