Oregon Indians
Voices from Two Centuries
In this deeply researched volume, Stephen Dow Beckham brings together commentary by Native Americans about the events affecting their lives in Oregon. Now available in paperback for the first time, this volume presents first-person accounts of events threatening, changing, and shaping the lives of Oregon Indians, from “first encounters” in the late eighteenth century to modern tribal economies.
The book's seven thematic sections are arranged chronologically and prefaced with introductory essays that provide the context of Indian relations with Euro-Americans and tightening federal policy. Each of the nearly seventy documents has a brief introduction that identifies the event and the speakers involved. Most of the book's selections are little known. Few have been previously published, including treaty council minutes, court and congressional testimonies, letters, and passages from travelers’ journals.
Oregon Indians opens with the arrival of Euro-Americans and their introduction of new technology, weapons, and diseases. The role of treaties, machinations of the Oregon volunteers, efforts of the US Army to protect the Indians but also subdue and confine them, and the emergence of reservation programs to “civilize” them are recorded in a variety of documents that illuminate nineteenth-century Indian experiences.
Twentieth-century documents include Tommy Thompson on the flooding of the Celilo Falls fishing grounds in 1942, as well as Indian voices challenging the "disastrous policy of termination," the state's prohibition on inter-racial marriage, and the final resting ground of Kennewick Man. Selections in the book's final section speak to the changing political atmosphere of the late twentieth century, and suggest that hope, rather than despair, became a possibility for Oregon tribes.
Children of the Stars
Indigenous Science Education in a Reservation Classroom
In the 1990s, Ed Galindo, a high school science teacher on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, took a team of Shoshone-Bannock students first to Johnson Space Center in Texas and then to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These students had submitted a project to a competitive NASA program that was usually intended for college students—and they earned a spot to see NASA astronauts test out their experiment in space. The students designed and built the project themselves: a system to mix phosphate and water in space to create a fertilizer that would aid explorers in growing food on other planets.
In Children of the Stars, Galindo relates his experience with this first team and with successive student teams, who continued to participate in NASA programs over the course of a decade. He discusses the challenges of teaching American Indian students, from the practical limits of a rural reservation school to the importance of respecting and incorporating Indigenous knowledge systems. In describing how he had to earn the trust of his students to truly be successful as their teacher, Galindo also touches on the complexities of community belonging and understanding; although Indigenous himself, Galindo is not a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes and was still an outsider who had as much to learn as the students.
Children of the Stars is the story of students and a teacher, courage and hope. Written in a conversational style, it’s an accessible story about students who were supported and educated in culturally relevant ways and so overcame the limitations of an underfunded reservation school to reach great heights.
Salmon is Everything
Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed
Kaiaulu
Gathering Tides
To Win the Indian Heart
Music at Chemawa Indian School
Ancestral Places
Understanding Kanaka Geographies
A Deeper Sense of Place
Stories and Journeys of Collaboration in Indigenous Research
Asserting Native Resilience
Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis
Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau
The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer
The First Oregonians, Second Edition
Originally published in 1991, The First Oregonians has been revised and expanded for a new generation of Oregonians. It provides a comprehensive view of Oregon's native peoples from the past to the present.
In this remarkable volume, Oregon Indians tell their own stories—more than half of the chapters are written by members of Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes. Using oral histories and personal recollections, these chapters vividly depict not only a history of decimation and decline, but also a contemporary view of cultural revitalization, renewal, and continuity. The First Oregonians also includes essays by prominent Northwest scholars exploring geography, federal-Indian relations, language, and art.
No other book offers as wide a variety of views and stories about the historical and contemporary experience of Oregon Indians. The First Oregonians is the definitive volume for anyone interested in the fascinating story of Oregon’s first peoples.
Contributors: C. Melvin Aikens, Stephen Dow Beckham, Marilyn Couture, Douglas Deur, Yvonne Hajda, Eugene Hunn, Dell Hymes, Jennifer Karson, Robert Kentta, Bill Mercer, Brent Merrill, Wil Phinney, Michael Rondeau, Howard P. Roy, Minerva T. Soucie, Kathryn Anne Toepel, George B. Wasson, Jr., and Elizabeth Woody.
About the Publisher
Oregon Council for the Humanities is an independent, nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities that offers Oregonians the opportunity to reflect upon and discuss the critical issues and ideas of our time.