Rethinking Oregon History

 

Assembled from the Oregon Historical Society website (descriptions are by OHS) & others (where indicated)

by Kristin K for Racial & Social Equity Tillamook

 

Confronting the Past: Difficult Questions and Public History Today 2019 Blog by OHS board member

At its July 2019 annual retreat, the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) Board of Trustees engaged in conversation about naming and historical memory as part of ongoing efforts to help guide the organization in fulfilling its mission to “preserve our state’s history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon.” OHS board member Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols led that discussion and explores what it means to illuminate the past in more complete ways.

 

Historic Monuments mostly fail to acknowledge white supremacy. OPB Think Outloud, Oct 29, 2020. (12 min audio)

There are nearly 3,000 designated historic landmarks across the country, each with their own set of descriptive plaques and associated tours. But how many of those monuments contain information about the racial injustice or white supremacy that were inherent in their history? That’s a question University of Oregon professor Laura Pulido has set out to answer. Pulido joins us to discuss how these monuments reflect what the U.S. chooses to remember and represent in history. Includes discussion of Oregon monuments

 

“What’s in a name?”: The University of Oregon, De-Naming Controversies, and the Ethics of Public Memory OHQ pdf 2019

In this essay, Matthew Dennis and Samuel Reis-Dennis explore the significance of honorific building naming on college campuses. According to Dennis and Reis-Denis, “questions about honorific naming opportunities…are not just academic — they are edifying. In 2015, African American students at the University of Oregon presented university president Michael Schill with a list of demands to address racism on campus, including removing the names of Matthew Deady and Frederic Dunn from campus buildings. Deady, a prominent lawyer, judge, and president of the 1857 Constitutional Convention, held pro-slavery views and advocated for black exclusion but also protected Chinese who faced discrimination and violence. Dunn, a classics professor at the university from 1898 to 1937, helped lead Eugene’s chapter of the KKK as its Exalted Cyclops. Ultimately, Schill decided to rename the Dunn building but not Deady Hall, a move the authors suggest “excused the inexcusable,” and elevated Deady’s efforts on behalf of Chinese inhabitants over his racist views.

 

The Earliest American Map of the Northwest Coast: John Hoskins’s A Chart of the Northwest Coast of America Sketched on board the Ship Columbia Rediviva . . . 1791 & 1792 OHQ pdf 2017

Between 1790 and 1793, John Hoskins created a map of the Northwest Coast of North America that included ninety-one place names documenting Native communities. The map is the earliest example of such detailed documentation by an American and was rediscovered in 1852 at the Cartographic Archives Division of the National Archives and Records Administration. In this research article, James Walker and William Lang provide a historical context for the map, including comparative charts that break down the Native names that Hoskins documented into seven cultural groups. According to Walker and Lang, the map “opens a window to what American traders knew, what they perceived about the region, and what they may have understood about the Native landscape.”

 

The Unwanted Sailor: Exclusions of Black Sailors in the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Southeast OHQ pdf 2016

Jacki Hedlund Tyler, a recipient of the 2014 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Graduate Research Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History, documents little-known Pacific Northwest sailor laws and their role in racial oppression in Oregon. Tyler compares Oregon’s early black sailor laws, beginning prior to the Civil War and continuing past statehood in 1859, with Negro Seaman Acts of slave-holding states in the Atlantic Southeast. On both coasts the laws helped “legitimize claims of authority and ownership made by white inhabitants over non-white populations” and were “linked to debates over the institution of slavery; the desire to regulate maritime trade; and efforts to prohibit the spread of ‘contagion’ in the form of racial hostilities.” This research article is an important addition to the history of black American sailors during the nineteenth century.

 

White American Violence on Tribal Peoples of the Oregon Coast OHQ pdf 2019

In this Oregon Voices essay, David G. Lewis and Thomas J. Connolly discuss how “acts of physical injury, murder, and trauma” against Native people “provide insight into how White supremacy was institutionalized in Oregon.” Beginning with the fur-trade era in Oregon Country, Lewis and Connolly use primary sources and secondary scholarship to document how people of European descent established new laws and customs in the region, ignoring tribal governance that had existed long before their arrival. That violence was marked on the landscape through battles and removal, in the legal system that provided no justice for Native people, and on paper with written words. Lewis and Connolly argue that “bearing witness to this violence is crucial to understanding” the foundations of White supremacy and “is important to the process of recovery and healing efforts of Native people” — a process that is still young.

 

Rethinking Oregon Settlement.  Online lecture 2019

Two historians encourage attendees to consider the complexities surrounding OR settlement.

•Katy Barber, Oregon & the ‘Rise of the Anglo World’

The westward migration of thousands of Americans in the nineteenth century was part of a much larger mass movement of people across the globe between roughly 1815 and the close of the nineteenth century, what historian James Belich calls “the rise of the Anglo world.” This presentation will strip the Oregon narrative of any remaining residue of exceptionalism to consider how it fits into a global discussion of the movements of permanent settlers and laboring classes and the factors—improvements in transportation, rise of mass literacy, wars against and removals of Indigenous people, among others—that made possible their migration.

•Melinda Marie Jetté, The Settlement of the Willamette Valley in Global Context, 1800–1870

During the nineteenth century, historians and Oregon Trail pioneers crafted a popular story of Oregon’s founding that emphasized the exploits and accomplishments of Anglo-American settlers. In recent years, Native peoples, scholars, and writers have re-examined this powerful mythology to create a more complex and multi-faceted history of the Pacific Northwest. The story of the settlement of the Willamette Valley, the destination of choice for many Oregon Trail pioneers, is particularly compelling, as it was one of the earliest sites of intercultural contact among the Indigenous groups, fur traders, and Euro-American settlers.

 

Oregon, Indigenous Nations, Manifest Destiny, and the Doctrine of Discovery Online video lecture for OHS by Robert J Miller 2019

The “Doctrine of Discovery” is the international law principle that European nations used to claim most of the non-European world. This talk will explain the elements that make up this law and argue that the Doctrine of Discovery morphed into “American Manifest Destiny” and was used, and is still being used today, to justify the acquisition of lands and assets of Indian Nations and peoples.
[Talks about Captain Gray at around 1:09:00]

 

York of the Corps of Discovery: Interpretations of York’s Character and His Role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition OHQ pdf 2003

The celebration of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial has stimulated much academic and public discussion about the Corps of Discovery and its exploration of the West. During the past two hundred years, much has been written about expedition members’ scientific observations, the political implications of their explorations, and the cultural consequences of contact between the Corps members and the indigenous populations they encountered. Considerably less attention has been paid to the sole black member of the Corp—York, the slave of William Clark. Professor Darrell Millner adds to the sparse literature on York by documenting his contributions to the expedition, examining the “racial realities and dynamics of American life” at the time, and scrutinizing “how York is portrayed in the scholarly and popular writing that has been published in the two hundred years since 1805–1806.” Millner incorporates recent documentation that challenges long-standing ideas regarding the status of York as a slave and his relationship with Clark in the post-expedition period.

 

“We’ll all Start at Even”: White Egalitarianism and the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act OHQ pdf 2019

Kenneth R. Coleman examines the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Claim Act, a bill unprecedented in its generous land distribution and unique in that it was the only federal land-distribution act that specifically limited land grants by race. Oregon’s early political leaders “repeatedly invoked a Jacksonian vision of egalitarianism rooted in White supremacy to justify their actions” and successfully lobbied Congress to allow White settlers to seize Indigenous lands before they were ceded through federal treaties. The DCLA allowed privatization of over 2.5 million acres of Oregon land and influenced future land-distribution legislation, such as the 1863 Homestead Act. In using land as a tool of racial exclusion, Coleman argues that “Oregon’s early political leaders initiated a pattern that continued well into the twentieth century,” and “any serious attempt to challenge White supremacy in Oregon must engage with the economic legacy of institutionalized racism limiting access to real estate and, as such, wealth and social power.”

 

Completing Lewis and Clark’s Westward March: Exhibiting a History of Empire at the 1905 Portland World’s Fair OHQ pdf 2015

Lisa Blee explicates the complexities and conundrums of American culture and the legacy of American expansionism set in motion with Lewis and Clark’s expeditionary westward march. The Lewis and Clark Exposition — Portland’s 1905 World’s Fair — functioned both as a celebration of America’s historical progress and as tacit justification for further colonial and economic ambitions. The subject matter and peoples on display at the fair, reflective of the romantic historicism of Frederick Jackson Turner, provided tangible links to an acceptable past and emotional testaments to the supremacy of the American way of life in the face of an ever-expanding world marketplace.

 

Pioneer Problems: “Wanton Murder,” Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History OHQ pdf 2020

In this research article, Marc James Carpenter examines the Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast (IWV-NPC), an organization founded by former volunteer soldiers in Oregon and Washington, and how their efforts to reshape historical memory fit within the larger pioneer narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a narrative that often skewed Euro-American violence against Native people. Pioneer societies and historians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distorted these historical narratives through omission, ignoring settlers’ violence toward Native people and condemning their retribution. As Carpenter suggests, “a true history of the Pacific Northwest must reckon with the legions of Euro-American pioneers who, during the 1840s, the 1850s, and beyond, pursued pogroms and inflicted acts of workaday racial violence in pursuit of a White ethno-state.”

 

“White Supremacy & Resistance” OHQ Winter 2019. Full Issue OHQ pdf 2019

This special issue features articles that explore the history of White supremacy and resistance in Oregon. Authors discuss topics including Whiteness, settler colonialism, racial exclusion and land ownership, abolitionism and anti-slavery politics, violence, labor and organizing, White supremacist organizations, and forms of resistance to White supremacy.

 

“We were at our journey’s end”: Settler Sovereignty Formation in Oregon OHQ pdf 2019

When Esther Bell Hanna migrated to Oregon Territory in September 1852 and documented in her diary her first glimpse of the Columbia River, “she looked out over a landscape that contained relationships both legible and illegible to her.” In this research article, Barber explores those relationships through the lens of settler colonialism and White supremacy that “alienated Indigenous people from their lands through ordinary acts of fencing and plowing fields” and “disorganized terror and calculated war.” Barber also discusses acts of disruption and resistance to White supremacy, and argues that “to grapple with the foundations, legacies, and persistent characteristics of settler colonialism and its twin — White supremacy — is to grapple with the inequities that shape Oregon’s history, present, and future in ways both symbolic and material.”

 

The Long Journey to Reveal the Oregon Trail's Racist History Narratively.com blog 2017

As the U.S. grapples with its legacy of prejudice, one parent is bringing the fight to Oregon public schools.“We felt kids get a lot of history about the Oregon Trail, but rarely does it discuss [the pioneers'] impact, of their meeting Native Americans or the African Americans who were on the trail,” says Alperin. “It’s basically a white picture. The untold history is what we were trying to get at.” [Recap of struggle to change how Oregon history is taught to elementary school kids.]