Oregon Indians: Voices from Two Centuries
Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2006.
First Edition. Hardcover.
Stephen Dow Beckham brings together commentary by Native Oregonians about the events affecting their lives in Oregon. It includes 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. These themes include: Encounters; Treaties and Warfare; Removals and Reservations; Walking the “White Man’s Road”; Prospects of a New Deal; The Disastrous Policy of Termination; and Restoration of Hope. Nearly seventy documents collected here – including treaty council minutes, court and congressional testimonies, letters, and passages from travelers’ journals – illustrate the struggles and indignities that come with adaptation. Each has a brief introduction that identifies the event and the speakers involved.
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, has become a possibility for Oregon tribes.
Item #902715ISBN: 9780870710889
6-1/4 x 9-1/2", olive green cloth with gilt spine titles, olive green endpapers, xv, 583pp, bibliography, index.
Slight spine lean, light soiling to edges of textblock, clean of owner's marks, tight, near fine in dust wrapper and protective mylar.
Price: $75.00