Oregon Indigenous historian David G. Lewis provides an exhaustive overview of the Indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley in Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley, which includes documentation of various kinds: personal accounts, maps, photographs, and written records. These sources demonstrate what transpired when Native populations were met with outside forces that took their land, confined them to reservations, and enforced compulsory education of their children in a protracted, dehumanizing act of colonization.
Settlement of what is now known as Oregon involved the U.S. government and settlers displacing such Native peoples as the Kalapuya, Chinook, Molalla, and Klamath in coercive and violent ways, though history has left that story largely untold--or actively erased it. The official U.S. history includes mention of Indigenous peoples in the Declaration of Independence but refers to them as "merciless Indian savages," and places the burden of conflict entirely on the tribes.
"Tribes were in the way of American expansion and removal of the tribes to reservations was not enough," writes Lewis. "The Indian office began to institute policies that would cause the eventual elimination of Native people through systems of assimilation. Education could teach them western culture and eliminate their 'Indian' culture." The author tracks the trajectories of the various tribes and individual tribal members to demonstrate the full picture and pathos of cultural assimilation and destruction.
Lewis's book is a detailed account of Indigenous peoples and the impact of U.S. expansion throughout the 19th and 20th centuries--with clear reverberations into the present day. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.