Oregon History 101 - "Two Hundred Years of Changes to Native Peoples of Western Oregon"

Presented by David Lewis, Ph.D. Cultural Resources Director, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde

Recorded at McMenamins Kennedy School, Portland, Oregon
Monday, September 8, 2014

Native societies in Oregon have seen monumental changes in the last two hundred years. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Oregon's tribes and bands have witnessed great losses of land to federal government allotment programs; death from European diseases; and the loss of culture and language from assimilation programs at Indian boarding schools. Through all these changes, Native cultures in Oregon have adapted, and continue to thrive and adapt.

David Lewis, Ph.D., Head of the Cultural Resources Department for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community, will describe what life was like for western Oregon tribes, and examine the changes that resulted from the resettlement of Native lands.

Oregon History 101 is a nine-month public history program series designed to give Oregonians a basic understanding of the state’s significant people, places, and events. Each month, historians will present a chapter of Oregon history, beginning with the earliest peoples and ending with the turn of the twenty-first century. The series will emphasize Oregon’s connection to historical themes in American history, including Native history, early exploration, western expansion, race, gender, and social justice, and the post-industrial economy. Series Editors Dr. Carl Abbott and Dr. William Lang have designed the series and invited many of the state’s most distinguished senior scholars to speak. Each presentation will feature images from the Oregon Historical Society archives and will be filmed and made available on the World Wide Web, along with research guides and other digitized material from The Oregon Encyclopedia and the Oregon History Project.

Many of the images prepared by the speakers for Oregon 101 presentations are copyrighted by institutions other than the Oregon Historical Society. The Oregon Historical Society may not make those images available on the Web, so the PowerPoints have been excluded from the videos.