Epilogue

Like many Native people from Oregon, I learned most about my native heritage from my father, who would take me into the forest to cut firewood, to camp, or to take the family to the coast for the day. As a young person we occasionally traveled through the old Grand Ronde Reservation, but in the 1970s, there was nearly nothing “Native” in Grand Ronde, except a bookstore and an old hotel, the native presence seemingly erased. This is the experience of many Native people in western Oregon, their tribes terminated by federal policies. Termination and the remote rural locations of reservations caused many non-Native people to believe that Native people were gone, extinct. These factors influenced the lack of knowledge about Native peoples, whose culture, history, contributions, and whose continued presence was also ignored for generations by historians and educators.

In the United States today, the only exposure most students have gotten to information about Native peoples is in their school’s annual Thanksgiving pageants, where many have crafted paper feathers and stood in a row on the school stage depicting a fictional history of Tribal-European brotherhood, while their parents took photos. In Oregon, students are exposed to stories about how American pioneers came to Oregon in covered wagons braving fierce Indian attacks on their holy pilgrimage. In high schools, in American history classes, students read about Lewis and Clark and their heroic journey across the continent in 1805-1806 to found Oregon for the United States. In most cases these histories depict white American settlers saving the “Indians” from their savagery.

In Oregon, the majority of students learn next to nothing about Native peoples, their cultures, their experiences with colonization, and their eventual removal to make way for thousands of white American settlers to claim their homelands. Few people learn of the great injustices done to tribes by taking their lands, and making wars upon them to remove them from their villages, nor that they suffered for generations on poorly administered Indian reservations. The majority of all histories of Oregon do not include the perspectives of Native peoples, as the majority of all histories about Native peoples written in books or taught, are from the perspective of non-native white scholars. The history of Native peoples has been severely neglected, and the few books that do exist do not begin to tell the history or help people understand the culture of some 100 tribes in Oregon.

The state of Oregon was created by Americans as a place where white Americans would come to find their Manifest Destiny, the assumed right of white Americans to settle and own the west regardless of the presence of Native peoples. Native peoples in Oregon were only seen as useful when they were helpful to pioneers in building their homesteads, or helping to bring in the crops, otherwise they were to remain on federal reservations, far away from white settlements.

Colonial policies like this were in place for centuries across the Americas with European countries taking lands from Native peoples, making Native people slaves to colonization, and exploiting their labor to build frontier economies. Spain initiated the conquest in the Caribbean, and then throughout the Americas, first as explorers, then as colonists. Later they were joined by Russia, Portugal, Great Britain, Denmark, and France. These European countries sought the expansion of their empires through taking land and exploiting resources, including Native peoples. The United States became a late player in expansionism, first declaring independence from Great Britain, then continuing to expand land claims, influence, and exploitation westward, in a violent manner, comparable to that of the Europeans.

On the Northwest Coast, Spanish and Russian explorers were really the first to explore the region, followed closely by Britain, and the United States. And while Spain was the first to claim vast resources on the west coast, in the form of Baja and Alta California, they did not settle the region as quickly as the Americans from the United States. American expansionism was propelled by competition with several other colonial countries, Britain, Russia, France, and Spain, and once the U.S. decided to take the Pacific coast, white American citizens answered the call to settle in support of their young democracy. American settlers flooded to the West eventually causing the United States to initiate a war on Spanish Mexico to take the whole northern part of the Spanish claim, including the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of other territories (Mexican-American War, 1846-1848). In a swath across the center of the continent, the United States purchased the claim to the Louisiana Territory from France, which included parts of the southeast and the American Plains (Louisiana Purchase, 1803), and later settled the boundary between British Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel (Oregon Treaty 1846). Still later, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia (1867) to complete the continental United States.

The story of these competing colonial powers on the Pacific coast historically has completely ignored the impact of colonization on the tribal nations. The whole of the region was occupied and owned by many hundreds of tribes who were ever-present and encountered change everywhere the colonists landed. The tribes became the victims in many ways of the competition over which colonial power would take the Pacific coast in their push for global economic and political dominance. Tribal nations collapsed and many nearly went extinct as disease, war, genocide, and violent conflicts caused native populations to decline dramatically. At the same time, these colonizing powers continued exploiting Native peoples’ labor for growing their power and wealth.

It is only in the recent period, in the past 20-30 years, that Native perspectives about their history and culture have begun to be written and legitimized. As noted previously, Oregon history has historically not included the native perspectives of what Native peoples experienced during colonization, much of which has yet to be researched and written today.

In this history of the Spanish exploration of the Northwest Coast and California, there is another story of the colonization of Native lands that is rarely represented in Oregon history. The Spanish sailors were the first Europeans to visit many tribes on the coast and it is important to understand this story, so that the next generations of native scholars can research the native experience during Spanish exploration. Native scholars can bring meaning to these historic encounters as they apply historic and cultural understandings to the actions of tribes who met with and traded with these strange and foreign men for the first time. This history will be every bit as terrible and heart-breaking as those histories of the other colonizers, but necessary to fully tell the history and context of human interactions during first contacts on the Pacific coast.

David G. Lewis, PhD (Santiam, Chinook, Molalla, Takelma)

Salem, Oregon, October 29th, 2019