2021-11-18 - Colonization of the Rogue Valley by Petey Pinecone =============================================================== An Incomplete History of the Colonization of the Rogue Valley by ================================================================ Petey Pinecone ============== Indigenous territories of southern Oregon Oftentimes, acknowledgments to the Indigenous peoples whose traditional lands we live on get lumped into larger ecological histories of those places. We hope to do a better job of more fully acknowledging the history and status of settler colonialism here in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion and southern so-called Oregon and northern so-called California as a whole, as its own story, instead of just a footnote. Of course, this is an imperfect and necessarily abbreviated history, drawn from my own conversations with friends and acquaintances within various tribes, and tribal histories, as told by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and Klamath Tribes governments. The middle valley of the Tak-elam (the Takelma name for the Rogue River), where the EF!J now lives, is the traditional homeland of the Takelma, Latgawa, Dakubetede, and Taltushtuntede peoples. The Takelma lived in the lower parts of the valley and the Latgawa (or Upland Takelma, as they have been called) lived higher up the valley and in the foothills of the Cascades, they both spoke a form of the Penutian language family. The Dakubetede (or Applegate Valley) and the Taltushtuntede (or Galice Creek) tribes spoke forms of the Athabaskan language, and lived in the Applegate and Galice Creek valleys respectively. The Shasta lived in the south end of the valley, near what is now the city of Ashland. They all lived primarily along creeks and rivers, where they used fire to cultivate the meadows for food, hunted deer and elk, caught salmon and steelhead from the annual upriver fish migrations, and foraged for berries, roots and other foods in the region. Downriver towards the coast lived the Shasta Costa (sometimes spelled Chasta Costa, different from the Shasta), and on the coast lived the Tututni, the Chetco and the Tolowa. On the eastern slope of the southern Cascades, in the headwaters, lakes and wetlands of the Klamath River live the Klamath people, and downriver live the Karuk, the Hupa, and the Yurok. To the north, along the Umpqua river, lived the Umpqua people. These peoples and their lands were largely free from contact with capitalist settler-colonial society until almost the 19th century. Trade and exploration ships had contact with coastal communities in the late 1700s, which brought diseases, including smallpox, that devastated Native communities, killing as much as 75 to 90 percent of the region's population with each pandemic wave. Colonization began with the fur trade that took root following the Lewis and Clark expedition at the start of the 19th century. What began as trade, in which Indigenous communities sold furs to white traders, quickly became "economic warfare" as the white trappers began setting their own trap lines in Indigenous territories without permission. In an insulting irony, the French traders called the Tak-elam the "Rogue River," so named because they claimed the Indigenous peoples here were "rogues." In the 1840s, white settlers began emigrating to the region in large numbers as part of the settler-colonial project of "manifest destiny." They mostly occupied the Willamette Valley (the Eugene-Portland area), which led to the US government declaring the Oregon Territory (comprised of present day Oregon, Washington, and Idaho) in 1848 and installing a territorial government. This marked the beginning of direct US colonial policy in the region. Two years later, the US instituted a policy of formalized land theft; giving Indigenous land to white settlers, despite the fact that no treaties had been signed with any of the many tribes whose lands were being stolen. As a history of the Siletz tribe describes, "Many settlers were not opposed to violent eviction or outright murder of our people if we occupied the best locations. Resistance to the brutality gained a reputation of savagery for many of our tribes, and it was became [sic] common practice, if not 'sport' in some districts (particularly southern Oregon) to shoot all native people who came into view." [1] In southern Oregon, including the Rogue Valley, the discovery of gold in the late 1840s and early 1850s brought an influx of white settlers and miners who were horrifically violent in their displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants from their lands, in what quickly became an extermination policy. In addition to volunteer militias of white miners and settlers that attacked and massacred Native peoples, the US army often joined the genocidal effort. In 1851, they attacked a Takelma village, killing 50 people and taking 30 more prisoners. The tribes resisted the genocide of colonization in what white society called the "Rogue River Indian Wars" of the 1850s. They disrupted settler emigration routes and won a number of outright battles with US soldiers and militias. After several years of clashes, combined with the cumulative impact of settler diseases, as well as routine violence and massacres by miners and settlers, the US government forced most of the Takelma, Latgawa, Shasta, Dakubetede and Taltushtuntede, as well as the Chasta Costa and Tututni peoples, to sign treaties relinquishing most of their lands. Even after signing treaties, tribes and bands fought back against the invaders, even briefly re-taking much of the southern coast. Following this resistance, and continued attacks and murders by white settlers and miners, most of the tribes along the Tak-elam and its tributaries were forcibly relocated to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations established by the US government in northwest Oregon, hundreds of miles away from their homes. Many of the treaties that tribes signed were ignored and violated by the US government, which sought only to dispossess the first peoples here of their lands for capitalist exploitation and extraction. Some managed to evade relocation and remain in their homelands or escaped from reservations. But forced displacement to distant reservations, along with the efforts by the US government to eliminate Native languages and cultural practices, means there largely aren't distinct Takelma, Latgawa, Dakubetede, or Taltushtuntede communities or culture that have been preserved to this day. Which also means that doing justice in acknowledging this history is pretty challenging. As is the case across the continent, colonization is not a singular event that took place and ended. It's an active, ongoing process that has changed forms and taken on new strategies, but has never stopped trying to erase and eliminate the Indigenous peoples whose land it has stolen. In the 1950s, the US government "terminated" many of the tribes in so-called Oregon, suddenly declaring that it no longer recognized those tribes as legitimate formalized organizations. The impact was devastating. In one example, the Klamath Tribes were stripped of their 1.8 million acre reservation. It took decades of struggle for tribes, including the Klamath Tribes, the Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Grand Ronde Tribes, to get their federal recognition restored. Some tribes haven't had their federal recognition restored by the US government, and are still fighting for formal recognition, which, among other things, would allow them greater protections for cultural resources. One of these is the Confederated Tribes of the Lower Rogue, comprised of survivors of Chetco, Tututni, Shasta Costa, and Takelma tribes from the lower end of the Tak-elam, on and near the coast, who weren't incorporated into the Siletz or Grand Ronde reservations. The process of settlement and forced displacement here in southern Oregon followed the same pattern of colonization throughout the continent. Indigenous right to land was acknowledged only when extractive settler-colonial projects didn't have an immediate interest in it, and as soon as that changed, settlers moved in by force, and the US government would force tribes off their lands to "settle the conflict" and "secure the rights of its citizens." The connection between colonialism and extraction should be obvious; settler colonial society enacted land theft and genocide in order to expand the capitalist economy. Wars against the Native peoples here aided capitalist industries. This was partly why white settlers made calculated attacks aimed at prolonging them and sabotaging peace negotiations--they knew there was a lot of money to be made off the wars (like selling supplies to the Army). Mining, logging and large-scale agriculture were the main industries behind the push to displace Native communities and seize their lands. The fact that these are the same industries people are still fighting against today in defense of the land here is no coincidence--it's an uninterrupted, ongoing form of colonization. Here in the Rogue Valley, Native communities regularly lit and managed small fires in the forests, which were crucial to forest health, in addition to creating food habitat (meadows for acorn-bearing oaks, driving deer and other game out to be hunted, etc). Colonization removed those Indigenous communities--and their traditional ecological knowledge and practices--from the land, and then settler society instituted more than 100 years of fire suppression (not starting fires and putting out all wildfires as quickly as possible) and industrial forestry. Extractive logging on a massive scale clear cut most of the older, healthy, resilient forests and replanted them with monocrops of dense plantations--the polar opposite of what Indigenous communities had done for thousands of years. The current reality--climate change driven "megafires" and a push to expand the extensive logging which exacerbates them--is a direct result and continuation of colonization. It should be met with an end to industrial forestry and should follow the leadership of tribes to return healthy fire to the forests. Mostly, this new debate over fire and "forest management" is about "federally-owned" public forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. As public lands, they're supposed to "belong to everyone," and that's a message that the environmental movement has widely embraced and reinvigorated in the last few years as communities push back against schemes by the Trump administration to throw open the doors to mining, logging, oil and gas drilling, and other forms of extraction. But rarely, if ever, do we pause to consider how those lands became public lands. They were stolen from Indigenous people by force and through genocide and forced relocation, and when we don't at the very least acknowledge that, claiming them as public lands that "belong to all of us," we perpetuate that colonial legacy. A particularly glaring example of this is the Winema National Forest, which lays to the east over the Cascade mountains. When the US government terminated the Klamath Tribes in 1954, it also turned 635,000 acres of what had been their reservation into the Winema National Forest. It did so at the behest of the timber industry, which worried that an influx of timber on the market, due to the reservation lands being privatized and immediately logged, would shrink the price of lumber. Again, the settler-colonial state dispossesses Indigenous peoples for the benefit of capitalist extraction. There are plenty of other examples of extraction happening here that are the result of colonization. In acknowledging the original inhabitants on whose stolen lands we (and now the EF! Journal) live, we must also acknowledge that the extractive capitalist industries we fight are themselves the ongoing forces of settler-colonialism. Not so that we can claim labels for ourselves, or declare that a treesit is "a form of decolonization," but so we can recognize that colonization isn't something that ended, or just a story to mention formulaically at the beginning of large gatherings, rather it's a continuing struggle; and it's our responsibility as people living on stolen lands to be part of the fight against it. Resources for More Information ============================== Below are some resources for more information about the tribes whose lands these are and the history of colonization in the area. Of course, there is much more to this story than this article has space for. * Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians history series. This one is great, very in depth, has lots of info, and a great bibliography of more sources! Siletz Heritage Part 1 * A brief history of Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde on the tribal government website. Grand Ronde History * A brief history of the Klamath Tribes. Klamath History Books to check out for more info: * Charles Wilkinson's "The People Are Dancing Again" University of Washington Press (2010) * M. Sue Van Laere's "Fine Words and Promises" Serendipity Historical Research (2010) * E.A. Schwartz's "The Rogue River Indian War And Its Aftermath, 1850-1980" University of Oklahoma Press (1997) [1] Part IV of Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians history page, Siletz History Part 4 [Ben's note: for further reading, see also: * The Returner by John Medicine Horse Kelly * Prehistory and history of the Rogue River National Forest by Jeffrey M. Lalande ] tags: article,history,native-american,oregon Tags ==== article history native-american oregon