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# 2021-11-18 - Colonization of the Rogue Valley by Petey Pinecone
# An Incomplete History of the Colonization of the Rogue Valley by
# Petey Pinecone
(IMG) 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!
(HTM) Siletz Heritage Part 1
* A brief history of Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde on the
tribal government website.
(HTM) Grand Ronde History
* A brief history of the Klamath Tribes.
(HTM) 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,
(HTM) Siletz History Part 4
[Ben's note: for further reading, see also:
(DIR) * The Returner by John Medicine Horse Kelly
(DIR) * Prehistory and history of the Rogue River National Forest by Jeffrey M. Lalande
]
tags: article,history,native-american,oregon
# Tags
(DIR) article
(DIR) history
(DIR) native-american
(DIR) oregon