Book Review: Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley

Title: Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley 

Author: David G. Lewis

Date: 2023

Publisher: Ooligan (Portland State University)

ISBN: 9781947845404

Length: 211 pages

Quote: "The Kalapuyans consisted of approximately nineteen different autonomous tribes and bands."

Lewis is, he tells us, a descendant of one of these groups. The "tribes and bands" spoke different languages but had a sort of lingua franca, the "Chinuk Wawa," that mixed words from these languages into something relatively easy for everyone to learn. Wawa apparently meant a meeting and, hence, the language used at meetings, 

The purpose of these meetings seems to have been trade. To the extent that they had governments at all these groups had their own governments, but very little is known about how their governments worked. A tribe is a large extended family; decisions may be referred to an elder, or elders. A band is a smaller group of people, often organized for a specific short-term activity and led by the person considered to do that activity best--or even to do the leading, as distinct from the activity, best. It would be interesting to have more information on how the Kalapuyans, or people of the rich valley land in what is now Oregon, organized themselves, but apparently that information was available only in the oral history, or pre-history, that was lost when these people were exposed to Euro-American diseases.

Compared with other indigenous groups they seem to have been a remarkably peaceable people. They ate mostly plants and fish. They lived in a place where plants and fish were abundant. Life was good to the people Lewis collectively calls Kalapuyans. They had time to make things they found useful, had quite a lot of time to trade, recognized private wealth and were likely to be recognized as having a lot of it. Wealth was respected; sometimes the richest people in a group were identified as the chiefs, though the words used suggests that in some cases this may have been a misunderstanding; leadership may have been inherited, or conferred on people after special achievements. French and later Anglo-American "settlers" were respected because they were obviously rich and had good things to trade. Before drinking and gambling became common, at least, disagreements--even homicides--could be settled by payment. Inability to pay for things might result in enslavement, but since all of these people worked continually to acquire their wealth, lived in tents, and migrated around their territories following the plants and animals they ate, the slaves' daily existence was probably similar to the slaveowners'. Their civilization never developed much in the way of technology but it reached what may well have been its :Golden Age" phrase before the plagues of measles, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases appeared.

So, although there was some direct opposition to the Anglo-Americans' taking over, there wasn't very much. Anglo-Americans basically bought land from grief-stricken survivors of groups that were in the process of being decimated. It was all peaceful and civilized except that, as the new system of land ownership and farming was introduced, the original land owners' claims were often ignored. Farming the Willamette Valley disrupted the ecology that had kept fish and nutritious plant foods plentiful. The staple foods the Anglo-Americans brought in and relied on were not, in fact, as healthy a diet as the fish, roots, seeds, leaves, and fruits of indigenous plants had been. The Kalapuyans rejected their shares of things like salt pork and wheat flour, and then starved; or they ate those things, felt sick, and were soberly reported as having died of measles before they'd even had time to go down with tuberculosis. They failed to establish use of the farmland that was agreed to be theirs. That land was then claimed by other Anglo-Americans, with the result that Lewis grew up among people who laughed bitterly about the cliche of friendly Anglo-American neighbors who recognized that their farm should have belonged to some landless person of Kalapuyan descent, and they said they were sorry, but they refused to give the land back.

Kalapuyans who didn't assimilate immediately into Anglo-style farm life were herded into "reservation" land, which they didn't seem to want. They preferred, if possible, to stay in the Anglo-American towns where they were accepted only as laborers and segregated into "squaw town" neighborhoods, but were free to work and trade. They were not massacred or persecuted, exactly. Only, somehow, even people who could prove descent from the richest of the really old families in the Willamette Valley tended, by Lewis's time, to be the poorest people in the Valley.

This is the sad, general story Lewis tells. It adds something to the information that is likely to be available to the reader; few people know the names of the Kalapuyan groups, their leaders, or their surviving families, and Lewis has documented several of those. It explains how, as "race" thinking and racism came into fashion in Europe and the Eastern States, people destroyed the records of their claims to benefits from tribal membership in order to get the more desirable benefits of fitting into mainstream Anglo-American communities, and thus obliterated any chance of gaining restitution when Anglo-American thought was more sympathetic to indigenous Americans. 

More information might have been available, if he'd dug for it, about the languages, crafts, foods, stories, and the rest of the traditions that may or may not have been completely lost. Lewis seems to anticipate a lack of interest in the traditions. His focus is on establishing that the indigenous culture of Oregon recognized private property and that the heirs of much of this fertile land have been cheated out of their share of it.

This book contains very little of the melodrama people expect a "western" story to contain. It's worth reading, along with the "western" stories that Louis L'Amour and less gifted writers made into novels and movies, just to offset those. Even in Oregon there were a few battles; in other states there were more battles, feuds, and duels. The battles were a relatively small part of "How the West Was Won." A bigger part was the claiming of land for Anglo-style agriculture///through the courage, thrift, and hard work of "our" White ancestors, yes, and also through the disease-infested filth many Anglo-Americans wore like a sort of armor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the bigotry they affected between about 1850 and 1950.  Our own personal ancestors may not have been racists but they had to survive in a racist system, perhaps by exploiting it, or even by subverting it.

Some residents of other States know Oregon only through the popular children's stories Beverly Cleary, "the girl from Yamhill," wrote about the fictional Quimby family who lived on Klickitat Street. "Yamhill" and "Quimby" and even "Klickitat" sound as if they were names of English origin; this book explains what sort of names they really are. The Quimby family, especially the extrovert youngest child "Ramona the Pest," could be Anglo-American. Anglo-Americans named their daughters "Ramona," too. Around 1950 that was apparently where many Kalapuyan people were, or wanted to be: accepted as White, probably at least half White in terms of actual ancestry, the parents employed in well paid jobs in White suburban neighborhoods, the children walking to school and coming home every night rather than being crowded into unsanitary boarding schools, and no real proof of whether their family name might have derived from an English name like Quenby rather than a Kalapuyan name like Quinaby. 

Ramona the Pest would be well along in middle age by now, and, without wanting to displace any actual farmers, she just might feel that banks, at least, ought to be required to give her the next good farm they acquire. You might feel that way, too. This book will support such a feeling.

For those who live in Oregon, this book even provides a few--apparently not all--of the original names of the settlements that grew, under Anglo management, into the State's biggest towns and cities.