Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley

From oral history to written word, learn about the history of Oregon through the stories of the Indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley.

The Willamette Valley is rich with history--its riverbanks, forests, and mountains home to the tribes of Kalapuya, Chinook, Molalla, and more for thousands of years. This history has been largely unrecorded, incomplete, poorly researched, or partially told. In these stories, enriched by photographs and maps, Oregon Indigenous historian David G. Lewis combines years of researching historical documents and collecting oral stories, highlighting Native perspectives about the history of the Willamette Valley as they experienced it.

The timeline spans the first years of contact between settlers and tribes, the takeover of tribal lands and creation of reservations by the US Federal Government, and the assimilation efforts of boarding schools. Lewis shows the resiliency of Native peoples in the face of colonization.

Undoing the erasure of these stories reveals the fuller picture of the colonization and changes experienced by the Native peoples of the Willamette Valley absent from other contemporary histories of Oregon.

David G. Lewis, PhD, and member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, is a recognized researcher, scholar, writer and assistant professor of anthropology and Indigenous studies at Oregon State University. His publications include "Willamette Valley Treaties," "A History of Native Peoples of the Eugene, Cascades & Coast Region," and others. For more than twenty years, Lewis has been passionate about studying the original histories of the people of Oregon and California and has an extensive record of collaborative projects with regional scholars, tribes, local governments, and communities. Lewis's research specializes in the history of Kalapuyans and other Western Oregon tribes, which he explores through journal essays and on his blog The Quartux Journal. He currently resides in Chemeketa, now Salem, Oregon, with his wife, Donna, and two sons, Saghaley and Inatye.