Subjects
grand ronde, oregon city, tribe, tyee, settler colonialism, kinship, racial exclusion, donation land act, reservations, indian removal, Rogue River War, Willamette Valley
Abstract
Throughout its history the United States government professed the goal of assimilation of North America’s indigenous peoples. Whatever words Americans used to frame this social project, it was clearly the result of a view of Native societies as inferior to their own. In investigating the events surrounding the colonization of the Willamette Valley in the 1850s it becomes clear that apartheid, rather than assimilation, was the goal and the result of American colonization in Oregon. Working back from the text “My Life: The Autobiography of Louis Kenoyer,” dictated to anthropologist Melville Jacobs in the 1920s by a Tualatin man about his childhood in Grand Ronde, this examines appearances in the historical records of his father, Peter Kinai, his grandfather, Kamatc, and his great uncle, treaty chief Kiakuts to better illustrate the effects of historic events on real people.
DOI
10.15760/mcnair.2021.15.1.6
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37003
Recommended Citation
Jenks, Bruce
(2021)
"American Apartheid in the Walamt Valley: The Creation of Grand Ronde and the Struggle to Assimilate to a Segregated Society,"
PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal:
Vol. 15:
Iss.
1, Article 6.
https://doi.org/10.15760/mcnair.2021.15.1.6