The massive lake known in English as Crater Lake attracts visitors from all over the world to admire its splendor and beauty. However, what's lesser known about the lake, called giiwas in the Klamath language, is that it’s of great cultural and spiritual significance to the Klamath Tribes (Klamath, Modoc, Yahooskin).
Klamath oral tradition described the history of the volcanic lake long before scientists would “discover” its origins for themselves, more than 7,000 years after tribes experienced it.
Native peoples struggle to exert influence over prevailing narratives surrounding the history of colonization and genocide in North America — colonizers go to great lengths to seize and maintain control of the narrative.
Although in the description of Crater Lake National Park, the National Park Service mentions “Native Americans witnessed” the formation of giiwas more than 7,000 years ago, there is little reference to the Klamath Tribes’ cultural and spiritual relationship with the lake, nor the other regional tribes that knew the lake, such as the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua.
Research shows non-Natives in the United States hold many misconceptions about Native American peoples, and academics see the effects of ignoring Indigenous voices and history in Oregon, where most are unfamiliar with the state’s history of federal Indian boarding schools and some commonly used “Native American” phrases are of questionable origin.
Tribal histories and the extent of genocidal atrocities white settlers committed against Indigenous peoples are not widely publicized. That information is mostly known by those who seek the information themselves.
Often, the only stories breaking into the mainstream are stories of despair, strife and loss among Native peoples. These narratives align squarely with settler-colonial values, which claim Indigenous peoples are incompatible with modernity. Stories of Indigenous excellence, joy and resilience amid struggle frequently go untold, furthering the notion Native peoples are a struggling minority with little going for them.
Ignored, rewritten, reframed
Some stories about historical Native American figures and places receiving the most attention are not true at all, or the facts are grossly manipulated to fit a particular narrative. Such is the case of the settler fairytale of the “first Thanksgiving” or the fetishization of Matoaka, known to most as “Pocahontas.”
In Oregon, “Chief Multnomah” is an oft-cited Native American figure, though whether he even existed is the subject of debate.
Professor David Lewis (Takelma, Chinook, Molalla, Santiam Kalapuya) is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at Oregon State University and specializes in research on the tribes of Western Oregon. He says several commonly used “Native American” names and legends, like the supposed “Native American name” for Mount Hood, Wy’east, and “Chief Multnomah of the Willamette Tribe,” are of undeterminable origin, if not outright fictional.
“So, as a historian, I'm looking, trying to find the origins of these things," Lewis said. "Sometimes, I can't find an origin. The only thing I can figure out is somebody made it up.”
Further, peddling false narratives portraying settlers and Indigenous peoples as having a mutually beneficial relationship is more palatable for non-Native audiences — and certainly more profitable.
“A lot of people have profited off this stuff, just making up information, making up stuff that there's no origin for (that) we can find,” Lewis said. “It's one thing to have the names of things, and to question what those are, you also really got to question the story and different parts of the story. Sometimes, anthropologists and historians and pioneers will add pieces in the stories that don't really exist. They kind of make up stuff.”
Frederick Homer Balch, a white author from the 19th century, was one such profiteer. His novel, “Bridge of the Gods: A Romance of Indian Oregon” tells the story of “Chief Multnomah” and mentions “Wy’east.” The novel was a hit among white audiences, and despite its fictional status, the stories within were taken at face value.
“In Bridge of the Gods, (Balch) is saying that Chief Multnomah helped the white people sort of take his land,” Lewis said.
Additionally, there’s no clear source for the word “Wy’east,” a supposed “Native American name” that appears on everything from a Portland-area school to a winery.
However, according to Lewis, aside from a few mentions in the old newspaper, the Hood River Glacier, which ran from the 1880s to the 1920s, attributing the word Wy’east to a “Cascade Indian” woman, there is precious little information about where the word came from, or if it came from any Indigenous language at all.
“The problem is if you look in any of the language ethnographies or linguistic stuff, you'll not find the word Wy’east used anywhere,” Lewis said. “We've looked in linguistic sources for the Warm Springs, for Umatilla, for Grand Ronde, for all the tribes in the area (and) not found Wy'east at all.”
The Cascades tribe was small, and when they were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands, the tribe was divided onto different reservations, meaning the opportunity to study their culture and language was likely limited, according to Lewis.
Despite the lack of information on the origins of the word Wy’east and questions about its legitimacy, use of the word is popular, particularly among non-Native entities, to ‘pay homage’ to Native American people.
Nevertheless, this nebulous attribution fails to account for the vast diversity of languages people spoke in this populous, tribally diverse region.
Historical failures
The structural failure to accurately teach Native American history to the non-Native public has tangible effects on Native American peoples today.
The vast majority of public K-12 schools in the United States do not teach Native American history beyond 1900, according to a study.
The Reclaiming Native Truth Project is a research project backed by the First Nations Development Institute using focus groups, social media and literary analysis to determine prevailing characterizations of Indigenous peoples in North America.
The project found “contemporary Native Americans are, for the most part, invisible in the United States” to non-Native people.
The research found harmful misconceptions about Native Americans were prevalent, such as the utterly false notion that all Native Americans receive government assistance, attend college for free and are wealthy from casino money.
Additionally, the project found focus group participants were largely uninterested in Native American issues and think Native people are disappearing. At times, the stereotypes people held about Native Americans were contradicting, such as believing Native people were simultaneously living in poverty on reservations, while also extremely wealthy from casino money.
Settler-colonial narratives often lump Native Americans together under the false notion that all Native peoples are the same, failing to acknowledge Native Americans are made up of hundreds of distinct tribal nations with their own culture, language, history and practices. The project reaffirmed this, concluding most non-Natives do not view tribes as sovereign and cannot conceptualize nearly 600 federally recognized sovereign tribes sharing geography with the United States.
Sanitized narratives
The version of U.S. history presented to the majority of the American public is sanitized of much of the atrocities committed by white settlers against Indigenous and Black communities.
Only this May did the Department of the Interior release its first-ever report on Native American boarding schools, dubbed the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, acknowledging the presence of hundreds of “schools” Native American children were forced to attend in what is increasingly recognized as a key tool in the U.S. government’s efforts to commit genocide against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.
Oregon had nine federal Indian boarding schools. U.S. officials took Indigenous children in the Northwest from their communities and sent them to boarding schools as far away as Oklahoma. In turn, hundreds of Indigenous children from other regions were sent to boarding schools in Oregon, like Chemawa Boarding School in Western Oregon, near Salem.
Kali Simmons (Oglala Lakota), assistant professor of Native American studies at Portland State University, grew up and attended public school in Oregon. She said the only reason she knew about boarding schools was because she came from a Native background. She sees that lack of education reflected in the university classrooms she now teaches in.
“It sort of creates a new mythology for the Northwest, but it's really kind of romantically being reimagined to fit a vision of the founding of Oregon that pioneers would like to have.”
— Professor David Lewis, assistant professor of ethnic studies at Oregon State University
“I start by asking (students), ‘How many of you in this room know what residential schools are?’ Simmons said. “And usually, it's like, a couple of Native students will raise their hand and then the rest of them don’t, or a few students who maybe have taken a Native studies class before (do).”
Hundreds of years of calculated efforts by the U.S. government and white settlers to exterminate Indigenous peoples and their connections to ancestral homelands devastated Indigenous communities and severely hampered their ability to pass on languages, spiritual practices, cultural practices and oral histories to their descendants.
Much of the popular information on various tribal histories is attributable to white settlers who “studied” or “observed” Native American tribes, rather than from Indigenous peoples themselves. Even fiction novels about Native Americans written by white authors, like Balch and his “Bridge of the Gods,” are accepted as fact over Indigenous knowledge.
“It sort of creates a new mythology for the Northwest, but it's really kind of romantically being reimagined to fit a vision of the founding of Oregon that pioneers would like to have,” Lewis said. “(A version) that pioneers and their descendants would like to see, that the things that happened here were not that bad, that they really did help Indians rather than just take away the land and destroy them.”
While not all popular stories about Native Americans are fabricated or manipulated, Lewis said it matters who translates and contextualizes stories.
“Whenever you are translating from another language, a Native language, into English, there's always some loss of information in context, as well,” Lewis said. “Then if you're analyzing it not as a Native person but as a white person, how do you analyze it? A lot of folks will, rather than Great Spirit, they'll throw God into it as if the Christian God was a part of the story originally.
“This is all reimagined to fit their own culture, their own belief system.”
Tribal advocates, tribes and educators like Lewis and Simmons are working to recenter Indigenous voices in conversations where they’ve long been ignored.
Rewriting, “re-righting”
In Oregon, efforts are underway to teach children in K-12 schools a more accurate and comprehensive version of the history of tribes in the Northwest.
In 2017, the Oregon Legislature enacted “Senate Bill 13: Tribal History/Shared History,” a bill designed in collaboration with tribal nations “to create K-12 Native American Curriculum for inclusion in Oregon public schools and provide professional development to educators,” as well as provide funding to the nine federally recognized tribes located in Oregon to create individual, place-based curriculum for their students.
Though new efforts are welcomed by those who favor factual information in school curricula, most Oregonians who attended public schools prior to 2017 will forever lack the information the bill intends to provide unless they seek it out themselves.
As a part of the bill, the Oregon Department of Education creates and posts lesson plans on tribal history and Indigenous peoples for teachers to utilize on its website, including “The Importance of Treaties” and “Cultural Appropriation.”
The pandemic drastically altered schooling over the past two and a half years, and the department of education has not offered an update on Senate Bill 13 since August 2020, when it said work to further implement the Native American curriculum is ongoing.
In her work at PSU, Simmons negotiates informing her students about the painful history of colonization in addition to Indigenous resilience and joy amid struggle.
“I think even though it's important to sort of lay out the facts of history, when we do that, we run the risk of sort of perpetuating this idea that Indigenous people were all miserable and broken and are lacking,” Simmons said. “So I also really try to show the vitality of our people that we have fun and tell jokes, (and) that our languages are important and valuable, not only because of the knowledge that they have, but like we literally talk to our kids, and like, tell jokes in their languages.”
Accurately describing the brutality of genocide against Indigenous peoples and its ongoing effects while highlighting ongoing Native presence and triumphs is a tall order, but Simmons navigates the issues deftly.
“Those are the things I try to balance, right, is unpacking the reality of what colonialism has done, but to also say that as much as it tried to destroy all these great things that Indigenous people know and do — we still know those things, we're still doing those things, and we find joy, even in horrific situations,” Simmons said.
“You know, we survived an apocalypse, and we're prepared to survive the next apocalypse."
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