I’m asking for $28,000, or $2,000 per month (before Kickstarter fees and rewards costs) so that I can devote full time to completing the manuscript.  Go to “Work in Progress” to see a description of the project, an overview of chapters drafted to date, and a summary of work yet to do.  Then visit the Kickstarter page – www.kickstarter.com/projects/1828053248/before-portland-the-native-americans-wappato-valle  (that’s right–there wasn’t room for “-y-book”!) for details on the campaign, and if you can, make a donation so that the book can become reality!

The procedure after submission is: 1) The manuscript will be sent to outside readers for peer review.  The readers will evaluate whether the Press should publish, and make editorial suggestions.  Then 2) a Press editor will go over the entire thing, and 3) we’ll get permissions for visuals and figure out the layout of the book.  All this is preliminary to actual publication, probably some time in 2018.  It’s all a very long, deliberate process, but the final result should be well worth the wait!

Of the sixty works, ten are from the Pacific Northwest, and six from the lower Columbia.  They are:                                                                                                                                                                             Tshimikaine [Spokane] Mission                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Nez Perce Indians                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Puget Sound and Mt Rainier from Whitby’s [sic] Island                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Dalles of the Columbia Looking Westward                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Mountain Landscape with Indians                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Scene on the Columbia River                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Fort Vancouver                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Asa Lawrence Lovejoy                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Chinook Burial Grounds                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Oregon City on the Willamette

Painted Journeys has new information on “Mountain Landscape with Indians,” held by the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is reproduced on the first page of this website.  The painting is dated to 1870, long after Stanley let the Northwest, but the excellent and apparently ethnographically correct detail has always led me to believe that it was composed from field sketches made in either 1847-48 or 1853-54 when Stanley was in the Northwest and passed through the Columbia River Gorge.  Painted Journeys offers another theory: that this painting and a few others were copied from daguerrotypes that Stanley took during his 1853-54 trip.  If that theory is correct, the case for the painting as an accurate ethnographic record is strengthened, though it is still possible that it is a composite of several images.

The Tacoma exhibit will also display Stanley’s “Oregon City on the Willamette,” owned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which has been the topic of some discussion among several of us Portland Basin Native history researchers, because it appears to show the West Linn plank house just before it was burned by white arsonists in August 1848.  Until now, enlargements of the online reproduction of the painting have been the only recourse for local researchers to determine whether the structure depicted on the West Linn river bank is indeed a plank house, but the enlargements have not been clear enough to decide.  The Tacoma exhibit should provide the opportunity to answer that question.

The Painted Journeys exhibit will also display “Chinook Burial Grounds,” which has its own problems of where it was painted and whether it is a composite, besides being full of ethnographic detail.

John Mix Stanley was, like his counterpart Paul Kane, a major illustrator of early Northwest Native life.  But unlike Kane, only some of his paintings survive, as most were destroyed in a fire in 1865 when on display at the Smithsonian Institution.  We lost, for example, five Native portraits from Willamette Falls, and contemporary portraits of Dr. John McLoughlin and Wappato Chief Kiesno (also painted by Paul Kane).

The Tacoma exhibit will partially overlap with an exhibit on Dr. John Tolmie, one of the HBC physicians at Fort Vancouver, later in charge of Fort Nisqually.  That exhibit will be at the Fort Nisqually Living History Museum in Point Defiance Park, from November 21 through April 30.  That’s two major exhibits centering on individuals who filled important roles in recording Northwest Native American contact-era ethnography and history.  Exciting times–I plan on attending both, and hope many who read this post will too!

The original intent of Indigenous Peoples’ Day was to recognize the incredible loss to Native Americans that came in the wake of Columbus–through disease, warfare, loss of land base and confinement to reservations, policies of acculturation and assimilation, boarding schools…on and on–a cascading series of events that led to massive loss of life and traditional culture.  The topic is huge in Western and World history, but few people know or understand much about it, since it has not been taught in schools.

By far the greatest loss came from introduced diseases, and I’ve covered that thoroughly for the Northwest in my early research and publications.  But there is another, more positive side to celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and that is recognizing and learning more about the diversity and complexity of Native American cultures and peoples that have both been lost and that remain with us.  There is a great lack of knowledge, especially at the local level, about Native American history and culture, and raising awareness about that for the Portland Basin is what my op ed, which appeared in the October 25 Sunday Oregonian, was meant to do.  I also floated several ideas–relatively easy-to-do if awareness of Native peoples is on one’s radar– that might increase visibility and understanding of local Native American culture in the Portland Basin.  Maybe by the time Indigenous Peoples’ Day rolls along again in 2016 some of these will be closer to becoming part of public awareness and urban policy.

Here the op ed is:

Indigenous Peoples Day is just a start; we can do more

Robert Boyd  IN MY OPINION

On Oct. 7, the Portland City council formally declared the second Monday in October “Indigenous peoples Day,” in honor of our Native American citizens.  A commendable step, and nice words, but now let’s back it up with some action, ‘walk the talk,” and bring Portland’s rich native American heritage and the descendants of its “first peoples’ back into civic affairs and city life where they belong.

In the early 1800s, there were upwards of 30 native villages recorded in the Portland Basin, clustered in three areas: around Sauvie Island and Lake River (Lewis and Clark’s “Wwappato nation”); along the Columbia river from Vancouver to Cascade Locks (the Cascades people); and below Willamette Falls and on the Clackamas River.  All spoke varieties of Kiksht, the Upper Chinook language.

The villages contained long and spacious red cedar plankhouses, usually ranged in a line along river banks.  Each was politically autonomous, though linked by networks of kin relations.  The people moved seasonally to fisheries, wetlands and wet and dry prairies to collect wild foods, when they lived in temporary structures.  They had a material culture based on woodworking and a distinctive regional art style; they made large dugout canoes and traded prestige objects over a wide area; they practiced a religion centered on animal and guardian spirits and celebrated first-salmon and winter spirit dances.  And they had a rich oral literature of myths and tales–a sample of which was preserved in the recorded traditions of Clackamas speaker Victoria Wishikin Howard, just before she died in 1930.

In addition, the living, breathing culture of the “people before Portland” was recorded on the spot by Lewis and Clark and many other observers before the fatal years of the early 1830s, when annual summer epidemics of “fever and ague” took most of the native people to their graves.

In the late 1830s non-Chinookan natives (Upper Cowlitz, Klikatat and Molala) moved closer to the rivers, and in the 1840s, white settlers immigrated en masse, overwhelming all first peoples.  In the mid-1850s native survivors were collected on four temporary reserves–near St. Helens, the Portland International Airport, Gladstone and Fort Vancouver, before removal to the Grand Ronde (Oregon) or Yakama (Washington) reservations.  Most descendants of the Portland Basin Upper Chinook people today belong to the Grand Ronde Tribe, but others are enrolled elsewhere, and many reside again in the greater Portland area.

In the past year, there have been several events that hint at a reawakening of interest in greater Portland’s native heritage.  On March 29, the Cathlapotle Plankhouse at the Ridgefield Wildlie Reserve celebrated its 190th anniversary; on May 16, Khunamokwst (“together”) park in the Cully neighborhood opened; on April 17, the Grand Ronde Tribe held a gifting ceremony at the new Tilikum (“people”) Crossing light-rail bridge, and on Sept. 12, the bridge formally opened.  And on Oct. 17, the Portland Art Museum opened its Center for Contemporary Native Art, highlighting the work of two Chinookan descendants whose art is grounded in the traditional regional style.

Studies of Portland native cultures are ongoing at both Portland State University and Grand Ronde, but Portland Basin governments and agencies can do much more in collaborating with the tribes and increasing native visibility.  Here are some thoughts: Expand the naming program to streets and buildings, using both Kiksht and Chinuk Wawa (the trade language) words, and honor notable figures such as Chief Kiesno and Victoria Howard; commission more public art works in the Chinook style such as already exist at Tilikum Crossing, the Cathlapotle Plankhouse and Blue Lake and Parker’s landing parks; concentrate on the restoration of not just rivers and fishes but wetlands and prairies and keystone native resource species: wapato, camas, and Oregon oak; and–really thinking big–build a plankhouse similar to that at Ridgefield on the Oregon side of the river.  An ideal location would be the newly reopened Willamette Falls, the site of a major fishery and close to three pre-removal villages.  Then during the annual summer intertribal “canoe journey,” native canoes could sail up the river to the falls like they did 200 years ago.  What a wonderful way to honor our native heritage and recognize Portland’s pre-settlement roots that would be.

Robert Boyd (http://RobertTBoyd.com) is affiliated research faculty in the anthropology department at Portland State University and lead editor of “Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia.”

The same could be done for the city of Portland, and I’ll be doing some of that in the last chapters of Before Portland.  We have the pre-and early settlement maps: from the 1841 Wilkes Expedition, showing former shorelines, from the General Land Office survey maps of the 1850’s, showing detailed topography and plant cover at the beginning of settlement, and the 1888 Cleveland Rockwell maps which show the former waterways of the Columbia Slough and other wetlands along the river.  We can add lost and subtract invasive species too.  And most importantly, with the Chinookan village list and list of resource species in Chinookan Peoples, plus information from early history and archaeology, we can come up with a close approximation of how the “people before Portland” lived on the land.  And then maybe, reincorporate the best of those vanished systems into a richer, sustainable Portland of the future.

Mannahatta is a groundbreaking and thought-provoking book.

For a talk by Sanderson on the Mannahatta Project, see www.ted.com/talks/eric_sanderson

For an image of Portland’s original vegetation cover based on the GLO maps, see the map in John Christy and Ed Alverson’s 2011 “Historical Vegetation of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, circa 1850″ (Northwest Science 85(2): 93-107).