American Indian Culture and Research Journal

As an indigenous researcher, I have many questions about what has happened to the Willamette Valley, the traditional landscape where my people have lived for more than 16,000 years. The valley is now completely recreated in a settler vision for agriculture leaving little land, about 1 percent of the valley as still a traditional landscape. Generations of settlers have changed their land, drained off the water, and engineered the environment to be an arid landscape.

Using ethnographic reports, ethnological fieldwork, oral histories, settler accounts, and tribal intellectual knowledge I reconstruct the original environment of the valley to reveal the character of the land in which the Kalapuyan peoples used to live. Research shows that they lived in a vast landscape of wetlands, the prairies expanding into shallow swales during any season. The majority wetlands of the valley give many clues as to what the original Kalapuyan culture was like, because they had to collect food, hunt, fish, dig roots, and set fall prairie fires, despite the great amount of seasonal moisture. 

The Kalapuyans were colonized very early in the history of the West, 1830–1856. Because of this, little information was collected about their traditional lifeways, their villages, or even their houses. Historically, there was rare information preserved about how the valley was changed by settlers to become an arid landscape. The fact that wetlands dominated the valley will change many assumptions made by scholars about tribal cultures, and that water will need to be restored to have successful restoration and decolonization projects.