"W e Oregonians like to believe that we are an enlightened lot. We like to believe that we have always treated the environment and the people who have resided in it with fairness, respect and honor. But our belief is mistaken, and if one has any doubts about this, reading "Oregon Indians: Voices From Two Centuries" should quickly erase them.

Stephen Dow Beckham, a history professor at Lewis & Clark College, has assembled and edited an important anthology of more than 60 selected writings that document the lives and challenges faced by the first residents of Oregon, the members of the many varied tribes and nations of Native Americans. Beginning with accounts of mariners' first encounters with coastal Indians and continuing to unpublished manuscripts from the 1990s, Beckham has created a moving book that details many of the tragedies that have befallen Oregon tribes as a result of European intrusion into their ancestral homelands.

"Encounters" opens the book with a prophetic narrative, first published in 1909, by Sophia Klickitat, an Indian woman who lived on the Columbia River. She passes on an old oral tale that foretold the coming of white people to Indian country: "Soon all sorts of strange things will come. No longer (will things be) as before. . . . " Throughout the book are similar haunting phrases that linger with the reader. In 1811-12, fur trader Robert Stuart visited the Chinookans and noted that "they possess their present lands and situation from time immemorial," a notion discounted or ignored throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century."

Get the Story:
Haunting voices: Oregon's native peoples and the brutal history that befell them (The Oregonian 6/25)