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REVIEWS
THE FIRST OREGONIANS: SECOND EDITION
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edited by Laura Berg
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| Oregon Council for the Humanities, Portland, 2007. Photographs, bibliography, index. 360 pages. $22.95 paper. |
| The second edition of The First Oregonians offers an amazing range of essays on the indigenous peoples and tribes of Oregon authored by legendary academic scholars, current professionals in anthropology and history, and prominent Native American scholars from most of the represented tribes. As such, the book offers a unique juxtaposition of academic and Native perspectives on Oregon Indians and their culture and history that is rarely available for educational and public consumption. Whereas educators previously had to laboriously assemble chapters and essays from a wide variety of texts to teach about all Oregon tribes, now they will be able to rely on one source as the primary text for their classes. The First Oregonians: Second Edition will be a welcome addition to any library concerned with contemporary and accurate information about Oregon's Native peoples. This update of the original 1992 publication does not completely replace the first edition essays but instead enhances and expands the available information about Oregon's Native peoples. |
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The most remarkable achievement of the book is the authoring of many of the chapters by members of the nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon. The Native perspectives offer valuable understandings of tribal history and culture that join the ranks of recent accomplished books such as As Days Go By, by Jennifer Karson (Oregon Historical Society Press and Tamastslikt Cultural Institute in association with University of Washington Press, 2006) and When the River Ran Wild! By George Aguilar (Oregon Historical Society Press in association with University of Washington Press, 2005), and Standing Tall: The Lifeway of Kathryn Jones Harrison by Kristine Olson (Oregon Historical Society Press, 2005). Those Native-authored and -narrated books and chapters in The First Oregonians join a growing bibliography of resources with similar perspectives that are challenging and correcting outdated histories and ethnographies of Oregon Indians. |
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Despite all of the benefits of the book, it is not without critique. The chapters are all written by different authors with different styles of scholarship, which lends to an inconsistency in the information about each tribe. Some chapters offer wonderfully deep stories of Indian removal and hardship, such as the Klamath chapter by Douglas Deur and the Siletz chapter by Robert Kentta, but they do not address the contemporary era with similar detail. Dell Hymes's language chapter offers challengingly complex organization and a scholarly writing style that seems out of place in the volume and is too complex for beginning scholars, although it is immensely enjoyable for seasoned linguists. |
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Additionally, the tribally written chapters do not commonly include references to outside sources. The authors' individual Native perspectives are presented as a single source, and there are few references to other Native people telling their own histories. This is not so much a problem as it is understood that the authors, being researchers and cultural leaders in their tribes, likely have condensed the perspectives of many tribal members into their narrative. There is value, however, in offering "first person" oral histories narrated by tribal Elder historians; they offer deeply layered and interesting voices in historical texts. Despite this, the authors should be commended for their years of research on tribal histories and for being able to condense all of the individual accounts down to essay length summaries of what must be several books if fully assembled. |
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The chapters on Federal Indian Relations and the Oregon Coast written by esteemed scholar Stephen Dow Beckham do not offer Native perspectives or a true introduction, conclusion, or critical reflection about the subject. While the information is a valuable addition to the book, the chapter deserves more substantive analysis that would help readers fully engage with the subjects. In the Oregon Coast chapter, Beckham does offer a nice summary but does not distinguish individual tribes along the coast, where a variety of different language families and cultures are represented. |
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The Grand Ronde Indian Reservation chapter is authored by two scholars, tribal member Brent Merrill and academic Yvonne Hajda. The chapter benefits from collaboration between two authors with different scholarly strengths, making it packed with information. There are paragraphs of the chapter, however, that are obviously written by Hadja and others by Merrill, making the reading recognizably uneven. A synthesis of the writing styles would have benefited the chapter. |
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Any edited volume has its challenges, as different writers offer different writing strengths. This book is no exception. What makes it amazing is the breadth and depth of information available about Native peoples from various cultural and scholarly perspectives. The Native authors are some of the key scholars in their community who can write these stories, an option that was not available for all Oregon tribes in the previous decades due to the termination of most tribes in Oregon. The book is destined to become a mainstay and the primary resource for all scholars of Oregon Indians and will be sought after by historians, anthropologists, linguists, and students majoring in Native Studies. No Oregon library should be without several copies of this book, and college and secondary school curriculum writers need to find ways to utilize it in all classes concerning Oregon Indian history and culture. In many ways, The First Oregonians: Second Edition fully engages with and fills what author George Wasson, Jr., calls the cultural blackhole. |
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David G. Lewis and
Anthropology 231 students
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| Grand Ronde Tribe and Willamette University |
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