Oregon coast artifacts vs. Drake - Long Reply -Reply

[Mike Cleven]

Tony Johnson wrote:
>
> A quick note...
>
> The Southern Athpaskan folks in this area lived in plank houses also.
> Their sweat lodges were also of the same design--rectangular plank
> houses.  Some of the Kalapuya groups of the Willamette Valley did have
> round pit houses, and surely coast tribes in our area were all aware of
> them.  No answers from me though, just thoughts.

Maybe it's just "people got around" and someone from a pit-house
building culture lived there for a while at some time?
>
> Regarding Drake, I surely don't mean to imply that he physically brought
> in colonization.  For that matter our folks liked the first ship captain
> to come into our river (we burned the second one).  It's just that with
> no adequate notes on our history in parks or roadsides in my country I
> would like to see reference to our thriving at the time of these
> encounters, and a note of the (often unintentional) decimation that
> followed.

I completely agree about that last bit concerning public notes; in the
provincial centennial year (1958) the provgov put up hundreds of
roadside markers about the history and the geography of the province,
some of them quite good, and many remain today.  Very, very few say
anything about the native peoples or, for example, mark the site of
major settlements or events in native history.  And as you note, there
is little reference on any of these, or in the public school curriculum
(or media stylebooks) about the populousness and prosperity of the
native peoples prior to Contact and Colonization.  One result is that
the anti-native propagandists really do think that native life
pre-Contact was 'nasty, brutish and short' (as infamously quoted by
Justice McEachern of the Court of Appeals in the first Delgamuukw vs.
the Queen decision), and that the place was really pretty much empty
before the white man's culture came; this thinking is used to back up
the "we conquered it, we'll keep it" mentality of the anti-native
political movement as expressed by such groups as the BC Liberal and new
federal Alliance parties (to name only the most mainstream).  Public
education is definitely needed; but will people learn what they do not
want to know; or find inconvenient to learn?

MC