You've Come A Long Way, Dude!

When you first looked at the image above, my guess is that you had no idea what it could possibly be. This was my first impression.

The Internet as a forum for cowardice

Sometimes.

Not always, but sometimes.

Sure, there are reasons for being anonymous.

I've engaged in a conversation about this here.

This may very well be another example of a person screaming into the wind, but I wanted to invite the coward to respond here. Except that RedState tells me: "Error: You have not been registered long enough to comment."

However, here's what I wanted to say, and, perhaps, RedState will eventually grace me with the privilege of expressing myself in their restricted venue:

Hey hogan, you're an ignoramus and a coward!*

I've made some comments about your post on this site. If you have any interest in responding, feel free to respond on my blog (I can't extend the invitation for you to post on the first blog as it is not mine).

Whatever. At least we're not dead yet!

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* Clarification May 28, 2010: In reflecting on the way I phrased this post, and this sentence in particular, I recognize that this likely comes across as ad hominem. However, before you come to this conclusion, please do read the EotAW comment thread I link to above, because I do try to support my case with evidence. My general point with all of this is that ignorance and cowardice need to be addressed directly, and not perpetuated (as Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh would prefer us to do). If you read the thread and still come to the conclusion that my language is unjustified, please do make your case.

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Those pesky shape-shifting political parties of ours!

Jennifer asked me a few weeks ago how the current national political system had evolved. I explained my understanding of this process by concentrating on the movement of conservative Democrats in the South into the Republican party after World War II. Opposition to civil rights and perceived threats to state's rights propelled these "Dixiecrats" to change their party affiliation from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Strom Thurmond's unsuccessful 1948 presidential run as part of the State's Rights party was an expression of racist and socially conservative sentiments* centered in the South; Thurmond's efforts to craft Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" helped the latter win the presidency in 1968 [Source]. This realignment helped bring into the Republican party some core constituencies that we find currently, such as the religious fundamentalists and social conservatives with varying shades of implicit and explicit racism.

Over at Edge of the American West, Eric has recently written an excellent post about how the ideologies of our present political parties evolved. His post (and the comment thread) is much more illuminating and thorough than my cursory overview.** Yet another reason to love EotAW and benefit from the hard work of others!

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* Though often correlated, I'm not insinuating there that these two things are always the same thing.

** Which is just one reason why, I suppose, he gets the awards and earns the big bucks.

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Variable veracity

Earlier I discussed Biblical literalism in two posts (here and here). I just read an article in the Oregonian today that brought to my attention another approach to Biblical literalism that contributes much more of positive benefit to society than the work of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the Family Research Council (FRC), and similar organizations.[1]

First, what does "literal" mean, anyway? One definition is "following the words of the original very closely and exactly." From this beginning, one could take the ICR's or FRC's path and selectively ignore or inflate evidence that that contradicts or supports, respectively, one's ideological interpretation and political goals. Alternately, once could start from this point and delve more deeply into the original words of the text as written in their original languages, seek to understand a fuller context of meaning at the time they were written, and investigate how words and meanings changed over time and in different places.

Blogging the ASEH 2010 (pt. 2): Plenary Session on the Klamath River Agreement

The American Society for Environmental History's 2010 conference Plenary Session on "Dam Removal and the Klamath River," taped in Portland, Oregon, March 11, 2010, is now available on C-Span.

Last fall, a decades-long debate over a dam project in Oregon was resolved when all parties agreed to tear down four dams along the Klamath River. Native American tribes, farmers, fishermen and conservation groups battled each other over access and control of scarce water supplies in the region. The American Society for Environmental History recently presented a case study about the controversy.

I was present at this plenary and found it to be a fascinating example of real progress among contending parties over a very contentious issue. Often, such contentious issues can seem impossible to overcome, but, as this example shows, progress is possible.

Not that everything is smooth-sailing from here on out, of course, but it's inspiring to see positive examples of democracy and empathy and communication in action.

Other sources on the Klamath River issue:

Oregon Public Broadcasting's Think Out Loud program, "Klamath River Drought," aired May 14, 2010.

Martin Goebel, "The Klamath Basin agreement: seizing a chance to move forward," Oregonian Jan. 18, 2010.

William Yardley, "Pacts Signed to Help River and Salmon," New York Times Feb. 18, 2010.

Yurok Tribe, Klamath River News.

http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/.
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p.s., at this rate I'll be done blogging the ASEH 2010 by about next January.

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wálamt, wallamat, wolamat, wolamut, Willamette

In doing research for my book, I recently came across Urban Scout's discussion of the origin of the word "Willamette". He debunks some myths about the meaning of this word, and concludes:

In remembrance of the Kalapuyan and Clackamas (lower Columbia Chinook) [I]ndians who lived and died here, and in honor of those who still live here; please stop saying “no one lived here.” Please stop saying that Willamette means “the valley of sickness and death.”[1] Please know that if the natives later refered to this valley as one of “sickness and death,” it came from the biological genicide inflicted on the natives by this [i.e., Euro American] civilization. Please go to the library, or better yet find a living native, and learn the real history of this place.

Urban Scout does a great job of sleuthing that includes critiquing "explanations" of the name that do not cite a source and then referencing scholarly works on the topic, particularly Henry Zenk's essay in the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7: Northwest Coast (1990). To add a little to this . . .

Lewis and Clark identified the river we now know as the Willamette as the Multnomah in their journal entries of early April 1806, though the Chinookan word that served as their source refers only to a village on Sauvie Island (/máånumaå/, “those towards the water”).

Henry Zenk finds that trappers and Indians extended the name “Willamette” (also spelled wálamt, wallamat, wolamat, and wolamut) to the entire river and watershed by the time the Pacific Fur Company founded Fort Astoria in 1811. Zenk posits that this is most most likely by way of the lingua franca of the Columbia basin, Chinuk Wawa. Previously, the name appears to have only applied to the name of a Chinook village on the west side of Willamette Falls that had long served as an important center of trading, at least until the large-scale depopulations from malaria outbreaks between 1830 and 1834. We have no definitive record of what the name “Willamette” meant to the Chinooks.[2]
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[1] I hadn't heard this explanation before reading this Urban Scout's blog.

[2] Henry Zenk, "Notes on Native American Place-names of the Willamette Valley Region," Oregon Historical Quarterly 109: 1 (Spring 2008), 25-26. See entries for April 2- 6, 1806, in Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001), http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu, accessed May 3, 2010.

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History of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians

The video above showcases Charles Wilkinson's latest project, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (UW Press, Fall 2010).

I'm excited about this. While growing up in Siletz in the 1980s, I didn't learn much at all about the tribe's history.

Internet sources on Siletz history can be found here, on the website of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and through the Oregon Encyclopedia. The National Museum of the American Indian also contains some information on Siletz Indians.

One other, printed, source that I just recently discovered is the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7: Northwest Coast (1990). I've made use of this source in writing the first portion of Chapter 1 of my book on Willamette River pollution.

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Whites vs. peoples of color in the Pac NW

Before Euro Americans in the Pac NW interred Japanese Americans during World War II, but after they shunted Indians off to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations and at about the same time that they were parading down Oregon's city streets wearing white pointy hoods, some white folks in Toledo, Oregon, ran Japanese people out of town. This is the "Toledo Incident of 1925."

"Tokyo Slough" in Toledo is named for the residential area where Japanese, Korean, and Filippino workers and families lived (red "A" in map below):

The event in 1925 occurred forty-three years after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, thirty-eight years after a massacre of Chinese miners at Deep Creek, near the confluence of the Snake and Imhaha rivers in eastern Oregon, and about twenty years after a series of "anti-Hindu" riots in Bellingham, Washington and other cities in the region.

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