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j ~ In the 1850s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs The Golden Age "resettled" the remaining Kalapuya to the Radiocarbon dating has indicated that the Grand Ronde Reservation, along with other Willamette Valley's first human inhabitants western Oregon tribal groups, near the probably arrived some 12,000 years ago. present-day town of Willamina. Their For several thousand years, small family ancestral lands were officially placed in the bands roamed about a s arsel o ulated P Yp P J public domain for settlement through the landscape, hunting and collecting wild f Donation Land Claims program. They were foods where they were most readily The Kalapuya culture not compensated. Despite resistance to available, and moving on to other areas ' has long been government treaties and resettlement in when the food was depleted. mysterious and other areas, as exemplified by the Rogue misunderstood Indian War in southern Oregon, the As the population of the valley eventually ci Kalapuya did not resist. Evidence suggests increased, the archaeological record ~ that their culture was, by this time, too shows that the pattern shifted to a more ~ ~ scattered, and the Willamette Valley already stabilized lifestyle. About 5,000 to 6,000 ~j too densely populated by Euro-American years ago, evidence suggests the settlers. ,j construction of more permanent settlements, including the "construction of Itwas not until afterthis period of relocation substantial houses, and the intensive ~ to reservations that early ethnographers, for harvest of certain abundant foods (such as ! the first time, began transcribing oral salmon)" (Connolly 1999), as well as the histories from the Kalapuya themselves. storage of food. Since the salmon j Prior to the Most of the information that exists from the population in the upper Willamette River epidemics, the Kalapuya comes from interviews during this was never great enough to serve as a main Kalapuya culture was period, and from the inherited oral tradition food staple, the inhabitants of the large, complex and that the Kalapuya descendants carry with Willamette River began to intensively ~ becoming an them. harvest and process camas, a highly agricultural society nutritious bulb growing abundantly in moist It is little wonder, then, that even the most prairie areas of the valley floor. Several open-minded and searching of other species of plant growing on the ethnographers have been challenged to prairies, such as varieties of native piece together this mystery: what were the sunflower (or tarweed), were also harvested Kalapuya really like? To answer that at least as intensively as camas as a food question, the bits and pieces of information staple. . j _j that do exist need to be carefully examined and continually reinterpreted. Around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, the ~ inhabitants of the Willamette Valley Modern research methods allow an probably began to take on a more settled ` ~ The camas lily was an increasingly accurate glimpse into the life similar to what it must have been like important staple food for the climate and plant communities over just prior to the introduction of disease in ' Kalapuya ~ thousands of years, shedding light on the 1770. This probably represents the conditions under which the inhabitants of Kalapuya as they were described by the Willamette Valley lived. Archaeological descendants on the Grande Ronde Indian i techniques are also improving, and Reservation and recorded in the 1850s by traditional biases and filters for their early ethnographers. interpretation are slowly falling away to be replaced by new, more accurate analyses. The Kalapuya had begun to settle into a Most importantly, the history of the broad assemblage of ethnically related Kalapuya, as it is told by the Kalapuya communities or bands, each with its own themselves, is more becoming more readily cluster of separate villages, and each - accepted than it once was. Through all of typically speaking a separate dialect of the i ~ ~ ' these methods, a picture of a lost culture Kalapuya language. Each band shared ~ is beginning to form. certain resources, such as big game, within k . ~ awell-defined territory. The boundaries for I. ~'r-i ' Skinner Butte Park • Master Plan 2001 25