What You Need to Know about the Kalapuya

The Kalapuyans originally occupied over a million acres in the Willamette and the Umpqua valleys. They have lived here for over 14,000 years and have endured enormous changes to their traditional life-ways during the past 200 years. The Kalapuyan peoples created the amazing fecundity of the Willamette Valley by practicing a form of land management or horticulture where they annually set fire to the valley, and in so doing cleared the land of excess vegetation, renewed food plants, and deposited nutrients in the soil, as well as other benefits. They were a stable society who harvested the fruits and vegetables of the valley and hunted and fished the terrestrial and aquatic animals to provide their primary food sources.
Frequently in Eugene you will hear this paragraph before a meeting begins:
“The University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya Ilihi (Cal-uh-POO-yuh ILL-ih-hee), the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon”.
Don’t you want to know more about this tribe, its history, lifestyle and culture? And don’t you want to know more about the descendants of the Kalapuya, who and where they are now?
Come to the University of Oregon Many Nations Longhouse, 1630 Columbia Street, on Friday, January 30 at noon to hear Anthropology Professor David G. Lewis of Oregon State University, a well-respected historian of the tribes of Southwest Oregon. He is the author of “Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley.”