Since time immemorial, the North Santiam Canyon has been part of the territorial homelands of the Kalapuyans in the west near the Willamette Valley and the Molallans in the east near the Cascade Mountains. To better understand the history of Detroit, Oregon, we must know the stories of the people who first inhabited the land.
The Atlas of Drowned Towns strives to be comprehensive. The project encompasses a myriad of homes displaced and disappeared by reservoirs, from incorporated towns to unincorporated villages to Tribal homelands. To better understand the history of Detroit, Oregon, we must know the stories of the people who first inhabited the land.
Since time immemorial, the North Santiam Canyon has been part of the territorial homelands of the Kalapuyans in the west near the Willamette Valley and the Molallans in the east near the Cascade Mountains. Their extensive and sophisticated use of the North Santiam Canyon is evident in the more than four hundred prehistoric sites and one hundred historic sites unearthed by archaeologists.[1]
The Kalapuyans, who were also known as the “Santiam” after a local chief by Euro-Americans, established a seasonal pattern of hunting and agricultural practices in the North Santiam Canyon. In the colder winter months, they settled in lower-elevation villages, surviving off of preserved foods from the previous season’s harvest. In the spring, they moved away from their settlements to harvest local foods, such as acorns and the bulbs of camas plants. The summer months brought them to the higher-elevation areas of the North Santiam Canyon to hunt game and pick huckleberries.[2] The Molallans developed similar cyclical patterns to the Santiam Kalapuyans, residing in villages closer to the Willamette Valley in the winter months before utilizing the abundant landscape of the North Santiam Canyon in the warmer months. Although these groups are unique in their culture and languages, a relationship, although not always amicable, existed between them through marriages and slavery. Attracted to the abundance of fish, game, and harvestable food, the Kalapuyans and Molallans enjoyed the North Santiam Canyon as their homelands.
Euro-American encroachment of the Kalapuyan and Molallan homelands began in the early nineteenth century, but settler interaction was largely dictated and limited by Native choice. As Euro Americans established fur trading posts throughout the Willamette Valley, Native peoples declined to trade with them, preferring to trade with other Native peoples.[3] Their commitment to their existing trade relations and seasonal lifestyle demonstrated their autonomy and persistence to the Euro-American newcomers. However, as more Euro Americans established households in the Willamette Valley and as diseases decimated the local Indigenous population, the Kalapuyans and Molallans’ autonomy was jeopardized. By the mid-1800s, both Native groups entered treaty negotiations with the US government.
In April and May 1851, US government agents met with representatives from the Santiam Kalapuyans and Molallans, respectively. The government intended on removing all Native peoples from the Willamette Valley, but when brought this proposition, both Native parties refused. After multiple negotiation sessions, the Kalapuyans and Molallans agreed to sell some of their land, but they insisted on retaining their homeland in the North Santiam Canyon. Part of the agreement included a cash payment rather than a payment in Euro-American goods, which is yet another indication of the various ways the Kalapuyans and Molallans attempted to retain control over their interactions with Euro Americans.[4] However, the treaties of 1851 were never ratified, despite being signed and authorized by agents of the federal government.
Encouraged by the growing voices of Euro-American squatters in the North Santiam Canyon as well as the Oregon’s territorial governor Joseph Lane, treaty negotiations with the Kalapuyans and Molallans began again in 1855, but with a new fervor to remove all Native peoples from the Willamette Valley. Agents did not even meet with individual tribes but rather grouped all Indigenous nation, including every band of Kalapuyan and Molallan, together. The 1855 treaty took the North Santiam Canyon away from its Native keepers and removed the Santiam Kalapuyans and Molallans to a small reservation in the Grande Ronde Valley.
While Native presence has since decreased in the North Santiam Canyon, their histories are still tied to the place. To the huckleberry patches where they once gathered berries, to the forested woods where they hunted game, and to the riverbeds where they dried their salmon, their stories are connected to the landscape.
As the North Santiam Canyon was altered due to the construction of the Detroit Dam, the landscape that was once known and beloved by the Kalapuyans and Molallans changed. As Patrick McCully points out in Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (1996), it is an upsetting irony that even though Indigenous populations make up a disproportionately large number of those impacted by dams, they are still not consulted. A growing corpus of literature examines the impact of large-scale water projects have on Indigenous communities and the cultural, social, and economic components of their societies. In their article “Annihilation of Both Place and Sense of Place: The Experience of the Cheslatta T’En Canadian First Nation within the Context of Large-Scale Environmental Projects,” J.E Windsor and J.A. McVey concluded that water projects often have damaging effects on Indigenous communities’ “sense of place,” going as far as to argue that dams annihilate an Indigenous “sense of place.” A renewed historical analysis reveals that many resource projects, such as the construction of dams, occurred without collaboration, or even thinking of collaboration, with local Native communities. Through its research and community outreach, the Atlas emphasizes how a better understanding of the past can help inform contemporary solutions to conservation and resource management issues, encouraging future river development projects to consult and collaborate with the Native communities whose homelands are being permanently altered.
As always, if you or someone you know are interested in telling your story, please consider joining us in our mission to rediscover these places and histories lost to river development projects. Telling the full story of these inundated places requires working with different groups to ensure that their stories are being told, how they want them to be told. Share your story here!
[1] Cara McCulley Kelly, “Prehistoric Land-Use Patterns in the North Santiam Subbasin, On the Western Slopes of the Oregon Cascade Range,” MA Thesis, (Oregon State University, 2002), 99.
[2] Bob Reinhardt, Struggle on the North Santiam: Power and Community on the Margins of the American West (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2020), 11.
[3] Reinhardt, 14.
[4] Reinhardt, 15.
Further Reading
- Santiam descendent and anthropologists, David G. Lewis keeps a regular blog, NDNHistory Research, that explores Indigenous histories in Oregon. Found at: https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/blog/
- Barber, Katrine. Death of Celilo Falls. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.
- Lawson, Michael L. Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan plan and the Missouri River Sioux. Pierre, SD: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2009.
- McCully, Patrick. Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London: Zed Books, 1996.
- Reinhardt, Bob. Struggle on the North Santiam: Power and Community on the Margins of the American West. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2020.
- Ulrich, Roberta. Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1999.
- Windsor, J.E. and J.A. McVey. “Annihilation of Both Place and Sense of Place: The Experience of the Cheslatta T’En Canadian First Nation within the Context of Large-Scale Environmental Projects.” The Geographical Journal 171, no. 2 (June 2005): 146-165.
Citation Info
Klade, Rachel. “Since Time Immemorial—The Kalapuyans and Molallans of the North Santiam Canyon.” The Atlas of Drowned Towns (blog). June 22, 2023.