Five minutes from my condo door in Portland’s urban Northwest, I can park at a trailhead in Forest Park; an urban wilderness running along the Tualatin Range. 5,200 acres of parkland with ancient forests, ferns, deep crevasses and multiple shades of green from the floor to the tip of the Douglas firs, hemlocks, and red cedars. The park can resemble an alpine forest or, in some places, a tropical rainforest. 80 miles of trails offer enough hiking opportunities for a lifetime.
Forest Park is an urban treasure. And it has a history. Or, perhaps, a history un- recognized by white settlers, who stripped out the indigenous inhabitants by the mid-1800s. On line, the only sentence that recognize the Park’s indigenous past reads, in full: “Native American settlement of the area now known as Forest Park is believed to date back 10,000 years.”
Ten centuries of inhabitants, summed up in a single sentence. The next sentence just moves ahead to white history: “The first European American explorers arrived in the Willamette Valley with the Lewis & Clark expedition in 1806.” That’s all.
Were these original residents, perhaps, the Tualatin Kalapuya. The Kalapuya nation in the Willamette Valley numbered around 15,000 when Lewis and Clark stopped by. By 1859, only 600 were left. By the end of the 19th century, Forest Park was empty, aside from a few settlers who pretty much failed to build on its sloping hills. The indigenous population was no more. The Park was saved from development and preserved for the pleasure of the white settlers and their descendants, like me, the trails maintained by a bevy of volunteers, some of whom I meet on my walks.
Elimination from the land; a consequence of conquest. A people virtually eradicated by war, imported alcohol and disease. They have been erased.
This is the story of our land, a narrative in which 15 million indigenous inhabitants of what is now the United States were reduced to three million, largely contained in “reservations.” Now, pitifully, in meetings attended by white settler descendants like me, we “acknowledge” ten centuries of life on this soil. We name the tribes who once lived on the ground we stand on, but their stories and memories are lost or passed over.
This is our colonial legacy, the consequence of the myth “Manifest Destiny.” The story is reflected throughout the continents of North and South America, areas named not for an indigenous person or nation, but for a sixteenth century white European explorer at the cutting edge of expulsion and genocide. (Some indigenous peoples call this land Turtle Island.) Ask the indigenous people of Canada, or the remnants of Aztecan Mexico, or Mayan Central America, or the forest people of Brazil, for more of the story.
Seizing indigenous land and expelling the inhabitants knows no boundaries. Ask the 15 million Congolese sacrificed to Belgian colonialism. Or the one million Rohingyan refugees expelled from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Or the 1.5 million Palestinians wrenched from their land in the last century, still living in refugee camps. Globally, today over 100 million people are refugees, displaced, externally and internally.
Remove the people and seize the land. The narrative of the conquerors prevails – a glorification of westward expansion in America, accompanied by Hollywood’s repeated celebration of settler accomplishments. Today’s right-wing narrative that the US is a white, Christian country; the settlers dominate by religious right, not through genocide reinforced by racism.
The makers of US foreign policy regularly congratulate themselves for America’s generosity in the rest of the world. We are not a colonial power, they say, we mean only the best. Once we have brought peace to another land, we leave, extracting nothing.
Conveniently we forget that white settlers seized this entire continent – through purchase, conquest, and genocide. We then came late to the imperial party, seizing only Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines. Exercise economic and political sway over much of Central and South America, acting under the Monroe Doctrine – this is ours, stay out! How many fortunes have been made under that policy of exclusive domination?
“Why do white people have to hate everyone else,” my Chinese-American friend asked me this week. She quoted her Chinese father, who struggled with racism on the California coast: “While Caucasians were still living in caves, the Chinese were writing poetry.”
I tried to explain the hatred, expulsion and murder carried out by my ancestors. Well, it’s about resources and land. It’s about greed. Greed and an armed patriarchy. It’s about psychology – the expectation that fighting is necessary lest one show weakness. It’s about fear, of losing one’s position. It’s about John Calvin and his starched-front, white, patriarchal ideas. Something has to explain this historical outrage.
“Not good enough,” she says, “these are all excuses.” Because the prejudice runs deep, becomes personal, is irrational, can’t be explained. Mere analytical history is not enough; there has to be something more, something deeper. “What is wrong with you white people,” she demands. Good question.
On the eve of the righteously re-named second Monday in October - Indigenous People’s Day - the trails of endless tears that continue to flow today leave me without an adequate answer – just excuses. The stain is on my hands, on every white settler descendant’s hands, on every government official that created the expulsion and genocide. On every soldier or settler who carried it out, including my own great-great grandfather. It is a permanent, un-erasable stain, for which there is no justification.
In 1877, Chief Joseph of one of the Nez Perce tribes gave voice to the sorrows of the defeated. He led one of the great retreats of all time, compared to that of Napoleon from Russia in 1812: 700 Nez Perce men, women, and children 1,400 miles away from the Northwest into Canada, pursued by the US Army.
"I am tired of fighting," he said. "Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, 'Yes' or 'No.' He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
There is no excuse.
They sure didn't teach us that in Oregon History when I way growing up. Probably still don't. Thank you for this.