Presentation Abstract

Faculty's Name: Melinda Jette, Ph.D.

Co-registrant Names:

Type of Presentation: Faculty Research Lightning Round

Presentation Title: "Kalapuyan Women and Gender Relations, 1800-1850s Melinda Marie Jetté"

Abstract:

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Kalapuyan women of Oregon's Willamette Valley, their families, and their communities experienced continuity, change, and adaptation in the face of sustained pressure and encroachment on their homelands, their natural resources, their livelihoods, and their sovereignty. The lives and the experiences of the Kalapuyan women reflected larger patterns of Native history in the Pacific Northwest during this period. In addition to the sustained pressures of colonization, there was a concomitant marginalization of Kalapuyan women in the historical record due to patriarchal and racial biases in Euro-American settler culture and scholarship. More recent scholarship on Indigenous women’s history outlines the importance of recovering their experiences for a fuller, more accurate account of the past. Equally significant is the ways in which gender provides a window into early intercultural relations in the Pacific Northwest, most notably in the Willamette Valley, a major theater of Euro-American colonization throughout the nineteenth century.

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