A living document for engagement & relationship-building
This text is a living document that will function in the teaching, learning, and mentoring work of our program, including but not limited to classroom engagement, special projects, and faculty outreach activities.
Conflict Resolution acknowledges that the lands on which Portland State University stands today are the historic homelands of several bands of Chinook-speaking people including many Multnomah, Clackamas, and Watlata/Cascade villages. There were also Kalapuya (Tualatin villages) nearby and the Molalla people in the Willamette Valley. Today their descendants are primarily members of the Grande Ronde and Siletz Confederated Tribes, with Chinook and other tribal relations at Warm Springs, Yakima, and the Chinook Nation. A number of Native American individuals and groups own land in Multnomah County on modern terms. Multnomah County is unceded Indian land and, in this sense, remains contestable space. In addition to the federally recognized tribes located primarily in the state of Oregon listed in this document, we acknowledge the presence of numerous "unrecognized" tribes and indigenous groups, whose stories also demand our attention.
The settler colonialism that displaces the indigenous population simultaneously creates conditions of violence and exclusion for other groups of people. In the nineteenth century, Africa-descended people were officially prohibited from residence in the territory and, later, the state of Oregon and only gradually gained access to citizenship rights like voting and property ownership. In addition to banning the institution of slavery, the Oregon state constitution of 1859 contained explicit provisions for (free) Black residential exclusion and limitations on political rights. These constitutional provisions were not rescinded until the 1920s. Local sundown laws, redlining, and other segregationist practices persisted into the post-world war II period. The struggle of African American citizens to access full and equal participation in the life of the city of Portland, the state of Oregon, and the nation continues to this day, notably in the area of law enforcement, which hyper-regulates Black youth and adults, often fatally.
Since the 1830s, migrants and contract laborers from around the Pacific rim, including the Kanaka maori peoples from Hawai'i, Chinese people (notably from Guangdong province), Japanese individuals and families, and men and women from the Philippines, have faced exclusions in economic and civic life in the U.S. The Naturalization Law of 1870 defined Asian migrants as "aliens ineligible to citizenship" and restricted naturalization to those humans who could be categorized as "white" or "black." The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883 blocked the entrance of people from China for all but a few categories of visitors (diplomats, merchants, and students). The Supreme Court cases Ozawa v. United States (1922) and Thind v. United States (1923) prevented Japanese heritage and South Asian heritage individuals, respectively, from claiming naturalization rights under the category "white." The so-called Alien Land Laws of the world war I era prevented Japanese immigrants from owning land. Executive Order 9066 (1942) imprisoned Japanese and Japanese Americans as a war-time measure, disrupting the lives of 120,000 people and resulting in a significant out-transfer for wealth and property from families and communities. Some reparations to Japanese American citizens interned under 9066 were made by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
Settler colonialism and capitalist expansion in the United States have been further enabled by the biased policing of residents of the Spanish empire (before 1820) and citizens of the nation of Mexico (after 1848). In some areas, like Baja California and New Mexico, the blended heritage of Mexicans and indigenous North American peoples makes distinguishing U.S. "immigration policy" and "Native American policy" exceedingly difficult. Although never subjected to immigration restriction or quotas (like the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Johnson Reed Act of 1924) Mexican nationals endure highly volatile legislation and enforcement practices that together reinforce their status as a temporary or "reserve" labor force in the service and agricultural sectors of the United States. Examples of such regulation are the Repatriation Program (1929-1936) which deported over 1 million Mexicans and Mexican American (citizens) during the Great Depression and the Bracero Program (1942-1964) which enabled migration back into the United States in specific labor and employment sectors ("bracero" means worker in Spanish). The current practice of detaining unaccompanied minors and of separating parents or other adult relatives from their children or younger kin at the border is another chapter in the long history of repressive policing tied to a colonial history.
Sometimes colonized populations have had citizenship and even "whiteness" imposed on them, resulting in an engulfment or quasi-forced assimilation policy. Such moves include the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which categorized Californios/as and other Mexicano/a groups in New Mexico, Texas, and neighboring areas as "white" and thereby citizens of the United States. However, most of these white-by-law populations have had difficulty accessing full citizenship rights for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Similarly, Native Americans were pressured into religious and economic assimilation and, from there, into citizenship by the federal boarding school system, the Dawes Severalty Act of 1882, and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Some Native Americans supported the idea of citizenship and voting as part of an overall survivance strategy; those who did not support these approaches were rarely consulted and remained mostly unheard in the halls of power. Federal land policies in favor of continued settler colonialism often underwrote Indian assimilation programs. For example, Dawes enabled the dissolution and breaking up of Indian reservations in favor of single-family farm plots. The abolition of Indian governments under the Tribal Termination Act of 1954 had a similar "detribalization" thrust and included programs that physically moved Native Americans into cities and urban areas, resettling them far away from what remained of reservation or allotted lands. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 belatedly halted the forced removal of native children from their families of origin under the guise of "rescue" and "assimilation," actions which severely disrupted family function and prevented the passing of indigenous cultural heritage across the generations.
The displacement of poorer urban residents, including those of European descent, echoes some of this pressure on land and citizenship rights characteristic of settler colonialism in the United States. The Vanport Flood of 1948 destroyed PSU's predecessor, Vanport Extension College, and displaced hundreds of poor and working families from the remnants of the Vanport war time housing project, a population that at that point included a majority of African Americans. Urban renewal projects in post-world-war II cities frequently displaced the residents of immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods. In 1960s Portland, these projects included the Albina district in NE, where African Americans had acquired a small economic toehold in a segregated area of the district, as well as in south Portland, which was a mostly Italian and Jewish neighborhood that also included a population of Roma families. A few buildings remain that mark these former neighborhoods. Such buildings include Christian churches, like Mt. Olivet Baptist near the convention center, and St. Michael's and St. Mary's downtown, as well as the Sephardi synagogue Avahath Achin and the old Neighborhood House in SW Lair Hill. These buildings are the remnants of ethnic-cultural enclaves that were sacrificed with varying levels of consent to economic projects directed by the city and business elites.
The establishment of Portland State University on the south park blocks thus fits into this landscape of post-war urban redevelopment projects and physically sits at the historic cross roads of these layered struggles over land use, citizenship rights, and social belonging. The building of the Native American Student and Community Center in 2012 marks a gradual reorientation of space with a long and fraught history up to the present day.
Federally Recognized Indian Tribes in Oregon
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians
Burns Paiute Tribe
Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
Coquille Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Klamath Tribes
Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes
Thank you to Dr. Tracy Prince, Robert Franklin, Yolonda Salguiero, and Trevino Brings Plenty for feedback and guidance on this document.
The above document is drawn from the following sources:
Dodds, Gordon B. The College That Would Not Die: The First Fifty Years of Portland State University, 1946-1996. Oregon Historical Society Press, 2000.
Gibson, Karen J. "Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940-2000." Transforming Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2007): 3-25.
Haney-López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 2006.
Maben, Manly. Vanport. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1987.
McLagan, Elizabeth. A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940. Georgian Press, 1980.
Prince, Tracy J., and Schaffer, Zadie. Notable Women of Portland. Arcadia Publishing, 2017.
Rosenthal, Nicolas G. "Repositioning Indianness: Native American Organizations in Portland, Oregon, 1959–1975." Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 3 (2002): 415-38.
Wong, Marie Rose. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon. University of Washington Press, 2004.