Gettin' Real About WU and Chemawa History

Part of my Chemawa Indian School Partnership Program class is learning about the history of the institutions, both Willamette and Chemawa, because they have deeply connected and important ties. I should note that Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington (among many other schools in the NW) has a similar story.

In the 1830s, Jason Lee and other Methodist missionaries came to the Oregon territory, which used to cover most of present-day Washington, to minister to the native peoples already inhabiting the land. The Kalapuyan nation had worked the land, cultivating the area to fit their specific needs, creating what looked like a Garden of Eden to these white missionaries. But, by the time the missionaries arrived, diseases spreading from the south had wiped out nearly 80% of the native population, leaving an unnatural demographic of people trying to rebuild their community. So, Lee and his counterparts developed missionary schools to "civilize" and convert the native peoples.

Because of huge differences in culture and a struggling mission, in 1842 the school was closed to native youths and re-organized to educate the children of the missionaries. They wanted to stay, but recognized the goal of conversion to be an irrational one.

By the 1870s, the period of outright warfare between natives and white settlers in the U.S. was beginning to end. The federal government, later to become the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Richard Pratt created boarding schools for native youth. Children of ages 5 and above were taken from their homes and families on the reservation to be prepared for the ideology of individualism, to lose their languages, to train for menial jobs, and to be separated from the sense of community so crucial and central to their cultures (I can't help but use rhetoric of disgust and insert strong opinions).

In 1880, the Chemawa Indian School was founded in Forest Grove, the site of Pacific University, and later moved to Salem. The children of the school essential built it, working the land, planting orchards which would eventually generate some money for the school. By the late 1800s, there were 24 other boarding schools across the nation. It was mandatory at the time for all children to go to school, but natives were banned from public school because they were not actually granted citizenship until 1924. Citizenship in 1924! Women got the vote in 1920! So, virtually the only option for native families was to send their children to these government-run boarding schools. There were children from many different nations at Chemawa, but in the 1950s the student body consisted of mostly Navajo peoples from Arizona and New Mexico.

In the 1970s, due to the rise in native movements and new treaty rights, Chemawa began to shift from a strictly vocational school to a traditional high school. Not until 2005 did Willamette have a public ceremony of renewal with the Chemawa school, at which Chemawa's superintendent approached President Pelton asking for help from our university. He felt comfortable to do this because in the fall of 2005, 14 native students enrolled at Willamette and began working with Chemawa students on their own. Rebecca Dobkins, our professor, had been doing work as well to acknowledge the history of our institution and generate a relationship between our two schools. So, the Chemawa school was under pressure from the BIA to improve performance and change curriculum, and sought help from those interested in creating that relationship.

Our university now has a class and a tutoring partnership, but we have still not really institutionalized the relationship. This year, the Grand Ronde tribes are funding the Chemawa program. Kind of ironic, no? Rebecca has to fundraise $10-15,000 each year to keep the program running, and spent years pleading and eventually jump-starting the program with the help of students and without administrative approval. People believed students wouldn't be interested, that it was a bad idea, that we should leave it be.

Oh yeah. Since the Chemawa school is funded by the federal government, the wars in Iraq and Iran have essentially erased the budget.