4 JUNE 1,2006
Smoke Signals
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Tribal member David Lewis helps uncover and distribute hundreds of thousands of pages of Northwest Indian
history so that new histories will come from the Tribal viewpoint.
By Ron Karten
An Indian, Peter Petit (an old spell
ing) of the Grand Ronde Tribe, had
lost his leg in the 1880s. A series
of letters described how an Indian
Agent at Grand Ronde, tried to get
a prosthesis made for him and that
they were successful in the effort.
Another set of correspondence dealt
with a petition. The first letter ap
peared to be a petition from Indians
of Grand Ronde seeking to end their
status as Indians and sell all their
land. The letter said they wanted to
be treated fairly.
A month later, the correspondence
shows that the letter was a fake. The
names falsely put on the petition
were a creation of a real estate at
torney from Dallas, Oregon.
These are some of the gems to come
out of the work of Tribal member
David Lewis through the Southwest
Oregon Research Project (SWORP).
Today, he is in his final year of his
University of Oregon Ph.D. program
p ana is aiso
3
,
if H
port from many quarters, most re
cently, $20,000 from the Coquelle
Community Fund.
"The purpose (of the grant) is to go
"The Tribes can recover language and
culture. They can do their own research into
what occurred between the United States and
the Tribes, (into) what conditions were like.
David Lewis, Tribal member
Manager and
Director of SWORP.
Since 1995, Lewis has been back
to Washington, D.C. twice to comb
through Indian archives and bring
the fruits of his search back home.
His work has drawn financial sup-
back to archival collections." Lewis
has already searched Washington,
D.C.'s National Anthropological
Archives and the National Archives
of the Smithsonian Institution to
collect written pages relating to the
Northwest Indian experience.
"We're looking at others for the
future," he said. "We intend to look
through American Philosophical Soci
ety in Philadelphia, and we'd like to go
through the Bancroft
Library at Berkeley,
and the University of
Washington (state)
Library, mainly be
cause all of those li
braries have the most
extensive collections
that deal with Oregon
Indians."
The "we" refers to
scholars from the
Coquelle, Siletz and Grand Ronde
Tribes, who have participated in
SWORP, started in 1998 by George
Wasson, a Tribal Elder of the Co
See LEWIS
on page 5
Looking Wolf Headlines American Indian Week At Spirit Mountain Casino
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Hand Made Tribal member Jan Michael Reibach played the Native flute as part of American Indian Week held at Spirit Mountain Casino on the week of May 1 5-20.