April: Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley with Dr. David Lewis

On April 9th, Dr. David G. Lewis gave the first presentation in the Willamette Valley History Series. The author of Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley gave an overview of the Indigenous history of the region, with a focus on pre and post contact land use and changes of the once oak savannah valley we live on today. 

Dr. Lewis is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Indigenous Studies at Oregon State University, who in 2001 began publishing his extensive research on the Tribal histories of the Northwest Coastal peoples, specializing in the Western Oregon Tribes. 

While most publications and stories omit over ten thousand years of human history in the region, Dr. Lewis’s most recent work, “Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley,” focuses on the region’s First Peoples and their experiences as their homelands drastically changed in a short amount of time. We hope you can join us for this presentation on a part of the past that most people are unacquainted with.

You can find more information about Dr. Lewis and the book here, and more of his work can be found here.