Land Acknowledgment
We would like to acknowledge that the home of The Bellwether Review, Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus, is located on the land of the Atfalati-Kalapuyan tribes (also known as Tualatin Kalapuyan), who were among the First People living in what we currently call Washington County. In 1855, the Atfalati tribes were forced to sign a treaty relinquishing ownership of their land. Today, the Kalapuyan people are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, located southwest of Washington County.
We also want to acknowledge and thank the original stewards of the land throughout the area which PCC serves today, including the Molalla; the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook; as well as the many other Tribes who have made their homes along the Columbia River.
We, the editors, have chosen to include this land acknowledgment as an active commitment to supporting contemporary Indigenous sovereignty by promoting awareness and fostering dialogue as a contribution toward decolonizing the oppression which has resulted from systemic policies of colonization—including genocide, relocation, broken treaties, and assimilation.
The Bellwether Review seeks to highlight the diversity of linguistic and artistic expression of student voices on the Rock Creek campus and throughout the PCC community; with this in mind, we want to acknowledge the absence of voices that might otherwise have been thriving today, if it were not for the practices of forced cultural assimilation that leads to the loss of fluency in local Indigenous languages. The last known fluent speaker of Tualatin Northern Kalapuyan, Louis Kenoyer (baxawádas), died in 1937. Kenoyer’s memoir, My Life: Reminiscences of a Grande Ronde Reservation Childhood, translated into English from Tualatin Northern Kalapuyan, is available at the PCC Rock Creek Library.
We encourage readers of The Bellwether Review to honor the journal’s connection to the history of the land upon which it is produced by supporting and promoting organizations that are working to cultivate and honor contemporary Indigenous cultures in a variety of ways, such as PCC’s Native Nations Club, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, The NAYA Family Center, Salmon Nation, and the First Nations’ Native Language Immersion Initiative.
Learn more about the Kalapuyan people by exploring Kalapuyan Tribal History, Pacific University’s Indigenous History of Oregon, and the Five Oaks Museum’s online exhibition, This IS Kalapuyan Land.
The Bellwether Review editorial team would like to thank PCC Native Nations Club Coordinator Karry Kelley (Yahooskin/Modoc) and Dr. Blake Hausman (Cherokee Nation), PCC faculty in English and Native American Studies, for advising us on crafting this acknowledgment.