Event

Native Children and the Forest Grove Indian School

Until a few decades ago, it was U.S. federal policy to take children away from Native American families and place them in boarding schools. These schools punished students for any expression of their Native cultures or languages. One of the earliest such boarding schools opened in Forest Grove in 1880. Its descendant, Chemawa Indian School, is still open today in Salem. The school has had profound and lasting effects on the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. This talk will include images and maps of the school, and will speak on the forces that drove its founding. It will also describe the daily life of students and how we can confront the boarding school systems legacy of trauma.

Ticket proceeds go to Native youth education.
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Eva Guggemos is the Archivist and an Associate Professor at Pacific University in Oregon. Previously, she was the Research Services Librarian at Yale Universitys Rare Book Library. She has an M.A. in History from Yale University, a Master of Library Science from Simmons University, and a B.A. from the University of Kansas. At Pacific, she has spearheaded a project to digitize all the university's records related to the Forest Grove Indian School, which later became Chemawa Indian School in Salem. Her current project is a book on the Forest Grove Indian School.