EDITOR'S NOTE

Abstract

OHQ vol. 118, no. 1 6 © 2017 Oregon Historical Society THE ANNUAL MEETINGS of the State of Jefferson Historical Group (SOJHG) provided the inspiration for this special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. As Trudy Vaughan explains, those meetings have now been taking place for over four decades, enabling anthropologists, archaeologists , librarians, historians, Tribal members, and interested members of the public to share their questions and discoveries about the history of the region defined since the middle of the nineteenth century as northern California and southwestern Oregon. These gatherings are predicated on the idea that it is valuable to explore and exchange information about a how human beings have lived within the landscape. For many of the people who present at SOJHG meetings, and most of the authors in this issue, the region they study is also the place where they make their homes. The resulting personal stories of connection, of relationships, are woven throughout this issue, where the authors are working to understand not only what happened in the past but also what reverberations that past has today, on themselves and their neighbors throughout the region. Jeff LaLande gives a sweeping and analytical overview of the 160-year history of the concept of the as-yet-unrealized new state of the United States. He splits the history into three phases, the third fitting roughly into the chronology of his residence in the region, allowing the essay to become both a scholarly and a personal investigation. LaLande explores the ways that Jeffersonian advocates have used the threat, or romance, of secession for a variety of purposes, finding that all are based in the feeling of being distinct from, and perhaps disrespected by, the distant, urban centers of power. In Oregon, like much of the United States, there is a well-documented feeling of disconnection between those who live in rural areas and those who live in urban ones. Chelsea Rose and Mark Tveksov’s descriptions of a rural community’s long-term tension between the desire to be isolated and to interact with more urban places on their own terms calls back to the LaLande’s concluding comments on the complexities of individualism. Rose and Tveskov invite us to see the history of places like Powers not solely through the lens of the ravages of resource-extraction capitalism, but also through the powerEDITOR ’S NOTE Canty-Jones, Editor’s Note 7 ful desire to be left alone and a deep distrust of the judgment of outsiders. The authors’ analysis of the history of the Carolina Company’s emigration to Oregon, and of the farmers and ranchers who carry that legacy today in the remote landscape of the upper South Fork Coquille River River, is deeply informed by the conversations they had with local residents while doing archaeology in the area. Their work and conversations in the field were just as crucial to their conclusions as their work in the archives. Engaging in a collaborative investigation of landscape and archives was also crucial to Mark Tveskov’s conclusions about the Battle of Hungry Hill. He goes beyond revealing what happened on that battlefield, long lost to history, to raise and answer the question of why that story had been misremembered , ignored, erased, and rewritten. Tveskov argues that in bending or disregarding the truth, memoirists, journalists, civic boosters, and historians contributed to “an emergent American mythology that is morally absolved of the responsibilities of violence on the colonial encounter.” That violence is front-and-center in the article by Shannon Tushingham and Richard Brooks, who explicitly and purposefully use the term genocide to explain the massacres visited on Tolowa people, including at their most sacred annual gathering. Tushingham had begun her study of Hiouchi (Xaa-yuu-chit) with the intention of learning about the pre-contact lifeways of the Tolowa, and it was through discussion with Brooks and other Tolowa that she learned the significance of survival, the importance of adding details to that story of the time between “when the world turned upside down” and today. For the Oregon Historical Quarterly, our responsibilities of violence on the colonial encounter must be to acknowledge it, to create space for the stories to...