The Making of Seaside's “Indian Place”: Contested and Enduring Native Spaces on the Nineteenth Century Oregon Coast

Abstract

During the mid nineteenth century, non-Native settlement and activities disrupted and changed historic Chinook and Clatsop settlements along the Columbia River. Indian Place in Seaside, Oregon, became home to a number of displaced peoples and an enclave where “the living gathered with the remains of the dead,” for “modest protection from the apocalyptic changes that so radically disrupted tribal lands, lives, and worldviews.” Douglas Deur documents tribal migration to Seaside during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and calls attention to significant early residents of Indian Place. Transitional communities such as Indian Place, Deur attests, “defined the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Native experience in northwestern Oregon and beyond.” While the Indian Place no longer exists, it remains an “important [conduit] for tribal cultural knowledge, values, and practices that endure today.”