In spring 2020, Dr. Laura Pulido taught the course, “Culture, Ethnicity, and Nationalism” in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon. Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd Protests, we as students learned, among other things, about Oregon's foundation as a white utopia. Settlers from the Midwest and Eastern United States poured into Oregon illegally. They were inspired by Manifest Destiny, which affirmed and justified their desire to travel along the Oregon Trail in their pursuit of a promised Eden of bountiful crops, lumber, fish, and minerals.
In that process, Oregonians forbid Black citizens from entering most cities and dispossessed, often violently, Native Americans who had lived on this land for centuries. In addition, they violently policed Chinese and Japanese migrants who built railroads, canals, and other necessary infrastructure for white Americans to produce and sell goods from the private property given exclusively to them through the Donation Land Claim Act.
A few students, I among them, found this both disturbing and fascinating. Why hadn’t I learned this in my K-12 education? Why are textbooks silent on non white Oregon residents throughout its history? I am from Hood River, Oregon - where many Japanese Americans resisted decades of White Only exclusionary policies and newspapers describing Japanese Americans as vermin, invaders, and driving Japan's imperialist agenda. I had never heard a thing about this history.
Laura had a proposition for the class: Let’s study every Oregon Travel Information Council (OTIC) Highway Historical Marker and ask, do any of these signs mention Oregon’s white supremacist history? Highway markers, among other historical markers, are an important piece of cultural information because they tell the public how to remember history. Laura had the metaphor of the movie screen. While watching a movie, the audience is provided with a specific camera shot from a selective perspective. The audience does not get to see what is outside the camera’s view or from other perspectives. Historical markers similarly only show a specific moment and point of view of history. As a group, we wanted to study the set of scenes and perspectives OTIC had chosen, and determine what biases existed in the whole movie OTIC constructed along the state's highways.
After a rough database was put together by our whole class, Sophia Ford, I, and two other students set out to complete the database of all of these markers, which you can view on the map and download here. We also wrote an analysis of our findings here. While some markers mention Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and Black Americans, few wrestle with the discrimination and violence these groups of people actually faced. Take a look for yourself. How do you interpret our State’s history?