Thread by @cjcmichel

Fascinating paper on the historical memory of imperial settler-colonial violence in Oregon, and how wonton anti-Indigenous violence was whitewashed out of Oregon's (and the Pacific Northwest's) story:

https://twitter.com/OrHist/status/1315864807346642944

'During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Americans understood the term 'pioneer' as reference to a soldier of colonialism. They specifically conceptualized pioneers... as people who were actively and often violently expelling Native people and overtaking their land.'

'A plurality of the Euro-Americans who came to mid-19th-century Oregon sought to create a racially exclusionary state... People at the federal and territorial level alike envisioned Oregon... as a White man’s republic, from which Native people had to be (or had been) expunged.'

‘A true history of the Pacific Northwest must reckon with the legions of Euro-American pioneers who, during the 1840s, the 1850s, and beyond, pursued pogroms and inflicted acts of workaday racial violence in pursuit of a White ethno-state.'

'As they had since the founding of the United States, federal treaty negotiators [in the Pacific Northwest] often threatened genocide to compel Indigenous leaders to sign iniquitous treaties.'

‘According to Article II of the 1948 U.N. genocide conventions, the territory and state of Oregon perpetrated genocide against Native nations not only in the 1850s but well into the twentieth century.'