Mondo's NAT #294 - Kalapuya Traditional Cache
Mondo's NAT #294 - Kalapuya
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Native American Tribes series.
Kalapuya
The Kalapuya are a Native American ethnic group and are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. The Kalapuya tribes' traditional homelands were the Willamette Valley of present-day western Oregon in the United States, an area bounded by the Cascade Mountains at the east and the Oregon Coast Range at the west, the Columbia River at the north to the Calapooya Mountains of the Umpqua River at the south.
The Kalapuya[1] people are said to have originally entered their tribal homeland, located in the Willamette Valley located in the American state of Oregon by migrating from the south of the valley northwards, forcing out earlier inhabitants. The Kalapuyan people spoke sundry dialects of a Kalapuyan language, categorized by John Wesley Powell as part of the Takelman language group, today known as the Oregon Penutian languages.
The Kalapuyan people were not a single homogenous tribal entity but rather were divided into multiple autonomous subdivisions loosely related to one another by virtue of language. The eight related groups comprising the Kalapuya people spoke three distinct dialects of the Oregon Penutian language family: Northern Kalapuyan, Central Kalapuyan, and Yoncalla (also called Southern Kalapuya). These languages were mutually unintelligible.
Each of these bands occupied specific areas along the Willamette, Umpqua, and McKenzie rivers. The various Kalapuyan bands were hunter-gatherers, producing food by fishing and hunting. The tribe made use of obsidian obtained from the volcanic ranges to the east to fashion sharp and effective projectile points, including arrowheads and spear tips.
Prior to contact with white explorers, traders, and missionaries, the Kalapuya population is believed to have numbered as many as 15,000 people. Epidemiology scholar Robert Boyd pegs the total Kalapuyan population between 8,780 and 9,200 for the period between 1805 and the end of the decade of the 1820s. Viral epidemics which decimated indigenous populations accompanied the white explorers, traders, and missionaries which entered the region. Some accounts recount tales of villages devoid of inhabitants, standing in grim testament to the devastating effect of epidemic disease. By 1849 Oregon territorial governor Joseph Lane reckoned the remaining Kalapuyan population at just 60 souls — with those survivors managing to exist in the most dire of conditions.
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