History Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Collaboration, Tradition, and Reimagination: The Influence of Soviet Cultural Policy on Uzbek Music
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Bender, Walter; Hessler, Julie
This thesis, “Collaboration, Tradition, and Reimagination: The Influence of Soviet Cultural Policy on Uzbek Music,” is an exploration of three Uzbek musicians and their engagement with Soviet cultural institutions. By using the careers of these musicians, this thesis uncovers the trajectory of increasing nationalist sentiment in Uzbek music, the legacy of the Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy, and the ways that Uzbek musicians interpreted commands from the metropolitan cultural authorities. This thesis also explores the routes to success for musicians within the Uzbek SSR and the different musical movements that took form under different Soviet leaders. This thesis discusses the concept of authenticity in music and within the USSR, where the Soviets attempted to create “authentic” cultural expression from the top down. Musicians in Uzbekistan had ample opportunities to work within the Soviet system, but they were also working for the benefit of Uzbekistan at the same time, creating a culture that continued to be important after the collapse of the USSR.
Open Access
“The Whole Thing Was to Try to Make a Living Here”: Labor, Land, and the Relationships They Produced on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, 1974-Present
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) McIntosh, Matthew; Beda, Steven
This thesis examines the relationships between workers, their labor, and the land during and after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). It places these relationships within a broader history of twentieth century industrial labor on the North Slope and in Alaska. Without these antecedents, the TAPS would not have been possible. I understand and analyze these relationships using oral histories, memoirs, and archival materials including photographs and journals. The TAPS workers’ relationships with labor and land were a productive historical process and force which created oil infrastructure. Workers on the TAPS built meaningful affective relationships which shared many factors with the conservation and environmental movements that so vehemently opposed the TAPS. Therefore, I argue that for some Pipeline workers, these relationships contributed to the construction of future personal lives and small businesses in Alaska’s post-1977 economy. This economy features environmental tourism alongside other resource extraction. I argue that the logics of capitalist extraction and extractivist labor run throughout both forms of value production. Because workers are one consistent throughline between these seemingly disparate economies, labor organizers can use environmental logics with fossil fuel workers to win broad proposals for a post-fossil capital economy.
Open Access
Disrupting Colonial Binaries: Gender and Masculinity on the Northwestern Frontier of New Spain, 1540-1780
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Austin, Zahran; Heinz, Annelise
The overall goal of this thesis is to expand the understanding of the role of gender in theSpanish colonization of the margins of northwestern New Spain as well as the historiographical conceptions which have previously restricted some aspects of this field of study. My sources include both published and unpublished documents, primarily centered around Hernando de Alarcón, Juan de Oñate, Pedro Fages, and Francisco Palóu. The main argument of the thesis is that the proper performance of masculinity was so important to the colonizing Spanish, including missionaries, settlers, and soldiers, that it shaped what they considered good governance, reasonable conduct, appropriate clothing, marriage practices, and sexual behavior. They used the actions of Indigenous people as a rhetorical foil both to make their own masculinity appear stronger and to mark Indigenous people as inferior and other on the grounds of their improper performance of Spanish gender norms.
Open Access
A Deal with the Devil: Arizona State University and the Built Environment in the 20th Century
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Gorham, Chandler; Howell, Ocean
This thesis examines the changing role of Arizona State University (ASU) in Phoenix and the United States from 1950 to 1994. The regional alliance of boosters in Phoenix made ASU a key part of the Valley’s economy as the university advanced research and development (R&D) capabilities to attract knowledge industries. Parallel to the distribution of knowledge production to Phoenix was the Cold War which granted American firms and universities R&D funding increases. The growth of Arizona State changed the built environment in Tempe and across the Valley as the university transitioned space to fit their needs. ASU expanded their facilities in Tempe, built a branch campus in Glendale in 1986, and opened a research park in 1984, all highlighting the university’s commitment to knowledge production. The process of development was unevenly distributed in Tempe as original residents were replaced by students and knowledge workers.
Open Access
Somos de Allá y de Aquí: Tejano Sojourners, Mexican Immigrants, & the Creation of a Familiar Mexican Place in Independence, Oregon, 1950-2000
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ochoa, Victor; Weise, Julie
As Mexican Americans from southern Texas, who called themselves Tejanos, and Mexican immigrants migrated to Independence, Oregon, in the mid-to-late 20th century, memory became a way to familiarize a foreign place. In the 1950s and 1960s, a few Tejano families migrated from the Lower Rio Grande Valley and replicated a sense of home in the migrant stream that would follow them as they settled in Independence. By the 1970s, Mexicanos arrived to a Tejano community who labeled them as a threat to their home. The flames of diasporic strife were fanned in the 1980s and 1990s when the national debate on immigration became racially charged. However, through engaging in a constant struggle to validate their citizenship in Independence, Tejanos and Mexicanos would blossom into a unified community. By the 2000s, this unity would come to mobilize ethnic Mexicans to cement their place in Independence’s historical memory. Although these efforts proved successful, the memories of ethnic Mexicans are quickly becoming shelved. Thus a new effort is required to expand the accessibility of this memory into the heart of Independence.
Embargo
Seafloor Machina: Aging Technologies in the Depths of the Pacific Ocean
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Brazier, Hayley; Weisiger, Marsha
Everyone is talking about, reporting on, and studying the ocean, focusing on issues from sea level rise and pollution to coral reefs and algae blooms. Yet the piece we are missing in our study of the sea is understanding how we are industrializing the ocean floor, how the marine environment is responding to that industrialization, and how our present-day society cannot function without the manipulation, engineering, and management of machines on the seabed. By combining historical, primary source research with present-day marine science, this study offers one of the first environmental histories of the ocean floor. The dissertation analyzes the development of three seafloor industries in the northeast Pacific Ocean from the 1890s into the present day, including oil and gas drilling in the shoreline, telecommunications cables on the continental shelf, and cabled observatories in the abyss. These industries have become indispensable to onshore society: offshore drilling accounts for approximately 30 percent of the globe’s supply of oil; undersea cables facilitate 98 percent of all Internet and international phone traffic; and cabled observatories are scientific instruments at the forefront of collecting marine data that can help to prepare society for earthquakes, tsunamis, and the effects of climate change. Fixed seabed infrastructure has become one of the most important ways that humans are interacting with the ocean, just as fisheries have been to previous generations. I argue that the industrialization of the northeast Pacific’s seabed has resulted in a persistent interaction between marine life and machines. Within months of entering the seawater, marine life colonizes seafloor technologies and transforms them into habitat, a transition I refer to as the machine's biotic afterlife. The biotic afterlife marks not only the decades or centuries the machine will spend in the sea but also its integration into the seafloor’s ecology. Once these machines have spent years, decades, and now centuries in the ocean, what to do with them—to remove, or not to remove?—is the underlying question that drives this dissertation. Ultimately, as this research shows, the removal of machines from the seabed is often a political decision, rather than an ecological one.
Open Access
“Big Tales of Indians Ahead:” The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Discourse in the American West
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Smith, Christopher; Ostler, Jeffrey
“Big Tales of Indians Ahead” traces the reproduction of settler colonial discourses—sentiments narrated by a settler society about themselves and about the Native American societies that predated them—from the period of colonial history of the seventeenth century to the present day in the twenty-first century. This study argues that the anti-Indian rhetoric that could be found in early colonial EuroAmerican writings, particularly Indian captivity narratives, were reproduced by subsequent settler societies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of settler narratives from the overland trail migrations and various forms of popular culture. In the twentieth century these discourses, heavily influenced by past settler discourses, reached wider audiences through new forms of popular culture—particularly Western genre films and mass-produced works of fiction aimed at younger audiences. Finally, this dissertation tracks the ways in which these discourses are still reproduced and present in contemporary popular culture media and political identities in the American West. From Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative of the late-seventeenth century to the overland trail settler narratives of the Oregon Trail and the wildly-popular Western films of the mid-twentieth century, Native Americans had consistently been tied to reductive and derogatory depictions in American collective cultural discourses that has tied stereotypes of so-called “Indians” to inherently-racial traits such as savagery, depravity, and violence. This study not only shows that these assertions from a settler population, and their descendants, has been falsely (and thus unfairly) attributed to racialized notions of “Indianness,” but also provides a clear and consistent historical timeline that tracks these depictions across centuries and various forms of settler discourses.
Open Access
Daughters of Hereditary Societies: The Role of the Amateur in Professional Historic Preservation
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Vanier, Jolie; Randl, Chad
Hereditary societies are membership organizations dedicated to the preservation of the memory of particular people or events. This research explored the contribution of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), as an amateur entity, to preservation. A small group of scholars approached the early history of the DAR and similar organizations, and criticized its historic role as a gatekeeper of American history. This research addressed the historic role of the DAR previously explored by other scholars, but further expanded the literature by shedding light on its positive evolution to an organization that supports diverse approaches to genealogy, provides scholarships, engages in educational outreach, and supports historic sites. Hereditary societies are privately formed organizations with a vested interest in historic preservation, and should be used as allies in the advocacy and development of future historic preservation endeavors.
Open Access
They "Look with Longing Eyes": Pre-Allotment Strategies on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, 1880-1885
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Brown , Madelyn; Weisiger, Marsha
Before the ratification of a national allotment policy in 1887, the US Office of Indian Affairs used assimilation policies to prepare individual reservations for privatization. Situated within the larger themes of US colonialism and nineteenth-century Indigenous landownership, this microhistory examines assimilatory methods and their impact on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation from 1880 to 1885. During this period, the reservation became a space of conflict as government ideologies clashed with Indigenous and settler realities. In their attempt to prove the reservation was prepared for allotment, Indian agents only increased the Confederated Tribes vulnerability to settler interests through a faulty education system; cash-crop agriculture that promoted settler immigration; and the diminishment of a viable economic resource: pastoralism. With Indigenous allottees, white farmers, and white ranchers vying for available land, these assimilation policies did little to prevent settler greed—and extreme land loss—during the Confederated Tribes allotment era.
Open Access
Re-imaging Japan: Photographing a "New Cultural Nation" under the Allied Occupation, 1945-1952
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Cole, Emily; Hanes, Jeffrey
This dissertation examines the role that photography played in re-imaging Japanese cultural identity during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952). It argues that photographers viewed the camera as a tool with which they could engage the postwar discourse on Japanese culture and identity. Eager to renounce the militarism and ultra-nationalism that had previously pervaded society, photographers endeavored to re-image Japan as a “new cultural nation” (shin bunka kokka). Inspired by American photojournalism and European human-interest photography, photographers captured telling scenes of Japanese society and culture. Photographers invoked symbols of tradition (e.g., rural villages, cherry blossoms, Buddhist monks) as well as icons of modernity (e.g., trendy fashions, movie theaters, urban neighborhoods). They photographed men and women at work, at home, and enjoying moments of leisure, and they snapped children at play. Photographers documented social and economic recovery, and they also captured scenes of poverty and material deprivation. Their photos illuminated changing social values and gender roles, foreign cultural influences, and life under the Occupation. As they took pictures of their postwar world, Japanese photographers also quietly addressed the authority of the Occupation, sometimes positively and at other times critically. Images of brawny Japanese athletes who competed—and (sometimes) won—against the U.S. on a world stage connoted an implicit challenge to America authority. At the same time, photos of American GIs in uniform strolling along Japanese streets and training on military bases projected American dominance in Japan. Most American photographers, on the other hand, tended to tout the Occupation as a transformative intervention aimed at helping Japan recover from the devastation of war and embrace the supposedly superior American way of life. In the turbulence of the first postwar decade, Japanese and American photographers were extraordinarily active in documenting and interpreting the complex engagement of Japan with America. By taking a close look at the photographs taken by the Occupied Japanese and the Occupying Americans alike, we gain valuable insight into how they perceived, experienced, and documented each other at the moment of this epochal historical encounter.
Open Access
The World They Wanted: The Japanese Delegation in the World Youth Forum
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Blake, William; Goble, Andrew
This thesis introduces the contribution of Japanese teenage diplomats to the discourse of US-Japan relations in the 1950s. This thesis is focused on young Japanese individuals, and how they chose to represent both themselves and their country in the New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum and the televised debates, The World We Want. I explain how Cold War diplomacy was not exclusively directed by veteran diplomats appointed by elected officials, but also by teenagers who took their opportunity to represent Japan with focus and with intention. My research, based on newspaper articles from the Herald Tribune covering the event, biographies written by the delegates, and the televised debates, emphasizes how the delegates took an active stake in Japan’s post war future while representing Japan on 1950s American television in the process.
Open Access
From Russia With Love: A Transnational History of Post-Soviet Wives and Their American Husbands
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Brereton, August; Hessler, Julie
This thesis addresses the motivations and experiences of post-Soviet women who married American men though internet agencies in the 1990s and 2000s. I explain the historical context for these migrations, unpack the mechanics of international marriage, and shed light on the experiences of Russian women and their marriages in America. As the post-Soviet period enters the discipline of history, I aim to complicate earlier scholarship which focused on the legal side of international marriage as an industry, without thorough exploration of the individuals involved. My research, based heavily on eight interviews conducted during the summer of 2021, emphasizes the agency of Russian women as they consciously sought loving marriages and material security, while simultaneously navigating the gendered strains of the Soviet collapse.
Open Access
"Rake Up No Old Stories of Evil": Memory, Celebration, and Erasure of Settler Violence in the American Pacific Northwest
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Carpenter, Marc; Ostler, Jeffrey
This dissertation is both a new historical synthesis of pioneer violence within and beyond the wars on Native people in the mid-nineteenth-century American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars—and broader tides of colonial violence—were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. Violence against Native people was even more frequent and more accepted across pioneer spaces than has typically been argued—indeed, I contend that most of the wars and associated violence were part of a single broad-based war on Native people across the Northwest. Early generations of regional history writers deliberately distorted the historical record to paint pioneer volunteer soldiers as heroes. But disagreements about which acts were heroic accidentally preserved archives of atrocity, from the mouths and pens of pioneers themselves.I draw on numerous virtually unused archival sources from pioneer perpetrators to make a number of interventions into the history of the pioneer Northwest: reframing wars, uncovering acts of genocide, relating unrecognized instances of lynching and sexual violence, and unmasking murderers along with the people and politicians who supported and joined them, at the time and since. Proving the untruths deliberately propagated by pioneers and their historians weighs on the balance of historical narratives about key events. Stripped of the veneer of deceit added for posterity, pioneer memories often mirror Indigenous histories of the same events—with the differences crafted through the efforts of generations of history writers, who preferred gauzy tales to hard truths. By delving into the work and specific mechanics of erasure and nostalgia, I demonstrate both deliberate intent behind the cover-ups and the failures of those who attempted them. This should not only reshape the history of colonialism and genocide in the Pacific Northwest, but suggest useful methodological and theoretical interventions in the history of American colonialism specifically and settler colonialism broadly. This dissertation affirms the existence of the structures of oppression that support colonial projects, but recognizes the fissures and cracks in those structures that Indigenous activists and their allies were able to use—sometimes in acts of difficult compromise—in their ongoing struggles for life, rights, and sovereignty.
Open Access
The Christianization of Kyushu: A World-Historical Interpretation of the Jesuit Mission to Japan, 1549-1650
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Glowark, Erik; hanes, Jeff
This dissertation locates Japan’s place in the world-historical phenomenon of Christianization. Intended as a case study in the spread of Christianity across cultures, it uses the Japanese experience with Jesuit missionary activity to highlight the shared features of Christianization as a “connective” world-historical process over centuries. The project aims: 1. To overturn notions of Japan as an isolated society with negligible participation in world history during the premodern period, focusing specifically on its so-called “Christian Century;” and 2. To explore Japan’s place in the inherently polymorphic universe of Christianity that was extended through missionization. With this dissertation, I shed light on how the religion there and elsewhere permits us to see “connections,” across time and space, in how we think about seemingly disparate cultures such as the Japanese, the Nahuas, the ancient Romans, and medieval Germanic peoples. Moreover, it demonstrates how early modern Catholicism resonated with Japanese religious sensibilities. Employing four parts, three of which mirror the ecclesiological concept of the Communion of Saints, I show how the Japanese fully engaged Christianization on Kyushu. Part I, “The Mechanics of Christianization,” outlines for the first time how this world-historical process played out on Kyushu specifically. Its three chapters focus on three common aspects of the process of Christianization world-historically, namely “missionization,” “community,” and “tension.” Part II, “The Church Militant,” examines how Christian forms of exorcism acted as a “native mode of persuasion” in a variety of premodern societies, Japan included. Japanese Christians embraced and practiced Catholic exorcism on their own, thus greatly facilitating the transplantation of the religion. Part III, “The Church Suffering,” focuses on how the Christian living and the Christian dead constituted one community on Kyushu. Through “the praxis of purgatory,” which included penitential practices, suffrages, and indulgences, Japanese Christians cared for their own “future dead selves” and their dead family members and coreligionists in the afterlife. Part IV, “The Church Triumphant,” shows how the translation of relics was an important part of establishing sacred landscapes in both Buddhism and Christianity. On Kyushu, Japanese Christians carried relics as personal loci of sacrality in addition to those enshrined in churches.
Open Access
Running the Redwood Empire: Indigeneity, Modernity, and a 480-Mile Footrace
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Keegan, Tara; Ostler, Jeffrey
Scholars have reexamined U.S. Indian policy in order to detail American genocidal efforts in the lands that became the United States. Others have studied the lives and influences of Tribes and Indigenous individuals who survived genocide and contributed their labor and creativity to modern enterprises. Rarely, however, are the two approaches combined in a single work that traces the mechanisms for survival in the face of nineteenth-century genocide and the survivors’ enduring legacies in a modern age of industry, technology, and reinvented popular culture. This dissertation utilizes archival sources and oral histories to study the intersection of traditional Indigenous and mainstream American cultures and reconstruct a timeline of genocide, survival, adaptation, and influence in Northern California from the Gold Rush to the growth of regional identities and economies in the late 1920s. Native people went from being the targets of genocide to key celebrities that projected Native modernity in the face of white supremacist backlash and “Vanishing Race” ideology that anticipated Native extinction.The central case study is the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon of 1927 and 1928—the first official “ultramarathon” in U.S. history. The story of this event provides the narrative arc and interpretive fulcrum of the dissertation. The marathon extended the 480-miles of the Redwood Highway, which also served as the racetrack. Boosters designed the event to showcase the highway and invited only Native men to participate, plus employed a Native woman as the event—and highway—mascot. These were the sites of intervention I discuss. The central case study is the Redwood Highway Indian Marathon of 1927 and 1928—the first official “ultramarathon” in U.S. history. The marathon extended the 480-miles of the Redwood Highway, which also served as the racetrack. Boosters designed the event to showcase the highway and invited only Native men to participate, plus employed a Native woman as the event—and highway—mascot. These were the sites of intervention. This project furthers studies of the Indigenous American experience and its intersection with mainstream American culture, colonialism, and evolving racism from the age of genocide through the turbulent 1920s. It documents a century-old revision of racial stereotypes and invites another today.
Open Access
China's Farthest Southwest: The Transformation of Yunnan During the Reign of Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735)
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Hou, Jue; Asim, Ina
During the reign of Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), the emperor initiated a radical frontier policy to consolidate and transform Yunnan, the province located in the far southwest of China that borders with the Southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. The Qing expansion of Yunnan represented an intention to incorporate and dominate the population of Yunnan province. Shaped by the notion of cultural superiority in an area with a comparatively underdeveloped economy, the Han majority was viewed as representing the superior civilization capable of assimilating and civilizing the frontier communities. This thesis aims to challenge the myth of Han superiority by considering how ethnic communities and Han settlers equally contributed to Yunnan’s transformation. Although the tensions between the two groups were visible, they accommodated, acculturated, and influenced each other in constructing a new social order in Yunnan.
Open Access
From Captivity to Placement: Re-examining the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Evans, Jack; Ostler, Jeffrey
This thesis investigates the Indian Student Placement Program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which removed tens of thousands of Native students from their families and placed them in white LDS homes during the latter half of the twentieth century. I argue that greater attention to the LDS past and the historical context of Indigenous child removal reframes the program as a settler colonial effort, which distanced placement students from their Indigeneity. Despite this, Native people turned placement to their own ends, simultaneously maximizing the program’s benefits while minimizing its harms. Today, the LDS Church and its settler membership hardly discuss placement, opting instead for a whitewashed, selective memory of the past. Yet, for better or worse—probably worse—placement played a significant role in the history of Indigenous North America and the church in the twentieth century. It must not be forgotten.
Open Access
Sanitizing History: Environmental Cleanup and Historic Preservation in U.S. West Mining Communities
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Frank, Nichelle; Weisiger, Marsha
Residents in mining towns of the U.S. West face a troubling quandary in their attempts to preserve historical evidence of their town’s industrial past, because that evidence threatens their health. The 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, or “Superfund”) authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up toxic sites, but these sites are often where the most marginalized residents have lived and are sometimes the only evidence of those residents. How have mining communities preserved the past while ensuring the community’s health and safety? My dissertation, “Sanitizing History: Historic Preservation and Environmentalism in U.S. West Mining Communities,” is the first book-length study that weaves together the histories of historic preservation and environmentalism to demonstrate that the answer lies with interagency cooperation and site-specific solutions. Focusing on Butte, Montana; Globe, Arizona; and Leadville, Colorado, my study relies on a wide array of source material, including archival collections and site visits. Chapter Two shows how some narratives about mining towns, rather than boosting the towns, derided them for their physical and moral uncleanliness. Chapter Three traces Progressive Era urban reform while Chapter Four documents infrastructure modernization from the 1920s to 1940s and the resulting destruction of historical resources related to marginalized populations. Chapter Five explores redevelopment in the early postwar years. Chapter Six demonstrates how historic preservation and environmental policies coalesced in the 1960s, and Chapter Seven reveals that previously marginalized residents leveraged 1980s environmental laws to gain cleanup of mining landscapes. By employing lenses of intersectionality and agency, my project concludes that, in the process of asserting their right to bodily health and safety, mining town residents have perpetuated a pattern of forgetting that allowed cultural ills to continue. My work thus prompts scholars, activists, and members of the general public to search for policies that preserve painful pasts while allowing for healing.
Open Access
Oil Capital: Industry and Society in Baku, Azerbaijan, 1870-Present
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Hastings, Rebecca; Hessler, Julie
This dissertation is a historical study of the city of Baku, Azerbaijan, and its oil industry from the 1870s to the present, covering the tsarist Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras. The history of the Baku oil industry offers a clear, focused example of the social and physical effects of the imposition of external parties’ financial and commodity demands on an urban-industrial setting. Baku as an urban environment, comprising not just the physical elements of the city but also its sociocultural communities, has embodied priorities imposed on the oil industry that have shifted as the global importance of oil and natural gas has grown, as those commodities’ uses have changed over time, and according to successive regimes’ respective political and economic ideologies. Despite the extra-regional connections that have contributed to Baku’s incongruous nature relative to its surroundings, in every era the city has remained to some degree engaged with its Azerbaijani and Transcaucasian contexts, including ethnic relations, geography, and geology. Throughout successive administrative eras, the city’s population grew and shrank, diversified and grew more homogeneous; interethnic and labor relations eased and raged; the city’s architecture and physical layout altered according to authorities’ tastes, ad hoc additions, industrial booms, innovations, and stagnation; the state of the natural environment deteriorated (according to modern standards) almost continuously, an unobjectionable or perturbing process, depending on the prevailing attitudes of the period. Using a synthesis of archival and published sources, this study investigates the extensive degree to which the character of the city, and its residents’ experience of it, hinged on its status as an oil capital.
Open Access
Invisible Indigeneity: Examining the Indigenous Historical Landscape in Oregon
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Persico, Ariana; Ostler, Jeffrey
Specifically focusing on the Museum at Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the High Desert Museum this thesis explores how Native and non-Native museums exist at the intersection of historical narrative production and memory studies. By examining how these institutions illuminate the Indigenous Historical Landscape it is easier to see how museums engage with Native histories and voices. Historians tend to favor historical monographs, not museums, as the cornerstone for historical narrative dissemination which leaves museums struggling to display complex Native histories. By arguing for museums as sites of active engagement with memory and as authors of historical narratives, museums will be able to participate in better decolonizing practices in order to combat settler colonial narrative erasure. Museums are unique educational institutions that create space for critical interactions that change how history is produced, consumed, and circulated.