Program date: Jan. 30, 2026
Air date: Feb. 2, 2026
From the City Club of Eugene:
The Kalapuyans originally occupied over a million acres in the Willamette and the Umpqua valleys. They have lived here for over 14,000 years and have endured enormous changes to their traditional life-ways during the past 200 years. The Kalapuyan peoples created the amazing fecundity of the Willamette Valley by practicing a form of land management or horticulture where they annually set fire to the valley, and in so doing cleared the land of excess vegetation, renewed food plants, and deposited nutrients in the soil, as well as other benefits. They were a stable society who harvested the fruits and vegetables of the valley and hunted and fished the terrestrial and aquatic animals to provide their primary food sources.
Frequently in Eugene you will hear this paragraph before a meeting begins:
“The University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya Ilihi (Cal-uh-POO-yuh ILL-ih-hee), the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon”.
Don’t you want to know more about this tribe, its history, lifestyle and culture? And don’t you want to know more about the descendants of the Kalapuya, who and where they are now?
Listen to Anthropology Professor David G. Lewis of Oregon State University, a well-respected historian of the tribes of Southwest Oregon. He is the author of “Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley.”
Speakers:
David G. Lewis, PhD, is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, a descendant of the Takelma, Chinook, Molalla, and Santiam Kalapuya peoples of western Oregon. David has engaged in research on the tribal histories of Northwest Coastal peoples, specializing in the Western Oregon Tribes. David served as the director of the Southwest Oregon Research Project Collection at the UO, and was the Culture Department manager of the Grand Ronde Tribe for eight years. David has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Oregon (2009) and teaches full time in Anthropology and Indigenous Studies at OSU. Over 500 of David’s research essays about the histories of the tribes are published on the blogsite The Quartux Journal. David lives in Salem with his wife, Donna, and sons Inatye and Saghaley.
About the City Club of Eugene:
The mission of the City Club of Eugene is to build community vision through open inquiry. The Club explores a wide range of significant local, state, and national issues and helps to formulate new approaches and solutions to problems. Membership is open to all, and Club members have a direct influence on public policy by discussing issues of concern with elected officials and other policy makers. The City Club’s mailing address is PO Box 12084, Eugene, OR 97440, and its website is cityclubofeugene.org.
Video and Broadcast
This program will be live streamed, and the videotape will be made available on the City Club of Eugene’s Facebook page and You Tube Channel, in addition to our website. It will be broadcast on Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., on KLCC 89.7 FM.