Indigenous History
The Soap Creek Valley is located within the traditional homelands of the Ampinefu Band (also known as the Mary's River band) and Luckiamute band of Kalapuya. Since time immemorial, the Kalapuya have lived on and cared for the land that Euro-American settlers later claimed in the Willamette Valley beginning in the 1830s.
Euro-Americans’ desire for farmland led to individual, and later, government-sanctioned actions, to dispose the Kalapuya and other Indigenous Oregonians from their lands. Devastating diseases created conditions for an even more aggressive displacement of Native peoples from their lands throughout the Oregon Trail period (1840s-1850s), as Indigenous communities were unable to repel the increasing waves of white settlement.
Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 (Kalapuya etc., Treaty), Kalapuya people were forcibly removed by federal law to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, their living descendants are a part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.
Next Page: Settlement Era Land History
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