Presenter: Kiara Kashuba
Faculty Mentor: Kevin Hatfield, Jennifer O’Neal
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Social Science
Major: Planning, Public Policy, and Management
This paper examines how Euro-American agrarian ideology was an agent of oppressive assimilation and acculturation of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in central Oregon. My research establishes agriculture at center stage, reexamining it as a paramount assimilation tactic rather than an afterthought. My secondary sources discuss agrarian ideologies such as Jeffersonian Agrarianism, the Yeoman and the Fee-Simple Empire, and Manifest Destiny, and my primary research draws from treaties, annual reports, diary entries, letters between government officials, and interviews with tribal elders.Most interestingly, throughout the course of my research I discovered a great deal of documentations of the failure of agriculture on the Warm Springs Reservation. Soil quality and weather deemed the region almost entirely unfit for agriculture, and yet, fully aware of the land’s inability to produce crops, the government relentlessly forced the indigenous tribes to adopt an agrarian lifestyle. Thus my research reveals that agriculture on the reservation was about more than just growing food, it was about assimilation and fulfilling Jeffersonian Agrarian ideals.