Chemawa Indian School near Salem, Oregon is the oldest continuously operating off-reservation boarding school for Native children in the United States.
Founded in 1880 as the Forest Grove Indian Industrial Training School, the school was moved to its current location in 1885. The school underwent several name changes before officially changing to Chemawa Indian School in 1939 and keeping that name until the present day. The boarding school housed children not only from Oregon’s Sovereign Nations but also from tribal communities throughout the country. Many scholars, both settler and Indigenous, have researched and reported on the history of the boarding school and the consequences of forced assimilation of Native children. This Windows in Time presentation will review some of this research but also describe new research opportunities made available through the online Chemawa American, the school’s weekly newspaper recently digitized for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program.
Maureen Flanagan Battistella is an affiliate faculty member of the Southern Oregon University College of Natural and Social Sciences. Her research interests include community documentation, oral history and heritage preservation, the work published to the Stories of Southern Oregon on YouTube, the Internet Archives and the Southern Oregon Digital Archives at Southern Oregon University. Battistella currently serves as an Oregon Heritage commissioner and on the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program’s advisory board. She holds a BS and MLS from Rutgers University.
The monthly Windows in Time lunchtime lectures feature well-known writers and historians and bring alive the people, values, and events that shaped our Southern Oregon heritage. Lectures are jointly sponsored by the Southern Oregon Historical Society (SOHS) and Jackson County Library Services. Programs are presented in Medford (first Wednesdays, in-person and online) and again in Ashland (second Wednesdays, in-person). Registration is only required to attend the Zoom version of Medford’s program. Recordings of Medford presentations are available on the JCLS Beyond YouTube channel.
