front cover of Warm Springs Millennium
Warm Springs Millennium
Voices from the Reservation
By Michael Baughman and Charlotte Hadella
University of Texas Press, 2000

Established in 1855 on an area one-fifteenth the size of the lands relinquished in return for it, the Warm Springs Reservation in north central Oregon is home to some 3,600 Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute Indians, half of whom are under twenty. This book seeks to understand the reservation's inhabitants as a "viable people" who are both visible and vocal as they reflect on their daily lives, their struggles and successes, and their hopes for the future.

Michael Baughman and Charlotte Hadella present extended interviews with seven Indian and two non-Indian members of the community. They discuss issues such as the difficulty of maintaining traditional lifeways centered around hunting, fishing, and gathering; the disruptions caused by alcoholism and diseases such as diabetes; and the need for culturally appropriate education for the young. The authors frame the interviews with explanatory material that covers the reservation's history and relations with white society and its efforts to transmit native languages and cultural traditions to its children.

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Water War in the Klamath Basin
Macho Law, Combat Biology, and Dirty Politics
Holly Doremus and A. Dan Tarlock
Island Press, 2008
In the drought summer of 2001, a simmering conflict between agricultural and environmental interests in southern Oregon’s Upper Klamath Basin turned into a guerrilla war of protests, vandalism, and apocalyptic rhetoric when the federal Bureau of Reclamation shut down the headgates of the Klamath Project to conserve water needed by endangered species. This was the first time in U.S. history that the headgates of a federal irrigation project were closed—and irrigators denied the use of their state water rights—in favor of conservation. Farmers mounted a brief rebellion to keep the water flowing, but ultimately conceded defeat.
 
In Water War in the Klamath Basin, legal scholars Holly Doremus and A. Dan Tarlock examine the genesis of the crisis and its fallout, offering a comprehensive review of the event, the history leading up to it, and the lessons it holds for anyone seeking to understand conflicts over water use in the arid West. The authors focus primarily on the legal institutions that contributed to the conflict—what they call “the accretion of unintegrated resource management and environmental laws” that make environmental protection so challenging, especially in politically divided regions with a long-standing history of entitlement-based resource allocation.
 
Water War in the Klamath Basin explores common elements fundamental to natural resource conflicts that must be overcome if conflicts are to be resolved. It is a fascinating look at a topic of importance for anyone concerned with the management, use, and conservation of increasingly limited natural resources.
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Waters of Oregon
A Source Book on Oregon's Water and Water Management
Rick Bastasch
Oregon State University Press, 1998

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What Trouble I Have Seen
A History of Violence against Wives
David Peterson del Mar
Harvard University Press, 1996

It was 1869 and Sarah Moses, with "a very black eye," told her father: The world will never know what trouble I have seen. What she'd seen was violence at the hands of her husband. Does the world know any more of such things today than it did in Sarah's time?

Sarah, it so happens, lived in Oregon, that Edenic state on the Pacific Coast, and it is here that David Peterson del Mar centers his history of violence against wives. What causes such violence? Has it changed over time? How does it relate to the state of society as a whole? And how have women tried to stop it, resist it, escape it? These are the questions Peterson del Mar pursues, and the answers he finds are as fascinating as they are disturbing.

Thousands of thickly documented divorce cases from the Oregon circuit courts let us listen to voices who often go unheard. These are the people who didn't keep diaries or leave autobiographies, who sometimes could not write at all. Here they speak of a society that quietly condoned wife beating until the spread of an ethos of self-restraint in the late nineteenth century. And then, Peterson del Mar finds, the practice increased with a vengeance with the florescence of expressive individualism during the twentieth century.

What Trouble I Have Seen also traces a dramatic shift in wives' response to their husbands' violence. Settler and Native American women commonly fought abusive mates. Most wives of the late nineteenth century acted more cautiously and relied on others for protection. But twentieth-century privatism, Peterson del Mar discovers, often isolated modern wives from family and neighbors, casting abused women on the mercy of the police, women's shelters, and, most important, their own resources. Thus a new emphasis on self-determination, even as it stimulated violence among men, enhanced the ability of women to resist and escape violent husbands.

The first sustained history of violence toward wives, What Trouble I Have Seen offers remarkable testimony to the impact of social trends on the most private arrangements, and the resilience of women subject to a seemingly timeless crime.

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front cover of Where the Crooked River Rises
Where the Crooked River Rises
A High Desert Home
Ellen Waterston
Oregon State University Press, 2010

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Willamette River Greenways
Navigating the Currents of Conservation Policy and Practice
Travis Williams
Oregon State University Press, 2021
The Willamette River Greenway Program, first proposed in 1966 by future Oregon governor Bob Straub, envisioned a nearly two-hundred-mile assemblage of public lands along the Willamette River for public use and environmental protection. While the Greenway Program fell far short of Straub’s original proposal, today it provides for significant riverside lands with a range of public benefits. The Greenway Program also offers a useful lens through which to view the successes and failures of Oregon’s environmental protection policies over the past few decades.

Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, has spent countless hours paddling the Willamette, becoming familiar with its flora, fauna, and human neighbors. In Willamette River Greenways, he combines personal narrative about his experiences on the river with nuanced consideration of the controversies and challenges of the Greenway Program. Williams sheds light on current land stewardship practices, revealing the institutional and leadership failures that endanger the river’s water quality and habitat, and looks to the program’s future. He also takes readers with him onto the water, sharing what it’s like to travel the river by canoe, paying homage to the river’s natural beauty and the host of wildlife species that call it home.

Part policy analysis, part advocacy, and all love letter to one of Oregon’s great rivers, Willamette River Greenways offers valuable perspective to policymakers, land use managers, and recreational river users alike.
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front cover of Winter Twigs, Revised Edition
Winter Twigs, Revised Edition
A Wintertime Key to Deciduous Trees and Shrubs of Northwestern Oregon and Western Washington
Helen Gilkey
Oregon State University Press, 2001
Winter Twigs has long been respected and widely used as a unique guide for wintertime identification of the deciduous plants of northwestern Oregon and western Washington (many of the species covered are also found in British Columbia and Alaska). The first edition of this book has been used by thousands of botany students and other interested individuals to identify plants during the months that they lack the leaves and flowers that most field guides rely on. Intended for use by teachers, students, scientists, amateur botanists, and outdoor enthusiasts, Winter Twigs brings together in one convenient volume the information necessary to identify all of the native deciduous woody plants likely to be encountered in the region, as well as many of the more common escaped cultivated species, Also included are certain species which are normally evergreen but may be deciduous during severe winters. Covered are 82 species representing 35 genera of 17 plant families likely to be found between the Cascade mountains and Pacific Coast in Washington and Oregon as far south as the Umpqua divide, and keys to all species that can be readily identified by winter characteristics. The glossary of botanical terms and more than 100 line drawings that highlight the identifying features of various plants will be especially valuable to students and beginners. To make this new edition as accurate and up-to-date as possible, the nomenclature for 22 species has been updated to conform to the latest scientific literature, with contributions by the Oregon Vascular Plant Checklist Project.
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front cover of Words Marked by a Place
Words Marked by a Place
Local Histories in Central Oregon
Jarold Ramsey
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Words Marked by a Place is a book of interconnected writings reflecting on the human and natural history of central Oregon. This chronological collection presents the reader with key episodes of central Oregon history, from nineteenth-century exploration to the railroading and homesteading era to the era of community-building and development that followed.

While telling these local stories, Jarold Ramsey explores alternative ways of engaging history in the act of writing, breaking new ground by discovering and exploring primary sources that bear on the region’s colorful but little-known past. Throughout the collection, he interrogates “local history” as a subject. What is local history? How is it related to mainstream academic history? What are legitimate ways of doing it? How do the details of what we call local history inform “history-at-large,” and vice-versa?

From the opening narrative concerning Lieutenant Henry Larcom Abbot’s “Railroad Survey” of the region in 1855 to the concluding account of Lieutenant Robert Cranston’s last months and dramatic death, when his “Airacobra” fighter plane crashed near Madras in 1944, Words Marked by a Place sheds new light on the ongoing story of central Oregon by illuminating forgotten corners of its past. Through both theory and example, it represents an important contribution to the history of the region and the endeavors of local historians, wherever they happen to work.
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