A guest post by Justin Spence, ODNP Project Manager and coordinator of the tribal publications project

We recently posted about ODNP’s current project to digitize Native American tribal newspapers. Under the same initiative, we are also digitizing newspapers and other serialized publications from other eras that pertain directly to the history of Native American people in Oregon. Key among these are materials produced at the institution known today as Chemawa Indian School (and by other names earlier in its history), both in its current location in Salem and its earliest instantiation as the Forest Grove Indian School in Forest Grove. (We will refer to these collectively simply as “Chemawa” for simplicity.) 

Chemawa is part of the system of federally run residential schools established in the United States whose primary mission for many decades was to remove Native American children from their families, often hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and assimilate them to a dominant American society. The history of the residential schools is complex, with students having quite varied experiences depending on circumstances such as which school they attended and when, the school staff and administrators, prevailing attitudes towards discipline and the value of Native American knowledge systems, etc. But collectively these institutions are widely considered to have negatively impacted many individuals who went through them, who suffered various forms of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, with lasting effects on the communities they came from in the present day.  

Currently, there are major efforts to document and better understand the experiences of students who attended the federal residential schools, including at the national level via the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative (culminating with an official apology issued in October 2024) and nonprofits such as the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, alongside numerous local, community-led initiatives. One important component of this broad effort is providing access to archival documents generated by the bureaucratic apparatus created to support systems of coercive assimilation that the residential schools too often imposed. The Chemawa school newspaper is one such set of documents and is especially important because it provides glimpses at regular intervals of student life at Chemawa. In some years, especially by the mid-20th century, the newspaper was produced with significant input from the student body itself, voices that are rarely heard so directly in other kinds of historical documents (e.g., reports generated by school administrators). The newspaper ran as The Indian Citizen when the school was still located at Forest Grove, then was published as the Weekly Chemawa American and Chemawa American (with earlier and later instantiations under that title) after it relocated to its present-day location in Salem in the late 1880s. 

The ODNP digitization effort was initiated by some of the federally recognized tribes of Oregon and has received a strong endorsement from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (resolution #2023-04, “Endorsement for the Addition of Chemawa Indian School’s Historic Newspapers to the Oregon Historical Newspaper Program Repository”). Drawing materals provided by over a dozen archival repositories, ODNP has nearly finished digitizing issues spanning more than a century (1880s to 1980s). We are now turning our attention to digitizing yearbooks published at Chemawa each spring starting in the 1920s. Although these are not newspapers, they are serials published annually and can be incorporated into the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. We are also exploring alternative platforms that might be able to host the yearbooks once digitization is complete, such as Oregon Digital, Northwest Digital Heritage, and the Plateau Peoples’ Portal (the last of these already hosts some issues of the Chemawa yearbook). 

ODNP would like to thank the partner institutions who generously provided access to materials in their collections, in many cases digitizing materials free of charge. Without their contributions, we would not have been able to provide the same level of access to these important historical documents. 

• Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde 
• The Huntington Library 
• Library of Congress 
• Oregon Historical Society 
• Pacific University Libraries 
• Princeton University Library Special Collections 
• State Library of Oregon 
• University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archive 
• University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
• Washington State University, Terrell Library 
• Whitman College and Northwest Archives, Penrose Library 
• Willamette University Libraries 
• Wisconsin Historical Society 
• Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library