From the event page:
OHS presents “Oregon Connections: A Conversation Series on the Right to be Free,” an all-virtual program series featuring conversations among experts and with audience members.
Although many of the decisions that affect people’s access to rights such as freedom of speech, citizenship, and due process are made at the federal level, it is often on the local level that those freedoms are both exercised and oppressed — amid debates, actions, and inspirations on a global scale.
During the months leading up to the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the Oregon Connections series invites audiences to listen, learn, ask questions, and consider some of the ways Oregonians have struggled for justice and freedom.
For thousands of years, Native peoples in what is now the United States have exercised their sovereignty. Citizenship within the colonizing nation of the United States is a complex proposition for many Indigenous people. The United States Constitution recognizes treaties made by the nation, including those made with sovereign Native nations within the country, as the “supreme law of the land.” In Oregon, tribal nations and people have asserted their rights while fighting to maintain their sovereignty within the new nation of the United States. Tribal scholars Bobbie Conner and Robert Kentta will discuss the historical intersections of U.S. citizenship and Native sovereignty in Oregon.
Roberta (Bobbie) Conner is the director of Tamástslikt Cultural Institute. The institute, which opened in 1998, serves three tribal goals: to accurately depict the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples’ history, to perpetuate knowledge of their history and culture, and to contribute to the tribal economy. Tamátslikt is the only tribally owned and operated museum on the entire National Historic Oregon Trail and is one of a handful on the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail. The museum is renowned for its deft telling of the story of westward expansion from a tribal perspective. Conner is Cayuse-Umatilla-Nez Perce, enrolled in the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla, and a graduate of the University of Oregon and Willamette University’s Graduate School of Management. She serves on the Oregon Historical Society’s board of trustees and the Ecotrust, Oregon Community Foundation, and Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland boards of directors.
Robert Kentta is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Shasta and Applegate River Athabaskan (Dakubetede) ancestry. He grew up in the Siletz community with the Siletz Tribe as a government having been “terminated” in the mid-1950s and, then, restored by congressional action in 1977. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1980s, graduating with an AFA and majoring in museum studies, with a minor in 3D Arts (Traditional Techniques focus). After a brief sojourn at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Kentta returned to Siletz and worked construction and logging jobs before being hired to research the Siletz Tribe’s treaty and administrative and legislative history. A fellowship at the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1985 launched a decades-long career. In the early 1990s, Kentta was hired to start a Cultural Resources Program for his Tribe. The program focused on archaeological protections, archival research and retrieval of materials, cultural education work, and building Siletz tribal cultural object collections. Kentta’s archival research helped the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians define their own history and legal status under treaties, legislation, executive orders, and other federal Indian policy, from their own perspective for the first time. The contrast between what he was able to document and the official U.S. government interpretation was shocking. Kentta worked in cultural programs for 30 years, also serving in elected government during the last 18 of those years. After not running in the February 2023 election, he also retired from his Cultural Resources Director position. He ran and won a seat on the Siletz Tribal Council in February 2024, and is now serving in his 21st year on the Siletz Tribal Council.
