Kalapuya people

Kalapuya

Esther Stutzman, a Kalapuya elder, leads her daughters in a Kalapuya welcome song, 2009.
Total population
estimated 4,000
Regions with significant populations
United States United States ( Oregon)
Languages
English language, formerly Kalapuya language

The Kalapuya are a Native American ethnic group, which had eight independent groups speaking three mutually unintelligible dialects. The Kalapuya tribes' traditional homelands were the Willamette Valley of present-day western Oregon in the United States, an area bounded by the Cascade Range to the east, the Oregon Coast Range at the west, the Columbia River at the north, to the Calapooya Mountains of the Umpqua River at the south.

Today, most Kalapuya people are enrolled in the federally recognized Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon; in addition, some are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz. In both cases descendants have often intermarried with people of other tribes in the confederated tribes, and are counted in overall tribal numbers, rather than separately. Most of the Kalapuya descendants live at the Grand Ronde reservation, located in Yamhill and Polk counties.

The tribal name has been rendered into English under various spellings as "Calapooia," "Calapuya," "Calapooya," "Kalapooia," and "Kalapooya."

The Kalapuyan people spoke sundry dialects of a Kalapuyan language. It was categorized by John Wesley Powell as part of the Takelman language group. In the early 21st century, these are known as the Oregon Penutian languages.

The Kalapuyan people were not a single homogeneous tribal entity but rather were made up of eight autonomous subdivisions, loosely related to one another by three language dialects, which were mutually unintelligible. The eight related groups comprising the Kalapuya people spoke three distinct dialects of the Oregon Penutian language family: Northern Kalapuyan, Central Kalapuyan, and Yoncalla (also called Southern Kalapuya). These languages were mutually unintelligible.