Takelma people

The Takelma (also Dagelma) are a Native American people who originally lived in the Rogue Valley of interior southwestern Oregon.

Most of their villages were sited along the Rogue River. The name Takelma means "(Those) Along the River".

Much less is known about the lifeways of the Takelma Indians than about their neighbors in other parts of Oregon and northern California. Their homeland was settled by Euroamericans late in the history of the American Frontier, because the surrounding mountainous country protected it. But once colonization began, it proceeded rapidly. The discovery of gold spurred the first white settlement of the region in 1852. The Takelma who survived were sent to reservations in 1856. Settlers and natives lived in the region together for less than four years.

Because Takelma territory included the most agriculturally attractive part of the Rogue Valley, particularly along the Rogue River itself, their valuable land was preferentially seized and settled by Euroamerican invaders in the mid-19th century. Almost without exception, these newcomers had little or no interest in learning about their indigenous neighbors, and they considered them a dangerous nuisance. They recorded little about the Takelma, beyond documenting their own perspective on conflicts. Native Americans living near the Takelma but on more marginal and rugged land, such as the Shastan and Rogue River Athabascan peoples, survived the colonization period with their cultures and languages more intact.

Conflicts between the settlers and the indigenous peoples of both coastal and interior southwest Oregon escalated and became known as the Rogue River Wars. Nathan Douthit examined peaceful encounters between the whites and southern Oregon Indians, encounters he describes as "middle-ground" interactions, undertaken by "cultural intermediaries." Douthit argues that without such "middle-ground" contact, the Takelma and other southern Oregon Indians would have been exterminated rather than relocated.

In 1856, the U.S. government forcibly relocated the Takelma who survived the Rogue Indian Wars to the Coast Indian Reservation (today the Siletz Reservation) on the rainy northern Oregon coast, an environment much different from the dry oak and chaparral country that they knew. Many died on the way to the Siletz Reservation and the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, which now exists as Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. And many died on the reservations from disease, despair and inadequate diet. Indian agents taught the surviving Takelma farming skills and discouraged them from speaking their own language, believing that their best chance for productive lives depended on their learning useful skills and the English language. On the reservations, the Takelma lived with Native Americans from different cultures; and their intermarriage with people of other cultures, both on and off the reservation, worked against the transmission of Takelman language and culture to Takelman descendants.

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