Kalapuya: Original People Of the Upper Willamette Valley

'The Upper Willamette Valley has been populated by a series of native peoples for thousands of years. The most recent native American inhabitants of the Upper Willamette Valley were collectively called Kalapuya. They spoke 3 closely related but mutually unintelligible languages of Kalapuya linguistic stock: Tualatin-Yamhill (north), Santiam (central), and Yonkalla (south). They lived throughout the valley in bands ranging from 20 to 500 inhabitants. The band in the Eugene area was the Calapuya Proper. Several villages were concentrated near Eugene. An increased concentration of major tributaries in the Eugene area was more productive for subsistence activities, and therefore this was a more populous habitation area.Kalapuyans were seminomadic. Groups generally remained within a specific sub basin of the valley, moving on a seasonal round between winter villages and summer base camps. People congregated in large winter villages as soon as the flood waters began to rise, staying from mid-October to mid-March. Houses were pole structures with bark roofs surrounded by earthen banks; each held from four to ten families. During the remainder of the year, people divided into smaller bands to harvest food and hunt on the rich floodplains of the Willamette River. They did not build summer homes, but occasionally constructed windbreaks of fir boughs. Summer base camps were used for harvesting tasks and were frequently revisited over the centuries. From these locations—winter villages or summer base camps—smaller groups went to task-specific sites to exploit upland or lowland resources. '

by Margaret Robertson 2002

For the complete article from which the above is an excerpt go to: http://neighbors.designcommunity.com/notes/1347.html