Name: History Pub - The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest
Start: 2025-11-24T19:00:00-08:00
Location: McMenamins Kennedy School

McMenamins and Oregon Historical Society present History Pub
The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest
Presented by Marc Carpenter
McMenamins Kennedy School Theater
Monday, November 24, 2025
7pm/doors 6pm
$5/$6 doors
All ages welcome
The small, mostly forgotten wars of the 1850s in the American Pacific Northwest were part of a broader, often genocidal campaign to seize Native land; many of the horrors were then blotted out by pioneers and the historians who loved them. Illahee (a Chinook term for “homeland”) was turned into the states of Oregon and Washington through the violence of invading soldiers, settlers, and serial killers. Clashes over the brutality of invasion – should it be celebrated, isolated, or erased? – left behind accidental archives of atrocity, as history writers disagreed over which stories they should tell and which stories they could sell. By the 1920s, the War on Illahee had been “disappeared.” Historian Marc James Carpenter, author of 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑎𝑟 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑙𝑙𝑎ℎ𝑒𝑒: 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒, 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐶𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟-𝑈𝑝𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑟 𝑁𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑤𝑒𝑠𝑡, discusses how everyday people in Portland and Vancouver took part in the campaigns of killing that seized the land.
Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as assistant professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.