Oregon Connections: Tribal Sovereignty and Civil Rights
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.