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| Eleanor Gordon recorded Eugeneans’ personal connections to the Willamette River. |
Eleanor Gordon discovered earlier this year that the land along the Willamette River holds hundreds of years’ worth of stories, and as a senior environmental studies student, it was her job to unearth those stories.
“The Willamette River has undergone many drastic changes,” Gordon said. “The further that I dig, the more it becomes apparent: Oral history is like the soil of this river valley: it is important because it belongs to each and every one of us and must be cultivated as a common good.”
Last winter Gordon and the other members of the Environmental History Team gathered oral histories of this area and the people connected to it, highlighting Eugene’s unique environment and culture. The project was designed to be an educational tool to create a stronger relationship between the community and its local environment by exploring how awareness of a place influences the way people live and act within it.
The Environmental History Team was one of four projects offered during the winter 2006 term as part of the Environmental Leadership Program, the capstone to environmental studies students’ learning experience. As a service-learning program, the students team up with local community partners to apply what they learn in the classroom to real environmental issues. Not only did this project offer real-world experience to six environmental studies students, but it has also given a voice to the diverse stories related to the Willamette River Valley and its inhabitants.
The team conducted ethnographic interviews, geographic exploration and civic and library archival research to reveal many perspectives about how the river and the surrounding valley have transformed.
To share their findings, the group placed handmade flags along the Willamette bike paths listing a phone number to call to hear audio recordings of the stories. The flags denoted locations where stories took place, giving the public a brief narration of how the area might have looked or been used in the past.
One story is about the adventures of a sixty-mile boat ride a man and his children embarked on fifty years ago. Another explains the ecological impact of the construction of the Valley River Center. In another, a local elder of the Kalapuya Native Americans speaks of their strong connection to the area.
“The power of this project is that the students, as well as the wider community, have the opportunity to learn about the Willamette River from a diverse set of people,” said Dr. Kathryn Lynch, the program’s co-coordinator. Lynch has been working to broaden the department’s offerings to include more service learning projects in the humanities and social sciences since she joined the university in September of 2005. “Each story provides unique insight into the cultural, historical, political and economic factors that influence how people connect and interact with their natural environment.”
The audio recordings can be heard at: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ecostudy/elp/ehistory/oralhistory.htm.
— KN
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