Chepenafa Erotic

The Chepenafa were a Kalapuya band of Oregon's Willamette Valley who lived along Marys River, around present-day Corvallis, until treaty and removal in the 1850s ended their life as a separate community. Their descendants are enrolled today in the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and, in smaller numbers, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Settlers called them the Marys River Indians, or the Marysville band, after the town that later became Corvallis.

What set them apart from their neighbors was mostly place. The dozen or so Kalapuya bands shared a way of life, but each held its own stretch of river, and the Chepenafa held the country where Marys River comes down from the Coast Range to meet the Willamette. They spoke a dialect of Central Kalapuya, one of three languages in the small Kalapuyan family, which some linguists place in the proposed Penutian grouping. Their speech was close to that of the Santiam and other mid-valley bands, while Tualatin to the north and Yoncalla to the south were separate languages.

The valley they lived in was a managed one. Each fall the Kalapuya burned the prairies, which kept the oak savanna open, made deer easier to hunt, and readied tarweed seeds for gathering. Camas was the staple: bulbs dug in early summer, baked for days in earth ovens, and pressed into cakes that kept through winter. Wapato, acorns, hazelnuts, and berries filled out the diet, and salmon mattered less here than on the Columbia. Families wintered in permanent villages of multi-family houses and scattered to open camps in the warm months. Religion centered on personal spirit powers sought in solitary quests, with shamans treating illness and winter dances where power songs were sung.

The collapse came fast. Malaria, the fever and ague of settler accounts, arrived around 1830, swept the lower Columbia and the Willamette Valley, and killed the great majority of Kalapuya people within a few years. When American settlers filled the valley in the 1840s, the surviving bands were tiny. In January 1855 the Chepenafa signed the Willamette Valley treaty negotiated by Joel Palmer, ceding their land, and in 1856 they were moved to the Grand Ronde reservation. There the bands intermarried and Chinook Jargon became the common tongue.

Their language survives on paper. In 1913 and 1914 William Hartless, a Marys River speaker, dictated myths and accounts to the linguist Leo Frachtenberg, and those texts were later published in Melville Jacobs's Kalapuya Texts. Around Corvallis, camas still blooms each spring in the remnant wet prairies, and Grand Ronde tribal members still dig and bake it.