The War on Illahee

How a generation of pioneers and their historians knowingly hid the violent history of Indigenous dispossession in the Pacific Northwest

The small, mostly forgotten wars of the 1850s in the American Pacific Northwest were part of a broader genocidal war—the War on Illahee—to seize Native land for Euro‑Americans. Illahee (a term for “homeland” in Chinook) 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.

Drawing on records from the perpetrators themselves, the papers of historians, and previously suppressed evidence from Indigenous survivors, Marc James Carpenter has written both a new history of pioneer atrocities within and beyond the wars on Native people in the American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. The overlapping distortions have embedded inaccuracies in our histories and textbooks all the way to the present. Beyond reshaping the history of the Pacific Northwest, this searing book opens broader conversations about settler colonialism, historical memory, problematic monuments, and the historical profession.

Author Biography

Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate 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.