Rich Bergeman, The Land Remembers

May 2 – Sept. 15, 2023
Lecture and Book Signing, 1pm, May 20, 2023

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site
1501 E Evergreen Blvd.
Vancouver, WA 98661
https://www.nps.gov/fova/index.htm
360 907-1075
Open Tues-Sat 10am-3:45pm

Selections from Rich Bergeman’s “The Land Remembers: Photographs Inspired by the Rogue River Wars of Southern Oregon” are on display at the Fort Vancouver Visitor Center now through Sept. 15. The Corvallis photographer will give an illustrated lecture on Saturday, May 20, at 1 p.m.

The exhibit features a dozen black-and-white infrared photographs from Bergeman’s two-year project exploring the landscapes where the Rogue River Indian Wars took place in the 1850s. “My goal was to bring this largely forgotten war back into our collective consciousness by reflecting on the beauty of the landscapes that played host to those tragic events,” Bergeman said.
One of the least remembered and yet bloodiest of the Oregon Territory’s Indian wars, the conflicts ranged over a broad swath of rugged territory between the Rogue River Country and the South Coast between 1851 and 1856.

The war traces its beginning to the passage of the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act in 1850 and the nearly simultaneous discovery of gold in the region. As settlers and miners streamed in, the various small tribes who lived there suddenly found their hunter-gatherer way of life being destroyed. Skirmishes, murders and atrocities on both sides inevitably followed, until the conflict erupted into all-out war involving the U.S. Army. It ended with the forced removal of the decimated tribes to newly created coastal reservations at Siletz and Grand Ronde in 1856 in what descendants today memorialize as Oregon’s “Trail of Tears.”

An Oregonian since 1976, Bergeman is a retired instructor of journalism and photography at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany. The 74-year-old photographer has been exhibiting his work throughout the Northwest since the 1980s. Over the past two decades he has focused primarily on portraying forgotten Northwest histories through photographs of what’s been left behind. His portfolios can be seen at richbergeman.zenfolio.com, and in book form at blurb.com