Kalapuya
The Kalapuya are a Native American ethnic group. They are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. The Kalapuya tribes' traditional homelands were the Willamette Valley of present-day western Oregon in the United States, an area bounded by the Cascade Range to the east, the Oregon Coast Range at the west, the Columbia River at the north, to the Calapooya Mountains of the Umpqua River at the south.
History
Origins
The Kalapuya people are said to have originally entered their tribal homeland, in the Willamette Valley located in the American state of Oregon, by migrating from the south of the valley northwards, forcing out earlier inhabitants. The Kalapuyan people spoke sundry dialects of a Kalapuyan language. It was categorized by John Wesley Powell as part of the Takelman language group; in the early 21st century these are known as the Oregon Penutian languages.
The Kalapuyan people were not a single homogeneous tribal entity but rather were made up of multiple autonomous subdivisions, loosely related to one another by language dialects, which were mutually unintelligible. The eight related groups comprising the Kalapuya people spoke three distinct dialects of the Oregon Penutian language family: Northern Kalapuyan, Central Kalapuyan, and Yoncalla (also called Southern Kalapuya). These languages were mutually unintelligible. Catholic missionary François Blanchet said that "fourteen or fifteen different dialects were spoken by these tribes; they are not so essentially different but that they can understand each other. Moreover, the Chinook jargon is spoken among the Kalapooias [sic]."
