Tumwata School now honors Indigenous, not murderous trapper

Published 12:00 am Friday, August 6, 2021

A newly renovated building in Oregon City will be renamed Tumwata Middle School, a name that means Willamette Falls in the Clackamas tribal language, later Anglicized as Tumwater.

Tumwata was formerly named Peter Skene Ogden Middle School, after a fur trapper and explorer best known for his aggressive tactics in competition with Native American tribes. Oregon City School Board members unanimously approved the name change at their June 21 meeting.

Ogden’s renaming follows this year’s decision by Clackamas Community College to rename its Welcome Center to pay homage to Chief Dan Wacheno, who signed the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 on behalf of the Clackamas people and was later removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation.

In 2018, Oregon City-area residents voted to pay about an extra $30 a year in property taxes for school facilities to pay back the district’s loans over approximately the next 31 years. The $158 million school construction bond set aside $20 million to renovate Tumwata, built in 1965 to serve the northern half of the school district.

Ogden Renaming Committee members included a parent, a student, a school board member, an Oregon City Chamber member, an OC graduate who now works with Indigenous groups at the federal level, three teachers and the Oregon School Employees Association president.

Board member Steven Soll thanked students who initiated the renaming in consultation with Grand Ronde tribal members, along with Mary Andres McGlothlan, who was elected chair of the renaming committee.

“It’s a really great piece of progress, and it so rightly honors and acknowledges Indigenous people, and it’s so instructive to the community and to students who will be going to that school,” Soll said.

Benjamin Rickard, a teacher and former student at Tumwata, starting meeting in 2019 with eighth-grade social studies students who volunteered during their lunch breaks to discuss possible new school names.

“We started brainstorming ideas; they started researching,” Rickard said.

References to Willamette Falls were always one of the most popular names.

Jessica Gambee, another teacher and former student at Tumwata, said that Rickard’s early efforts spurred on sixth graders and new groups of students wanting to become involved in the renaming process. Gambee said students’ research of potential names focused on what they wanted the name to represent in terms of the school’s community values.

“They did a really great job, used their voices and were able to say, ‘Hey, this is our school, and we want something that represents who we are and who we want to be,'” Gambee said.

Glyndwr Williams, a history professor and Ogden biographer, called Ogden “one of the most energetic and controversial figures to have left his mark on the North American fur trade.”

Ogden’s controversial biography included his “murdering an Indian in cold blood” in an area now part of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, according to Joseph Berens, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).

“In May 1816, Ogden crossed the boundary between physical assault, which had become commonplace in the trade war, and killing, which had not,” Williams wrote. “An indictment against Ogden for murder was drawn up in Lower Canada in March 1818. To put Ogden out of reach of the HBC he was transferred to the Columbia department in 1818.”

Another problem for naming a school here after Ogden (1790-1854), according to Tumwata Principal Ben Kates, is Ogden’s tenuous connection to Oregon City.

“He really only lived here for the last few months of his life,” Kates said.

Although the possibility of keeping the Ogden name remained on the table, “that group of students decided we really want a different name,” Kates said.

OCSD expects to reopen schools, including the newly renovated Tumwata, to five full days weekly of in-person learning this fall.