BEND, OR -- A weekend symposium in Bend looks at the history of humans in Oregon’s Great Basin. Eliza Canty-Jones, with the Oregon Historical Society, says moderns society can learn a lot from artifacts uncovered by archeologists and passed down by tribal ancestors, "Finding these remains that people who lived thousands of years ago left behind, and they’re understanding ways about how those people lived, how they lived with changes in climate, how they lived with the plants and animals around them, how they lived through different kinds of seasons and with the changes in the landscape." 

This weekend’s event at OSU-Cascades is a partnership between the Oregon Historical Society, Deschutes County Historical Society, Burns Paiute Tribe and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indians. 

Nearly two dozen K-12 teachers are registered to attend, to learn more about southeast Oregon’s ancient history and new ways to present it to students. "This is a place archeologists have been studying for a long time. But of course, it’s a place that tribal members have ancestral knowledge about since time immemorial," says Canty-Jones, "These ways of learning about the world and learning about the past, they’re different kinds of tools, they’re different kinds of approaches." She tells KBND News, "And sometimes these approaches are at odds with each other. But, the time that we’re living in now, there’s been really decades in which tribal and non-tribal people who are interested in this history have grappled with some of these differences together. And I think they work closely now in ways they did not several decades ago, when archeologists began working in this area."

Registration for the symposium is full, but there is an effort to use the content in a special issue of the journal Oregon Historical Quarterly.