Environmental Justice Research Repository

Interconnected histories of racism, urban ecology, and environmental activism in Eugene, Oregon.

Contents: About the Project | About the Dataset | Intellectual Property Rights | Sponsors | Community Partners | Contributors | Additional Support | Land Acknowledgment | Harmful Content Statement |

About the Project

This digital collection serves as a repository of research materials related to the history of environmental racism in the Eugene-Springfield community. In consultation with the nonprofit organization Beyond Toxics, students and faculty at the University of Oregon are working to collect and catalog primary sources related to the formal and informal segregation of housing, education, and outdoor recreation opportunities in our city.

We aim to better understand the ways predominantly white institutions have systematically shifted environmental hazards onto communities of color and how these communities have organized and advocated around issues of environmental justice.

About the Dataset

The collection brings together reports, policy documents, maps, newspaper clippings, newsletters, museum exhibit catalogs, curricular materials, academic research, and demographic data that together shed light on our local history and its relationship to events and trends at the state, regional, and national level. These materials come from city, state, and federal government websites; UO Libraries digital collections; the Lane County History Museum Archives; and publicly available sources.

Intellectual Property Rights

The materials in this collection are gathered here for educational and not-for-profit research purposes. The project team has either received explicit permission to include these materials in the collection or has completed a fair use evaluation for its use. The team has also made a good-faith effort to determine and record rights information about each primary source in the item-level metadata. Users who wish to reuse sources from this collection should verify independently the copyright status of each item and contact the rights holder directly for reuse permission. Content developed specifically for this website is copyrighted by the University of Oregon under the terms of an agreement with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is published under a Creative Commons-BY-ND-NC license.

Acknowledgements

Sponsors

CollectionBuilder and digital pedagogy support for this project were sponsored by the a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH Award HAA-281018-21). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Web resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Partnership development and environmental justice education for this project were sponsored by a Sustainability Fellowship for Community-Engaged Learning from the University of Oregon Office of Sustainability and the Mellon-funded Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Special Initiative 2008-08962).

Community Partners

This project was inspired by Beyond Toxics, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working for environmental justice in Oregon. Project content was developed in consultation with Lisa Arkin, Executive Director, and Arjorie Arberry-Beribeault, West Eugene Environmental Justice Organizer, as part of the organization’s long-term grassroots organizing in Eugene. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed by users of this material do not necessarily represent those of Beyond Toxics.

Contributors

Additional Support

Land Acknowledgment

It is impossible to address environmental racism in our community without recognizing the Indigenous people who have stewarded these lands and waters since time immemorial. The cities of Eugene and Springfield and the University of Oregon are situated on the traditional homelands of the Kalapuya people, whom the U.S. Government forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855. Today, Kalapuya people’s descendents are citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. We express our respect for them and for all federally recognized Tribal Nations of Oregon–including the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, and the Klamath Tribes–and for all other displaced Indigenous peoples who call Kalapuya Ilihi home.

Harmful Content Statement

This digital collection includes digitized archival materials that document traumatic histories and violent ideologies.

Some of these materials use offensive language, express biased or hateful views, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes, particularly with respect to race, color, national origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. In addition, some of the descriptive metadata used to catalog these materials is inherited from predominantly white institutions where communities of color have historically had less access and privilege, and therefore less control over their own representation.

The Eugene-Springfield community and the University of Oregon continue to reflect and to be structured by these histories, and our project team is not immune to bias or prejudice. We are actively working to remediate, re-process, and re-contextualize these objects as source material for anti-racist digital storytelling projects that might eventually play a small role in repairing some of these harms.