Content note

The collection statement

How the Library handles this

Archives describe; they do not edit. The transcripts in this collection were corrected and approved by the people who spoke them, and the Library does not alter what a narrator approved, soften a word, or quietly drop a passage. Instead it notes.

• At page level. Where a specific passage carries offensive language or sensitive personal detail, a short neutral note appears on that page saying so. The note describes; it does not quote.
• At collection level. The statement above appears on the finding aid, so nobody meets this material without warning.
• Held pages. A page whose content is personal data about named individuals — a 1941 directory of addresses and telephone numbers, an appendix naming children, a table of landowners and tax lots — is held. The page still exists in the sequence and says it is held, and why. Nothing is silently missing.
• Withheld places. Pages describing the locations of American Indian burial, grave or artifact sites are held, and so are the index entries, place pages and timeline entries that would lead a reader to them. They stay held while the Library consults the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Whether to describe those places at all is not the Library's decision alone. Kalapuya history itself stays: what is withheld is where things are, not whose they were.

Oregon State's own notice

Oregon State University's Special Collections and Archives Research Center holds the recordings and publishes its own statement about this language, dated April 2025, on the finding aid for OH 006, the Soap Creek Valley History Project Oral Histories. It reads, in part: "Please be aware that some of the Soap Creek Valley History Project Oral Histories include racist terms that may be disturbing or activating. Specifically, the interviewer, in attempting to collect demographic information about early-twentieth-century Corvallis, uses derogatory terms for African Americans and East Asians. The interviewer and some of the interviewees also refer to a location known as 'Savage Creek'. We acknowledge the racism represented by this language and the harm it may cause our users. Providing access to these historical materials does not endorse any attitudes or behavior depicted therein." SCARC also points readers to its Anti-Racist Actions Statement.

Where the language comes from

The narrators were born between 1890 and 1930 and were speaking in the 1970s through the 2000s about a valley and a coast range they had worked all their lives. The language appears in the narrators' answers, in the interviewer's questions, and in historical documents reprinted as appendices. The Library does not weigh those against each other, and does not tell a reader in advance whose words a passage carries: the page-level notes say what is on the page and where, and the page itself shows who said it.

If you think a note is wrong

Notes can be too heavy, too light, or in the wrong place. All three are correctable, and the Library would rather hear it than not: send a correction. Descendants of narrators and of people named in the interviews are especially welcome to write; the Library will act on a family's request about personal information about their own relatives.

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