Native American History tied to the Hop Industry by Peter Kopp

Published: Dec. 9, 2021

The Dawes Act of 1887 distanced Indigenous people from their traditional practices, as it tried to assimilate them into farming like white settlers and divided tribal lands into individual plots. In this era, the Willamette Valley hop industry was on the rise and growers struggled to find seasonal workers to harvest the hops, said History Associate Professor Peter Kopp, author of Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. “The important context for the Indian history is this is when most tribes had been put on reservations,” Kopp said. “It led more to wage labor rather than traditional economies.”

Grand Ronde members worked the fields and made Willamette Valley the ‘hop capital of the world’
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