My family never rumbled west on the Oregon Trail. We came by plane and minivan in the summer of 1990. I had just finished third grade. Back then, I pronounced Oregon like a shape: hexagon, octagon, Oregon.
My memories of upstate New York, where I was born, are dim and few. The creaking floors of the little green house where my mom grew up. Burning piles of trash with my grandpa in back. We fished the creek nearby, and once my legs got tangled up in a line of barbed wire along its edge. On my dad’s side, my strongest memory is of an enduring lesson in who we were: Sottiles first, then Irish Italians, then New Yorkers. Heart, history, home.
As an adult, I’ve had hard conversations with my parents about how my identity has, over the past thirty-six years, deviated from theirs. They’re New Yorkers who’ve lived in Oregon for three decades; I’m an Oregonian who happened to be born elsewhere.
My memories sharpen in Oregon: at Outdoor School on the coast, brushing my fingers against sea anemones in an early-morning tide pool. At GI Joe’s, lacing up my first pair of hiking boots, brown with a purple stripe. At fourteen, in the passenger seat of my brother’s car, flying through the Sunset Tunnel way too fast. My identity took root in Oregon, rhizomatic and inseparable from the place. A Douglas fir can grow anywhere, but in the Pacific Northwest it soars. I could have grown up anywhere; here, I became me.
Outside my childhood bedroom, my parents hung a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence. At some point, it disappeared.
“I think I probably gave it away?” my mom said when I called and asked about it. My parents bought it at an auction. “It was a rustic wooden frame, dark wood, and it looked like the paper was aged . . . It caught our eye. Your father said, ‘The kids would like that.’”
I told her that not knowing what happened to it felt like a metaphor for American identity at this point in time.
This year marks the 250th since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to take pride in the state and country where you live. Both can be hard to hold onto if you understand history at even a passing glance, or possess any amount of empathy for what had to happen for Oregon and the United States to come to be.
I’ve been thinking, too, about how the Declaration of Independence is, at its heart, a manifesto that boldly reveres independence and equality, and how that feels hypocritical given the violence, segregation, and oppression that defined the country’s next two and a half centuries, and that continue to this day. The signers of that manifesto said “all men are created equal,” and given the current state of independence and equality for anyone but men, I guess they meant that literally.
Oregon was eighty-three years away from being founded when the Declaration was signed. It was a territory populated by Indigenous people whose equality and independence were ruthlessly severed to create a state. When Oregon became Oregon, the framers of the state constitution codified White supremacy through racial exclusion laws. Indigenous people were violently removed from their lands and forced onto reservations. White people from somewhere else were the ones deemed worthy of calling themselves Oregonians. Those exclusion laws were repealed, but racist language was still being picked out of Oregon’s constitution into the early 2000s.
The Declaration, as a manifesto, says a lot about being an American. What manifesto can we turn to for guidance about what it means to be an Oregonian?
It turns out Oregon hasn’t said much about what it takes—not overtly. But, for a while now, Oregonians have been issuing quiet manifestos—hushed statements about who we are and who we aren’t.
Let me make a case for why the manifesto should be taken back from the psychos you might have heard about.
The manifesto, as a genre, is often quick to anger: Julian Hanna, author of The Manifesto Handbook, has described them as “incend-iary.” He writes that “manifestos have no reverence for the past, no homage to what has come before. They want only what is new, of the now, in the present tense, and they want it immediately.”
I think it’s safe to say that those descriptions apply to the Declaration of Independence: a manifesto whose authors were absolutely fed up, and who, fueled by their anger, envisioned their own independence by dissolving all ties to the British Crown.
As a literary form, the manifesto is headstrong, bullish, bold—an unapologetic profession of belief. In the collection Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution, author Breanne Fahs describes manifestos as writing that mixes “the romantic quality of dreamers and artists imagining something new and whimsical together with the crushing power of a Mack truck bulldozing over established traditions, trashing accepted modes of thought, and eradicating the past,” all while doing “the transformative work of hoping and destroying, reflecting and violently ending things.”
Hope and destruction have taken myriad forms in the eyes of feminist dreamers. In a speech given at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, now known by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?,” the abolitionist Sojourner Truth bluntly asked why women were not given as many rights as men if they did as much work. That’s a question I’m still asking. In 2015, Crystal Zaragoza wrote in “Manifesto of the Erased: Mujeres, Decolonize El Dios Americano” that “instead of staying quiet, like we are taught to be, let’s be loud. Loud enough the whole world hears and feels our anger. So loud they too want to create change.”
And, of course, there was Valerie Solanas, who wrote this in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto: “This society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”
A year later, she tried to kill Andy Warhol.
I would venture a guess that the modern American masses associate manifestos only with people who were, quite literally, focused on violently ending things, like Solanas, or with the mass shooters we are led to believe are unstoppable and as entwined with American identity as the very threads of the flag.
I know a lot about these kinds of manifestos. As a journalist, I’ve often written about the rise in political violence in the United States, which has, as an unfortunate consequence, led me to read more than my fair share of manifestos.
Over time, I’ve noticed that no matter how noxious or extreme the ideas spouted in these sorts of manifestos are, they will, inevitably, filter into the mainstream. For example, when the conspiratorial White supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, published in 1978, was cited as Timothy McVeigh’s inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, people were horrified. Then, for three decades afterward, more mass shooters than I can count cited it as justification for their violence too. For years, you could buy a copy of The Turner Diaries on Amazon. The bitter taste of violence seems to become more palatable when society is used to the flavor.
Then there’s the 1995 manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, written by Ted Kaczynski—better known as the Unabomber. In this manifesto, Kaczynski wrote that technology would be the death of humanity. The first line reads, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Save for a few Silicon Valley tech bros, who among us disagrees with that sentiment now?
In the decades since Kaczynski killed people over the very ideas in his manifesto, people across the political spectrum have deconstructed his words, viewing them as the ideas of a misunderstood genius. Therein lies a question about hypocrisy: To believe a man a genius, don’t you have to set aside the fact that he murdered people?
Isn’t this what we must do to revere American history? We remember the ideas more clearly than we remember the blood that was spilled to make those ideas reality.
A person eager to crown Kaczynski a brilliant man needs to read more than an AI summary of his manifesto. It’s a screed that drips with criticism of feminists, leftists, and progressive social policies, and since its publication, it has consistently served as inspiration for violent far-right extremists. Even if you can set aside his violence, Kaczynski was a violent pig who inspired other violent pigs. Do we want to be the sort of society that, when enough time passes, gilds its pigs?
A more recent, and less academic, manifesto authored by an accused murderer was the note left behind by Luigi Mangione—the young man who made the conscious decision to shoot and kill the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company, on a New York City street in December 2024. Like the manifestos of many modern perpetrators of gun violence, his was far less philosophical than Kaczynski’s. Mangione offered a curt explanation: The broken American health care system, run by wealthy executives, is driven by “corruption and greed.”
“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play,” he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
While some polls show that many people were horrified at the idea of a man being shot dead in the street, no matter how powerful, many others seemed to be fine with the fact that Mangione unapologetically ended a man’s life.
Conversation swirled around this topic. An executive perpetrated systemic violence through the health care system, and he met the end of another man’s gun. Die in the street, die in the hospital. We all die one way or another, but dying is different than killing. Should we justify killing? Should we encourage killing those we oppose? Squash an ant, kill a CEO? Is it the same question?
Or is asking for Americans to be nonviolent, at this point, irrelevant? In a system that does not give anything to those it purports to help, people will rebel. That’s precisely what the framers of the Declaration of Independence were doing. They were taking things into their own hands. We celebrate that.
So perhaps to agree with Mangione is to be the truest kind of American: one who believes in the equality and independence that were professed in the Declaration, which then paved the way for some people to use violence to take equality and independence away from others.
The Declaration of Independence isn’t the reason for America’s violence. But it must be seen as a manifesto that exists in the context of a violent colonialist society. So, as Americans, as Oregonians, what emphasis should we place on that hypocrisy at its core? Can altruistic ideas exist in a vacuum, divorced from the violent actions of their authors?
Is it possible for you, too, to separate your own identity from violence?
Growing up here, I learned what it meant to be an Oregonian. In public school, we churned butter and played The Oregon Trail video game. A team of people, presumably, had programmed a fantasy video game about an imagined bloodless westward expansion where the biggest lessons seemed to concern the correct spelling of dysentery and how you should never drive a wagon headlong into a raging river. And then it was used as part of the teaching curriculum in Oregon schools, which is shocking if you think about it.
One thing I learned as a child is that Oregonians despise outsiders. But some of the most famous words about Oregon have been uttered by outsiders. Governor Tom McCall—who, like me, was not born in Oregon—uttered the now-famous lines: “We want you to visit our State of Excitement often. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t move here to live.”
Later, McCall, who was from Massachusetts, explained his meaning further: His words could not be divorced from their context. When a bill over land use in the state was in question, threatening Oregon’s landscapes, he told a crowd at the City Club of Portland, “If they throw that out please throw me out too, because I don’t intend to preside over the degradation of the state of Oregon.”
Quotes like McCall’s have served as quiet Oregon manifestos, declaring what we are about without stating it directly. For a place known for being passive-aggressive, perhaps this is the best we can do.
McCall’s famous line echoes a more aggressive regionalism that has, for a long time, been perpetuated by people who weren’t born in Oregon, but love the state deeply and feel like they should have been. People like me, basically.
The Northwest has long been filled with people who came here from another place—and have a little chip on their shoulder about it. In this way, perhaps Northwesterners are not unlike the framers of the Declaration: people from elsewhere claiming a place as part of their new identity.
In 1894, Adella M. Parker, who was born in Michigan and became one of the first women to get a law degree at the University of Washington, gave a speech to this effect. “That the West should unfalteringly follow the East in fashions and ideals would be as false and fatal as that America should obey the standards of Europe,” she said. “Let the West, daring and unprejudiced, discover its own ideals and follow them.”
Like America’s mythology, the most revered stories Oregon tells about itself have been shaped by outsiders.
Take Stewart Holbrook, a writer as Oregon as they come. Only Holbrook was not from Oregon. He was born in Vermont. When he arrived in Oregon in the 1920s, it was to work as a writer for the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, or the “Four L,” a government-created labor union.
By 1917, loggers in the Northwest had long been maligned, considered hoboes and roustabouts and ne’er-do-wells. When the Industrial Workers of the World (or the IWW, also known as the Wobblies) unionized these loggers in the midst of World War I and they went on strike, it threatened the entire war effort, which depended on Pacific Northwest spruce to build planes.
Like a comic book villain, the federal government dreamt up a new narrative and rebranded logging entirely. Loggers who signed up for work with the Four L were noble patriots, they said—unlike those radical anti-American Wobblies. It was propaganda. And it stuck.
Holbrook’s work brought him into close contact with the IWW, but he wasn’t convinced by the government’s Four L narrative. He wrote continually about the Wobblies, who, he said, “kept the lumber industry of the Northwest in a state bordering on insanity.” In one instance, Holbrook referred to members of the IWW as part of “the national conscience.”
For his part, Holbrook also railed against the East Coast. Famously, he led a campaign to rename Portland “Multnomah.” “We should prefer to live in a city uniquely named, rather than in one that calls for the add-ition of a qualifying state to make clear exactly where we live,” he said.
Holbrook viewed Oregonians as bright lights shining out into a dark nation. In his 1957 book Dreamers of the American Dream, he wrote fondly of Abigail Scott Duniway, an Illinoisan who ran a newspaper devoted to women’s rights in 1870s Oregon—at the time, its own kind of manifesto in a state and country that didn’t see women as equal citizens.
But Holbrook was also an aggressive regionalist who didn’t want new people flooding into Oregon. He encouraged locals to loudly promote Portland’s rain, which he saw as a surefire way to keep people away.
In this way, Holbrook, like McCall, was a typical transplant: someone who wasn’t born in Oregon, but who had arrived here and wanted to close the door right behind him.
I admit that I occasionally resort to my own form of regionalism. For years, I’ve used my social media accounts to rail against bad coverage of the area by reporters from New York. The trend is for them to fly in for the weekend and leave with a story painting Oregon as some curious hinterland, or as a war zone of progressivism gone wrong. In that regard, I’d like to issue an amended version of McCall’s barbed quote: We want you to visit our state, but for heaven’s sake, don’t write about it.
For as long as Oregonians have been defined by the words of transplants like me, so too have Oregonians pointed toward other Oregonians and seen only differences.
In 1998, Senator Ron Wyden—another import, he was born in Kansas and raised in California—held a meeting in the town of Fossil, reminding people there that he wasn’t “the senator from Portland. I’m the senator from Oregon.” Wyden was acutely aware that Oregon is constantly at odds with its own identity, obsessed with the invisible “urban-rural divide” that severs the state from itself. It was something the longtime Oregon politics pundit Ron Blankenbaker (who was originally from Yakima, Washington) deemed the “urban-rural split”—a tale of “two Oregons, each trying to impose its values on the other.”
In 2009, when Oregon celebrated its sesquicentennial—150 years of statehood—Ted Ferrioli, a Republican representing John Day and the minority leader in the Oregon State Senate, took the occasion as an opportunity to slam Portland. Having a celebration in the state’s largest city would have been wrong, said Ferrioli—who was born in Spokane, Washington, and lived there until he was eight years old. “Downtown Portland is not where Oregonians live,” he said. “It isn’t the real deal, it isn’t the Oregon Trail, it isn’t the pioneering spirit.” (Hate to break it to you, Ferrioli, but John Day wasn’t on the Oregon Trail either.)
On the same occasion, Statesman Journal columnist Dick Hughes wrote, “True confessions: I’m not a native Oregonian. But I am a native Northwesterner.” Explaining that his chief worry for his adopted home was the urban-rural divide, he wrote: “Too many Oregonians cling to outdated stereotypes of one another instead of recognizing our symbiotic relationships.”
Oregon continued to issue louder and louder manifestos. In 2015, someone slapped “No Californians” stickers on real estate signs in North Portland.
During election season in Clackamas and Yamhill Counties, signs popped up cautioning against “Portland Creep.” The message was clearly about culture, not land use. Signs appeared in the Central Oregon town of Maupin, too: “Don’t Bend Maupin”; “Keep Maupin Normal. Let Portland Have Its Weird.” The slogan “Keep Portland Weird”—wide open for interpretation and a manifesto in its own right—seemed to become more controversial as the city found itself in the news more and more often in 2020 for racial injustice protests. Statewide, signs and stickers began warning “Don’t Portland My Oregon.” Stickers bearing the word “Oregunian” above the silhouette of an AR-15 started to appear in car windows. Produced by an Oregon City company, these stickers could be read as their own kind of manifesto.
In 2022, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, who was born in Chicago but raised on a farm in the Willamette Valley, issued his own manifesto for what it means to be an Oregonian. Kristof was planning to run for Oregon governor, but the secretary of state’s office was doubtful he met the residency requirements.
“He owns and pays taxes on real property here. He has a bedroom here. He manages a farm and an agricultural business here,” read Kristof’s manifesto. “He has hiked the entire length of Oregon along the Pacific Crest Trail, sent his children to OMSI camps, backpacked around Mount Hood, eaten at Mo’s in Lincoln City, and grieved the loss of family members and friends as part of a community here.”
Kristof was eventually deemed ineligible to run. His statement of identity read like a travel guide, not a statement of the qualities that make an Oregonian.
I have wondered what motivates all these declarations by non-Oregon-born Oregonians on what it means to be from here. Is it because we see this place as unlike anywhere else? We left other places—some of us by choice, some not. We ended up here and put down roots.
In her novel Wise Blood, the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who never visited Oregon as far as I know, tells the story of a man creating his own religion—a religion that rejects religion. In one part of the book, he preaches: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”
“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he continues. “You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”
While ruminating on the state of this state and this country, I found myself returning again and again to these words, thinking about how American identity is a state of mind. And minds can change.
I think Oregon is also a state of mind. And over the years that state of mind has become less shared, perhaps, than it once was.
We have bifurcated and trifurcated, spliced and split what it means to be an Oregonian. We say this is Oregon and that is not. This is reductive—silly to think a whole state must believe in one way, vote in one way, look one way, talk one way, worship one way, protest one way. These statements about what it means to be an Ore-gonian are wrongheaded in that they encourage groupthink, nativism, isolationism. They forget that the original sin in the founding of this place was exclusion.
What if Oregon’s manifesto, going forward, were simple? Keep the air of this place smelling like the woods. Make the water so clear you can see to the bottom. Keep the coastline open forever. Make sure Oregon stays wild: in the woods, in the cities. Take care of each other. On the trail, say hello and spare some water for someone who needs it; in schools, make sure kids can read and know what a sea anemone feels like. Teach the full history of this place, the one where our ancestors were colonizers. We can handle the truth. In the statehouse, stay at the table and have hard conversations. Listen hard to everyone who was left out of this place at the beginning of Oregon, but don’t stop there. Give over the reins. Trust each other—because together, in ourselves right now, is all we’ve got.
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