WE DON’T OFTEN SPEAK OF GHOSTS, BUT THEY ARE DEFINITELY THERE

CONNECTING TO THE LIVING INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF THIS PLACE

JUSTIN CORY

It is no secret that in the startlingly recent past, the entire North American continent underwent an incomprehensibly massive and brutal cultural reconfiguring.

According to the scholarship of Erin McKenna, the population of Indigenous people in North and South America in 1491 was around 145 million people—by 1691, their population had plummeted by 90–95 percent, around 130 million people.

I believe it is important to acknowledge whose land we are actually on, but land acknowledgements tend to be hollow and performative gestures that do little to nothing in actually advocating for Indigenous sovereignty or in returning these stolen lands to the people who spent millennia here upon them.

There have been some recent victories for Indigenous people in the Land Back movement—for instance, when a multinational timber company returned a stretch of tidelands known as the Little Skookum Inlet in Mason County, Washington to the Squaxin Island Tribe.

In other instances, some tribes have been able to legally challenge the atrocities committed against them, even as the legal system itself is stacked against acknowledging that the U.S. has broken the majority of its treaties with Indigenous peoples. Still the deep scars of colonialism are ever present.

Some tribes have also begun purchasing their own lands back. One such recent Indigenous victory happened here in the Willamette Valley with the return of the lands around Willamette Falls to the Grand Ronde Tribes, after over a century of industrial abuse of the area by paper and wood-milling facilities.

The area is a deeply significant place culturally and spiritually, as it is the former home of the Clowewalla and Kosh-huk-shix villages of the Clackamas people who were forcibly removed and relocated by the U.S. government under the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855.

Jamie Hale of The Oregonian wrote that the Grand Ronde have their own name for Willamette Falls—“tumwata”—the Chinook jargon word for waterfall. Tumwater, Washington also takes its name from that same word for waterfall.

In the spirit of Land Back and in paying loving tribute and respect to the vibrant and living Indigenous cultures and peoples of the Pacific Northwest, this article explores some of the true names of these places and lands upon which so many of us have lived—largely as strangers and settlers.

This entire valley takes its name from the mighty river that went by the Chinook name “walamt,” later anglicized into what we now call the Willamette. As locals all know, it is pronounced “will-AM-it,” but few realize that it means “still water.” This describes a place on the river near Oregon City that was—and, to a smaller degree, still is—inhabited by members of the Kalapuya, Molalla, Clackamas and Chinook peoples. As you can ascertain, these tribal appellations have also been applied to counties, rivers, towns and other places locally as well.

Further up on the Willamette River, a band of Chinook known as the Multnomah people lived on an island known for an abundance of “wapato,” a native potato-like plant whose roots were and still are a vital food source. It was for this reason that the island was dubbed “Wapato” by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark when they passed through. We now know it as Sauvie Island, named after the French-Canadian Laurent Sauvé who managed the dairy farms there for the Hudson’s Bay Company after the colonizers forcefully cleared the Multnomah people from their villages.

As for the mighty Columbia River—the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and a major lifeblood of the region—the Chinook call it “Wimahl.” The Sahaptin-speaking peoples of the river’s middle course in Central Washington call it the “Nch’iWàna.” Finally, the Sinixt people of the Arrow Lakes region in Canada call the river “Swah’netk’qhu.” All of these terms essentially translate to “the big river.”

Along the “Wimahl” river and close to Portland is a beloved swimming hole and nude beach called Rooster Rock.

ROOSTER ROCK (“WOOT’LAT” IN THE CHINOOK LANGUAGE) NEAR THE COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE. CAMDEN BENESH/PSU VANGUARD

Not many folks realize that the name comes from a rock formation that the Chinook called “Woot’lat,” a slang term for a phallus. According to the seminal late Coquille Indigenous scholar George Bundy Wasson Jr., in his dissertation on the history of the coast tribes of Oregon called Growing Up Indian: An Emic Perspective, the rock formation was a useful position marker for those navigating the river. Later, Europeans took the “colorfully direct translation of the [Chinook] jargon to English whereby ‘Woot’lat’ (phallus or penis) would readily be called ‘Cock Rock.’”

As place names were formalized, the Puritan-informed sensibilities of the government naming agencies changed its name to Rooster Rock. Ironically, today many still chuckle at the connotations of “cock rock,” especially as it has evolved over time into a gay cruising beach, without realizing that they are closer to the nature of its original name in doing so.

The Indigenous names of the volcanic mountains towering above us and bisecting the high deserts and the lush rain forests of this Cascadian region are likewise full of gorgeous mythopoetic intrigue.

Mount Hood is currently named after a British admiral, but for countless ages it was known as “Wy’east.” This comes from a Multnomah/Chinook legend in which two sons of the Great Spirit Sahale fell in love with a beautiful woman named Loowit. She could not decide which to choose so the two young men battled over her, creating much destruction in their wake. Sahale became enraged and smote all three lovers. He created three mountain peaks to mark the place that each fell.

You may have gathered from that tale that “Loowit” forms the original name for Mount St. Helens, and that “Klikitat” is the original name of Mount Adams. The other mountains in our region have ancient names like “Seekseekqua” before Mount Jefferson, “Tahoma” before Rainier, “Kulshan” before Baker and “Dahkobed” before Glacier Peak.

There are countless other names and aspects of local lore that could continue well beyond the confines of this limited article, but the point is to stir respect, interest and connection. Indigenous people are far too often disregarded and thought of as belonging only to a tragic past—the original sin at the founding of the United States of America. The wrongs committed against them past and present are awaiting recourse—we all collectively owe them that and much more as we benefit from our continued occupation of their lands.

Learning the true aboriginal names of these places, much like toothless land acknowledgements, is far from adequate. However, through connecting with the people and culture of this place—in helping to keep their languages, lore and vibrancy at the forefront—we can be part of the thinning of the veil between the ghosts of the past and the legacy of material conditions that are their result.

Portland is home to the ninth largest urban Indigenous population in the country and, as reported by the Coalition of Communities of Color and Portland State University, Native poverty rates are triple those in white communities with a rate of 34% compared to white Portlanders at 12.3%. Indigenous people are the victims of violent crimes at rates 250% higher than those of white people in the area.

It is clear that the war on Indigenous people has never ended as oil pipelines continue to be forced through their meager remaining reservations, and supposedly green energy companies continue to devastate Indigenous sacred sites for electric battery lithium mines in Nevada and copper mines in Arizona.

Much more needs to be done than simply remembering the true names of the places we live in. We need to remember, love and hold in the highest esteem of our heart’s expansive solidarity the Indigenous people who have always made this place what it is. Cherish them and fight to help return them their land, and do seek out and keep on your tongues the true names and mytho-poetry of this gorgeous place and its original people.

A CLOSER LOOK INTO RECENT HACKS OF SAMSUNG AND NVIDIA

A SAMSUNG GALAXY FOLD SMARTPHONE HELD BY MCCONNELL. SOFIE BRANDT/PSU VANGUARD

RYAN MCCONNELL

One word differentiates the paranoid from the conscientious when it comes to cybersecurity—why. Ads from companies like Norton love to explain how their products protect users from hackers, viruses and other online threats. Hackers could steal your data, install malware on your phone and even spy on you!

While there should always be a certain level of cyber-hygiene, it’s important to think about what companies would want with your data. Why would they install malware on your phone for no reason?

Chances are that hackers will have little-to-no vested interest in you. Rather, hackers are often motivated by four things— money, activism, information and sabotage.

Money is the most common reason behind hacking incidents, from small-scale actions like stealing credit card data to larger attacks such as locking down an entire business network. Ransomware is the most common—groups such as REvil infect computers to make them unusable until the hackers are paid a fee.

When hackers disrupt a business, group or individual in order to prove a point—for social justice—it is often called hacktivism. While much more prevalent in the ‘90s and the early ‘00s with the rise of Anonymous, a good modern-day example would be the Parler hack that occured Jan. 12, 2021.

A hacker group had successfully gathered the entire database— roughly dozens of terabytes—of users who had used the app, known for being a breeding ground for disinformation and hate speech. This information was then posted online in hopes of supporting investigations of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Things get more frightening when hackers are looking to steal information—or to sabotage people, systems or governments. These kinds of attacks are rarely done by independent organizations, but nation-states with millions of dollars of funding. Individuals, no matter how skilled, simply do not have the kind of equipment or knowledge necessary to break through such intricate systems.

Hacks conducted over the past couple weeks by the hacker group known as Lapsus$ are particularly bizarre, confusing and ultimately far more concerning than what the victims may mention publicly.

On Feb. 23, Nvidia was hacked immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than one terabyte (1TB) of data was stolen from the corporate network—with Lapsus$ threatening to expose the entire registry of credentials and data by March 4 if the company did not comply. It has been confirmed that Lapsus$ has indeed held true to their threats, with the credentials being used to install malware inside the company's own systems.

What was their demand?

Allow the company’s graphics cards to mine cryptocurrency faster—or face the consequences.

In Feb. 2021, Nvidia announced its graphics cards (GPUs) would have a crypto-mining cap, known as LHR, or Lite Hash Rate. It tells the GPU to go slower if it’s trying to mine any digital currencies, with the intention of driving down demand for graphics cards. The cap would place more of the company’s products in the hands of everyday people, instead of scalpers and millionaires setting up a mining warehouse. This cap gave Nvidia some unexpected enemies.

On March 7, Lapsus$ had purportedly shown off over 200GB worth of data stolen from Samsung’s headquarters in South Korea. This data wasn’t a list of credentials or accounts, but the source code to Samsung Galaxy devices—more specifically, the biometric and encryption programs Galaxy phones use to lock and unlock themselves.

If these hacks appear to be separate from the motivations listed earlier, that’s because they are. Or rather, they appear to be.

In a post on The Hacker News, Sasha Gohman described the first step of planning an attack. Knowing what platforms, technologies and operating systems will be targeted is essential, so that hackers can develop and find tools that specifically break into those devices.

Unfortunately, the best way to build tools that can break into a device is to look at the source code of the device itself, so what makes Lapsus$ frightening is not what they’ve already done, but rather what they haven’t done.

We don’t know exactly who Lapsus$ is. They could be a nation state, or a group of independent, seasoned hackers or some emerging hacktivist organization. We also don’t know why they want Samsung’s source code or the LHR lifted on GPUs.

What we do know is that they stole data used to change the locks on very specific devices, but they kept it internally within the group instead of releasing it to the public. With that kind of data, hackers can effortlessly develop tools to break into Samsung Galaxy phones if need be. The question then becomes the most important one of all—why?