On January 11, Ashland Together invites you to join Portland State University history professor Kristin Teigen for a free, two hour webinar examining Oregon’s difficult racial past. The event will serve as an introductory session in the lead up to a four week, online course titled “Unwelcomed: Oregon’s History of Exclusion” beginning February 1.

To register for Seeds of White Utopia webinar, visit Ashland Together’s event page and click on the RSVP button. The group provided more details about the event and a description of the month long course below.

What You Will Learn

The goal of this two hour webinar is to better understand our state’s largely unexamined history of discrimination with the hope of empowering us all to be part of the vision for a more equitable and inclusive community. Knowing our complicated origin story goes a long way in making that vision a reality.


This introductory lecture will be followed a 4-week special series that will reveal how continued forms of discrimination, from redlining to deportations, from internment to indigenous genocide, land grabs, and more created an environment where non-white people were not welcomed. While that is to some extent still true today, we will learn how we can effectively take action to create a new opportunities for conscious inclusion.

Professor Teigen’s presentation begins by exploring the early American events that set the stage for Oregon’s foundation as a ‘whites-only’ territory. She will delve into topics like the construct of race, Bacon’s Rebellion, Manifest Destiny and the Missouri Compromise, significant historical moments that planted the seeds for exclusionary practices that would set the stage of discrimination for generations to come. Among other things, you will also learn about early relations with Indigenous tribes and what led to the widespread seizure of tribal lands.

This introductory lecture will be followed a 4-week special series that will reveal how continued forms of discrimination, from redlining to deportations, from internment to indigenous genocide, land grabs, and more created an environment where non-white people were not welcomed. While that is to some extent still true today, we will learn how we can effectively take action to create a new opportunities for conscious inclusion.

Instructor: Kristin Teigen, MA, M.Ed. is an educator at Portland State University, where she teaches the history of BIPOC communities in Oregon and issues of women’s homelessness. She’s also an anti-oppression activist, working in feminist, queer, environmental justice and people of color movements, and a trained anti-oppression facilitator.