It’s likely that many people entering Portland State University’s Native American Student and Community Center never noticed its street address, said Tabitha Whitefoot, a former coordinator at the center.
But those who did understood its profoundly negative history, Whitefoot said. “A daily insult,” according to LaJune Thorson, president of Portland’s Downtown Neighborhood Association.
The student center opened in 2003 and sits on Southwest Jackson Street, named for the 7th U.S. president and signatory to the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
On Thursday, the Portland City Council will hear testimony about the years-long process to strip Jackson’s name from the three blocks of downtown Portland in front of and near the student center.
Among the people who felt strongly that Jackson did not deserve to be honored with a street was Rose Hill, a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a PSU graduate whom the city describes as the “driving force” behind the establishment of PSU’s center. She died last year at 82.
“She was rabid about Jackson,” Whitefoot said, noting that the Indian Removal Act particularly harmed the Oneida people. “It was very close to home for her.”
Now, after concluding a community process, Portland is proposing to rename the three blocks Southwest Rose Hill Street.
PSU President Ann Cudd is scheduled to testify Thursday. “By finalizing this change, we are aligning our city’s physical geography with its stated values of equity and historical truth,” she wrote in prepared remarks.
Hill’s niece, Elsa Hill, calls the move a “big honor” and pointed to her aunt’s own words, from when she testified about the proposal in 2024.
“Never in a million years did I ever think that there would be a street named after me,” she told the Portland City Council a year before her death. “It is a truly remarkable situation that I’ve lasted this long, and I’m able to see the actual results of it, and I’m going to have a street and I’m replacing Andrew Jackson, the Indian killer.”
She added, “So, hey, how about that?”
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