By CHERYL ROMANO/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – It’s a rare, bright spring day and Joanne Kittel – wearing her usual kneepads, rain gear and a reflective vest – is simultaneously transplanting ferns, dog-sitting for a friend, and greeting walkers as they make their way along the Amanda Trail.
Rain or shine, it’s a typical day.
There’s trail work in and around the Amanda Grotto, organizational chores for this weekend’s dedication ceremonies for the new 142-foot-long suspension bridge spanning Amanda Creek, and Zoom meetings with a Yachats commission and the city council to keep another big project — a $1 million boardwalk along Ocean View Drive — moving along.
Some people work their butts off for a cause, and bask in their earned applause. Some people pitch in from time to time, and don’t mind some recognition. And then there’s Joanne Kittel.
Although she has become the living face of Amanda — as in in the Amanda Trail, the new Amanda Bridge and the Amanda Creek on the south end of Yachats — Kittel (pronounced kit-TELL) doesn’t merely shun the spotlight. She runs from it, all the while crediting others for work she spearheads.
“Joanne abhors praise and recognition,” says John Purcell, who until recently was her co-chair of View the Future, the Yachats-based nonprofit conservation group. At the same time, “She is tireless … you don’t want to be in front of her.”
Dennis Comfort, the coast region director for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, has known Kittel since 2003. That’s when he met the woman who, with her husband, Norman, were the first people in Oregon to donate a hiking trail in to the public, in collaboration with his agency.
“She’s selfless and very driven, as well,” Comfort says. “She moves with purpose.”
View the Future board member Bette Perman has known Kittel for 12 years.
“Her work ethic is unbelievable; I call her a spark plug; she makes things happen,” Perman says.
A rainy day changed everything
On Saturday, Yachats will host the dedication of the Amanda Trail bridge, a six-year, $434,000 project championed by Kittel and carried out with the help of dozens more. But it might not exist if the sun had shone one day in 1988.
On that day, Joanne and Norman Kittel were visiting Yachats from their home in Indiana near Lake Michigan. Spurred by Norman’s interest in the Pacific Northwest, they had purchased 27 acres of coastal woodland near Cape Perpetua with the idea of building a home.
They were checking out their new town when Joanne noticed a sign on King Street near the Yachats Memorial Cemetery. The sign described the “idyllic community” of Native Americans who lived in town, in what was called the Alsea Sub-Agency.
“I had no reason to question that,” she recalls. “It was a rainy day, and I went to the Yachats Library to see if I could get any more information about the Indians in this area.”
She found a book by Stephen Beckham called “The Indians of Western Oregon: This Land Was Theirs” that would change her life.
The book documented no “idyllic community,” but rather “A location of atrocities” where members of tribes “relocated” by the U.S. government suffered and died in present-day Yachats. From 1860-75, Native Americans were rounded up and imprisoned at the Alsea Sub-Agency.
“I made a vow to myself that when I moved here, I would find out the truth,” Kittel said.
Beckham’s book introduced Kittel to the story of Amanda De-Cuys, a member of the Coos tribe. Blind, she was forced by government troops in 1864 to leave her husband and daughter and walk barefoot from Coos Bay to the military camp in Yachats.
The Kittels moved to Yachats in 1993 and Joanne started chipping away at what she calls the “historical truth” of the subjugation of Native Americans on the Oregon coast. She and Suzanne Curtis published a booklet in 1996 called “The Yachats Indians, Origins of the Yachats Name, and the Prison Camp Years”. The two women worked under the supervision of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians to produce the work.
“Suzanne and I were handing it out in town,” Kittel recalls. “A lot of people were pleased to see it, but there was a loud minority that wasn’t. It took a while for this town to come around.”
But Yachats — and Lincoln County, the state of Oregon and the federal government — did come around, because all have been involved in Kittel’s quest to spread the truth, pivoting on the Amanda story as emblematic of what she calls “U.S. government genocidal policies.”
Two acres and a mission
Gradually, as the couple started building their house, the Amanda work moved forward. The Kittels donated two of their acres for a section of the trail, and Joanne’s gift for collaboration started to appear. Turned down by the City Council when they asked for help to get the trail built, Joanne started searching for volunteers.
She put up a notice at the Post Office advertising work meetings on the first Saturday of every month. “That’s how we got the trail done through our property,” she said of the 10-year effort. That was also the genesis of the Yachats Trails Committee, which began in 2005, and was formally recognized by the city in 2009.
Today, the all-volunteer group is the major force in maintaining and improving the city’s numerous trails and open spaces. Photos of Kittel and friends regularly appear on social media, digging, hacking, shoveling, raking and doing whatever it takes to help keep all of Yachats’ trails safe and clear.
These are not dilettantes. These are volunteers mostly in their 70s like Kittel, 71, who brave winds, rain and mud two Saturdays a month to work. And their ranks include some of the people Kittel would rather see in the spotlight, like Loren Dickinson, Bob Langley and Wally Orchard, who “give their heart and soul” to the effort, as Kittel puts it.
There’s a long list of people Kittel credits for helping tell the Amanda saga and build Yachats’ reputation as a trails city. It includes:
- Robert Kentta of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. He worked with Kittel and Diane Disse to correct and establish interpretive signs about First Nations history in the area;
- Chief Donald “Doc” Slyter of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. For years, he’s advocated for Amanda Trail capital projects that his Tribal Foundation supports;
- Yachats residents Nan and Greg Scott, contributors of $50,000 toward the new suspension bridge;
- View the Future members including Perman, Shelly Shrock and Dean Peterson;
- The late Lee Corbin, a former mayor of Yachats who was an early supporter of the Amanda Trail;
- Angell Job Corps, whose student/members helped work the trail and build the new bridge;
- Loyd Collett, a former trail planner for the Siuslaw National Forest, whose original idea became the Amanda Trail;
- Sharon Stewart, a manager at Siuslaw National Forest who took over maintenance of the federal side of Amanda Trail in 2005. Kittel and sometimes others had been tending the whole trail, but Kittel’s husband was ill, her wheelchair-bound mother was living with them, and Joanne herself suffered a minor stroke that year;
- Jerry and Kathleen Sand, who were instrumental in getting the Oregon Department of Transportation to approve plans to run the trail from Kittel’s property to Yachats Ocean Road;
- Lauralee Svendsgaard, the first chair of the Yachats Trails Committee and creator of the New Year’s Day Peace Hike;
- And all the other agencies and individuals whose names will be on the program at the bridge dedication May 21. (For more on the event, called “Bridging Cultures & Healing Hearts,” go here.)
A rare tribal honor
“I’m really not that interesting or important,” insists Kittel, who often says, “I’m the incompetent one” to reporters who have documented progress on the suspension bridge.
She does admit one gift.
“My biggest strength is I know my limitations and my weaknesses. I won’t ask for money, other people will. I’m really mediocre at writing grant applications. I’m dyslexic and anything formal I write has to be reviewed by someone else.”
But make no mistake, says Perman, Joanne Kittel is no saint.
“She’ll say, ‘I’m not a Buddhist’ — she’ll get really mad at people who are being obstructive or dishonest; she will wish them poorly,” said Perman.
For those who act in good faith, however, Kittel’s energy and empathy seem boundless.
“She’s 100 percent reliable,” said Perman. “She’s the best kind of friend.”
When Perman’s late wife was in cancer treatment a few years ago, Kittel didn’t offer just vague help. “Joanne would say, ‘Oh, you’re going to chemotherapy on Wednesday? I’ll pick up your dogs and bring them back the next day so you won’t need to think about it.’ ”
That empathy has served Kittel and her projects well.
“She’s established so many partnerships and collaborations,” says Orchard. “She’s got such a wide array of contacts … she knows where to get help from all sorts of sources.”
Donald “Doc” Slyter, chief of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, lives in Coos Bay, the town from which Amanda was forced to walk barefoot. Before Kittel started spreading the Amanda truth, he said tribal members wouldn’t drive through Yachats if they had to go north up the coast. (“They would be driving over their ancestors,” Kittel points out.)
“Amanda, who is blind, tore her feet horribly over these ragged rocks, leaving blood sufficient to track her by.” That’s a quote from the diary of Cpl. Royal Bensell, one of the white militia charged with returning “runaway” Indians to the Yachats prison camp. Little is known of Amanda’s fate after she arrived, or of the daughter she was forced to leave.
Propelled by the power of that story and her fury over its lies, Kittel’s work brought her a rare honor — she is one of only two people named an honorary member of Slyter’s tribe. That designation came “For her role in the education process about the Amanda Trail and how the Sub-Agency was actually an internment camp,” says Slyter.
“She’s taken that negative energy and turned it positive,” the chief says. “It’s not only Joanne; there’s a lot of people in Yachats that make this all possible. She understands it’s not about the individual, it’s the community.”
A trained psychotherapist
Where does this insight come from?
“Perhaps it’s her training and dealing with trauma that gives her the ability to see,” said Purcell.
A child of Czech heritage (with a little Irish blood, too), Joanne Genc grew up in a dual-language family in a Chicago suburb. Her mother ran several businesses and her father worked in tool and die. Years later, she married Norman Kittel and they moved to Arkansas for his work teaching criminal justice.
Armed with a masters in psychiatric social work from the University of Arkansas, Joanne Kittel worked as a psychotherapist for years, specializing in trauma — both victims’ and perpetrators’. After a move to Minnesota, she became director of a domestic abuse project. “Part of my work was with perpetrators, and I did that on purpose,” she said. “Not because I had any love for perpetrators, but I wanted to learn what goes on in their heads. The only way to do that was not from a textbook, but from being a therapist in that setting.”
The links to the Amanda story are obvious and strong.
Once the Kittels bought their Yachats acreage and Joanne discovered the Amanda story, “everything” about it resonated with her trauma work. “Because of my profession, I wasn’t surprised, but I was aghast,” she says.
Over the years, “Oregon’s Trail of Tears” has been publicized by national and international media — Sierra magazine, public radio, French TV and the British Broadcasting Corp., as well as many Oregon publications. But still, especially as new residents continue arriving in Yachats, there are people unaware of the area’s history.
“I’ve had a couple of tribal members ask me, ‘Why keep telling the story?’ ” Slyter relates. “I say, ‘If we don’t tell those stories to the people that were never part of that, it’s going to happen again.’ ”
Today, the sign near the cemetery that first caught Kittel’s eye no longer rhapsodizes about an “idyllic community.” Instead, it recognizes native peoples being “forcibly marched … death and injuries … refugees in their own land.”
On Saturday, when Amanda’s new bridge is dedicated, a long list of groups and individuals will be thanked. These include the state parks department, the tribes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Siuslaw National Forest, Three Rivers Foundation, Discover Your Northwest and View the Future, among many, many others. They all played important roles, thanks to the commitment and tenacity of Joanne Kittel.
But she’d be the last to say so.
- Cheryl Romano is a Yachats freelance reporter who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. She can be reached at Wordsell@gmail.com