Portland, Oregon, is a point of connection between Chief Bromden’s remembered home in the Columbia Gorge and the wider society that has tried to reshape it. The city is associated both with members of the tribe who have made lives there and with a hoped-for return: after escaping the hospital, Chief Bromden plans to look for people he once knew and recover a clearer sense of the country around the gorge.

A regional connection

In a childhood memory, Chief Bromden recalls that some people from his community are lawyers in Portland. He thinks of an uncle who became a lawyer, though Papa says the man would rather spend autumn poking salmon. The contrast unsettles the stereotype Chief Bromden attributes to highway tourists, who buy fish without coming to the village and may imagine its residents as relics of a violent past. Portland thus marks a place where members of the community participate in professional life beyond the village, even as outsiders’ assumptions persist.

The village and the development plan

Portland belongs to the broader world around the Columbia Gorge, where government representatives seek to secure the village and falls for a hydroelectric dam and lake. The old woman among the visitors advises against speaking with Chief Bromden’s father immediately. She proposes returning to town, publicizing the claimed advantages of the project, and mailing an offer to his white wife instead, hoping to avoid his resistance and attachment to home. The scene does not identify that town as Portland, but it places the city within the wider regional context of a development campaign directed at the community’s land and way of life.

Chief Bromden later explains to McMurphy that the government wanted his father to surrender everything: the tribe, the village, and the falls. The payments and checks offered in return did not answer his father’s question about what could be paid for the way a person lives or for what a person is. The account makes the conflict more than a transaction over property: it joins the threatened village and its fishing grounds to a struggle over identity and self-determination.

A hoped-for return

At the novel’s close, after fleeing the hospital, Chief Bromden considers going to Canada but imagines stopping first along the Columbia. He hopes to search Portland, Hood River, and The Dalles for people he knew from the village, including those who may have been damaged by drinking since the government tried to buy their right to be Indians. His return is still a plan, not an accomplished visit. He has heard that some members of the tribe have rebuilt their old wooden scaffolding around the hydroelectric dam and are spearing salmon in its spillway; he wants to see this for himself and to look again at the country around the gorge, which he has been away from for a long time. Portland therefore becomes part of a route toward people and a home landscape he hopes to recover in memory and, perhaps, encounter again.