Sense of Place: Rajneeshees in Oregon – Cancelled Due to Covid-19

Unfortunately, this event has been cancelled due to Covid-19. Thrive Hood River is honored to sponsor this lecture about an extraordinary time in Oregon history when a religious sect from India set up an experiment on a ranch outside Madras. In the 1980s, the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh presided over a sect that professed self-sufficiency and love that morphed into a tightly-controlled cult that engaged in assassination attempts and plots, orchestrated the largest illegal wiretapping operation in U.S. history, and poisoned hundreds of innocent diners as a way to suppress voter turnout. Why did they come to Oregon and how did they descend into criminal conduct? Local, state and federal officials all were put under enormous pressure to confront the group, and they responded with varying measures of success. What are the lessons even today from those long-ago events? Presenter Les Zaitz is an Oregon native. He started his professional journalism career right out of high school, hired in 1973 as a general assignment reporter for the Salem Statesman Journal. He continued writing as a staff reporter and correspondent while attending the University of Oregon, working for the Springfield News, the Oregon Journal, UPI, and the New York Times. From 1976-1987, he was a reporter for The Oregonian, handling various beats before taking an assignment in 1982 to the investigative team where he co-wrote a 20-part series about the Rajneeshees that was published in the Oregonian. More recently, he was included in the Netflix series Wild Wild Country, which looks at some of the history behind Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. Les is the editor and publisher of the weekly Malheur Enterprise newspaper, an award-winning newspaper based in Vale, Oregon. In 2018, he and a partner founded the Salem Reporter, a digital news service based in Oregon’s capital. He is the CEO and editor. Soon after its launch, Salem Reporter formed a collaboration with two other Oregon news organizations to create the Oregon Capital Bureau, focusing on state government reports. Les leads the team of three reporters as its editor. Sense of Place is an annual lecture series  produced by Gorge Owned and Mt. Adams Institute that seeks to foster a deeper understanding of and connection to our landscape and one another. $10 Suggested Donation. These popular conversations have been selling out, advance tickets are available via Eventbrite.