The following is an OPB
original series. Oregon Experience
is a production of OPB in partnership with
the Oregon Historical Society. [ ??? ] MAN: We have been here
since time began. We have been here since
the first human got here. For many thousands of years,
Oregon has been Indian country. MAN: Indian country
is pretty complex. It's not just one group of
people that are all the same. It's dozens of different tribes who once lived in hundreds
of villages in a diverse environment
of natural abundance. WOMAN: When those natural
resources were desired by the white folks that were
coming here to this land, Indian people were in the way. WOMAN: They fought with us,
they killed us, they drug us out
of our home territory. The treaty guaranteed us that
we would remain on this land in our ownership forever. Leading support for Oregon
Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Support for ''Broken Treaties''
is provided by... and viewers like you. MAN: I'm on the veterans
committee for the parade in Eugene. One of the meetings,
a woman brought her son and introduced me
as Chief Brainard, and the kid looked at me
and said, ''I thought all Indians
were dead.'' [ men singing and drumming ] The Indian people of this
country are very much alive... although others have long been
predicting their demise. [ singing ] MAN: The big picture
of American Indian policy was stated by George Washington
in 1783: The Indians are going to go
extinct, and the United States is going
to get all their lands. There was a time
after World War II and Korea that all the anthropologists
expected that we would become
culturally extinct, that we would lose
our language, our lands would be sold off
and frittered away. We would no longer be able
to be identified from any other person
on the landscape. But that's not the case. Oregon today is home to nine
federally recognized tribes. ANNOUNCER: Give her a big
round of applause -- Carissa Jackson,
incoming queen of the Restoration Powwow,
Klamath Tribes! Most are actually confederations
-- groupings -- of several different tribes. More than 60 tribes and bands
once lived here, speaking at least 18 languages. [ speaking in Native American
language ] [ speaking in Native American
language ] That's ''hello, my friend.'' [ speaks in Native American
language ] ''How is it you are doing?'' Oregon contains four distinct
culture areas -- with variations in terrain,
climate, and resources that can shape the way
people live. We have all these different
geographies, if you will, that distinguish
any one part of Oregon from any other part of Oregon. And that is the case
with the tribes. Each of their landscapes,
each of their geographic areas dictated their traditions,
dictated their technologies, dictated their relationships
with others. Each of the tribes are defined by a particular place
in the world. WOMAN: Coquille people lived
from the mouth of the river, the Nasomah Village complex. Up the river, we had
village sites anywhere that it was
a good place to fish and a good place to live. MAN: The Cayuse, Umatilla,
and Walla Walla people were strong traders. They controlled much of
the economic trade route that went into the Great Basin
to our south, that went into southern Canada
to our north. DON GENTRY: The E'ukskni,
the Klamath people -- that's what we called ourself,
''people of the lake,'' we lived in various
locations here along the rivers, the lakes,
and the marshes. MAN: I am Siuslawan, or Siuslaw,
as it's said today. So I am Siuslaw
[ speaks Native American term ]. And I'm also Kuitsh,
which is Lower Umpqua. MAN: I live here on the Umatilla
Indian Reservation. I'm a tribal member, and I have
lived here most of my life. WOMAN: I live in
Warm Springs, Oregon, and I'm Northern Paiute
and of the Sahaptin descent. I'm just three different types
of Paiute. [ chuckles ] The Paiutes claimed
most of what is now southeastern Oregon. WOMAN:
I think the distinction was our ability to thrive
and to live in country that other people found
less desirable. The Indians of this vast desert
area walked long distances to hunt, gather, and trade
for food. Today's Burns Paiute Tribe
was called the Wadatika, ''the eaters of the wada plant.'' RODERIQUE: Almost every
Paiute band is named after their primary food source. You have the Agai Ticutta,
the fish eaters. You have the Toi Ticutta,
the cattail eaters. You have the Gidi'tikadii,
the groundhog eaters. Some of the Great Basin
had no outlets to the ocean, so access to fresh salmon there
was limited. But that fish has always played
a big role in Northwest Native culture. We are called the Salmon People, and the salmon was
a great part of us. The Coos and other
coastal Oregon tribes never had to travel too far
for food. Large mammals existed here
in big numbers. Plant resources were abundant in
the rainforest environment, providing not only food but materials for baskets,
canoes, and plank houses. The people at water's edge
ate shellfish and fresh- and saltwater fish. MAN: All the tribes had
a relationship with salmon. If you didn't have a lot
of salmon, you would do whatever you could to make enough resources
to go trade for salmon. Today, this fish still swims
throughout much of Oregon. But before the dams
and habitat degradation, salmon and steelhead migrated into nearly every part
of the state. RODERIQUE: I had never seen
a salmon in the Malheur River. I remember as a little girl listening to my granduncle
and grandaunt talking about the salmon runs
in the Malheur River, how shallow the water was and that the fish were coming
so thick that you could walk across
on 'em and step on 'em. Most of northeastern Oregon -- and a big swath
down the center -- is plateau country -- wide open spaces
and rolling hills. Laced with waterways
and light on rainfall, this is the homeland
of the Umatillas, Walla Wallas and Cayuse... the Warm Springs
and the Wascos... the Klamaths, Modocs,
and Yahooskins and others. They harvested the salmon that passed by
in astounding numbers. The Cayuse acquired horses
in the early 1700s. WOMAN: One party was going
to raid the Shoshone. They saw a man there riding
something the size of an elk and decided to change
their mission immediately and obtain a mare
and a stallion. They gambled everything
they had to bring home both a mare
and a stallion, and came home naked --
that's everything you have. We selectively bred
the horses we obtained, and they became known later
as Cayuse horses, or Cayuse mustangs. [ horse nickers ] A wealthy family would have had
thousands of horses. And in 1890, we're the largest
livestock-producing tribe in the United States. [ ??? ] As this territory was settled by
Euro-Americans, they sometimes described it
as wilderness -- pristine and untouched. But in fact, the forests,
grasslands, and rivers had been maintained by the
Indians for a very long time. Our ancestors managed
the forest, managed the land
for a variety of things. After they were finished
hunting elk, they would burn off that area, because they would clean up
all the underbrush and provide more feed for the
elk and deer for the next year, and also any woody material
that was in that area, it would burn it down, and then it would come back with
tons of nice straight shoots that would be usable
for basket weaving. [ birds chirping ] Many of the tribes out here
in the Pacific Northwest lived what we would call
seasonal rounds. Tribes followed
the berries maturing. They would move elsewhere
and dig the roots. They would move elsewhere
and hunt deer. And they'd always get back
to the river for the very regular runs
of salmon that we know, the fall and spring chinook. RODERIQUE: We traveled northeast
to gather bitterroots and gather plants and berries
and medicines up in the forest. [ frogs croaking ] When you think of the expanse
of Eastern Oregon and where our people went to gather their foodstuffs
for the wintertime, we spent a lot of time
traveling. But the Indians' seasonal
mobility also meant that
they were often away and unable to defend
their property when the settlers arrived
and claimed it as their own. It is people being displaced
by other people, who, because it's convenient and because U.S. policy
lets it happen, can take over someone else's
neighborhood, can take over
someone else's house, can take over someone else's
resources. White settlers began to arrive
in large numbers in the early 1840s. GENTRY: Initially, the contact
was positive with some of the traders, but then the folks that wanted
our land, you know, moved in, and there was clashes and
loss of life on both sides. MAN: I always get a kick
out of that story about one Indian
that went to Italy and put his flag down
and says, ''I discovered this land,
I claim this land for the nation of --''
the Indian tribe he was from. And they all,
''What are you doing? What do you mean?
You can't do that. We've got a nation
already here.'' ''Yeah.'' ''And we have governments
for thousands of years.'' ''Yeah.'' ''And we've got organized
religions.'' ''Yeah.'' [ ??? ] In 1492, Christopher Columbus
''discovered'' -- and claimed -- the Americas
for the queen of Spain. A year later, Pope Alexander the
Sixth wrote the rules for the proper way to do that. His ''Doctrine of Discovery'' would guide Europe's
colonization of territories and subjugation of Native people
around the world. Lewis and Clark's 1804
Corps of Discovery was an early step in bringing
that way of thinking to the American West. MILLER: Tribes are sovereign
governments. The United States Constitution
recognizes them as sovereign governments. But part of the Doctrine
of Discovery claims the newly arrived United States
or European country has an overriding sovereignty over the sovereignty
of the indigenous groups, tribes, nations --
call it what you will. [ ??? ] In time, that policy
would take on a new name -- Manifest Destiny. SAMS:
As the pioneers came out West and were looking for more land, they believed it was
Manifest Destiny, that it was their right
under God that they should be able
to have these lands. And so the United States used
the Doctrine of Discovery, as other European powers
had used it, in order to get the land from
the tribal people out here. CONNER: Our inability
to read and write, not living in permanent
dwellings, not being an agricultural
society, never mind that we were
horticultural, are all things that were used
to keep us labeled as heathens, savages, primitives
and uncivilized peoples. And most of those were used to
help dispossess us of our lands. MILLER:
So this Doctrine of Discovery that today looks almost
ridiculous -- one culture sails across the
ocean and says, ''This is mine''? It's like if I come
to your house and say, ''It's mine, because
I'm Bob Miller, and I'm better than you.'' Well, we would laugh at that. But if I then have a gun
to back that up, all of a sudden it becomes
''the law.'' And the Doctrine of Discovery
and Manifest Destiny does not look much different
than that. In the early 1830s, the Oregon Trail
had established a direct route to the Pacific Northwest. The government encouraged
Americans to make the journey and to settle here to strengthen its claim
to the territory. The U.S. Congress
had formally declared the best of intentions
toward the Native people. MAN: ''Their lands and property
shall never be taken from them without their consent...'' But as the settlers moved in, few were asking
for the Indians' consent. So in our opinion,
people were trespassing. This is our land. And before any treaties
were signed, before the tribes had
surrendered any of their land, the government began
to officially give it away. The Oregon Donation Land Act
was passed in 1850, offering 320-acre parcels to thousands of white
immigrants. BEERS:
The Organic Act of 1848 says that you have to have
a ratified treaty in order to take those lands. So those lands were just taken
illegally. There was serious clashes between our people
and the non-Indians. You always have the U.S. Army
coming in, and they're there protecting
the settlers from the Indians. Excuse me! It was the other way around
because of militias, people that were, you know,
free territorial citizens, and they tasted land, and there
was resources almost unbound, and Indian people were just
in the way. [ ??? ] The 1840s and '50s saw
a sharp increase in violence between Indians
and non-Indians. [ gunshot ] In 1847, Cayuse warriors
attacked the Whitman Mission, blaming the Presbyterian
missionaries for the measles that had
infected the tribe. The consequence of us
killing the Whitmans is that Indians are being hunted
all over the Oregon Territory, and there's further bloodshed. Miners and other settlers killed hundreds
of Native people, sometimes with government
approval. If you were involved
in some sort of an effort to kill Indians,
then you were allowed to make up an invoice
of your expenses for, you know, using your rounds
of ammunition and food and your travel costs
and that kind of stuff. In 1854, several dozen miners came into the Coquille village
here, in what is now the town
of Bandon. They were angry over
an altercation with a Native man. They went to different areas
and just killed Indians, just wiped them out. The massacre at Bandon, they attacked them
in the early morning, while it was still dark. They burned all the houses
and killed women and children. They killed everybody. The violence only compounded
the impact of another factor that was taking a huge toll
on the tribal populations. Beginning in the late
18th century, outbreaks of introduced disease
swept through the territory. And in some areas, with no immunity to these
new infections, more than 90%
of the tribal people died. CONNER: And there was so much
decimation from pandemics, specifically measles --
and smallpox, dysentery, influenza, typhus
also take their toll. But in particular, measles
wipe out entire villages of Cayuse people. Weakened by sickness
and violence, most tribes knew they could not
win a war with the U.S. Army. SAMS: The United States
government at the time had a number of pony soldiers. Every time you killed
one of their pony soldiers, they just reached into their
vast numbers on the East Coast and replaced them. My ancestors, they recognized that for every one
of our warriors killed, it took many years to train
another warrior up and coming to fill that place. And the government knew that peaceful settlements
were less costly than battle. In 1850, the superintendent
of Indian Affairs for the Oregon Territory,
Anson Dart, set out to negotiate treaties
with the Indians. He had some success with tribes in the western part
of the state, but none would agree to move
away to eastern Oregon, which the settlers
were demanding. Anson Dart returned
to Washington with 19 signed treaties,
in which the tribes ceded almost 6 million acres of
their land to the government. But he had failed to move the
Indians out of western Oregon, so Congress never ratified
those treaties, and the president never
signed them into law. An unratified treaty
really is nothing. But what happened to the tribes
quite often is that they thought they had
a binding agreement. They perhaps moved
to the restricted area they agreed to. And yet then moneys never came
from the Congress because the treaty
was not ratified. Soon after that initial venture, the new superintendent for
Indian Affairs, Joel Palmer, embarked on another round
of treaty talks. Working with Isaac Stevens, governor of the Washington
Territory, Palmer signed a treaty
with the Nez Perce, the tribe of Chief Joseph. Their homelands included
the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon. But ultimately, their
reservation would be in Idaho. [ chirping ] The Umatilla, Walla Walla, and
Cayuse tribes resisted efforts to move them
to Washington Territory. SAMS:
Young Chief of the Cayuse is the one who stood toe to toe
with Palmer and Stevens and told them that they were
not going to leave, that they wanted to stay
in their homelands, the lands where the bones
of their people are buried, and that they couldn't give
those bones up. In the end, the three tribes
did negotiate a reservation on or near their
ancestral lands at the cost of ceding
more than 6 million acres to the United States. The 1855 treaty merged
the tribes to become the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation. SAMS:
And when they did so, reserving our rights to all
our usual custom places so that we can hunt, fish,
and gather is a critical part of that. They knew seven generations
down the line that would be important
to those children after them. But the benefits
of this agreement were not immediately apparent. The treaty doesn't actually get
ratified by Congress until 1859. In the meantime,
there's bloodshed and war. Sixty unarmed men, women,
and children are gunned down on the Grand Ronde River. Peo-peo-mox-mox,
one of the Treaty Council, is slain under a flag of truce
in the Walla Walla Valley. And people are encroaching
on our lands and our hunting and fishing
places. And so there's no peace
from this peace treaty. Their treaty was ratified,
and is still in effect today. So, too, is the treaty with the
Warm Springs and Wasco tribes -- later joined by Paiutes -- who reserved their fishing
and other rights by ceding about 10 million acres
of land. These plateau tribes had lived
for millennia along the Columbia River
and its tributaries, but the settlers now wanted
to farm that fertile land, with its abundant water. The Warm Springs Reservation
was established in a higher and drier area
of sagebrush and trees. PITT: All through the nation,
you find tribes that are located
in the worst lands. We were moved onto these lands. You take a look at the forest
around you. Don't forget, to a farmer,
a tree is in the way. And so, oh, no,
we don't want that, because it's got too darn
many trees on there, and it's a real hassle
to cut them down and get the roots up
and clear it out. The Warm Springs tribes, using the trees that
the settlers did not want, went on to build a sawmill
and a lumber business on the reservation. All right, it's powwow time! In southcentral Oregon, the treaty with the Klamath,
Modoc, and Yahooskin tribes got off to a rough start. GENTRY: And what happens
when the treaty was signed, between then and when
the treaty was ratified, folks started settling
in lands that we tried to reserve --
south of us in Swan Lake, northeast of us
in the Silver Lake area, northwest of us
in the Fort Klamath area. You know, all these areas that
we tried to reserve in treaty, people started moving in, and somehow the boundaries
got changed, you know, when the treaty was ratified. Nevertheless, it did reserve
for the Indians a huge swath of
high-elevation forest. MAN:
There's the timberland in the upper mountainous
regions, which we're in right now, and then there was
the lower land around the lakes and everything. And the people at the time
that moved into the area, the settlers, if you will,
they wanted to farm ground. They said, ''Well, let's move
those Indians up to that timberland,
because we can't farm it.'' It was of no value to them
at the time. Several years later, after
the reservation was formed, there became a demand
for timber. When we negotiated our treaty,
we didn't have rail here, but we did have one of the
most valuable old-growth Ponderosa pine forests
in the Pacific Northwest. By the late 1850s, most tribes in western Oregon
had signed treaties -- but without reserved rights
to hunt and fish. MAN:
They saw signing the treaty as a way to take care of
themselves for a few years. But you have to understand
that most of them thought that they were going to die. Tribes along the coast
appear on a single document, which has come to be known
as the ''Coast Treaty.'' Superintendent Palmer traveled
village to village, stopping to identify
local headmen, explain the terms
of the treaty, and acquire their marks, usually
exes. Most people within most tribes
spoke several languages because of the proximity
of different tribes, but English wasn't really
one of them. So, it's hard to say really as to what their understanding
of the treaty was. The treaties weren't
negotiations by any stretch
of the imagination. It was essentially Indian people
being compelled to sign this with a promise that, you know,
no harm will come your way. Don't sign it,
and all bets are off. The treaty specifies
the boundaries of a million-acre reservation
where the tribes would reside, a 105-mile strip along the
western edge of the territory, to be called the Siletz,
or ''coast,'' Reservation. In return for ceding most of
their lands to the government, the Indians were promised
a long list of compensations: cash payments, spread out
over several years for ''mutual improvement
and education,'' sawmills, flour mills, teachers,
schoolhouses, farming implements, tools,
even arms and ammunition. Soon after the treaty signings, the Indians were taken
to the Coast Reservation or the nearby Grand Ronde -- also called Grand Round --
Reservation. MAN: Some of our people
were herded like cattle to Port Orford. A lot of our people
died there. And they were kept there
for almost a year, and then they were put
on these ships. There were two steamers
that came up the coast, up the Columbia, and then
to Willamette Falls, you know, as far up
as you could go, and then they were marched
overland to what is now Grand Ronde. Then there was people who came
from more inland areas, and they were forced to march
up the coast. And of course in those days
there was no bridges, no nothing, and they had to fend
for themselves basically. They were in really bad shape. Mostly women and children
and older men. We refer to it
as our trail of tears. And people were forced to swim
with their kids on their backs across these rivers, every river system
all the way up the coast. MAN: And then some were
force marched from that temporary reserve
at Table Rock to Grand Ronde. It was in February,
in the middle of winter. The rough path ran
where I-5 is today and then out, once you get
to Eugene, down what 99 is. The whole way, there were people
that followed the Indians and essentially identified that
if they were to break ranks and leave that line,
that they would be killed. And the idea was to basically empty out western Oregon
for settlement. And we would we remain
on our reservations, and that would be
the grand bargain that we struck
in those treaties. Members of the coastal tribes
learned eventually that the treaty
had not been ratified. There would be no schools,
blacksmiths, or farm implements, and no returning to their
homelands. BRAINARD:
By not ratifying that treaty, there was no money
for the tribal people. And they rounded them up
here at Coos Bay and them moved them to
Fort Umpqua up at Reedsport. Held them there for seven years, and then they moved them
on to Yachats. One of the main holding centers
on the Coast Reservation had been here at Yachats. MAN: This is where the Coos,
Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw people were marched, the furthest
coming from Coos Bay, which is about, ah, 81 miles
south of us. It was an internment camp. Over 50% of the people
that came here perished because of the lack of food. The treaty was never ratified, so there was no money to support
the tribal people up here. And so they'd come out here
and go out onto the rocks after the shellfish. And you can see
what would happen as they would go out there
and a big wave would come in -- they would be knocked
into the water. The United States never did
ratify the Coast Treaty, but they did keep
the Indians' land. [ crickets chirping ] LEWIS: The United States
has really desired American Indian lands
since the very beginning. Every 20 to 30 years,
there's a new strategy. At first it was, let's write
treaties with them and put them on reservations
on lands that we don't want. We recognize you own
10 million acres of land, and it's your reservation,
your land forever. And then later on it became, well, now they have
too much land. How about you reduce your land
to 2 million acres? LEWIS: Well, you know,
we still need more land for settlers for Americans
to make proper use of it, because obviously American
Indians are wasting it because they're not making
proper use of it by putting in farming
and logging off all the timber. Why don't you have
500,000 acres? There's so few of you left
anymore, you don't need all this land. So the federal policy
has always been to diminish
the tribal land base. [ ??? ] Within 10 years
of its creation, the Coast Reservation
began to be dismantled. First, settlers realized that
Yaquina Bay did have value: as a harbor, as a source
of oysters, as a good place to build
a road inland to the Willamette Valley. The Indians were removed
in 1865. Soon, two more sections
met a similar fate. Then, in 1895, some
of the remaining land was parceled out to Indians
in small allotments. The rest was kept
by the government or sold. Today, the Siletz Reservation is
less than 4,000 acres. In northeastern Oregon, the signers of the 1855 Umatilla
Treaty agreed to certain boundaries
for their reservation. But the government's survey
would show very different boundaries,
and about half as much land. In the years that followed, the reservation was made smaller
still. SAMS:
By reducing our land mass down from a half a million acres
to 157,000 acres, they were able to get access to that prime real estate
for farming and they were able to then build
out the city of Pendleton. Ultimately,
a government program turned the community-owned
reservation land into a patchwork
of small allotments, privately owned by both Indians
and non-Indians. CONNER: The allotment era
was not just a land grab. It was also a way to break down
our communal structure and teach us to think:
this is mine; that's yours. What happens is a lot of land
falls out of our hands and we end up with
what's now called the ''checkerboard reservation.'' Assimilation has been a stated
goal of U.S. Indian policy -- that Native people would be
better off if they could lose their
Indianness -- quit speaking their Native
languages and learn English, dress in modern clothes, and convert to Western religion. The federal government
encouraged various denominations to establish churches and
schools on Indian reservations. LEWIS:
For some 20-some years, the various churches run
the schools on the reservations and processes of assimilation
at the reservations. In the latter 1850s, the federal government literally
assigned different denominations to each reservation. The Catholics came to
Grand Ronde and to Umatilla. Methodists went to Siletz. But they were basically
assigned. We'll do what we can to civilize
these heathen savages, to help them understand
that they need to become moral people of the land
and not be warlike, not have too many wives,
not have slaves. At Warm Springs, the
Presbyterians came into there. And so they all got their shot at trying to civilize
these people. SAMS:
We got two. On the northern half
of the reservation is the Catholic Church, which was established in 1847
at St. Andrews. And on the southern half
of the reservation is the Presbyterian Church. But we do practice one common
Native religion, and that is our Washat religion. Some of the same people that may go to different
churches early in the morning, you'll see them all together
at the Washat religion at the longhouse. When I was in my teenage years, I was confused and asking
my grandmother, ''Why do we go to both services?'' And she leaned over to me
and wanted to know, do I know what's going to happen
when I go to the other world? Do I know what's going to happen when you go to meet
your Creator? I said, ''Of course, I don't.'' And she goes, ''Neither do we,
neither do I. And so to play it safe, we should probably see
both religions, because we don't know
what's going to happen when we go off
to the other world.'' Most churches sponsored schools
for Indian children, and the government built
some of its own. In both, students who spoke
their native language would often be punished. We've been told that our
traditions and our religion and all of that was pagan. We're -- you know, we had
to learn Christianity. We had to speak English. You have to learn how to be
like the rest of the people. One of the first Indian boarding
schools -- in the early 1880s -- was a vocational school
in Forest Grove. That closed after
a couple years but led to the 1885 opening of the Chemawa Indian School
in Salem, which is still boarding and
teaching young Indians today. I was taken out of
my grandmother's home at five years old
and sent to Chemawa. You bring somebody
from an environment where there's no running water,
there's no bathrooms, no showers, no electricity. I'm still trying to get over this hot water coming out
of the wall. Then you take me -- is a treat,
and you have a big stage and you have all these
little Indian kids coming from traditional
backgrounds. And you're watching this guy
cut this lady in half. This is all scary. But I'll tell you one thing,
I had an education. You had one teacher, 35 different tribes represented
in one first grade classroom. By December, we were reading. The tribes of Oregon suffered to
varying degrees from white settlement, but few felt the impact more than the Native people
of Harney County -- the Burns Paiute Tribe. ADAMS: We really struggled
to find a home base because we were always being
chased off of this land for its value to cattle and
grazing and timber harvest. This rough desert country
was not choice farmland -- but to the Paiutes it was home, and had been for thousands
of years. ADAMS: The value of that land
to the Paiute people, it's tremendous. That's our whole existence,
why we're here in this valley. The wada seed and the tules, the willows, the hunting
that went on there -- that's all so valuable,
priceless. The Indians here depended
on seasonal access to the foods
that sustained them. But the newcomers began to erect
fences and graze cattle where those foods grew, and some would shoot at Indians
who dared walk there. Conflict ensued. [ ??? ] To isolate and protect
the Paiutes, the president,
by executive order, created the 1.8 million-acre
Malheur Reservation. Like other reservations, the Malheur soon began
to shrink in size as settlers,
ranchers, and miners demanded more and more
pieces of it. A few Paiutes joined members
of the Bannock Tribe in a short-lived effort
to repel the trespassers from the Indians' land. In response,
in the winter of 1879, the Army marched the whole local
population of Paiutes up to Fort Simcoe
on the Yakima Reservation, 350 miles away. There, they would be detained
for the next several years. Rena Beers was born in 1918. You boil them and eat it,
just like macaroni. Today, Rena is the oldest living
member of the Burns Paiute Tribe. This is my mother, my brother. These are my sister's kids. She remembers stories
from her mother, who had been a child when
the Paiutes were relocated. They were taken over there. She told me there was a lot
of prisoners over there. While the Indians were held
in Washington, the government here eliminated
the Malheur Reservation and opened that land
to settlement. And that reservation we had
was taken away from us. [ ??? ] In the mid-1880s,
after years of captivity, the Paiutes were released. Each adult that returned
to the Burns area was given an allotment of land
-- 160 acres -- to farm and to start
a new life. But most of those allotments sat on dry, alkaline
sagebrush soil and could support few, if any,
of the returning families. It was a very poor time
for people that returned to this area,
to the homeland. They had no skills,
they had no education. Primarily talked
the Paiute language. Tried to live as they did before they were taken out
of this country -- digging roots, making jerky. The Indians had no money,
no tribal lands. The food resources
still existed, but the Paiutes' access to them
was limited. I remember my grandmother,
and we'd go around and pick up the other aunties,
and we'd go to Hines. There used to be a dump
out there. And the people in town,
when they would go, the meat, they would put it
in a box. They wouldn't throw it in
with the rest of the trash and set it aside, because they
knew the Indians were coming. That's how they were able
to get their meat. Because just to go out there
and hunt, they'd get shot at. The hard times that ensued would
color the Paiutes' lives far into the 20th century. RODERIQUE:
We survived on donations, things that were found
at the city dump. I think it was especially hard
for men to find jobs. RENA BEERS:
We worked for food. Chopped woods so they can have
something to eat. They'd trade that for breakfast
or something. This is how we lived. I survived through that. That's my mother,
my two sisters. And my brother's laying
right there. And then this is our dad. A local business gave the tribe
a small parcel of property at the edge of town. The tent village that developed
there was called ''Old Camp.'' RENA BEERS:
Little tents. And then later on,
they'd give us those Army tents. We lived way back there,
second tent. Today, the Burns Paiute
Reservation is about 770 acres just outside the town of Burns. Some tribal members
are still trying to get at least part of the
Malheur Reservation back. We didn't give up this land. We didn't sign anything. We didn't sign a treaty. This land could still be ours. [ drumming and singing ] The government
had intended to move all the Indians
in western Oregon onto the Siletz and Grand Ronde
reservations. Whole tribes had been uprooted
and damaged. And women were often the glue that held their people together. IVY: Women play big in
western Oregon Indian culture. Indian women were the ones
that were bilingual. They had to know their language
plus their husband's language, maybe it wasn't the same. They were always moving to, you
know, their husband's village so that they knew more history, because they had to not only
know their history, but their husband's history. HOCKEMA: When the government
was rounding up the Indians, if an Indian person was married
to a white person, they didn't have to go
to the reservation. A lot of people feel that the reason the Coquille
tribe is here today is because of those women
who stayed behind and, mostly secretly,
kept the traditions going -- the language and the customs. Many cultural objects -- tools, utensils, and items
of personal adornment -- had been lost
in the relocation. It broke that connection
to place that people have. It's where their ancestors
were buried. They were able to bring very few to little or no things
with them. WOMAN: Several waves
of displacement. And you render tribal people
and their art forms and their cultural expressions
invisible. And that happened here. So many of the iconic art forms
that you would have seen here a couple hundred years ago
were looted, were moved. Centuries-old information
and wisdom, stories about the art
on the rocks -- disappeared. On Oregon's east side,
the Umatilla tribes had been left to live closer
to their homelands with their cultures
more intact. In 1911, they partnered
with the city of Pendleton to start the Pendleton
Round-Up, a yearly event that endures
to this day. But back then, the Indians still
needed a signed pass to leave the reservation. The Umatillas did have, however,
reserved rights for fishing, hunting,
and gathering on and off the reservation. SAMS: My grandparents
used to say there, ''During the Great Depression,
we never went hungry.'' And the reason why is that because we had all of our
traditional food sources here and that we could fill our
tables and fill our bellies, ensure our children had
enough food to eat. In Klamath County, in 1908, the railroad was extended up
from California. The tribes turned the vast
forest lands -- theirs by treaty --
into a lucrative business. FOREMAN: The Klamath Tribes
supplied 36 mills in this area at one time. With rail moving in
and the demand for timber, it set us up economically
to be stable, and actually we were amongst
the richest and self-sufficient tribes
in the nation. The treaty guaranteed us that
we would remain on this land in our ownership forever. But things began to fall apart
for the Klamaths -- and many others --
in 1954, when Congress passed
public laws 587 and 588. HARRELSON:
We were all terminated. And termination was
a government policy that ended the recognition
of Native people by the federal government. The Klamath Termination Act and the Western Oregon Indian
Termination Act eliminated 61 Oregon bands
and tribes -- virtually all the Indians
west of the Cascades plus the Klamaths. They would no longer be
''federally recognized.'' The laws were touted as an effort to liberate
the Native people from government oversight. So the responsibilities
that the federal government committed to us by treaty -- the health, education,
all those benefits, basically went away. They essentially just wadded up
the treaty and threw it away and then paid us money. Many tribes drifted
into poverty. The Klamaths received some
financial compensation for their liquidated
timber holdings. GENTRY: There was a big flush
of money that some people were prepared
to handle, but a lot weren't. Some folks used their money
and bought a piece of property and bought furniture and
automobiles and went to work, and still had those properties. Other people lost it. There were hundreds, hundreds
that lost their lives under the age of 30 just because
they got this money. They went out and got
in car wrecks, alcoholism, shootings, stabbings. And it was a very difficult time
for tribal members. Only a fraction of America's
tribes were terminated. And across the country, conditions for many other Native
people were improving. Congress was funding better
health care, new housing, educational opportunities,
and more... for federally recognized tribes, but not the Indians
of western Oregon. [ ??? ] ANNOUNCER: So I'd like
to welcome everybody to the Klamath Tribes'
30th annual Restoration Celebration
and Powwow. After 20-30 years, most of the terminated tribes
were restored. The theme of our celebration
here is ''spirit of our ancestors.'' The people of each tribe
had to convince Congress that their members deserved
to be re-recognized as Indians. GIRLS:
Hi! The Klamaths won their case
on August 26, 1986. They celebrate that anniversary
here in Chiloquin every year. Their million-acre reservation had been reduced
to a few hundred. ANNOUNCER:
This is the Alvin Miller float. Glad to have you here,
and welcome. You guys look beautiful. Nevertheless, restoration
was a victory. [ drumming ] Three tribes in western Oregon
established their independence: the Cow Creek Band of Umpquas; the Confederated Coos,
Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw; and the Coquilles. The larger confederations,
the Siletz and the Grand Ronde, regrouped and looked
to the future. HARRELSON: So Grand Ronde
is a tribe. We all went through the
common cause of termination and then the effort to be
restored as a people together. And that really grounds us
as one entity of people. By the end of the 20th century, the Native people of Oregon
had survived deadly epidemics, vigilante raids, and countless
assaults on their culture. One of the first orders
of business for many tribes was to try preserve their
traditional languages, though some had been lost
forever. [ speaking in Native American
language ] Maintaining the Paiute language has become a priority
for the Burns Tribe. We should instill some pride
in our younger generation, because they're learning Spanish faster than they're learning
their own native language. So -- and it's dying away. [ singing ''The Itsy Bitsy
Spider'' in Native language ] And our language is important because that identifies
who we are. [ speaking in Native American
language ] We've got to teach our children so they can teach their children
and their children, because elders have said
that our language should never be forgotten. [ ??? ] It's important to recognize that there are many artistic
traditions in Oregon. WOMAN: These are called
the putlapa. They're worn in our traditional
ceremonies during the root feast
or the huckleberry feast. WOMAN: Our culture and our ways
of life are being diminished, so I really want
to bring that back. So it means a lot to me
in my heart to be able to teach others or to keep carrying it on
myself. But as I've gotten older, I've done my best to pass this
on to young people. WOMAN:
Someone made the comment that the tribe didn't do
beading, and then my cousin pulls out
her necklace that my great-grandmother made, that was a netted necklace
from the 1800s. So I replicated this, and then I taught the class
myself to the tribal members. And they learned how to do
Coquille art. DARTT:
Along the Oregon Coast you see a lot of open weave
baskets. They're beautiful
and really intricately woven, however, very utilitarian
for gathering clams and camas. And then when you get into
the Columbia River region, there's a lot of stonework,
a lot of carved material. WOMAN: These are all our
huckleberry baskets. From what I was told
from one of our elders, she used to go with her family
out on horseback. And they'd go out for weeks
picking huckleberries, and they'd have baskets
probably about this big and fill them up. Our collections is pretty unique with probably about 95%
of our objects coming from Warm Springs
tribal members. The Warm Springs collection
eventually grew so big, the tribe built a museum
to house it. A temporary exhibit displays the
modern work of another Warm Springs artist,
Lillian Pitt. DARTT: I would encourage you
to seek out the art of these contemporary, local
Native people. It places you in the present
with an anchor in the past, with this long history
of connection to this place. MILLER: The Indian cultures are
still here, they're strong, they're getting stronger. Tribes want to preserve
their languages; tribes want to preserve
their religions, their cultures,
their homelands. Most tribes, their population's
going up, their economy's going up. They're taking advantage
sometimes of opportunities because of their sovereign
status. Tribal gaming is
an example of that. Because they are separate
governments, the United States Supreme Court
recognized that tribes can offer gaming. Tribal gaming. Casinos. The Cow Creek Band of Umpquas opened Oregon's first casino
in 1994. Every tribe has one now. The casinos changed the game. Oh, man, the casino
is a lifesaver. It gives the tribal
governments money to spend any way they want. IVY: Tribes have been able
to enter into a social economic environment where they have brought
something to the table. And this is probably
the first time the tribes have had
the opportunity to have a place
in the marketplace. That gets you invited to the
Chamber of Commerce banquet. You know, that gets you involved
in the Rotary Luncheon. That gets you involved
and that gets you invited and it gets you on boards, and all of a sudden you begin
to learn the rest of the world. That revenue builds the capacity
of your community. SAMS: We are the largest
employer in the county, with 60% of our workforce
being non-Indian. We provide over $44 million
in taxes and payroll back into the local community. The tribes are funding
other work that may have far-reaching
effects. SAMS: This tribe fought hard
with the state to increase the water quality
standards for the entire state in order to protect
our fisheries and to protect our water. That benefit of exercising our
treaty right for that protection now benefits all Oregonians. Dams and diversions blocked
salmon migration in the Umatilla River
for more than 70 years. MAN: And we're able to restore
water and salmon to the river. We're doing that in
the Walla Walla right now and into the Grand Ronde area
as well. Nez Perces are doing that
in the Wallowa. In the Klamath Basin, battles over water have raged
for decades. But a treaty provision
has given the tribes a powerful seat
at the bargaining table. FOREMAN:
The courts determined that the Klamath Tribes had
senior water rights throughout the former
reservation. And that caused a lot
of contention of non-tribal members here that
depended on it, if you will. But the tribes are, you know, they've always been willing
to share, and we're sharing some
of that water today. Indians are increasingly playing
active roles in resource management. JESSE BEERS: I feel that I have
an extra stewardship duty to these lands and waters, and other people in our tribe
do as well. We may not legally own them,
depending on how you look at it, but we're here, we're not gone, and we're able to speak
for the generations before. MILLER: The United States'
relationship with Indian tribes is ongoing. The idea that Indians
would die out, what George Washington said,
has turned out to be false. Social Darwinism didn't happen. The Indian cultures
are still here, they're strong,
they're getting stronger. You want to show them
how you can run and buck and take off and be wild? These days, many Indians
are well-versed in the details of those treaties
of the 1850s and '60s. Most other Oregonians know
little or nothing about them. Come on, Dolly. Come on, Dolly, come on. How do people think Oregon,
the state of Oregon got here? How did these counties get here,
how did all of these cities? Under what legal authority, under what basis
do they even exist? HARRELSON:
The goal of the government was to remove our ancestors and make way for their people
to settle our lands. PITT:
The United States made a deal. We're going to live up
to our end of the deal. We're just wondering if the
other side's going to live up to their deal. [ ??? ] LEWIS: Once you've been
10,000 years in one place, and your culture and your
genealogy is a part of that place, you have a better understanding
of that place than anybody else, and everything you do
is going to resonate with the land around you. Our cultures resonate
with this place because we learned to live
with it. We're a part of it. The forests, the rivers,
the coastline, the mountains -- we're a part of all that. Our people are from there. Everything we do in our culture
resonates with that. [ cheering ] LAVADOUR: Indigenous people have
very much to offer the world, the contemporary world. This is a good place with good
people, compassionate people, people who care about the land, people who care about
one another. And that's a good thing,
you know. You know what I mean? It's a real good thing. ANNOUNCER: Dave Jackson
and family. MAN: Hey. There's more about
''Broken Treaties'' on Oregon Experience online. To learn more or to order
a DVD of the show, visit opb.org. [ ??? ] Leading support for Oregon
Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Support for ''Broken Treaties''
is provided by... and viewers like you.
