Broken Treaties: full documentary

The following is an OPB original series. The Oregon Experience is a production of OPB in association with the Oregon Historical Society. MAN: We've been here since the beginning of time. We've been here since the first human arrived. For many thousands of years, Oregon has been Indian Territory. MAN: Indian country is quite complex. It's not just a group of people who are all the same. They are dozens of different tribes that once lived in hundreds of villages in a diverse environment of natural abundance. WOMAN: When the white people who came to this land wanted those natural resources, the Indians stood in the way.

WOMAN: They fought with us, they killed us, they took us out of our territory for drugs. The treaty guaranteed us that we would remain on this land of ours forever. Primary support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Primary 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. At one of the meetings, a woman brought her son and introduced me as Chief Brainard, and the boy looked at me and said, "I thought all the Indians were dead." The Indian people of this country are very much alive... although others have long predicted their demise.

MAN: George Washington laid out the big picture of American Indian policy in 1783: The Indians are going to become extinct and the United States will keep all their lands. There was a time after World War II and Korea when all anthropologists expected that we would become culturally extinct, that we would lose our language, that our lands would be sold and wasted. We could no longer identify with any other person in the landscape. But that is not the case. Today, Oregon is home to nine federally recognized tribes. ANNOUNCER: Give her a big round of applause: Carissa Jackson, incoming Restoration Powwow Queen, Klamath Tribes!

Most are actually confederations (groupings) of several different tribes. More than 60 tribes and bands lived here, speaking at least 18 languages. That's "hello, my friend." "How's it going?" Oregon contains four distinct cultural areas, with variations in terrain, climate and resources that can shape the way people live. We have all these different geographies, so to speak, that distinguish any part of Oregon from any other part of Oregon. And that is the case of the tribes. Each of its landscapes, each of its geographical areas dictated its traditions, dictated its technologies, dictated its relationships with others. Each of the tribes is defined by a particular place in the world.

WOMAN: The Coquille people lived at the mouth of the river, the Nasomah Village complex. Upstream, we had village sites anywhere that 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 entering the Great Basin to the south and southern Canada to the north. DON GENTRY: The E'ukskni, the Klamath people, that's what we called ourselves, "lake people," lived in various places here along the rivers, lakes and swamps. MAN: I am Siuslawan, or Siuslaw, as they say today.

So I'm Siuslaw. And I'm also Kuitsh, which is Lower Umpqua. MAN: I live here on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. I am a tribal member and have lived here most of my life. WOMAN: I live in Warm Springs, Oregon, and I am Northern Paiute and of Sahaptin descent. I'm just three different types of Paiute. The Paiutes claimed most of what is now southeastern Oregon. WOMAN: I think the distinction was our ability to prosper and live in a country that other people considered less desirable. The Indians of this vast desert area walked long distances to hunt, gather, and trade food.

The current Burns Paiute tribe was called Wadatika, "those who eat the wada plant." RODERIQUE: Almost all Paiute bands are named after their main 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 parts of the Great Basin had no outlets to the ocean, so access to fresh salmon was limited. But that fish has always played an important role in Northwest Native culture. We called ourselves the Salmon People and salmon was a big part of us. The Coos and other coastal tribes of Oregon never had to travel far for food.

Large mammals existed here in large numbers. Plant resources were abundant in the rainforest environment and provided not only food but also materials for baskets, canoes, and plank houses. The people who were at the water's edge ate shellfish and freshwater and saltwater fish. MAN: All tribes had a relationship with salmon. If you didn't have much salmon, you would do everything you could to get enough resources to trade salmon. Today, this fish still swims throughout much of Oregon. But before dams and habitat degradation, salmon and steelhead migrated to almost every part of the state. RODERIQUE: I had never seen a salmon in the Malheur River.

I remember as a child listening to my great-uncle and great-aunt talk about the salmon channels on the Malheur River, how shallow the water was and how the fish came so thick you could walk through them and step on them. Most of northeastern Oregon (and a large swath in the middle) is a plateau area: wide open spaces and rolling hills. Surrounded by waterways and light rainfall, this is the homeland of the Umatillas, Walla Wallas and Cayuse... the Warm Springs and the Wascos... the Klamaths, Modocs, Yahooskins and others. They harvested the salmon that passed by in astonishing quantities.

The Cayuse acquired horses in the early 18th century. WOMAN: A group was going to attack the Shoshone. They saw a man there riding something the size of a moose and decided to change their mission immediately and get a mare and a stallion. They gambled everything they had to take home a mare and a stallion, and they came back naked... that's all you have. We selectively bred the horses we obtained, and they later became known as Cayuse horses or Cayuse mustangs. A rich family would have had thousands of horses. And in 1890, we were the largest cattle-producing tribe in the United States.

As this territory was settled by Euro-Americans, it was sometimes described as desert, pristine and untouched. But in reality, the forests, grasslands, and rivers had been maintained by the Indians for a long time. Our ancestors managed the forest, they managed the land for a variety of things. After they were done hunting elk, they would burn that area, because it would clear all the brush and provide more food for the elk and deer for the next year, and also any woody material that was in that area would be burned. I would take it down and then come back with tons of nice straight shoots that could be used for weaving baskets.

Many of the tribes here in the Pacific Northwest lived what we would call seasonal rounds. The tribes followed the ripening of the berries. They would move somewhere else and dig up the roots. They would move somewhere else and hunt deer. And they always came back to the river to see the regular salmon runs we know, the fall and spring chinook. RODERIQUE: We traveled to the northeast to gather bitter roots and plants, berries and medicines in the forest. When you think about the extent of eastern Oregon and where our people went to gather food for the winter, we spent a lot of time traveling.

But the seasonal mobility of the Indians also meant that they were often absent and unable to defend their property when settlers arrived and claimed it as their own. These are people displaced by other people who, because it's convenient and because American policy allows it, can take over someone else's neighborhood, can take over someone else's home, can take over someone else's resources. White settlers began arriving in large numbers in the early 1840s. GENTRY: Initially contact was positive with some of the traders, but then the people who wanted our land, you know, moved in and there was fighting and loss of lives on both sides.

MAN: I'm always amused by that story about an Indian who went to Italy, took down his flag and said, "I discovered this land, I claim this land for the nation of...", the Indian tribe he was from. of. And all of them: "What are you doing?" What do you mean? You can not do that. We already have a nation here.'' ''Yes.'' ''And we have had governments for thousands of years.'' ''Yes.'' ''And we have organized religions.'' ''Yes.” In 1492, Christopher Columbus “discovered” – and claimed – America for the queen of Spain. A year later, Pope Alexander VI wrote the rules on the correct way to do it.

His "Doctrine of Discovery" would guide Europe's colonization of territories and the subjugation of native peoples around the world. Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery of 1804 was a first 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 asserts that the United States or the newly arrived European country has primary sovereignty over the sovereignty of indigenous groups, tribes, and nations (call it what you want). Over time, that policy would take on a new name: Manifest Destiny.

SAMS: When the pioneers went out west and looked for more land, they believed it was Manifest Destiny, that they had a right before God to be able to have this land. And then the United States used the Doctrine of Discovery, as other European powers had used it, to seize land from the tribal peoples here. CONNER: Our inability to read and write, not living in permanent housing, not being an agricultural society, never mind that we were horticultural, are things that were used to keep us labeled as pagan, savage, primitive and uncivilized. And most of them were used to help us dispossess our lands.

MILLER: So this Doctrine of Discovery that seems almost ridiculous today: a culture sails across the ocean and says, "This is mine"? It's like I come to your house and say, "It's mine, because I'm Bob Miller and I'm better than you." Well, we'd laugh about that. But if I then have a gun to back it up, it suddenly becomes "the law." And the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny doesn't look much different from that. By the early 1830s, the Oregon Trail had established a direct route to the Pacific Northwest. The government encouraged Americans to travel and settle here to strengthen their claim to the territory.

The United States Congress had formally declared the best intentions toward the natives. MAN: ''Your lands and properties will never be taken away from you without your consent...'' But when the settlers arrived, few asked for the consent of the Indians. So, in our opinion, people were trespassing on the property. This is our land. And before any treaty was signed, before the tribes gave up their land, the government began officially giving it away. The Oregon Land Donation Act was passed in 1850, offering 320-acre plots to thousands of white immigrants. BEERS: The Organic Law of 1848 says that you must have a ratified treaty to be able to take those lands.

So those lands were taken illegally. There were serious clashes between our people and the non-Indians. The American army always arrives and is there protecting the settlers from the Indians. Excuse me! It was the other way around because of the militias, people who were, you know, free territorial citizens, and they tasted the land, and there were almost unlimited resources, and the Indians were just in the way. The 1840s and 1850s saw a sharp increase in violence between Indians and non-Indians. In 1847, Cayuse warriors attacked the Whitman Mission, blaming Presbyterian missionaries for the measles that had infected the tribe.

The consequence of us killing the Whitmans is that the Indians are being hunted throughout the Oregon Territory and there is more bloodshed. Miners and other settlers killed hundreds of natives, sometimes with government approval. If one was involved in some kind of effort to kill Indians, then one was allowed to make a bill of one's expenses, you know, the use of your ammunition rounds and food and your travel costs and that sort of thing. In 1854, several dozen miners arrived in the town of Coquille, in what is now the town of Bandon. They were angry about an altercation with a native.

They went to different areas and just killed Indians, just wiped them out. The Bandon massacre, they were attacked early in the morning, while it was still dark. They burned all the houses and killed women and children. They killed everyone. The violence only compounded the impact of another factor that was taking an enormous toll on tribal populations. Starting at the end of the 18th century, outbreaks of introduced diseases spread throughout the territory. And in some areas, without immunity to these new infections, more than 90% of the tribal population died. CONNER: And there was so much destruction from pandemics, specifically measles, and smallpox, and dysentery, and influenza, and typhus.They also take their toll.

But, in particular, measles wipes out entire towns of the Cayuse people. Weakened by disease and violence, most tribes knew they could not win a war with the American military. SAMS: The United States government at the time had several pony soldiers. Every time you killed one of their pony soldiers, they would simply arrive at their large numbers on the east coast and replace them. My ancestors recognized that for each of our warriors killed, it took many years to train another warrior to come take that place. And the government knew that peaceful agreements were less costly than battle.

In 1850, Oregon Territory Superintendent of Indian Affairs 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 agreed to move to eastern Oregon, as settlers demanded. Anson Dart returned to Washington with 19 signed

treaties

, in which the tribes ceded nearly 6 million acres of their lands to the government. But he failed to remove the Indians from western Oregon, so Congress never ratified those treaties and the president never signed them into law. An unratified treaty is really nothing. But what very often happened to tribes is that they thought they had a binding agreement.

Maybe they moved to the restricted area they agreed to. And yet, the money never came from Congress because the treaty was not ratified. Shortly after that initial initiative, the new Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Joel Palmer, embarked on another round of treaty talks. Working with Isaac Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, Palmer signed a treaty with the Nez Perce, Chief Joseph's tribe. Their homelands included the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon. But ultimately, his reservation would be in Idaho. The Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Cayuse tribes resisted efforts to relocate them to Washington Territory. SAMS: The young chief of the Cayuse is the one who came face to face 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 could not deliver those bones.

In the end, the three tribes negotiated 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, reserving our rights to all of our usual places to be able to hunt, fish and gather is a key part of that. They knew that seven subsequent generations would be important to the children who would come after them. But the benefits of this agreement were not immediately evident. Congress does not actually ratify the treaty until 1859.

Meanwhile, there is bloodshed and war. Sixty unarmed men, women and children are shot to death in the Grand Ronde River. Peo-peo-mox-mox, a member of the Treaty Council, is killed under a flag of truce in the Walla Walla Valley. And people are invading our lands and our hunting and fishing places. And then there is no peace with this peace treaty. Their treaty was ratified and is still in force today. So is the treaty with the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes, later joined by the Paiutes, who reserved their fishing and other rights by giving up about 10 million acres of land.

These plateau tribes had lived for millennia along the Columbia River and its tributaries, but settlers now wanted to cultivate that fertile land, with its abundant water. The Warm Springs Reservation was established in a higher, drier area of ​​sagebrush and trees. PITT: All over the country there are tribes located on the worst lands. They moved us to these lands. You take a look at the forest around you. Don't forget that for a farmer, a tree stands in his way. So, oh, no, we don't want that, because there are too many trees there, and it's a real hassle to cut them down, pull out the roots, and clean it up.

The Warm Springs tribes, using trees that settlers did not want, built a sawmill and logging business on the reservation. Alright, it's meeting time! In south-central Oregon, the treaty with the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin tribes got off to a rocky start. GENTRY: And what happened when the treaty was signed? Between then and when the treaty was ratified, people began settling on lands 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, in all these areas that we tried to set aside in the treaty, people started moving in and somehow the boundaries changed, you know, when the treaty was ratified.

However, he reserved a huge strip of high-altitude forest for the Indians. MAN: There are the forest lands in the upper mountainous regions, which we are in now, and then there were the lowlands around the lakes and everything. And the people at the time who moved into the area, the settlers, if you will, wanted to farm land. They said, "Well, let's move those Indians to that forest area, because we can't farm it." It had no value to them at that time. Several years later, after the reserve was formed, a demand for timber arose. When we negotiated our treaty, we didn't have a railroad 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 the majority thought they were going to die. The tribes along the coast appear in a single document, which is known as the "Coast Treaty." Superintendent Palmer traveled from town to town, stopping to identify local chiefs, explain the terms of the treaty, and acquire their marks. generally ex. Most people within most tribes spoke multiple languages ​​due to the proximity of different tribes, but English was not really one of them.

Therefore, it is difficult to really say what their interpretation of the treaty was. The treaties were not negotiations at all. Basically, it was the Indians who were forced to sign this with the promise that, you know, no harm will come to you. 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 Reservation, or "coast." In exchange for ceding most of their land to the government, the Indians were promised a long list of compensations: cash payments, spread over several years for "mutual improvement and education," sawmills, flour mills, teachers , schools, agricultural activities. implements, tools, even weapons and ammunition.

Shortly after the treaty was signed, the Indians were taken to the Coastal Reservation or the nearby Grand Ronde Reservation, also called the Grand Round Reservation. MAN: Some of our people were driven like cattle to Port Orford. Many of our people died there. And they kept them there for almost a year, and then they put them on these ships. There were two steamboats that went up the coast, up the Columbia and then up to Willamette Falls, you know, as far up as you could go, and then took them overland to what is now Grand Ronde. Then there were people who came from more inland areas, and they were forced to march up the coast.

And of course, in those days there were no bridges or anything, and they basically had to fend for themselves. They were in very bad condition. Mostly women, children and older men. We refer to it as our trail of tears. And people were forced to swim with their children on their backs through these rivers, all the river systems along the coast. MAN: And then some were forced to march from that temporary reservation at Table Rock to Grand Ronde. It was in February, in the middle of winter. The rough road ran along where I-5 is today and then, once you get to Eugene, down what is 99.

All along the way, there were people who followed the Indians and essentially identified that if they broke ranks and They abandoned that line, they would be killed. And the idea was to basically empty out western Oregon to establish settlements. And we would maintain our reservations, and that would be the great agreement that we reached in those treaties. Members of the coastal tribes eventually learned that the treaty had not been ratified. There would be no schools, blacksmiths or agricultural tools, nor return to their countries of origin. BRAINARD: By not ratifying that treaty, there was no money for the tribal people.

And they gathered them here in Coos Bay and moved them to Fort Umpqua in Reedsport. They were held there for seven years and then transferred to Yachats. One of the main detention centers in the Coastal Reserve had been here in Yachats. MAN: This is where the towns of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw marched, the furthest coming from Coos Bay, which is about 81 miles south of us. It was an internment camp. More than 50% of the people who came here died due to lack of food. The treaty was never ratified, so there was no money to support the tribal people here.

And then they would come here and go out on the rocks looking for shellfish. And you can see what would happen when they would go out and a big wave would come in: they would be thrown into the water. The United States never ratified the Coast Treaty, but it did preserve the Indians' lands. LEWIS: The United States has really wanted American Indian lands from the beginning. Every 20 or 30 years, there is a new strategy. At first it was: let's write treaties with them and put them on reservations on lands we don't want. We recognize that you own 10 million acres of land and it is your reserve, your land forever.

And then, well, now they have too much land. How about reducing your land to 2 million acres? LEWIS: Well, you know, we still need more settler land for the Americans to make proper use of it, because obviously the American Indians are wasting it because they're not making proper use of it by farming and cutting down all the land. wood. . Why don't you have 500,000 acres? There are so few of you left that you don't need all this land. So federal policy has always been to diminish the tribal land base. Ten years after its creation, the Coastal Reserve began to be dismantled.

First, settlers realized that Yaquina Bay did have value: as a port, as a source of oysters, as a good place to build a road into the Willamette Valley. The Indians were expelled in 1865. Soon, two more sections met a similar fate. Then, in 1895, some of the remaining land was distributed among the Indians in small plots. The rest was retained by the government or sold. Today, the Siletz Reservation is less than 4,000 acres. In northeastern Oregon, signers of the 1855 Treaty of Umatilla agreed to certain boundaries for their reservation. But the government study would show very different boundaries and about half as much land.

In subsequent years, the reserve became even smaller. SAMS: By reducing our land mass from half a million acres to 157,000 acres, they were able to gain access to that prime agricultural real estate and then they were able to build the city of Pendleton. Ultimately, a government program converted the community-owned reservation lands into a patchwork of small plots, privately owned by both Indians and non-Indians. CONNER: The allotment era wasn't just a land grab. It was also a way to break our community structure and teach us to think: this is mine; That is yours. What happens is that a lot of land falls out of our hands and we end up with what is now called the "checkerboard reserve." Assimilation has been a stated goal of US Indian policy: that native people would be better off if they could lose their Indianness: stop speaking their native languages ​​and learn English, dress in modern clothing, and convert to Western religion.

The federal government encouraged several denominations to establish churches and schools on Indian reservations. LEWIS: For about twenty years, the various churches ran the schools on the reservations and the assimilation processes on the reservations. In the late 1850s, the federal government literally assigned different designations to each reservation. The Catholics arrived at Grand Ronde and Umatilla. The Methodists went to Siletz. But basically they were assigned. We will do what we can to civilize these pagan 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 there. And so everyone had the opportunity to try to civilize these people. SAMS: We have two. In the northern half of the reserve is the Catholic Church, which was established in 1847 in St. Andrews. And in the southern half of the reservation is the Presbyterian Church. But we practice a common native religion, and that is our Washat religion. Some of the same people who may go to differentchurches early in the morning, you will see them all together in the Washat religion in the longhouse. When I was a teenager, I was confused and asked my grandmother, "Why do we go to both services?" And she leaned towards me and wanted to know, do I know what's going to happen when I go to the next world?

Do I know what is going to happen when you go to meet your Creator? I said, "Of course not." And she said, "Neither do we, nor do I. And to play it safe, we should probably look at both religions, because we don't know which one it is." "This is going to happen when we go to the other world." Most churches sponsored schools for Indian children, and the government built some of its own. In both cases, students who spoke their native language were often punished. We have been told that our traditions and our religion and all that was pagan.

We... you know, we had to learn Christianity. We had to speak English. You have to learn 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 of years, but led to the opening in 1885 of the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, which still houses and teaches young Indians today. I was taken from my grandmother's house when she was five years old and sent to Chemawa. You bring someone from an environment where there is no running water, no toilets, no showers, no electricity.

I'm still trying to get over the hot water coming out of the wall. So you take me, it's a pleasure, you have a big stage and you have all these little Indian kids who come from traditional backgrounds. And you're watching this guy cut this lady in half. All this is scary. But I'll tell you what, I had an education. You had one teacher, 35 different tribes represented in a first grade classroom. In December we were already reading. Oregon tribes suffered to varying degrees from white settlement, but few felt the impact more than the natives of Harney County: the Burns Paiute Tribe.

ADAMS: We had a hard time finding a base of operations because we were always being kicked off this land because of its value for livestock, grazing, and logging. This harsh 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 is tremendous. That is our entire existence, the reason we are here in this valley. The wada seed and the tules, the willows, the hunting that was done there... all of that is very valuable, it is priceless. The Indians here depended on seasonal access to food to sustain them.

But the new arrivals began erecting fences and grazing cattle where that food grew, and some shot Indians who dared to walk there. The conflict continued. To isolate and protect the Paiutes, the president, by executive order, created the 1.8 million-acre Malheur Reservation. Like other reserves, Malheur soon began to reduce in size as settlers, ranchers and miners demanded more and more pieces. A few Paiutes joined members of the Bannock tribe in a brief effort to repel intruders from Indian lands. In response, in the winter of 1879, the army marched the entire local Paiute population to Fort Simcoe on the Yakima reservation, 350 miles away.

There they would remain detained for the following years. Rena Beers was born in 1918. You boil them and eat them, like they were macaroni. Today, Rena is the oldest living member of the Burns Paiute Tribe. This is my mother, my brother. These are my sister's children. She remembers stories from her mother, who was a child when the Paiute were relocated. They were taken there. She told me there were many prisoners 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 freed. Each adult who returned to the Burns area was given a piece of land (160 acres) to farm and start a new life. But most of those plots sat on dry, alkaline sagebrush soils and could support few, if any, returning families. It was a very poor time for people who returned to this area, to their homeland. They had no skills, they had no education. He primarily spoke the Paiute language. They tried to live as they did before they were taken from this country: digging roots, making jerky.

The Indians had no money or tribal lands. Food resources still existed, but Paiute access to them was limited. I remember my grandmother, we would go pick up the other aunts and go to Hines. There used to be a garbage dump out there. And the townspeople, when they went, put the meat in a box. They didn't throw it away with the rest of the garbage or leave it aside, because they knew the Indians were coming. That's how they got their meat. Because just for going out hunting they would shoot them. The difficult times that followed would mark Paiute life well into the 20th century.

RODERIQUE: We survived thanks to donations, things that were found in the city garbage dump. I think it was especially difficult for men to find work. RENA BEERS: We work for food. Chopped firewood so they can have something to eat. They would change it for breakfast or something. That's how we lived. I survived that. That's my mother, my two sisters. And my brother is lying right there. And then this is our dad. A local company gave the tribe a small plot of property on the outskirts of town. The tent village that developed there was called ''Old Camp''.

RENA BEERS: Small tents. And then, they gave us those army tents. We lived back there, in the second store. Today, the Burns Paiute Reservation is approximately 770 acres just outside the town of Burns. Some tribal members are still trying to reclaim at least part of the Malheur Reservation. We do not give up this land. We didn't sign anything. We did not sign a treaty. This land could still be ours. The government intended to relocate all Indians from western Oregon to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations. Entire tribes had been uprooted and damaged. And women were often the glue that held their people together.

IVY: Women play an important role in Western Oregon Indian culture. Indian women were the ones who were bilingual. They had to know her language plus her husband's language, maybe it wasn't the same. They always moved to her husband's village to learn more history, because they not only had to know her history, but also her husband's history. HOCKEMA: When the government was rounding up the Indians, if an Indian was married to a white person, he didn't have to go to the reservation. Many people feel that the reason the Coquille tribe is here today is because of those women who stayed behind and, for the most part in secret, maintained the traditions: the language and the customs.

Many cultural objects (tools, utensils and items of personal adornment) were lost in the transfer. It broke that connection to the place that people have. It is where their ancestors were buried. They were able to bring very few or very few things with them. WOMAN: Several waves of displacement. And it becomes invisible to the tribal people, their artistic forms and their cultural expressions. And that happened here. Many of the iconic art forms that you would have seen here a couple of hundred years ago were looted and moved. Centuries-old information and wisdom, stories about rock art, disappeared. On the eastern side of Oregon, the Umatilla tribes had 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, an annual event that endures to this day. But back then, the Indians still needed a signed pass to get off the reservation. However, the Umatillas had reserved rights to fish, hunt, and gather on and off the reservation. SAMS: My grandparents used to say there, "During the Great Depression, we never went hungry." And the reason is that we had all our traditional food sources here and we could fill our tables and our bellies. , ensuring our children had enough food to eat. In Klamath County, in 1908, the railroad was extended 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 the advent of the railroad and the demand for lumber, we set ourselves up to be economically stable and, in fact, were among the wealthiest and most self-sufficient tribes in the nation. The treaty guaranteed us that we would remain on this land of ours 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 fired. And the termination was a government policy that ended the federal government's recognition of Native peoples.

The Klamath Termination Act and the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act eliminated 61 bands and tribes from Oregon: virtually all the Indians west of the Cascades plus the Klamath. They would no longer be "federally recognized." The laws were touted as an effort to free the natives from government oversight. So the responsibilities that the federal government gave us by treaty—health care, education, and all those benefits—basically disappeared. Basically, they just crumpled up the treaty, threw it in the trash, and then paid us money. Many tribes fell into poverty. The Klamaths received some financial compensation for their liquidated timber holdings.

GENTRY: There was a huge surge of money that some people were willing to handle, but a lot of people weren't. Some people used their money and bought property, bought furniture and cars, went to work and still had those properties. Other people lost it. There were hundreds, hundreds who lost their lives before the age of 30 just because they received this money. They went out and were involved in car accidents, alcoholism, shootings, stabbings. And it was a very difficult time for the tribe members. Only a fraction of the tribes in the United States were exterminated. And across the country, conditions for many other native peoples were improving.

Congress was funding better health care, new housing, educational opportunities, and more... for federally recognized tribes, but not for the Western Oregon Indians. ANNOUNCER: I would like to welcome everyone to the 30th Annual Restoration Celebration and Klamath Tribes Powwow. After 20 to 30 years, most of the extinct tribes were restored. The theme of our celebration here is "the spirit of our ancestors." The people of each tribe had to convince Congress that their members deserved to be recognized as Indians again. GIRLS: Hello! The Klamaths won their case on August 26, 1986. They celebrate that anniversary here in Chiloquin every year. Their million-acre reserve had dwindled to a few hundred.

ANNOUNCER: This is Alvin Miller's float. I'm glad to have you here and welcome. You guys look beautiful. However, the restoration was a victory. Three tribes in western Oregon established their independence: the Cow Creek Band of Umpquas; the Confederate Coos, the Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw; and the Coquilles. The largest confederations, Siletz and 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 restore ourselves together as a people. And that really grounds us as an entity of people. By the end of the 20th century, Oregon's native people had survived deadly epidemics, vigilante raids, and countless attacks on their culture.

One of the first tasks of many tribes was to try to preserve their traditional languages, although some had been lost forever. Maintaining the Paiute language has become a priority for the Burns Tribe. We should instill some pride in our younger generation, because they are learning Spanish faster than their own native language. So... and it's disappearing. And our language is important because it identifies who we are. We have to teach our children so that they can teach their children and their children, because the elders have said that our language should never be forgotten. It is important to recognize that there are many artistic traditions in Oregon.

WOMAN: These are called putlapa. They are used in our traditional ceremonies during the root festival or the cranberry festival. WOMAN: Our culture and our ways of life are declining, 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 continue to do so myself. But as I grew up, I did my best to pass this on to young people. WOMAN: Someone made the comment that the tribe didn't do beads, and then my cousin pulls out her necklace that my great-grandmother made, which was a 19th century net necklace.

So I replicated this and then taught the class myself to the tribe members. And they learned to make Coquille art. DARTT: Along the Oregon coastThey see many open-weave baskets. They are beautiful and very intricately woven, but very useful for collecting clams and bedding. And then when you get to the Columbia River region, there's a lot of masonry, a lot of carved material. WOMAN: These are all our blueberry baskets. According to what one of our elders told me, she used to go with her family on horseback. And they would go out for weeks picking blueberries, and they probably had baskets that big and they filled them up.

Our collections are quite unique and probably about 95% of our objects come from Warm Springs tribal members. The Warm Springs collection eventually grew so large that the tribe built a museum to house it. A temporary exhibit showcases the modern work of another Warm Springs artist, Lillian Pitt. DARTT: I encourage you to seek out the art of these contemporary local Native peoples. It places you in the present with an anchor in the past, with this long history of connection with this place. MILLER: Indian cultures are still here, they are strong, they are getting stronger. The tribes want to preserve their languages;

The tribes want to preserve their religions, their cultures, their countries of origin. In most tribes, their population and economy are increasing. Sometimes they are taking advantage of opportunities because of their sovereign status. Tribal games are an example of this. Because they are separate governments, the United States Supreme Court recognized that tribes can offer gaming. Tribal games. Casinos. The Cow Creek Band of Umpquas opened Oregon's first casino in 1994. Now every tribe has one. Casinos changed the game. OMG the casino is a lifesaver. It gives money to tribal governments to spend however they want. IVY: The tribes have been able to enter a social economic environment in which they have contributed something.

And this is probably the first time that tribes have had the opportunity to have a place in the market. That gets you invited to the Chamber of Commerce banquet. You know, that gets you involved in Rotary.Lunch. That gets you involved, invites you and gets you into the forums, and suddenly you start learning from the rest of the world. That income strengthens the capacity of your community. SAMS: We are the largest employer in the county and 60% of our workforce is non-Indian. We provided more than $44 million in taxes and payroll to the local community. Tribes are funding other work that can have far-reaching effects.

SAMS: This tribe fought hard with the state to increase water quality standards for the entire state in order to protect our fisheries and 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 can return water and salmon to the river. We're doing that in Walla Walla right now and also in the Grand Ronde area. Nez Percés are doing that in Wallowa. In the Klamath Basin, battles over water have raged for decades. But one treaty provision has given tribes a powerful place at the negotiating table.

FOREMAN: The courts determined that the Klamath tribes had superior water rights throughout the former reservation. And that caused a lot of discord among the non-tribal members here who depended on it, so to speak. But tribes have always been willing to share, and today we share some of that water. Indians are increasingly playing active roles in resource management. JESSE BEERS: I feel I have an additional duty of stewardship of 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 are here, we are not gone, and we can speak for previous generations.

MILLER: The United States' relationship with Indian tribes continues. The idea that Indians would become extinct, as George Washington said, has proven false. Social Darwinism did not exist. Indian cultures are still here, they are strong, they are getting stronger. Do you want to show them how you can run, buck, take off and be wild? Today, many Indians are well aware of the details of those treaties of the 1850s and 1860s. Most other Oregonians know little or nothing about them. Come on, doll. 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 these cities get here? Under what legal authority, on what basis do they exist? HARRELSON: The government's goal was to eliminate our ancestors and make way for their people to settle our lands. PITT: The United States made a deal. Let's keep our end of the deal. We are only wondering if the other party will honor their agreement. LEWIS: Once you've been in a place for 10,000 years, and your culture and your genealogy are part of that place, you understand that place better than anyone, and everything you do will resonate in the land around you. you.

Our cultures resonate with this place because we learned to live with it. We are part of it. The forests, the rivers, the coast, the mountains... we are part of all that. Our people are from there. Everything we do in our culture resonates with that. LAVADOUR: Indigenous peoples have a lot 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 each other. And that's a good thing, you know? You know what I mean? It's a really good thing. ANNOUNCER: Dave Jackson and family.

MAN: Hey. There is more information about the "Broken Treaties" at the Oregon Experience online. For more information or to order a DVD of the program, visit opb.org. Primary support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Primary support provided by... Support for ''Broken Treaties'' is provided by... and viewers like you.