By JULIA SHUMWAY/Oregon Capital Chronicle
SALEM — This spring, fresh off visiting Oregon’s 36 counties in her first year in office, Gov. Tina Kotek set out to visit each of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes.
On Wednesday, almost two months after the last of those visits, Kotek and leaders of six of the nine tribes reflected on the experience and the work ahead to improve the state’s relationship with the sovereign nations within its borders. Kotek was the first Oregon governor to hire a full-time tribal affairs director last year, and one of her first meetings after taking office was with tribal leaders.
Kotek stressed that each of the nine recognized tribes spread throughout Oregon are different, and she learned different things from each visit. She toured fish hatcheries with the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, crafted tule duck decoys with children in the Burns Paiute tribe and visited a traditional Coquille cedar plank house.
“Every visit was different, unique and instructive, specific to the tribe, and I just wish I could have done more than a day at each location,” Kotek said.
Brad Kneaper, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, praised Kotek for understanding the differences between each of Oregon’s recognized tribes and for prioritizing visiting with each tribe early in her term.
“One of the things that we’ve had happen in the past is somebody will talk to one tribe and assume they’ve talked to all tribes,” Kneaper said. “So they lump us all together, and we’re not all together. We all have individual governments. We have individual beliefs and cultural practices. And the governor, I believe, understands that and she’s commented on that in the past.”
The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians includes four bands — Hanis Coos, Miluk Coos, Lower Umpqua Tribe and Siuslaw Tribe — who have long lived on Coos River tributaries along Oregon’s central coast. During her July visit, Kotek saw a former Miluk village site at Gregory Point, an estuary restoration project and the Three Rivers Health Center, which provides care to tribal members and other residents of southwest Oregon.
“When you see how these tribal governments are in communities across Oregon, they not only serve the citizens of their nations, but the surrounding communities in very, very beneficial ways,” Kotek said. “They are providing access to transportation and housing and health care and education and much more in the communities of which they reside.”
That was the case on Kotek’s first visit, a March trip to the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians’ 16,655-acre reservation on the central coast. Confederation leaders showed Kotek their clinic and a garden property where the tribe grows fresh food for members and teaches them to grow their own fruits and vegetables.
Bud Lane, vice chairman of the tribal council, said it was especially important to him to show Kotek the community’s dance house and have young people share some traditional songs and dances.
“It was a meaningful day to us, and it helps to foster a better relationship, a government-to-government relationship, between us,” Lane said. ‘While we are governments and we do act formally with each other, it’s good to get to know each other on a personal level and be able to have those exchanges that mean so much to us.”
‘Be with us in our homelands’
Tracy Kennedy, chairwoman of the Burns Paiute tribe in eastern Oregon, said it was especially meaningful for Kotek to join tribal youth — who her tribe calls “future elders” — to make duck decoys as their ancestors have done for at least the past 2,000 years.
“There is only one way to truly understand us as a people, the Wadatika Band of Paiute, Northern Paiutes, and that is to be with us in our homelands, to see us, to hear us, to feel us, to even taste us in our foods,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy’s tribe now has about 400 enrolled members, less than half of whom live on a nearly 14,000-acre reservation north of Burns. Most are descended from the Wadatika Band of Northern Paiutes, who roamed 5,250 square miles of arid land in what is now Oregon, Nevada, California and Idaho. They refused to cede land and fought to maintain traditional practices, including by hiding children when federal Indian agents tried to force them into boarding schools.
Raymond Huesties, treasurer of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon, said it was important to feed Kotek and first lady Aimee Kotek Wilson the tribes’ “first foods” — the water, fish, big game roots and berries that have sustained tribes living on the Columbia River Plateau for thousands of years. He urged Kotek and other state and federal leaders to stay in constant, concise, clear communication with tribes.
“That’s the only way things can happen, and that’s the only way that there’s less confusion,” he said. “When the state of Oregon or the federal government is doing something within our ceded territory or our aboriginal use areas, that we have a seat at the table and we have a voice. And I do really believe that the Governor Kotek is letting that happen, and I just wanted to thank her.”
Kotek visited the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in June, a week before the tribes’ annual commemoration of the 1855 treaty that established the 644,000-acre reservation where members of the Wasco, Warm Springs and Paiute tribes agreed to live while retaining rights to fish, hunt and gather berries on ceded land and beyond.
Jonathan W. Smith, a member of the Warm Springs tribal council, said he and other leaders wanted to make sure Kotek knew about the treaty and the tribes’ “good neighbor policy” of collaborating with surrounding communities. They showed her the Pelton/Round Butte Hydroelectric Project, co-owned by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Portland General Electric, as well as the newly renovated Kah-Nee-Ta resort and the Warm Springs Fish Hatchery.
William Ray Jr., chairman of the Klamath Tribes, said he’s optimistic that Kotek’s July visit is a step toward building a better relationship with the state of Oregon.
“It still needs a lot of work to do to create a better place for us to exercise our aboriginal rights and the resources to our culture that we need for survival,” he said.
He and other leaders are concerned about potential policy decisions from an incoming Trump administration. In southern Oregon, the Klamath Tribes were excited this fall to see salmon swimming up the Klamath River for the first time in more than a century after dams were removed.
“Our biggest concerns about the incoming administration is the water delivery systems and how it’s going to affect our endangered species of C’waam and Koptu,” he said, using traditional words for the fish known in English as Lost River and shortnose sucker. “If all the water delivery agreements are going to be fulfilled at 100%, that’s going to adversely affect them where extinction becomes real viable.”
- Oregon Capital Chronicle is a nonprofit Salem-based news service that focuses its reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy.
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