By JAMIE HALE/The Oregonian/OregonLive
Forged by an explosive volcanic eruption in southwest Oregon, Table Rocks took their shape over millions of years, carved by the steady waters of the Rogue River which flows more than 800 feet below the rim.
Every autumn, as temperatures drop and rainclouds return, acorns fall from oak trees that surround the pair of flat-topped mesas. The return of the acorns precedes the return of Native peoples, who gather the bitter nuts, grind them up and turn them into a nutritious mush – a practice that goes back millennia.
More recently, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have created opportunities for members to reforge connections to their ancestors’ lands. Their removal from this place in 1856, an event some historians call the Rogue River Trail of Tears, has become a road map that many tribal members are retracing into the future.
In the fall, the two tribes come together to gather acorns at an event called Acorn Camp in southwest Oregon. In June, they will host their first joint Camas Camp, where they will harvest camas lilies and other spring plants.
Beginning Friday, the Siletz tribe will host its annual three-day Run to the Rogue marathon, a 216-mile relay down the coastline and up the Rogue River.
It is the first Run to the Rogue event since 2019. In 2020 and 2021, the run was canceled because of the pandemic and in 2022 and 2023, the event was canceled due to wildfires in southern Oregon. The run, usually held in the fall, has been moved to this weekend to avoid the potential fall cancellations because of wildfires.
Greg Archuleta, cultural policy analyst with the Grand Ronde tribe, said the current focus is on refamiliarizing tribal members with the places of their ancestors, as well as passing down practices that have survived for generations.
“Our primary focus right now is really to get tribal members out on the landscape,” Archuleta said. “It’s all about presence.”
That presence has also created a new sense of home for many Indigenous families who have spent generations living elsewhere – on reservations far away, in bigger cities or out of the region altogether.
“It’s kind of like meeting a relative that you’ve heard about for a long time but never had a chance to meet,” Robert Kentta, tribal council member for the Siletz tribe, said of returning to southwest Oregon. “That connection is still there.”
Trauma at Table Rocks
For tribal members, revisiting Table Rocks isn’t always easy. There is trauma there, buried in the ground.
At the start of the 19th century, the region was home to the Takelma, Shastan and Athabaskan peoples. But it was also becoming home to a growing number of non-Indigenous settlers. The first to arrive, French fur trappers called the Indigenous people in the region “rogues,” a derogatory nickname that was often used as a justification for violence, according to historian Gray Whaley in “Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee.”
In 1853, many of the Rogue River peoples gathered at Table Rocks to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in which they agreed to cede the lands in exchange for a permanent reservation. Violence from militias continued during the treaty negotiations, an attempt to derail the process, tribal historians said. After signing the treaty, the people were removed to a temporary reservation at Table Rocks, where hardships continued.
The situation came to a head in 1855, when the deaths of two packers were blamed on Indigenous men. A white militia seeking to avenge the deaths left under the cover of darkness to the Table Rock Reservation, where they killed about 25 people sleeping by the banks of the river, according to historical accounts. As they left, the militiamen killed another 50 to 80 Indigenous people in the area, most of whom were women and children.
In response to the attacks, a group of Indigenous leaders retaliated with raids on homesteads and settlements. In less than a year, roughly 250 Indigenous people were killed, along with some 50 non-Indigenous soldiers and 44 civilians, according to historical records.
Tribal members have been holding those horrific memories for generations.
In February 1856, amid the fighting, U.S. soldiers moved 325 people by foot from the Table Rocks Reservation to a place that would become the Grand Ronde Reservation, 263 miles away. The 33-day journey went over mountains and along rivers, north through the Willamette Valley, roughly following the future Interstate 5 corridor, and up into the Coast Range.
The Rogue River people who chose to stay and fight against removal held out until that summer, eventually surrendering after brutal losses. The surviving holdouts were taken to both the Grand Ronde and Siletz/Coast reservations.
Despite generations of oppression and the attempted genocide of a people, leaders in the Grand Ronde and Siletz tribes said they prefer a frame of resilience.
“There’s pride in the resilience of our ancestors,” Kentta said. “And some of it’s probably a stroke of luck that they didn’t get swept away.”
Homecoming
After the removal from southwest Oregon, the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations became home to more Indigenous survivors, people from neighboring lands who spoke different languages, ate different food and practiced their own customs. At first, most people kept to their own (going so far as to organize themselves geographically), according to tribal historians, but as the U.S. Government shrank the reservations – Siletz from 1.1 million acres to nearly 17,000 today, Grand Ronde from 61,000 acres to 11,500 today – the people came together, creating new tribal communities.
Of the 5,700 enrolled members of the Grand Ronde tribe, about 1,200 live in or around Grand Ronde today, said Chris Mercier, vice chair of the Grand Ronde tribal council. But those who do enjoy a tight-knit community, where the past, present and future of the tribe seem to collide at every turn.
For several generations after removal, people didn’t want to directly confront the traumas of the past, tribal leaders say. Only in the past few decades have the tribes directly faced the past, they said, seeking healing through conversation, support and returning to places of tragedy.
In the mid 1990s, the Siletz tribe started Run to the Rogue, in which tribal members run and walk their way down the coastline, then up the Rogue River to a place called Oak Flat, about 50 miles from Table Rocks.
Buddy Lane, cultural resources manager for the Siletz, has been organizing the event since 2012. He said runners of all abilities participate to different degrees. The tribe’s youngest members take the first mile in Siletz, and the elders take the final mile to Oak Flat. The strongest runners take the hardest miles along U.S. 101 at Cape Perpetua, a stretch Lane has done before.
“The trek is a lot easier than it was for our ancestors,” Lane said.
Many tribal members follow runners along the route, supporting their effort and finding ways to reconnect with their roots, he said. Some pay visits to the lands where their families once lived, or gather in parks, staying up late into the night as runners come and go.
“It’s an emotionally charged event,” Lane said. “We’re not celebrating something, but we’re remembering things and making sure those folks with stories are not forgotten.”
The relay, along with the Acorn Camp and Camas Camp, represents a new generation of tribal members who are actively connecting with their past through new experiences in the present, they said. The fact that these homecoming events all include a return trip back home – to Siletz, Grand Ronde and other places – underlines a complex question: What is “home” to a displaced people?
For Kentta, who has lived his whole life in Siletz and whose ancestors are from the Applegate Valley as well as Finland, southwest Oregon is like a home away from home.
“Whenever I’m in the Rogue Valley it’s kind of an emotional feeling of like a connection, even though I didn’t grow up there,” he said. “It’s an ancestral home rather than my current home.”
- Jamie Hale covers travel and the outdoors and co-hosts the Peak Northwest podcast. Reach him at 503-294-4077; jhale@oregonian.com or @HaleJamesB.
- Editor’s note: this is an abridged version of a May 25 story from The Oregonian/OregonLive and is used with permission. For the complete story go here.