Long-sought court ruling restores Oregon tribe’s hunting and fishing rights

LINCOLN CITY, Ore. – Drumming shook the floor and singing filled the conference room at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, as hundreds danced in a circle in tribal regalia.

For the past 47 years, the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians have held an annual powwow to celebrate regaining federal recognition. This month’s event, however, was particularly meaningful: It came just two weeks after a federal court lifted restrictions on the tribe’s right to hunt, fish and gather — restrictions that tribal leaders have opposed for decades.

“We are back to normal,” said Siletz Chairman Delores Pigsley. “It feels really good.”

The Siletz are a confederation of more than twenty groups and tribes whose traditional homelands include western Oregon, as well as parts of northern California and southwestern Washington state. The federal government forced them onto a reservation on the Oregon coast in the 1850s, where, despite their different backgrounds and languages, they were united together as a single, federally recognized tribe.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Congress withdrew recognition from more than a hundred tribes, including the Siletz, under a policy known as “termination.” Affected tribes lost millions of acres of land, as well as federal funding and services.

“The goal was to assimilate Native people and move them to the cities,” said Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund. “But I also think there was definitely a financial aspect to it. I think the United States was trying to see how they could limit their costs in terms of providing for tribal nations.”

Losing their land and self-government was painful, and the tribes fought for decades to regain federal recognition. In 1977, the Siletz became the second tribe to succeed, following the restoration of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin in 1973.

But to get back some of its land — roughly 1,457 acres of the 445,000-acre reservation established for the tribe in 1855 — the Siletz Tribe had to agree to a federal court order that placed restrictions on their hunting, fishing and collection rights. It was only one of two tribes in the country, along with Oregon’s Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, forced to do so to reclaim tribal lands.

The settlement limited the places where tribesmen could fish, hunt, and gather for ceremonial and subsistence purposes, and placed limits on the number of salmon, elk, and deer that could be harvested in a year. It was devastating, tribal chairman Pigsley recalled: The tribe was forced to buy salmon for ceremonies because the tribe could not make a living, and people were arrested for hunting and fishing violations.

“Giving up these rights was a terrible thing,” Pigsley, who led the tribe for 36 years, told The Associated Press earlier this year. “It was unfair at the time and we lived with it all these years.”

Decades later, Oregon and the U.S. realized that the agreement subjecting the tribe to state hunting and fishing regulations was biased, and agreed to join the tribe in recommending to the court that the restrictions on to lift.

“Oregon’s governor and Oregon congressional representatives have since recognized that the 1980 Agreement and Consent Decree was a product of their time and represented a biased and distorted position on tribal sovereignty, tribal traditions, and the power and authority of the Siletz tribe to manage and maintain the tribes. wildlife populations that it traditionally used for tribal ceremonial purposes and subsistence,” attorneys for the U.S., the state and the tribe wrote in a joint lawsuit.

Late last month, the tribe finally succeeded in having the injunction lifted by a federal judge. And a separate agreement with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has given the tribe a larger role in regulating tribal hunting and fishing.

As Pigsley reflected on those who died before seeing the tribe regain its rights, she expressed hope that the next generation would carry on vital traditions.

“There are a lot of young people learning tribal customs and culture,” she said. “It’s important today because we’re trying to raise healthy families, which means we need to get back to our natural foods.”

Among those celebrating and praying at the powwow was Tiffany Stuart, who wore a basket hat her ancestors were known for weaving, and her three-year-old daughter Kwestaani Chuski, whose name means “six butterflies” in the southwestern regional Athabaskan language of Oregon and northwestern California.

Given the restoration of rights, Stuart said, it was “very powerful for my children to dance.”

“You dance for the people who can no longer dance,” she said.