Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs

The six-hundred-forty-thousand acres stretching across the high plateau of north-central Oregon belong to the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs , a nation formed not of one people but of at least a dozen distinct bands who were pressed, under duress, into a single treaty in the summer of eighteen fifty-five.

By the early eighteen fifties, roughly twelve thousand emigrants a year were crossing through Wasco and Warm Springs territory on the Oregon Trail. Joel Palmer, the superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon Territory, received orders to clear indigenous people from the path of settlement. In June of eighteen fifty-five, he convened a council at the Dalles and pressured the Warm Springs, Tygh, Wyam, Tenino, and John Day bands , peoples of the plateau interior , along with the Wasco bands of the Columbia River plateau, to sign away approximately ten million acres of their ancestral homeland. In exchange, they received this reservation and a crucial guarantee: the right to fish, hunt, and gather in all their usual and accustomed places off the reservation, forever.

That fishing right would prove the most contested and most durable provision of the treaty. For more than eleven thousand years, Celilo Falls on the Columbia had been one of the great fisheries of North America. Tribes traveled from across the West to trade salmon there. The treaty signatories continued to fish at Celilo for a century , until March of nineteen fifty-seven, when the Army Corps of Engineers closed the gates of The Dalles Dam and the falls disappeared under backwater in a matter of hours.

A third group was added to the reservation not by choice, but by force. In eighteen seventy-nine, thirty-eight Northern Paiute, prisoners of war following the Bannock War of eighteen seventy-eight, were marched from the Yakama Reservation to Warm Springs. The Paiute, plateau peoples, and river peoples had distinct languages, cultures, and histories. Their shared governance took generations to build.

Today the Confederated Tribes operate the Kah-Nee-Ta resort, a hydroelectric plant, a museum, and timber enterprises , a sovereign nation governing its own affairs on land that carries the memory of everything it replaced.