Grand Ronde: Termination, Restoration, and Twenty-Seven Nations in One Government

The Grand Ronde Reservation was created in eighteen fifty-six in the foothills of the Coast Range, west of the Willamette Valley. The federal government placed more than twenty-seven tribal nations on it, peoples who had been rivals, who did not share language, who had been enemies in some cases, and who were now being told to live together on a fraction of their combined original territories. The Tualatin Kalapuya were there. The Clackamas. The Molalla. The Rogue River peoples. The Umpqua. The Tillamook.

The reservation was reduced several times in the following decades as federal policy shifted and land values increased.

In nineteen fifty-four, Congress passed the federal termination policy. Termination was a deliberate program: the government withdrew federal recognition from tribal nations across the country, abolished their reservation status, and attempted to liquidate tribal land holdings. For the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, termination meant losing their reservation, their tribal government authority, and their legal standing as a recognized nation. Federal services ended. The communal land base was dissolved.

For nearly three decades, the people of Grand Ronde organized without a federally recognized government. They maintained their community networks, documented their history, and built a political case for restoration. In nineteen eighty-three, Congress restored the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde to federal recognition. They received a small land base. They began rebuilding what termination had dismantled.

The Spirit Mountain Casino, opened in nineteen ninety-five, funds tribal government operations, cultural programs, language revitalization, and scholarship programs. The confederacy that the federal government tried to erase by legislative action in nineteen fifty-four is now one of the more financially stable tribal governments in Oregon.