Tribes of the Oregon country: Cultural plant harvests and indigenous relationships with ancestral lands in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon represent the descendants of dozens of bands and communities that had knowledge about, and relationships with, every dimension of the state’s lands, waters, flora, and fauna. While some tribes and their reservations were formed by treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate, other tribes negotiated treaties with the U.S. that either were never ratified or were ignored. This legal and political complexity is characteristic of federal-tribal relations across what was once the Oregon Country (modern day Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming). In this article, we discuss our research regarding one context in which these longstanding relationships occur today, namely, when tribal people seek to harvest plants from ancestral lands now held by the U.S. Forest Service. Underlying the research is our premise is that knowledge of historical relationships among American Indians, land, and natural resource harvests is vital to uphold the federal trust responsibility to tribes.

Citation

Dobkins, Rebecca; Hummel, Susan S.; Lewis, Ceara; Pochis, Grace; Dickey, Emily. 2017. Tribes of the Oregon country: Cultural plant harvests and indigenous relationships with ancestral lands in the twenty-first century. Oregon Historical Quarterly. 118(4): 488-517.