The Early Days on the Siletz Reservation

All our families have stories about things that happened during the removal to the reservation and/or events in the early days of the Siletz Reservation. It was an unpleasant time for everybody involved, marked by starvation, disease, violence, poverty and depression...

The End of Wars & Removal

The action of the President in creating the Coast (Siletz) Reservation did nothing to quell those in the mining camps and settlements screaming for the complete “extermination” of our people. In fact, the last portion of the Rogue River Wars was started by...

Creating the Coast (Siletz) Reservation

There has been a great deal of misinterpretation about how and why our reservation was created. These errors began shortly after the reservation was created and they have directed our tribal history from that point on. The misinterpretations were used to open the...

The Western Oregon Treaties of 1853-1855

Joel Palmer was appointed as the new Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon Territory, just as mining activity was bringing Indian/white relations to the breaking point. Palmer, an early arrival in the Oregon country, seems to have had an unusual amount of...

The Early Treaty Making Period of 1851

As over 2,000,000 acres of our homelands were being taken up in Donation Land Claims by thousands of U.S. citizens, the United States knew it could not guarantee clear title to its settlers unless our people formally ceded those lands to the United States by treaty....

Early Settlement Period

As was related in the previous article, most white contact with our people before 1845 or so was fleeting, consisting of traders, trappers, explorers of different sorts, with some areas being impacted by the occasional cattle drive from California to the Willamette...