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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 2005)
OCTOBER 1, 2005 Smoke Signals 9 Seasonal A heard of elk gather and feed in an open field in Tillamook County. This heard can be seen throughout Tillamook in different places. come, and in Polk County, where most Tribal members lived, it was about 63 percent of overall Oregon household income. In addition, Tribal members suffered consider ably higher rates of unemployment and less formal education than the general population. Also, 60 per cent of Tribal households reported unresolved vision problems and 50 percent reported unresolved dental problems. For a long time following the 1850s treaties when the 26 Tribes that became the Confeder ated Tribes of the Grand Ronde ceded their lands to the federal gov ernment, Tribal members continued to hunt, fish and gather resources for subsistence and cultural ceremo nies on and off the Reservation. laughed as he recalled, "He and (Tribal member) Clint Langley taught me a lot." All through the years up to Ter mination, Tom and dozens, hun dreds, probably thousands of other Tribal members either bought state tags or simply used their Tribal identification cards to continue to hunt and fish across the Tribe's ceded lands. "For me personally," said Tribal member Greg Archuleta, who first led the program to implement the terms of the hunting and fishing consent decree, "our family had an cestral fishing sites at Oregon City. It would have been nice to be able to continue fishing there. To keep the ancestral sites going. "We have a lot of Tribal families that came from Oregon City and Cascade Locks and all along the Hood) to the coast, and from McMinnville and Grand Ronde on the south to Forest Grove and Tillamook on the north. It repre sents a very small part of the lands the Tribes of today's Grand Ronde Confederation ceded to the federal government in the 1850s, that ex tend from the Columbia River on the north to California on the south; and from the coast to the Cascade Range at east and west. The Trask never was sufficient for Tribal hunting and fishing needs, and not only because it leaves out so many ancestral home lands. Over the years, the unit has long been over hunted and de pleted. The state has frequently changed the rules and the seasons without consulting the Tribe. And because it is nearby Oregon's ma jor metropolitan areas, it is always V.J ... i J ;.... i. 4, ;,.--""-"- mvmicm Yesterday Tradtional fishing at Celilo Falls in the 1 950s. The area has since been submerged by Columbia River Dams. three years ago, in part because so many younger hunters from the city hunted from their trucks. "If you want to be a hunter, you park your rig at the gate and go and get it," he said. "I saw a guy with a couch in the back of his truck," said Langley. Overcrowding got so bad in the 1990s, said Kelly Dirksen, Fish and Wildlife Coordinator for the Tribe, that the state imposed additional bag and season limits. In 1999, said Herman Biederback, who oversees the Trask Unit for the state Department of Fish & Wildlife, the state divided the five-week deer season in two, stuck the elk season more or less in between, and changed the rules to limit some older deer bags for younger deer with the idea that the older ones do the mating and maybe would result in more does... and to day all those rules have reverted to the 1998 versions. If all that sounds too complicated for people to understand, it probably is, but according to Biederback, the idea of it all was to reduce the pres sure on the Trask and Wilson Units in this area. All it did was drive hunters and those who police them crazy, and the nuisance of it kept hunters away. The agreement also left out salmon and steelhead, upland game birds and waterfowl, and when it came to cultural harvests, the Tribe was left high and dry. Whether for funerals or pow-wows or any of the seasonal events that Indians have long made their own by hunting for fresh foods, today, the Tribe is ex pected to use frozen food. Tribal Elder Leon "Chips" Tom recalls his initiation to hunting around 1940 when his uncle, Tribal member Mike Voutrin, who has since passed on, asked if he wanted to go hunting across Rock Creek. He shot a forked horn buck and asked Chips how much he could carry. "I said, 'Whatever you can put in my pack sack.' So he packed it up and put it on my shoulders and I went over backwards." Tom Columbia and Willamette and Salmon and Nestucca Rivers, the Rogue River, all in our traditional lands. None are allowed to fish there now (with Tribal licenses)." In fact, Tribal licenses agreed to in the 1986 Consent Decree allowed Tribal members to hunt and fish only in the Trask Game unit with little more than 1,000 square miles of big game habitat. The Trask runs east and west from the Cascades Range (with Mt. overrun by non-Indian hunters. Because of the crowds, "I never go out the first weekend," said Tribal hunter Bryan Langley. Lan gley hunts with a bow more than with a rifle, and said, "One reason I don't like to go rifle hunting is so many people are out there." Chips Tom"used to fish the Nestucca area religiously in the 60s and 70s, but it got to the point where it was just too crowded." Tom, who is 77, stopped hunting The list of injustices meted out in the hunting and fish ing consent decree is long and will be considered in a future installment. We also plan an installment to talk about traditional methods of hunting and how they have changed over the years. And finally, Smoke Signals will take a look at the Tribe's current effort to revisit this issue with the state and fed eral authorities. It promises to be a long process. In the meantime, we invite Tribal members with ex periences and opinions re garding traditional hunt ing and fishing rights, and any of these subjects to contact Smoke Signals with their stories.
