2
S moke S ignals
OCTOBER 1, 2017
Review threatens Tribal
ancestral homelands
By David G. Lewis
Beginning the day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump ques-
tioned the need to have so much land locked up in national monuments.
In April, Trump ordered a review of many of the most recent national
monuments that are protected under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The law
was enacted to prevent looting of Indian artifacts from archaeological sites.
The act has been used since then by many presidents to turn vulnerable
public lands into national monuments that are then protected forever from
commercial development or future mineral exploitation.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law,
created 18 monuments, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Olym-
pic National Park in Washington state, totaling more than a million acres.
Since then many more national monuments have been created.
The only national monument in Oregon is the Cascade-Siskiyou National
Monument, which lies mostly south and east of Medford with a small area
crossing the border into California. It was first signed into law by President
William Clinton in 2000 and President Barack Obama, who created 28 nation-
al monuments during his two terms in office, expanded the Cascade-Siskiyou.
In July, there was a visit to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument
by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who toured the monument for a couple
of days to scrutinize the monument for reduction. In August, Zinke recom-
mended shrinking the Cascade-Siskiyou over the objections of Oregon’s
senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, Gov. Kate Brown and local envi-
ronmental activists and community members.
National monuments possess some of the most threatened archaeological
sites in the United States. These Native cultural resources are subject to
destruction by hordes of tourists and to theft of artifacts by pot hunters.
This is one of the reasons these lands were set aside, to permanently protect
the archaeological resources.
One of the most recently created national monuments, Bears Ears in Utah,
contains one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in North America.
This spectacular cliff dwelling rests in the side of a huge cliff face and is
the ancestral homelands of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni and Ute peoples, all of
whom supported the creation of the national monument.
Establishing the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument preserved a
biologically diverse landscape for the future of all Americans. For Native
peoples, the ability to interact within our ancestral landscapes is priceless.
In the Cascade-Siskiyou area, Tribes can practice restoring cultural prac-
tices interacting in a nearly pristine and undeveloped landscape where our
people lived for more than 10,000 years.
Many people in the Grand Ronde Tribe have ancestral connections and
affinities to the Rogue River region, and the national monument preserves
the wilderness for us and our descendants. Many Tribal peoples in the
region are using the landscape for their cultural practices. This place is an
important vault of information about Tribal lifeways.
Now Bears Ears, Cascade-Siskiyou and a number of other Obama-era
designations are threatened. The most recently designated national mon-
uments are the first to be scrutinized because they have less federal and
state infrastructure built up around them, and so their elimination would
cause less economic and political problems for their regional communities.
However, a reduction or elimination of the national monuments would
mean there would no longer be the extra protection for the cultural re-
sources or species biodiversity in these areas.
Why is this important to Grand Ronde? The Cascade-Siskiyou National
Monument spans more than 66,000 acres of forestlands in southern Oregon
and northern California. These lands are the traditional homelands of the
Takelmans, Athapaskans, Shastans and Klamath peoples. These Rogue
River Tribes, as they are known today at Grand Ronde, were the Takelma,
Athapaskan, Shasta and some Umpqua Tribes of the region. Therefore, the
present monument expanded by Obama in 2016 spans the territory of three
primary Tribes from Grand Ronde and the western edge of Klamath territory.
In this territory were fought many of the Rogue River Indian wars from
1851-56, where our people fought for their rights to live on their lands
against the incursions of gold miners, ranchers, farmers and ranger militia
who sought their ultimate extermination.
Treaties were signed by three Tribes in this area (Rogue River treaties
1853 and 1854 and Chasta Costa Treaty 1854), which proposed peace
between the Tribes and the Americans. Chief John led the Tribes off the
Table Rock Reservation to fight for their lands against the Americans and
eventually surrendered at Port Orford. The Tribes were removed from
southwestern Oregon in 1856 on several Trails of Tears. The removals
brought the Tribes to the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation and many of
us at the Reservation are descended from these people.
Our homelands in southern Oregon were always known as rough and
mountainous terrain. This made defending that land much easier for the
Tribes in 1855-56. But the rough terrain also has not allowed people to
settle there in great numbers. The rough terrain and rugged conditions
have helped maintain a place of great biodiversity of animal and plant life.
It is a logging region, but it is first and foremost a vast natural landscape
that the Tribes adapted to live within for a very long time.
The Rogue River Tribes knew the ecology of the region and lived within
the seasonal cycles. They hunted, fished and gathered from all eco-zones of
the land. Many of the important places maintain our names, like Siskiyou,
Illahee and Umpqua.
At this time, the governor of Oregon has threatened legal action if there is
an attempt to eliminate the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Tribes
on Reservations have little control over their ancestral homelands. Tribal
governments are allowed to critically respond to proposals that affect their
ceded lands. It is in the various federal environmental and archaeological
protection acts that Tribes have a lot of power to protect their cultural
resources and the area’s species biodiversity.
If Zinke’s recommendation is acted on and becomes law, and the federal
government eliminates this monument, it would be a serious blow to Trib-
al rights to have their archaeological resources protected. It would also
seriously threaten one of the most biologically diverse areas of Oregon.
For more information, visit www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/Antiquities/
MonumentsList.htm.
(David G. Lewis is the former historian of the Grand Ronde Tribe
and previously managed the Tribe’s Cultural Resources Depart-
ment. If you would like to submit a “My Voice” guest column, contact
Smoke Signals Editor Dean Rhodes at dean.rhodes@grandronde.
org or 503-879-1463.)
Smoke Signals
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Monday, Nov. 20 .........................Dec. 1
Tuesday, Dec. 5 ..........................Dec. 15
Thursday, Dec. 21 ................Jan. 1, 2018
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