Clark Hansen

Oregon Voices

Indian Views of the Stevens-Palmer Treaties Today

The starting point for discussion of many current issues in the Columbia River Basin is the treaty relationship between Indian tribes and the U.S. government, often established before the states were formed. The foundational treaties between the U.S. government and the Indian nations of the lower Columbia Basin are the so-called Stevens-Palmer Treaties, negotiated in 1854–1855 on behalf of the United States by Isaac Stevens with tribes in Washington and by Joel Palmer with tribes in Oregon.

"The bad thing about history," Yakama leader Ted Strong says, "is that those who write it are those who are going to be believed, and Indians did not write the American history as it is currently documented." Oral history collections can help to bring in the often underrepresented perspectives of American Indians. Excerpts from three oral histories — one from a Yakama Nation leader and two from leaders of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Nation — offer some Indians' perspectives on the treaties and the issues they raise for the relationship between the tribes and the U.S. government.

In 1999, Jeff Van Pelt participated in the CCRH project "Columbia Communities," which explored the histories of eight communities in the Columbia River Basin since the building of major dams on the river and its tributaries beginning in the 1930s. One of the communities included was Umatilla, Oregon, a town on the river northwest of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation where Van Pelt grew up. In 2000, Ted Strong and Antone Minthorn participated in oral history interviews for "Managing the Columbia," a project conducted by the Center for Columbia River History (CCRH) in conjunction with the Oregon Historical Society. This project's intent was to document the contemporary history of the Columbia River Basin. The oral histories included the voices of men and women who disagreed with the way the Columbia River system has been managed and used at various times. More than sixty oral histories were conducted with narrators from many fields, agencies, and tribes, including sport and commercial fishers, former U.S. Forest Service employees, farmers, environmentalists, university educators, business leaders, and Indians in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. In all three oral histories included here, the narrators offered their views on the Stevens-Palmer treaties and their influence in the region today.^*

First signature page of the Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon, signed June 25, 1855

National Archives, RG 11, Ratified Indian Treaty #293

Jeff Van Pelt

On March 16, 1999, oral historian Donna Sinclair interviewed Jeff Van Pelt, a descendant of the Cayuse, Pitt River, Siletz, and Umatilla Tribes and enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). He served as Cultural Resource Protection Program Manager within the Department of Natural Resources of the CTUIR for many years and is now a consultant.

Donna Sinclair: Can you talk about the reserved treaty rights? What those mean to the tribes?

Jeff Van Pelt: The treaty of 1855. To understand treaty rights is a very complex issue. And I'm not an attorney, I'm not a judge, but I'm going to talk about how I personally think treaty rights are by what I've been taught. Treaty rights can't be interpreted by the treaty language or the articles they were written under. The Supreme Court in looking at treaty rights had a very difficult time, so they developed guiding principles called the canons of constructions, and the canons of construction, basically in a layman's kind of a summary as I understand it is, if I was going to contract with you, I'm a man. I'm stronger than you. You're a woman. You're physically weaker. So if I was going to go into an agreement with you, if I was to grab your arm and pull it behind your back and say, "Alright, I'm going to give you ten percent of what we're going to make, and I'm going to take ninety percent." And I bent your arm till you agreed to it, would that be a formal, fair contract that you and me would go into?

No. Canons of constructions as the guiding principles were basically based on that kind of a concept, that a stronger government can go in and bully a weaker government around to get them to sign an agreement. Basically pretty simple. So the treaty negotiations have to be interpreted to mean that the United States government had to prove that the tribe that was signing the treaty knew that they were giving or forfeiting them rights through the negotiations. There were certain things we specifically mention in the treaty. And remember the treaty is going through three to four different changes.... [Y]ou have Yakama, you have Nez Perce, you have Umatilla, Walla Walla, Cayuse. You have a whole host of different tribes of this treaty. There was a common language that was used as a very kind of really informal way of communicating.... There was a certain way that we could talk and we could communicate. And also by using kind of a Chinookan language, which was a language that we used in a lot of our trade areas where multi groups would come together. So the Sahaptin people were up there speaking in the treaty, and at first it started out that Governor Stevens and Palmer got up and they would say, well this is what we want to do in this treaty and blah-blah-blah. Then they would get interpreter, Sahaptin interpreter, interpreted that, and one of the person within the tribe that understood Sahaptin, and then that person would turn around in that language, whether it was ... Sahaptin or Cayuse or whatever, and would in turn tell it to that, and in turn it would go through them channels back to the non-Indian translation. So as you can understand, right off the bat there's a big communication gap. The specific things that our people talked about that they wanted, and when I say ceded — we ceded 6.5 million acres to the United States government with reserved rights. We reserved certain rights through that treaty. And to really understand Indian people and this way of thinking that I'm talking about, how we think, how we live, our laws, you have to understand them to understand what the Indian people were giving up at that time. We specifically mentioned that fish was very important to us, and if you're going to put us on that little bitty Indian reservation you need to understand that our economic base is very broad. We have many horses. We need to take care of the horses; we need pasturing areas for them horses. We need to have access to our usual and accustomed fishing areas where we always go to gather our fish. We need areas to go hunt. We need areas to go gather different kinds of foods and roots and berries. Those are things that specifically they take out into the articles of the treaty. But in reality what we were saying is, we want to continue our way of life as we always have. We'll give up title to the land, but we've always lived off the land. When we go to fish, I don't just go to fish for me and my family, what we need to eat. I go and take as much fish as I can, I harvest what I need to keep, and then I trade, barter and sell the rest of that resource for what I need to sustain my way of life. The same way with hunting. I'll go and hunt and hunt as much as I need, as much as my tribe needs. We'll gather the rest of the hides and the rest of the things and then when we sit down with trade it's our cash, it's our economic base. We still need access to that stuff because you're cramming us on a very small piece of land that we can't sustain a way of life there. The treaty rights have to give us access to our economic base.

Jeff Van Pelt

Courtesy Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation

Ted Strong

It would be hard to find a more eloquent and savvy Indian perspective than that of Ted Strong. Drawing from a broad range of experience in politics, business, and tribal management, he expresses views that often contain a spiritual context and a practical wisdom. Strong is a Yakama who was born, raised, and now lives and works on the Yakama Reservation in eastern Washington. He has served in numerous leadership positions, including comptroller for the Yakama Nation, and was appointed executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in 1989, where he was a strong advocate for ecosystem management for the Warm Springs, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes. In 1993, he was selected to represent tribal views at President Clinton's Timber Summit in Portland. Following an impressive presentation on the panel, he was selected as a member of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, as the co-chair of the Natural Resources Task Force. He has been associated with numerous groups and organizations, including the Pacific Salmon Commission and the Board of Directors for American Rivers. His wife, Alta, is Navajo, and they have three children and seven grandchildren. This interview took place January 17, 2000, at the Cultural Center of the Yakama Nation Tribal Center in Toppenish, Washington.

Clark Hansen: I thought we might begin first by going into your background ... as far back as you can trace it.

Ted Strong: I was born and raised on the Yakama Reservation. Principally, my upbringing was in an area called the Satus Area, and my father and his mother had allotments in this area. And these allotments made right after the turn of the twentieth century, provided our home base and began a new effort for my family to begin participating in a more agricultural economy....

My parents had fourteen children, and with only a third- and fourth-grade education, it took a lot to not only feed and clothe but to give time and attention.... I was born May 7, 1947. At least that's what I'm told. We never, I wasn't born in a hospital, was born at home, and it wasn't until I reached what I thought was age twenty-one and became an adult that my mother and I began this long journey of figuring out what day I was born. They had witnesses to my birth, but they were very general. It was, well, "I remember it was a warm spring day when he was born. I remember we were coming back from root-digging, and I remember it was after the spring migration of the salmon on the Columbia." And I just accept the fact that May seventh was probably the closest we could come, and that 1947 was the closest year we could come to. So I just accept that....

CH: How did the allotments work? How was that set up?

TS: The allotments were designated by the Dawes Act and Congress very clearly had indicated its interest in having unallotted lands to be made available to non-Indian settlers who were migrating out West, and in order to declare surplus lands, each member of the Yakama Nation who was enrolled by the early census-taking were given allotments of approximately eighty acres. And from this allotment, they were expected to make a new way of living. And the lands that were not allotted, after those enrolled through the census-taking process, were then to be made available for non-Indians to purchase on our reservation. This was an act that ran directly contrary to the Treaty of 1855 in which the ancestors, our chiefs of the Yakama Nation, very specifically negotiated provisions that the reservation, with boundaries clearly delineated, would be set aside for the exclusive use and benefit of tribal members. In consideration of this exclusivity, which also included recognition of our tribal sovereignty, was the ceding of approximately 10 million acres of other Yakama Nation homelands to help make the first taxable land base for the territory of Washington. Therefore, allotments were understood to be a further individuality effort, whereas tribal members previously never believed that they could ever own the land. It was a cultural, spiritual concept that the land had a singular spiritual existence and as mere humans, we couldn't take ownership of what was a divine spirit.

CH: In terms of the concept of land ownership, what kind of awareness did your people have at that time as to what they were doing with the [1855] Treaty?

TS: The understanding our tribal people had, and we can only surmise because we weren't there, but the story-telling around the reservation particularly at ceremonial gatherings very strongly suggested that the Treaty of 1855 was really an instrument to preserve life for our tribal nation, that short of agreeing to a treaty, we more than likely would have been engaged in war until the absolute destruction of our tribal peoples came about. And more and more, the white settlers were pouring into the Western United States, and new means and methods of transport, brought more military strength for the United States government, and it meant a diminishment of the tribal ability to retain its own independence. It's an understanding among our peoples that the chiefs and others of the Indian nation consulted among themselves, they counseled among themselves, had prayers and interpreted dreams. They did everything that up until that time was exclusively Indian culture, in trying to determine whether or not the treaty being offered by the United States government would be something as an honor or something as a dishonor. My understanding is that our treaties or our treaty was looked upon by our leaders as a way of preserving what tribal members were left after decimation by war, by diseases and a reduction in the quality of life because of the encroachment of a new order of people and society that was coming to the Northwest. The treaties today represent a tremendous accomplishment in terms of vision and wisdom by our leaders in the mid-1800s. They didn't ask for money, they didn't ask for capital goods, they sought to secure in perpetuity the lands that we believed we were created upon. They asked for recognition of our tribal sovereignty, they asked for hunting and fishing rights to be guaranteed in perpetuity. So the treaty today, as simple as it is worded and as brief as it is in language, provides everything that we need today that we should enjoy a simple and yet very spiritual existence.

Ted Strong

Courtesy Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

The Dawes Act or the Allotment Act [1887] was a unilateral act undertaken by the privilege and the power of the United States government, and tribes at that time around the 1800s were not learned people in the white culture. It is said that very few spoke the English language; very few participated in white education. And we weren't really in any position to consult with the United States Senate and House in matters that regarded these foreign concepts of individual land ownership. And the United States government felt compelled to do what they believed was best for uneducated Indian peoples. At least, that is the context in which they prepared themselves for what later would become a travesty for American Indians who gave up lands and reserved what they thought were the integrity of reservation lands. In fact, the Allotment Act was intended to further diminish Indian lands and bring about a faster assimilation into mainstream society of Native Americans. What began as a journey of conquest by the United States starting on the Eastern seaboard and today the extinction of most Indians that lived along the Eastern seaboard, many then were pushed westward into the Great Lakes regions and into the Great Plains area, and then moving westward trying to find the direct routes for trade, particularly by rail. One of the first pushes to obtain land through the Yakama reservation was for a rail line. And there were very specific Congressional acts that followed the Dawes Act once individual allotments were made to secure right-of-way for the railroad to run through the Yakama reservation. So the Allotment Act was another one of those methodical and systematic ways in which the United States government sought to implement its own concept of manifest destiny. These settlements were considered to be destined for the growth of capitalism, and tribes without any knowledge of capitalism other than trade and barter stood in the way of these very grand theories of economic development.

... Indian people were considered to be incompetents. The direct Latin term that I grew up hearing was non compos mentis. It was something that was stamped on most Indian people's ledger cards. And the agency superintendent each five years had to submit to Congress a certification as to whether the Indians were still incompetent, and this mentality about Indians being incompetent and the Indian agents being the ones competent enough to act in our behalf then made it convenient for Congress or the President to consult only the Indian agents. And the Indian agent was someone that was an instrument of either the President or Congress or both. And when the tribes were put up against this kind of systematic and very methodical effort to further separate Indians from their lands, the Indian agent played the key role as far as providing consultation, and ordinarily would be quick to say that the Indians have no use for their lands, the Indians have not been able to adjust to an agrarian economy. Many Indians are at this point in time, in the eighteen eighties, becoming addicted to alcohol, and many Indians are loath to work with the whites. Many Indians do not pickup blacksmithing and following the plow very well, and these situations made it sound that the Congress was doing a big favor to the Indian people by divesting them of lands that they had absolutely no use for in terms of the ownership concept....

The bad thing about history is that those who write it are those who are going to be believed, and Indians did not write the American history as it is currently documented, and as a result we are very hard-pressed to prove without evidence on paper what our ancestral lands were. Even the very name, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, are disputed among many of our tribal elders. Some of our tribal elders believe that our ancestral lands extended well down into Oregon and perhaps into Northern California and that the principal band of peoples were the Palouse peoples, and that the Palouse Nation was much farther-roaming in land area than even the approximately 11 million acres identified as the aboriginal territories of the Yakama Nation.

CH: ... There have been some accounts that during the time of the provisional governor, Stevens, in Washington, that some smaller Native American bands ... were actually given a kind of tribal status and chiefs appointed or whatever as a way of influencing what might go on within the Yakama Nation, as a way of gaining their support for Governor Stevens or the U.S. government to gain their support?

TS: From my understanding, the designation of chiefs or headmen for the purposes of negotiating the treaty were unprecedented as far as our tribal peoples were concerned. We had chiefs and headmen for waging war. We had spiritual leaders who were the caretaker of our stories from time of creation. And there were others, both men and women, in our ancestry that had charge of customs that were societal practices, but for purposes of negotiating away our ancestral lands? We never had envisioned anything like that, ever! And it was a very foreign concept. It was probably the exact opposite for the United States government. When they organized their government as a republic and the American people did it for a very clear reason, and those reasons which are embodied in the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence are honorable and very noble goals for a new republic. But the actions of the American government aren't indicative that the people were well schooled, trained and disciplined to follow the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. And things like greed and arrogance and authority became the symptoms of a degenerating republic. When gold was discovered on Indian lands, things like greed became the displacement for things like freedom, democracy, equality, and the land divestiture became a very high priority of the peoples who came out here. And for us here in the Northwest, being not necessarily a complete warring society, we respected each other's territorial boundaries. We had identified hunting and fishing sites and other food-gathering sites for roots and berries. And we had identified very specific other Indian nations for trade purposes....

I don't think, personally, that the United States would ever fulfill their treaties. I believe that the United States lied to Indian people to get their lands. I think that the United States government will never fulfill its solemn promises for true sovereignty recognition. So I think that the best assessment is you treat the non-Indian people in ways that make them realize that they are creating consequences for us as Indians exactly the way they feel they're being victimized which is through the economy. So you sue the hell out of them. And it hurts them. That's not going to restore treaty rights, it's not going to restore the integrity of the government. All that's going to do is create a judgment they have to pay....

The question about ... lawsuits I think is easily understood by minorities who are oppressed, and it's hard for white people to see the value in a lawsuit like that. It's not any different than the blacks in America seeking freedom and a civil rights act being passed and their being told from this point on, you're equal to the white American. That's essentially what treaties did. Equality, freedom, justice, they're all states of mind. Courts can't do a damn thing about a state of mind. You can't sue to make someone be honest. You can't sue to make someone be judicious. America is built on capitalism more so [than] on justice. So to hurt America, you sue where it's going to hurt them the most. They really, honestly, I don't think, give a damn whether you get a judgment saying that America was dishonest in its treatment of Indians or any other minority.

So I asked a rhetorical question: So what good is it to sue on the basis of principle? That's quickly forgotten. There are thousands if not millions of lawsuits filed every day. The thing about a damages lawsuit is that it gives the resources back to the Indian people. In other words, the white people stole from us and we're going to get back what they stole in monetary value because they can't ever give us back what they originally stole, which were clean water, clean air, salmon and unpolluted lands. It's not within their power to ever give that back. So you get something equivalent.

I think it's a somewhat reprehensible idea that we should make people in governments be forced to live up to their word. That's an embarrassment. I think when Justice Black wrote that great men, like great nations, keep their word, that's advice for all time. It shouldn't be up to Indian people to teach and counsel their white brothers in the white brothers' way of life. We didn't write those treaties. White folks wrote those. This is white justice we're going to. That's what I mean by an embarrassment, to have illiterate people come and say we're going to make you live up to what you wrote. It should be the embarrassment of the United States government who travel around the world to Tiananmen Square in Beijing and decrying the atrocities against people by the Chinese government accusing them of being inhumane, or who wage war in Vietnam for a decade-plus decrying the lack of political processes that people are not entitled to, and here in America these same things are solemnized by treaties. Who do you tell? The President? Do you tell the Speaker of the House or the President of the Senate? It's virtually impossible to do that.

Antone Minthorn

Antone Minthorn is a Cayuse who has served as chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation since 1997, prior to which he was chair of the Tribes' General Council for fifteen years. His background has been in planning, and he helped develop CTUIR's first Comprehensive Plan, which has guided growth and development for twenty years. Under his leadership, CTUIR restored salmon to the Umatilla River after a seventy-year absence, developed the reservation's economy, and reacquired land that had been part of their traditional homeland. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1957 to 1960, attended Gonzaga University, and graduated from Eastern Oregon State College (now Eastern Oregon University). He has numerous tribal and civic affiliations, including the boards of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, Northwest Area Foundation, and the Oregon Trail Coordinating Council.

This oral history interview took place in September 2000 at Tamástslikt Cultural Center. I asked Mr. Minthorn to describe how Indians in his homeland made their living and how it had changed over time.

Antone Minthorn: ... The men in my family, they worked for my grandfather on plowing, and taking care of stock, seeding, plowing and seeding, harvesting, putting up hay, and taking care of cattle and feeding them. So there was employment there, but then there was also timber in those days. And I remember then some of the men working out in the timber, so that was another means of employment. Or working for the farmers in this area.... Indians made a living, like I'm saying, on farming or berry gathering or hop picking, whichever way they could, and fishing by traveling to Celilo.... And I'm very certain that some of the tribes, some of the people accumulated a lot of wealth by fishing there for the summer or for the season. And some relied on that for their livelihood in that area, the Columbia River Indians. So when the changes came, maybe even before dams came in, you know the fish wheels or different ways of catching fish ... and then the dams, then this began to add to that, and eventually directly affected the major fishery of Celilo and inundated that and took away that livelihood, that economy from the tribes. And tribes adapted by using the different techniques for catching the salmon by those, what do you call them, drift nets. And that worked for a while as long as there were fish out there, but when the fish started declining, then there was no fish to get into those nets....

Antone Minthorn

Courtesy of the Confederated Umatilla Journal

Now my belief is that damage has been done to the tribes, the tribe's treaty rights that they've never been honored. And there is reason for it, and it's the dominance by the federal government in those treaties, and then the federal government having the authority to manage our affairs. And as long as they could do that, then we were vulnerable to whatever policies that the federal government came up with that was assimilative, or to get American Indians or Indians into the mainstream of American life, whatever they thought that was or what they thought civilization consisted of. If that meant taking things from Indians to make them American or to fit into the mainstream, then that is what they did....

But with the changes that came about, like the Self-Determination Act, which is a federal law that allows Indians to contract federal programs, rather than having the federal government or the Bureau of Indian Affairs manage them, tribes can manage them. Tribes can make the decisions. Tribes can administer them. That's a huge difference.

So we're relatively young, this sovereignty gain. But as tribes begin to succeed building, rebuilding their homelands, their nations, their governments, their economies, their religions, their social structures, their music, and their dances. As we begin to reestablish ourselves, restore ourselves, then I think that we will build a capacity and a capability to better manage our own affairs and to deal with the other sovereigns such as the state and the feds, and hold our own in the process, our own educational systems. I think that is crucial that as we sit here today in this building, this cultural center that was built by our tribal people who were instrumental in overseeing, having the oversight over the engineers and the architects and the construction people. That we can build our own infrastructure, our own systems, which puts us on the cutting edge of reestablishing our nations, that we can build these new nations sort of from scratch. As long as we are successful in business, successful in accumulating assets, revenues, and are successful politically and economically, I think we can begin to hold our own.

CH: ... Why haven't [the Tribes] taken the whole matter of the 1855 Treaty all the way to the Supreme Court to get compensation or restore the things that were taken away?

AM: One, the last thing we want is money to compensate for our treaty rights. We've been down that road before, and when we do that, we not only lose the money, we lose the resources. And we don't want to ever do that again. Litigation I think is a very risky thing. It always is. When we begin to think of suing the United States or suing in the Supreme Court or litigation, I think we've got to have the best talent to do that, legal talent, legal skills, because selecting the issue on which to base your litigation I think is critical in this. We've got to win, which we cannot go into with the thought of losing. So we have to be well prepared, because if you go to court and it goes against you, you can lose a lot. And we have been down that road recently here, too, with the — it was the Montana case I think, and with the Brendale [Brendale v. Confederated Bands and Tribes of the Yakima Indian Nations (1989)] where we lose jurisdictional rights on our own reservation, particularly jurisdiction over non-Indians that live on reservations....

This is our home, always has been our home. And that's the way we intend it to stay. You know, is to be our home. And as we begin to gain more power, then I think that we can contribute, we can better manage our affairs, which is to the benefit of all the people that we live with. The whole community will benefit from the tribes.

... We don't have a tax base, and if we're going to manage these governmental services, then we've got to have some source of income, and the gaming provides that. Although we do have grants and contracts from the federal government, but that I think is the tradeoff for the lands that we ceded to the United States Government in the Treaty of 1855 which was over, what, six million acres.

Yes, we have this big fight over the salmon restoration, and we say that the dams need to be breached in order to get adequate water for those fish. And we say that fish are important to the tribes, are an important value to the tribes because of the Treaty, and the preservation of the tribe's culture, the tribe's integrity.... So we are, because of that Treaty, we are obligated to fight for the salmon. We don't have a choice. Whatever the federal government proposes as alternatives to carry out their trust responsibilities to the tribe, they've got to work. If they don't want to breach dams to save salmon ... then what are these techniques, these other alternatives that you've got that's going to work. And are you going to put those resources, adequate resources to make those alternatives or options that you've got work. We will litigate. I mean we will litigate. I say we don't have a choice there. We've got to protect that resource. You have the trust responsibility because of that Treaty, to protect that resource, but you're not doing it. And what is it worth to us in terms of dollars, in billions of dollars for destroying the salmon in the Columbia River. What would I take in return for that?

What I was telling you is that, "Give me back my reservation. Give me back five hundred and twelve thousand acres of my reservation." Maybe, maybe that would satisfy things. That would maybe be a fair tradeoff for those salmon. Give me back my reservation. Give me back five hundred and twelve thousand acres, a half million acres of my reservation. Then maybe we're talking business. But other than that, just don't say we can't do it. You're not carrying out the trust responsibilities. And you know just what they did with us at Celilo. What, three thousand dollars per capita for inundating those falls and that economy to the Indians and their culture. And the amount of fish that had passed that way or the potential of the billions of dollars, millions and billions of dollars that have gone by there that you have not accounted for the Indian tribes, for the damage that you have done to us that you're not accounting for.

CH: At Toppenish, in the cultural center there, the Yakama have made a very strong point that as far as the Stevens treaties go, that the state was not — it was not a state. Washington was not a state at the time, and therefore their agreements were between them and the federal government. And the states really don't have a place to intervene in the matter.

AM: I accept state sovereignty, and I say that the states were formed around the tribe. The tribe was already here because of the Treaty of 1855. The Treaty of 1855 establishes the relationship between the feds and the tribes. But there is not such [a] treaty with the states that were created not too long after the Treaty. I think 1859 was the state of Oregon. They had, the states were created — the states are a political entity. They have elections; they have their own government. So they have their own constituencies. So they're sovereign in that respect. States rights. So as the tribes are sovereigns, and tribal rights are in effect.

So to me, because we ceded all that land to the United States Government, and the states came in and formed a political organization within that, within those areas that were ceded out. But we retained certain rights in those ceded areas, which are within state boundaries. So the federal government has this trust responsibility to take care of those rights, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. But do we have to make them do what they're supposed to be doing?

So my thought has been tribe-state relations, that we don't have a treaty with them, but we must develop some kind of a mechanism like a treaty with the states so that we can do business together....

8e*

The stevens treaties and other treaties and acts relating to the Indians of this region are more than historical artifacts. Theyremain important factors in determining public policy, and their interpretation continues to have a profound influence on tribal relationships, environmental, economic and ethical issues. These oral histories help contribute to a better understanding of the treaties and their effect on people today.

Ted Strong added this toward the end of his oral history: "So the opportunity to lend that little more of the horizon so that people can see not just what the people who are in privileged positions said about this, or those who can afford a professional writer, but what did the more common people really think and feel? So I feel like it's a privilege on a secondary basis to be able to add a personal note of my own, and somewhere along the way, if my grandchildren come along and say, I knew that was how my grandfather really was, I'll feel like I will have told the truth. They will know what that truth is, and I hope it sets a standard for other Indian peoples who come along, that it's a testimony to surviving and holding onto goodwill and good character despite everything else that could have made more enemies in this world, despite all of the turmoil. Which would have created defeatist attitudes."

Notes

^* The entire interview with Jeff Van Pelt and other interviews from the "Columbia Communities" project are available online at the Center for Columbia River History Web site, www.ccrh.org/comm/umatilla/oralarc.htm (accessed August 22, 2005). The full text of Ted Strong's and Antone Minthorn's oral histories are available at the CCRH offices at Portland State University and the Research Library at the Oregon Historical Society, Portland.

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