A tribal drum group lends the rhythmic beat for a dance competition during the powwow for the Grand Ronde Confederation’s 25th Anniversary Restoration Celebration Powwow at Spirit Mountain Casino on Nov. 21-22.

Marcus Larson
News-Register

It has been 25 years since President Ronald Reagan signed House Resolution 3885 restoring the legal status of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

The date was Nov. 22, 1983, and the victory had come only after an 11-year struggle on the part of a group of determined tribal members who refused to give up, despite obstacles placed in their path at nearly every step along the way.

To them, this was about the violation of principles so fundamental to human rights and dignity they could no longer be allowed to go unchallenged.

The U.S. government had seized some 69,000 acres of their ancestral lands in 1853 with the false promise of other good land — a dedicated reservation — in perpetuity. That pledge was broken again and again amid ongoing abuse and mistreatment of the native people.

Piece by piece, the supposedly ceded lands were taken back through processes that amounted to little more than legal thievery. The final and harshest indignity of all came in 1953 when tribes were disbanded — officially terminated by law — and native Americans were told they had to assimilate into mainstream society.

It was as if immigrants of English-Scottish heritage were told they could no longer claim that birthright. Even more debasing, it was essentially the right of might — the same immutable, Darwinian law that stronger societies have imposed on weaker ones throughout history:

Not only are we denying you your heritage, we are confiscating land that has been yours for centuries because you don’t have the ability to resist what we’re doing.

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However, 19 years and a near sea change in ethical views later, there appeared to be support at all levels of government for Grand Ronde tribal members to feel they had a chance to regain their rightful status.

They had important allies, including Congressman Les AuCoin and his successor, Elizabeth Furse, who worked for the Oregon Legal Services’ Native American Program at the time, and provided invaluable assistance to the effort.

Between 1979 and 1983, attorney and Native American Program founding director Don Wharton made tribal restorations the primary mandate of his organization.

“What was going on in the ‘70s is that the civil rights movement focused its larger lens on minority rights,” he said. “We had to survey the political landscape and start figuring out how to do the advocacy. It starts at the local level. Building relationships.”

Tribal Elder Kathryn Harrison, who became involved with the group in 1979, was one of its key figures. She was elected to seven straight terms on the council before retiring at the end of 2001.

She was temporary Tribal Chair in 1983, when restoration was finally achieved, and elected chair for two terms between 1996 and 2002.

Harrison stressed that one of their most important tasks was getting out and explaining about Termination. A lot of people had no idea what had happened to native Americans,” she said.

Wharton said of her, “Kathryn brought an enormous amount of credibility and focus to the leadership. She became an icon for the tribe and its efforts.”

“It was a great group of people who met at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in those days,” she recalled. “Mark, Darrell and Dean Mercier, Russ and Merle Leno, Candy Robinson, Henry Petite, and my son, Frank, were council members then.

“When I joined the tribal council we began applying for grants. We were pretty poor and every little bit helped. We raised money from bake sales and passing the hat.”

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Support from McKenzie River Gathering, Church Women United and the Association for Native Americans allowed them to hire Furse and paid for trips to Washington, D.C. They took the red eye and stayed in Quaker hostels.

“Oh, do I remember those trips,” Harrison said. “We really operated on a shoestring, but Elizabeth got us in to talk with the right committee people, and our own Congressional members — Senator Hatfield and Representative AuCoin — advised us on strategy.”

That strategy centered around getting Restoration through first and waiting to ask for reinstatement of other rights later. As Furse put it in an interview this year, “What we got was a very strong bill for Grand Ronde with the opportunity to come back two years later to do a reservation bill.”

In fact, it was five years before the Grand Ronde Reservation Act of 1988 was passed despite opposition from timber interests that didn’t want any federal lands given back and hunters who thought some of their best territory would become off-limits.

Then began the process, as Harrison put it, “To find a way that we could become self-sustaining.” She recalled that almost from the time Restoration was granted, gambling interests began knocking at their door.

“It was mostly bingo hall operators,” she said. “We started looking into economic development. We put money from the sale of timber off our 9,811 acres of restored land into an endowment fund.”

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In the early 1990s, Harrison, Bruce Thomas, Robert Watson, Merle Holmes and Dean Mercier headed a tribal committee that began evaluating the possibilities. In 1994, tribal membership voted to pursue gaming opportunities.

A delegation visited the Parks Creek Band in Alabama, which ran a successful bingo concern, and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Minnesota, whose Mystic Lakes Hotel Casino was already the envy of many tribes.

“We got a lot of valuable input from Mystic Lakes,” Harrison said. “When we decided this was the way to go, it made so much sense. A casino would employee people, it would keep the money here in Oregon and, most of all, it would help us help ourselves.”

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Well, recent, anyway. Spirit Mountain Casino opened it doors in October 1995. A health clinic for all tribal members and Grand Meadows, the tribe’s first housing development, were completed in 1997.

That same year the Spirit Mountain Community Foundation was established and mandated to give six percent of net casino profits to worthy causes in western Oregon.

In 1998, Spirit Mountain Lodge and the Tribal Governance office both opened. In 1999, the tribal council enacted a plan to distribute 25 percent of net casino revenues to tribal members.

Over the past 25 years, membership in the Grand Ronde Confederation of tribes — has grown from 862 at termination in 1953, to 1,100 at restoration in 1983 to more than 5,100 today.

On its Silver anniversary, the restored Confederation has a great deal to be thankful for and a grand tradition to uphold.

“It is our duty to plan for seven generations,” Harrison said. “Our belief is that the land belongs not to us, but to our children and their children and their children’s children and their children’s, children’s children. That gives us the courage to go on.”