The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde hold a ceremonial beginning for demolition of the former Blue Heron Paper Mill at Willamette Falls in Oregon City, reclaiming the land which is part of the tribe’s ancestral grounds, Sept. 24, 2021.
Michael Bendixen, OPB
The Willamette Falls Legacy Project aims to provide access to the West’s largest waterfall. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde hold a substantial piece in making that happen, but they have recently withdrawn from the project. The Confederated Bands and Tribes of the Yakama Nation, The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have voiced concerns about Grand Ronde’s motives in the project and why they feel the need for exclusivity in regard to the falls. We talk to Brian Oaster, also known as “Toastie,” staff writer at High Country News.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: The Willamette Falls Legacy Project aims to provide public access to the west’s largest waterfall, an area that was a fishing site, a marketplace and a meeting zone for Indigenous people for millennia. But for about 100 years now it has largely been cut off by huge industrial works, mills and a dam. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde own part of the site now. But inter tribal conflicts with the Yakima, Warm Springs and Umatilla Tribes are complicating the future of the area.
Brian Oaster wrote about this as a staff writer for High Country News and joins us now to talk about it. Welcome back. So I gave a one sentence version of this,but I’d love to hear more about this. Can you give us a sense for what Willamette Falls meant for Indigenous people in this area for thousands of years?
Brian Oaster: In its heyday, like you said, this was a marketplace. It was an international space where people would come from all over the Pacific Northwest to fish and also to trade. Tribes would come in from the plains with bison hides and maybe trade them for wapato. So it was a bustling international space.
Miller: And then what happened in the 20th century, can you give us a sense for just how much industry was constructed at the falls?
Oaster: If you want to get a sense for it, just try to access the falls and you’ll find that…
Miller: You can try to see them from land or at water level?
Oaster: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And from either side, if you try to go out on the West land side, you’re blocked by an active paper mill. And there’s others [including] a PG&E facility out there. And then on the Oregon City side there’s the old Blue Heron Paper Mill which is decommissioned. It’s no longer operational and it’s now being dismantled by Grand Ronde. And these other industrial structures that have just blocked any public access to the falls since industrialization around the area began over 100 years ago.
Miller: What did that mean in terms of fishing access?
Oaster: Well, the tribes that are from this region were divided up and sent to reservations, of course, by the federal government. But when the treaties were written that ejected them and sent them to reservations, the treaties include this phrase, that they will retain access and rights to their usual and accustomed - “usual and accustomed to fishing and hunting sites” and Willamette Falls is one of those “usual and accustomed fishing sites” for many tribes, including the ones that you listed Warm Springs, Siletz, Umatilla, the Yakama up in Washington. So the waterfall and the land around it, although it’s no longer part of tribal territory or of reservation, is still a place that Native people have a right to access by treaty law.
Miller: After the Blue Heron Paper Mill went bankrupt, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde bought that property in 2019. What were their plans for the site?
Oaster: Well, the plans were to develop the area and, as far as I understand, public access has always been a component of those plans. That is partly mandated by an easement that was on the property when Grand Ronde bought it. So they do have a bit of an obligation to include this public riverwalk. And whether or not it’s out of obligation, it does seem that they have always had that as part of their development plans. But their plans are public and you can look at them online. There’s more than just a river walk that they want to build. There’s these mixed use spaces and it seems like they want to turn this into a really nice welcoming area with commerce for the general public and with a place where you can go and snap photos with your family and see the waterfall and hear the roar and all of that.
Miller: So the Grande Ronde Tribe bought this property in 2019. But meanwhile, there were already some conversations underway regarding the future of the overall site. Can you explain what the Willamette Falls Legacy Project and the Willamette Falls Trust are?
Oaster: It gets a little dicey, but the best way to understand it is that the whole project was made up of two major entities which is the Legacy Project and the Trust. Now the Legacy Project was a partnership of municipalities. So that includes Clackamas County, State of Oregon, Oregon City and Metro. And that group had been, initially, a funding organization that was going to finance this whole restoration project . And the funding organization was called the Willamette Falls Trust. Now the Trust included Grand Ronde and Metro as well and some other entities. And the Trust eventually opened up to include seats on the board for other tribes. And that’s when all the disagreement was sort of set in motion.
Miller: Can you explain what the disagreement is? So the Grand Ronde Tribe basically said that they should be the only Northwest tribe at the table. What was their argument?
Oaster: The reasoning is basically that they hold the treaty, the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 for the Portland Metro region. So that land around the waterfall, they’re saying, is in their treaty that belongs to their tribe. So I’ll leave it at that. They cite that as the crux of their argument of exclusivity.
Miller: How did these other tribes respond to that argument?
Oaster: They said it’s ludicrous. They just said it’s absurd, you know ‚that they’re being treated as visitors, they are treated as though they don’t belong because of the history of the Falls as an international place. Grande Ronde counters that by saying in history, we were the hosts and other tribes would come here to fish and pay us tribute and whatnot. So it sounds like the history is not necessarily what’s being disputed. It’s who gets to have a role and who gets to have a seat at the table now.
Miller: So zooming forward a little bit, in April of 2021 Grand Ronde withdrew from the Willamette Falls Trust and then this spring it withdrew from the project altogether. What does it mean that this sovereign nation that owns a big chunk of the property that is at the heart of this and going to be redeveloped, that it’s not a part of the groups that have been working to redevelop this area?
Oaster: Well, there’s a concern about accountability. For example, if there’s going to be a public riverwalk, which Grand Ronde insists that there will be. When I went out to the property, they gave me a wonderful tour of the mill and they were emphatic that they are developing this to include a public riverwalk as they agreed to. The troubling thing, I think from other tribes point of view, is there’s no one to really hold them accountable to that now because they’ve sort of gone rogue. They’re on their own. They own this property, they can develop it as they see fit and who’s going to really say anything about it if they decide to change their plans.
Miller: It’s easy to see this, to some extent, as currently an inter tribal conflict between different sovereign nations of Indigenous Northwest tribes. But what role have earlier U.S. Government decisions played that have gotten us to where we are?
Oaster: There’s an interesting history there because these tribes now are not the tribes that existed before colonization. I mean what we have now in this region are confederations. And they’re confederations of tribes. Right? So for example, the Klikatat people - there’s some Klickitat people that are now in the Yakama nation. And there’s some Klickitat people that are now in Grand Ronde, just because of where they happened to be sent, by the decisions of bureaucrats and Indian agents and even the president. And there’s an example that I put in the article [where] James Buchanan was going to expand the western Oregon reservation, which at the time the only one was the Siletz reservation. And they needed to get rid of these communities that were in their way around the Willamette Valley. And so they needed to expand the Siletz reservation. And instead of expanding it, President Buchanan decided, kind of last minute, to make a separate reservation instead. And that ended up being Grand Ronde. So the point being, these are not separate peoples in the way that we see them as having these boundaries between them today. Traditionally, historically they were not separated by those same boundaries. So for one of these groups to claim exclusivity legitimizes these colonial politics and these painful histories, and excludes, oftentimes even, family members from participating in a place where they have a history.
Miller: Brian, thanks very much for joining us. That’s Brian Oaster, staff writer at High Country News. You can read their article online.
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