The Happy Hunting Ground of Southern Oregon

"This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me."
       Woody Guthrie 1940

Southern Oregon Indian tribes are fighting over turf. 

The local regional university, Southern Oregon University, has a prescribed Land Acknowledgement Statement. It begins:

We want to take this moment to acknowledge that Southern Oregon University is located within the ancestral homelands of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples who lived here since time immemorial. These Tribes were displaced during rapid Euro-American colonization, the Gold Rush, and armed conflict between 1851 and 1856. In the 1850s, discovery of gold and settlement brought thousands of Euro-Americans to their lands, leading to warfare, epidemics, starvation, and villages being burned. . . .

The notion that this was the rightful and permanent home of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa from the beginning and until displaced by White settlers, is a premise. It might be true. But the geography of tribes in Southern Oregon suggests a different, more contentious past. Humans are in constant movement in an effort to find and control better fishing and hunting opportunities, even if it is currently controlled by another tribe. I presume it happened in the past in Southern Oregon because it is happening here today. The various tribes are fighting over turf, a fight played out with lobbyists, lawyers, strategic donations to politicians' campaigns and non-profits, with governors and state legislatures, in Congress, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and in the courts. They are fighting for the right to earnings from gamblers, the modern-day equivalent of deer, elk, and salmon.

Tam Moore has been a journalist for seven decades. He is a Vietnam veteran and a former Jackson County Commissioner. He has observed and reported news for KOBI television and in print for the Capital Press. He lives in Medford, Oregon.

Tam Moore at 90

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Folks living in Medford, Oregon may wonder whose land it really is. On January 10, 2025 the U.S. Department of Interior on declared that 2.4 acres of land part of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s reservation. It is one of three decisions by the assistant secretary for Indian affairs issued in the closing days of the Biden administration that clear the way for tribes – once disbanded by federal order, now restored – to open gambling facilities on lands a significant distance from their ancestral homelands. 

The Department of Interior’s Medford decision is under legal challenge in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where one of the other two casino sites was litigated before being granted. Interior rests the Medford decision on the 1998 Coquille Restoration Act, which authorized the tribe to serve its members living in a five-county service area – Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson and Lane counties.

Interior found that law gives the secretary of interior “trust land acquisition authority within the service area.”  The Tribe’s headquarters and exiting casino are 168 highway miles from Medford.

 

Here’s a map from the 1976 Atlas of Oregon which shows by language group and geographic territory, where tribes were located in 1850.

That’s a critical benchmark year for all tribes, because as White settlers swarmed into Oregon Territory – statehood came in 1859 – native peoples were dispossessed. By 1857 the government ordered all indigenous people west of the Cascade Mountains to either the Siletz or Grand Ronde Indian Reservations. 

The Coquille ancestral lands were in the coastal river drainage of the same name and some of the streams and sloughs of Coos Bay. They never had a reservation; the Treaty of 1855 removed the Coquille to the Siletz Reservation. But tribal records show many folks didn’t go and remained living in their aboriginal territory. The Coquille opened a casino, “The Mill” in 2000 on a site next to Coos Bay. In 2012 they purchased a Medford bowling alley and adjoining land, applying for the federal designation finally issued nearly 13 years later. Interior found that revenues from The Mill “are no longer able to keep pace with needs of the Tribe.” In addition, the Coos and Lower Umpqua Tribes opened a competing casino three miles from The Mill. 

Tribal casinos in Oregon and on its borders:

 

The January 10 Interior decision touched off quick moves by the Coquille. Their warranty deed transferring the bowling alley to the United States was presented to the Jackson County Clerk at 10 a.m. on January 13.  By January 14 when Rogue Valley Times visited Roxy’s Bar and Grill located in part of the former bowling alley, electronic gaming machines were on site and being played. Interior didn’t publish its record of decision in the Federal Register until the next day. 

Below: Players gamble on Class II gaming devices at the planned site for The Cedars at Bear Creek casino. Photo by Buffy Pollock, Rogue Valley Times.

The public record isn’t clear on when, or if, the tribe has filed a license with the Federal Indian Gaming Commission for the additional location. That law requires the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when considering new gambling site applications, to consult with other tribes and governments in the region—“the Secretary shall consult with tribes and appropriate  state or local officials. . . .”  

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