Siuslaw

Names of Siuslaw groups: Siuslaw, Kalawatset (Lower Umpqua) Genetic affiliation Region: Central Oregon coast # of speakers: extinct

       "The Siuslaws lived on and near the Siuslaw River along the Oregon coast, in an area of sand dunes south of the rocky cliffs of Sea Lion Caves and Heceta Head. The houses of their roughly thirty-four villages consisted of excavations beneath frame-board structures covered with earth. Two or more of these houses were sometimes joined together. Passage in and out was by ladders. Siuslaw subsistence patterns included gathering foods from the sea and hunting game. A small tribe numerically, the Siuslaws on occasion were encroached upon by peoples from as far north as the Columbia River. In 1835 the latter captured and enslaved some Siuslaw women and children. To replace their lost women, Siuslaw men reportedly went south seeking wives among the Umpquas, because that tribe was 'most like the Siuslaws.' It was also said that at sometime before the middle of the nineteenth century, Siuslaw women introduced the practice of flattening the heads of their infants. Not knowing the precise pressure needed for the head-molding process, they watched helplessly as their babies died, whereupong Siuslaw men killed some of the women for their negligence, ending the practice.

       The Siuslaw homelands lay within the southern portion of the Coast Reservation, which was established by executive order or November 9, 1855. Before the Alsea Subagency was established on that southern portion, the Siuslaws were under the Umpqua Subagency (which was off the reservation at the mouth of the Umpqua River). The Umpqua Subagency supervised the Hanis and Miluk Coos Indians and the Kuitshes (or Lower Umpquas). There were 690 Indians under the subagency. After it closed on September 3, 1859, the Siuslaws were marched northward from their homelands to the Yachats River, where the Alsea Subagency was established in 1861. The Cooses and Umpquas were also moved there. In 1862 the military Fort Umpqua was abandoned because the Indians had become less inclined to escape their reservation confine. When a central strip was taken from the reservation on December 21, 1865, the northern half became the Alsea Reservation, containing 525 Indians. The removed strip, encompassing Yaquina Bay and Yaquina River, was opened to whites. The Alseas were living in their own homelands on the Alsea Reservation. They did not ally themselves with the Siuslaws, Kuitshes, and Coos who lived there also. An example of the friction among the tribes occured on September 17, 1864, when the military settled an intertribal squabble over a beached whale by dividing the animal and apportioning half of it to Alseas and the other half to other tribes. The Coos, Kuitshes, and Siuslaws were invited to a congressionally ordered council to secure their consent to closure of the entire Alsea Reservation. Dspite their opposition to the closure, the reservation was restored to the public domain by an act of Congress on March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 420, 446). The Alsea Reservation Indians, most of whom were Siuslaws, Kuitshes, or Coo, had the option of removing to the Siletz Reservation or resettling along the coast. Those who removed to the Siletz were to be provided alottments and subsistence in the Salmon River area in order not to overcrowd the Siletz valley. In 1881 a small number, 67 in all, representing fifteen families, took advantage of that option and moved to the Siletz. In 1876 the government granted 160-acre homesteads to those who had not removed to the Siletz. The Siuslaws among the latter group settled along the Siuslaw River in the Florence, Oregon, area. The Kuitshes went to the estuary of the Umpqua River, and the Coos went down to Coos Bay. Failing to adjust to white society in their former homelands, many Indians had drifted from the Alsea Reservation. Some went to the Siletz Reservation, only to starve because its agent, lacking funds, could not feed, clothe, or otherwise provide for them. Those who had organized gravitated in time to Coos Bay, where they purchased a 6.1 acre reservation, which is in nontrust status.

       In 1916 a few Siuslaws joined the Kuitshes and the Hanis and Miluk Coos to form an extension of the Coos who had organized on their own at Coos Bay. Without a reservation or treaty, the four tribes in 1917 began pressing claims for the lands that had been taken from them. They formed a new council with a chief and legal counsel. In 1929 Congress passed an act permitting them to sue the United States for their alienated lands (Case No. K-345), but on May 2, 1938, the Court of Claims ruled that by their oral testimony they had not proved ownership or title to any large acreage. The Claims Court declared that, as nontreaty Indians (the treaties made with their ancestors had never been ratified), they were unable to establish titles to the lands that they claimed. One judge of the court went so far as to state that, since they had been a relatively peaceful people, it was difficult to establish with any certainty their location before 1855. On November 14, 1938, the United States Supreme Court refused to consider their appeal. In 1947, recognizing that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had constructed a large meeting hall and food-processing center a decade earlier on their 6.1-acre reservation, the Siuslaws, the Kuitshes, and the Coos, in conjunction with the Lower Chinooks, filed a claim against the United States. Three years later four petitioners--the Siuslaws, the Kuitshes, and the Hanis and Miluk Coos--were eliminated from the suit. The Indian claims commissioners told them that they had already had their day in court. On August 8, 1956, they filed a petition with the United Nations to renew their land claim. The international body declined to act in the matter, stating that the claim was an internal matter of the United States.

       Today no one speaks the Siuslaw language." (Ruby and Brown, p. 206)