Klamath Tribal Persistence, State Resistance: Treaty Rights Activism, the Threat of Tribal Sovereignty, and Collaborative Natural Resource Management in the Pacific Northwest, 1954-1981

Abstract

In 1961 the federal Indian policy known as termination ended the Klamath Tribes' federal recognition and transferred the majority of communally held reservation land out of Klamath tribal ownership. Studies of the Klamath Tribes' termination generally focus on the negative impacts of this policy and tend to victimize the Klamath Tribes. During the 1970s, however, the Klamath Tribes affirmed their treaty rights and sovereignty in federal court, reestablished their tribal council, and appointed a tribal wildlife commission. Threatened by the Klamaths' actions, the State of Oregon resisted recognizing the Klamaths' treaty rights and sovereignty but succumbed to tribal pressure by 1981. This article challenges the trope of native resistance. Rather than victimize the Klamaths and assume that their activism was merely resistance against a more powerful state, this article demonstrates that the Klamath Tribes wielded more political power than the State of Oregon. This novel approach for understanding episodes in twentieth-century American Indian history further suggests that Indian-state-U.S. relations can be more fully understood through an examination of tribal entities, such as natural and cultural resource departments.