Now, on a site that was surrounded by tribal villages before white settlers moved in, the Grand Ronde are moving quickly to demolish the industrial buildings that displaced them. The tribes purchased the 23-acre Blue Heron Paper Mill site in 2019 with $15.29 million in profits from Spirit Mountain Casino, buying their way back to an area their ancestors were forced to leave after signing the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855. It’s filled what the government said they would do and didn’t do.” Spirit Mountain Casino is the reason the tribes were able to make the purchase, she said: “Spirit Mountain Casino has been very profitable for us. The land near Willamette Falls is a prominent example of how the Grand Ronde are reclaiming their place on Oregon’s landscape.Ĭheryle Kennedy, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde chairwoman, looks out from newly purchased land near Willamette Falls in Oregon City in August 2021.
“It’s a place of ownership to a nation that decided that they wanted to rid this land of me and my people.” “When I look at that flag, I see that I’m not welcome,” Kennedy said. government and a termination policy that stripped the tribe of federal recognition in 1954. The Grand Ronde people lost nearly all of their land to broken treaties with the U.S. “American flag,” the chairwoman of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde said. But something else caught her eye on top of a building across the river.
