Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
Traditional Territory
The Warm Springs and Wasco tribes lived along the Columbia River and Cascade Mountains. The Northern Paiutes had dominated South Eastern Oregon, Southern Idaho, Northern and Southern Nevada, and Northern California, with parts of Montana and Utah.
Overview
The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is a federally recognized Native American tribe made of three tribes who put together a confederation. They consist of the Sahaptin-speaking Tenino people, two bands of Wasco Indians, and the Northern Paiutes. They live on and govern the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon.
Historical Notes
Before 1800, the three tribes (Wasco, Warm Springs, and Paiute) lived along the Columbia River and Cascade Mountains. In 1800, settlers from the east began to arrive. The Warm Springs and Wasco tribes signed a treaty in 1855 and were confined to a reservation. The first Paiutes arrived on the reservation in 1879.
Language and Culture
The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs speak a language belonging to the Sahaptin, Upper Chinook, Uto-Aztecan language family, with historical presence recorded across Oregon, documented from 1800 to present. Language family affiliation is one of the primary means by which historians and anthropologists identify historical connections between Indigenous peoples across time and geography.
Federal Recognition
The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs hold federal recognition from the United States government, administered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Federally recognized tribes have a government-to-government relationship with the United States and are eligible for services and protections under federal Indian law. There are currently 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States.
Indigenous peoples had inhabited North America for at least 15,000 years before European contact, developing complex societies across every region of the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered on the city of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, reached its peak around 1100 AD with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 — larger than contemporary London. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Iroquois Confederacy, formed between roughly 1450 and 1600, united five nations under a constitution that influenced later American democratic thinking. Across the eastern woodlands, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest, hundreds of distinct nations maintained sophisticated trade networks, agricultural systems, and governance structures. European contact beginning in the late 15th century introduced epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, influenza — which devastated Indigenous populations by an estimated 50 to 90 percent within a century.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Source: Wikipedia.
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