Tribes of the Oregon Country: Cultural Plant Harvests and Indigenous Relationships with Ancestral Lands in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

Documented human presence in Oregon dates to at least 12,000 to 14,500 years ago, and Oregon Tribes “have ongoing legal, ecological, and cultural relationships with their ancestral lands even when they have been forcibly removed from them.” In this article, the authors discuss research they conducted to document the importance of understanding Native cultural plant harvesting and access rights on U.S. government land. The authors argue that “to sustain the Pacific Northwest's ecosystems and all the people who now call the region home, then there is a role for management that includes traditional knowledge....because Indigenous systems for tending plants and animals have been influencing forests and sustaining humans for millennia.”