As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s also an opportunity to look further back—and forward. Long before 1776, Indigenous peoples built the trade networks, stewardship traditions and cultural foundations that shaped Central Oregon. Today, those communities continue to influence the region through conservation, language preservation, storytelling and cultural leadership.

Indigenous Traditions Continue to Shape Central Oregon

Romaine “Smokey” Miller, an elder of the Klamath Tribe, held two eagle feathers, with beadwork on each end, blue for sky, green for earth. He uses them in traditional purification ceremonies, or smudging, to “speak from our heart, not from our ego or our pride…for a better future for our children,” he said. Miller touches the feather to the top of a person’s head, acknowledging that spirit comes from a place higher than we
can comprehend.

For spiritual wisdom and counsel, he goes from his home in Redmond to the Deschutes River, where its current has flowed free and clear for as long as Indigenous tribes’ seasonal travel, fishing and trade routes shaped life across the high desert, thousands of years ago. While the United States is marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the people and cultures who knew this landscape first are evolving, surviving and thriving.

How Indigenous Trade Networks Shaped Central Oregon Before 1776

At the Museum at Warm Springs, Executive Director Elizabeth Woody describes what was happening here in 1776: The region’s tribes of the Columbia Plateau were deeply connected to a vast trade and information network—aware that newcomers from the East were coming. The Wasco people served as a central hub, fluent in neighboring tribal languages, English, French and Chinook jargon. Woody’s own grandfather spoke seven dialects, plus English. These tribes—the Nez Perce, Northern Pauite, Umatilla, Tenino, Wasco and Yakama among them—had long defined themselves by exchange and would extend that spirit even to the newcomers arriving on their lands.

Indigenous Knowledge Helped Early Settlers Adapt to Central Oregon

That spirit of exchange didn’t end with colonization—it adapted. That adaptation came at enormous cost—forced removals, extermination, the systematic dismantling of language and sovereignty—yet the knowledge and relationships endured. When ranchers began homesteading in Jefferson County around 1910, many arrived without the knowledge to survive the high desert, Woody said, and tribal families stepped in to help. Through what became known as “sister ranches,” they taught settlers how to manage cattle through the winter, helped each other with branding, and shared medicinal herbs and knowledge of how to grow food in an unforgiving climate, said Woody, whose grandfather had such a partnership.

How the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Lead Salmon and Water Conservation

That tradition of stewardship—of tending not just to tribal lands but to the broader community of living things—continues in the tribes’ leadership on water, land and salmon conservation efforts that benefit all of Central Oregon. Through its 1855 treaty with the U.S. government, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs hold senior water rights on rivers such as the John Day and the Deschutes. Water, Woody notes, is their first medicine. “We were placed here by the Creator to take care of and to speak for those that cannot speak,” she said. Tradition is what works best, refined over generations. “Take only what you need. Do no harm.”

The Museum at Warm Springs Looks to the Future

It’s a philosophy Woody is now weaving into the museum’s future. The museum is raising funds to renew its permanent exhibit, originally built in 1993. The $3 million project received a $1.5 million grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust, which the museum must now match. The renewed exhibit, planned to open in 2028—the museum’s 35th anniversary—will update outdated systems and expand the story to include where Warm Springs is today and the tribes’ connection to their 10.5 million acres of ceded lands.

 How Indigenous Stewardship Shapes Conservation in Central Oregon

At the same time, the tribes’ philosophy of stewardship is increasingly being recognized in managing Central Oregon’s most pressing resource challenges. Robert “Bobby” Brunoe, a Wasco and Warm Springs tribal member who manages environmental and water resources for Warm Springs Power and Water, puts it into practice. A lifelong fisherman, he can’t cast a line until after the traditional salmon feast each spring—tribes don’t fish or gather until ceremonies have honored the Creator’s gifts. “It’s like Christmas morning,” he said of heading to Sherars Falls on the Deschutes, where tribal members still build wooden scaffolds over the water to net salmon by hand, just as his grandfather did.

Tribes think not in 20-year plans but in “seven generations,” according to Brunoe. “We are very patient,” he said, “as long as we’re moving that needle.” That long view is increasingly validated by Western science. Prescribed burning is one example—tribes were managing forests with fire long before it became an accepted conservation practice. “We’ve read the land, and know this is what’s needed,” he said.

The Hood River Basin tells a similar story: When tribes began salmon restoration work there in the early 1990s, the river had none. Through a tribal hatchery and years of patient work, salmon now spawn and thrive there. That type of stewardship on the Warm Springs Reservation has produced one of the healthiest bull trout populations in the Lower 48. Lake Billy Chinook, which borders the reservation, is one of the only places in the United States where a nontribal angler can catch and keep a bull trout, with a fishing permit available through the tribes’ website.

We’re Still Here. Indigenous Voices Preserve Culture Through Film, Storytelling and Tradition

It’s a place that filmmaker LaRonn Katchia knows well—he grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation and now brings Indigenous perspectives to broader audiences. His Emmy-nominated 2025 documentary Guardian of the Land, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting, and inspired by the 2024-2025 “Sensing Sasquatch” exhibit at the High Desert Museum, explores Bigfoot through oral histories from tribal leaders who regard Sasquatch as a revered protector and spiritual relative. “There’s so much land there that is still untouched, especially on the reservation, and it shows how we need to preserve that,” he said.

He also contributed to Uncovering Boarding Schools: Stories of Resistance and Resilience, about the legacy of Indigenous boarding schools and the path toward healing. “It was an obligation to honor those ancestors, to honor those relatives,” said Katchia, who is based in Portland. OPB had approached him about such projects at the Bend Film Festival in 2023, where Katchia hosted a panel discussion about Indigenous perspectives in film with actress Cara Jade Myers of Killers of the Flower Moon and Ryan RedCorn, a writer for the award-winning comedy-drama television series “Reservation Dogs.”

Katchia is at work on his next film, Songs of Warm Springs, which grew from a discovery: an album of traditional women’s social dance songs recorded in the 1970s, pressed on vinyl and still held at KWSO, the tribal radio station in Warm Springs, and now on Spotify. Katchia hopes the film, expected to be released next year, will allow elders to pass those songs to younger generations before that knowledge is lost.

Brunoe said he carries a core message into each of his conversations about tribes and their place in Central Oregon today. “We’re still here. Don’t forget us.” 

A New Home for Indigenous Stories at the High Desert Museum

An Expansion at the High Desert Museum Makes Space for Education and Exhibits

As the Museum at Warm Springs begins a renovation, the High Desert Museum in Bend is undergoing an expansion of its own. One of the most significant Indigenous Plateau collections in the nation almost left Oregon entirely, but the new 24,000-square-foot-wing will allow those objects to be seen anew.

The new space will increase the museum’s capacity for exhibitions, education and community engagement, adding new classrooms, expanded gallery space and new event and gathering spaces. It includes the renovation and reinstallation of the permanent exhibition dedicated to the Doris Swayze Bounds collection—with some 7,000 items from the surrounding region. The pieces came to the museum in 1990 when the Bounds family chose to keep it in the homeland rather than send it to the Smithsonian or other large, competing institutions. Bounds, a banker from Hermiston, spent her life building relationships with tribal leaders and families, and the objects reflect those connections—some were given to her as gifts at funerals and celebrations of life.

Developed in close collaboration with an advisory committee of Indigenous members, the reimagined galleries will center contemporary Native voices and perspectives, emphasizing the continuity of Plateau cultures and their enduring relationships to the high desert landscape.

The objects carry a power that transcends history, said Executive Director Dana Whitelaw. “These sovereign nations are our neighbors,” she said. “They have been living here and contributing to this landscape and these rich, deep stories that make Central Oregon so vibrant.”

The expansion is expected to be complete in early 2028. Learn more about the expansion at the High Desert Museum, here.