Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs

The Wasco language, known as Kiksht, has been passed down through generations of Warm Spring Tribe members. There is a concerted effort underway to try to preserve the ancestral language of the Wasco people, through educational programs and language repositories.[1] The United States Governmental policy of assimilation (1790–1920) nearly erased this language.[2][3] The young tribe members that attended governmental educational facilities were only permitted to speak English, and were forbidden to speak in their native tongue.

The loss of tribal elder Gladys Thompson in 2012 – who was the last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht – has caused the language to become nearly extinct.[4] Language preservation efforts include the Central Oregon Community College 100‑level course in the Kiksht Native Language.[5] The instructor for this course, Ms. Valerie Switzler, was the 2016 recipient of the Linguistic Society of America's Excellence in Community Linguistics Award.[6] The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London has preserved recordings of conversational Kiksht.[7]

These bands are split into different places but are the part of the same tribe. The bands of the Warm Springs tribe consists of Tenino, the Lower Deschutes, also called Wyam, the John-Day or Dock-Spus, and finally the Upper Deschutes or Tygh.[8]

The Warm Springs band spoke a language called Sahaptin. Today there are only about 50 people who speak it fluently and none of them are under fifty years old.

The Northern Paiutes had dominated South Eastern Oregon, Southern Idaho, Northern and Southern Nevada, and Northern California, with parts of Montana, and Utah.

The Northern Paiutes' language is an Uto-Aztecan language called Numu, which had around 1600 speakers in 1999.[9] It is closely related to the Mono language.[10]

Before becoming the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs the three tribes; Wasco, Warm Springs, and Paiute, lived along the Columbia River and Cascade Mountains. They all spoke different languages and had their own customs. The Warm Springs and Wasco tribes traded and conversed frequently, whereas the Paiute's language was so foreign to the other tribes that it prevented frequent contact.

In 1800, immigrants from the east first started to arrive, by 1852 around 12,000 settlers crossed the tribes' territories each year. The Warm springs and Wasco signed a treaty with Joel Palmer in 1855 after dealing with their traditional ways of life being disrupted by the settlers for many years. By signing the treaty the Wasco and Warm Springs tribes relinquished 10 million acres of land to the United States and kept 640,000 acres for their own use.

The first people from the Paiute tribe to arrive on reservation were the 38 Paiutes that were forced to move onto the Warm Springs Reservation from the Yakama Reservation in 1879. Soon more arrived and they eventually became a permanent part of the Warm Springs Reservation.[11]

The Confederated Tribes adopted a constitution in 1938, after the construction of Bonneville Dam flooded the major fishing site at Cascades Rapids. Upon receiving a $4 million settlement in compensation for the 1957 flooding of Celilo Falls by the construction of The Dalles Dam, the Tribes used part of the sum to build the Kah-Nee-Ta resort, which opened in 1964.[12]

In 2001, members of the Confederated Tribes persuaded the Oregon Legislative Assembly to pass a bill mandating that the word squaw be changed in numerous place names.[13]