American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The coast Indians between Cape Arago and Cape Foulweather have at one time been very numerous, the number of Indian graves and the vestiges of former habitations go to show that every stream and every nook was densely populated. Like most Indian tribes in the United States, the Coquille Indian tribe, from the southern Oregon Coast, has been marginalized politically, socially, and economically by the changing policies and laws enacted by the US government. This article is a personal and tribal history outlining the steps the Coquille took to strengthen its claim to tribal sovereignty through investment in tribal education, active participation in academic research, and the reestablishment of relationships through potlatches (gift giving). One of its most successful endeavors was initiated by Coquille scholars in 1995; called the Southwest Oregon Research Project (SWORP), it has been a major contributor to the Coquille tribe’s cultural revitalization and return to socioeconomic and regional political prominence. SWORP has become a celebrated archival research model whose focus on the repatriation of tribal intellectual properties is now revealing expansive collections that reside in private and government archives. These collections have been copied from the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History’s National Anthropological Archives and the National Archives and returned to tribal and local libraries where they are easily accessible to tribal and nontribal scholars alike. This collection now comprises nearly 110,000 pages including maps, journals, linguistic and ethnographic field notes, military documents, voice recordings, and information relevant to the Coquille and other tribes from Oregon and surrounding states. These collections are centrally archived at the University of Oregon’s Knight Library and the Coquille Indian Tribal Library; in addition, pertinent documents have been copied and “potlatched” to tribes in Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Washington, and Oklahoma. This paper chronicles the Coquille’s history, the inception of SWORP, the processes of two archival research projects in 1995 and 1998, and the reinstitution of the Coquille potlatch.