Coosans consisted of the Coosan proper and Siuslaw peoples. The word is probably southwestern Oregon Athapaskan and refers to Coos Bay and the surrounding region. "Coos" may mean "on the south," "lake," or "lagoon." "Siuslaw" comes from the Siuslaw word for their region.
Location The Coosans lived around Coos Bay, Oregon, roughly from Twomile Creek in the south to Tenmile Lake in the north. Siuslaw speakers lived north of them along the coast and inland, to about Tenmile Creek. Except for the immediate coast, much of the area is mountainous and densely forested. Today, most of these people live in and around Coos Bay in southwestern Oregon.
Population The number of Coosans in the mid-eighteenth century may have approximated 4,000. This number had declined to roughly 465 by 1870. In the early 1990s, the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians had an enrolled population of 526. The Siletz Reservation had an official Indian population of 2,000 in 1991.
Language Coosans spoke two Coosan languages, Hanis and Miluk. The Siuslawans spoke the Siuslaw language, which consisted of the dialects Siuslaw proper and Lower Umpqua (Kuitch). Both Coosan and Siuslaw were Penutian languages.
Historical Information
History The first regional contact with non-natives occurred in 1792, when Upper Umpquas traded with U.S. and British ships. Occasional trade-based contacts through the 1830s were generally amicable, except for a Kuitch (Lower Umpqua) massacre of the Jedediah Smith party in 1828 and their attack on a Hudson’s Bay Company fort in 1838.
Tensions increased with the major influx of non-natives in the 1850s. Although only the southernmost Coosan group, the Miluks (Lower Coquilles), participated in general in the 1855-1856 Rogue wars, all the Coosans and Siuslaws also suffered. An 1855 treaty, signed by Chief Jackson and others, though never ratified, was used to dispossess the Indians of their land and move them the following year to the Lower Umpqua River. Miluks and Kuitch were taken to the Coast (later the Siletz and the Alsea) Reservation, where about half died of starvation, exposure, and disease.
During these and subsequent years, the military continued to round up groups of Indians living in remote areas. As was the case nearly everywhere, Indian agents stole mercilessly from the Indians. Indians who practiced their traditional customs were whipped at a post. Easy access to alcohol corrupted, demoralized, and sickened the people.
In 1860, both groups were forcibly marched to the Siletz Reservation, which had been created five years earlier. In 1861, people on the southern part of Siletz, including Coos and Kuitch, were moved to or near the Yachats River on the coast, home of the Alsea Indians. They remained there until 1875, dying of illness and starvation from trying to farm in a rain forest. In 1865, a central strip was removed from the reservation and opened for white settlement. The northern part then became the Siletz Reservation (Miluk) and the southern half became the Alsea Reservation (Coosans, Kuitch, and Alseans).
In 1875, when the Alsea Reservation was made available for non-Indian settlement, many people refused to go to Siletz. Some joined the Siuslaws while others filtered back to their original homelands and received 80-acre homesteads from the government in 1876. As their culture and language languished, tribal members worked as loggers, laborers, clam diggers, and cranberry harvesters. Women specialized in making baskets and cattail fiber mats.
Those Coosans who did live at Siletz worked at subsistence activities around the turn of the century. Indian loggers cut trees that stood on their former, plundered reservation. Siletz Indians won several small land claims judgments in the 1930s and 1950s. However, the tribe and reservation were "terminated" in the mid-1950s, with devastating result. They were restored in 1977 and given a 3,630-acre reservation three years later.
The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Suislaw organized formally in 1916. They have spent the rest of the century petitioning the government for compensation for their aboriginal lands, in vain to date. The Coos obtained a 6.1-acre "reservation" at Coos Bay in 1940. They were involuntarily terminated in 1954 and restored 30 years later.
The Dream Dance, a local variation of the Ghost Dance, was popular in the 1870s. By the twentieth century, most native languages were no longer spoken. In 1917, Coosans and Siuslaws created the Coos-Lower Umpqua-Siuslaw Tribal Government. A schism in the Coos tribe occurred in 1951 after a court ruled that some Miluks were eligible to share in money awarded in a land claims suit to the (Upper) Coquille (Mishikhwutmetunne) Indians. These Miluks then became affiliated with the Coquille Indian Tribe.
Religion Individuals could acquire power, mostly used to ensure luck in gaining wealth, through dreams and spirit quests. Unlike more northerly tribes, few other than shamans were actively involved with the supernatural; most people were much more interested in obtaining wealth. The most common kind of shaman was rigorously trained as a curer of disease (caused either by intrusion of a disease-causing object, often sent by a hostile shaman, or, less often, by soul loss). The second kind of shaman was more ritualistic; in addition to curing, these shamans also found thieves and promulgated evil. This type of shaman was involved in the numerous life-cycle taboos and especially in the elaborate girls’ puberty ceremony and various other rituals of purification.
The people regularly held large-scale ceremonies featuring dancing, feasting, games, and gambling. Their mythology included stories of a primordial trickster, of legends, and of supernatural beings of forest and water. First salmon and first elk ceremonies were also held.
Government The basic political unit was the winter village group, usually a group of paternally related men with their families. Each major village had a chief and often an assistant chief. An informal council of wealthy men and women advised the chief. Succession was mainly hereditary, at least among the Coosans. Women might succeed if there were no eligible males. Chiefs arbitrated quarrels, supervised communal activities, and saw that no one went hungry. Villagers contributed food to the chief’s family.
Customs Coosan and Siuslaw society consisted of four classes: chiefly and wealthy families, a socially respectably majority, poor people, and slaves (obtained by capture or trade). The classes enjoyed similar subsistence levels; their main difference lay in nonfood wealth and status. Marriage occurred when a groom’s family paid a bride price, which was later returned in a lifelong cycle of mutual gift giving and responsibilities. The dead were buried. Their goods were broken and placed in and around the grave.
Dwellings Permanent houses ranged between 20 and 50 or more feet long and half as wide and were excavated to a depth of about 3 to 6 feet. Two or more center posts supported a single ridgepole. Rafters sloped to the ground or to side supports. Walls and gabled roofs were of lashed cedar planks. Tule mats lined the inside walls, mat partitions divided the several families within the house, and mats or hides covered the floors. Bed platforms ran along the walls. Among the Siuslaw, two or more houses were sometimes joined together.
Camp houses were of thatched grass with a gabled or one-pitch roof. Two types of sweat houses existed. One doubled as a men’s clubhouse and boys’ dormitory. It was square, plank-walled, excavated, and covered with dirt. The other, for use by both men and women, was in a beehive shape and heated by steam.
Diet The staple food was fish, primarily salmon. Fishing gear, used from shore and canoes, included dip nets, clubs, weirs, and harpoons. Other important food resources included shellfish, marine mammals, deer, and elk as well as various roots, shoots, and berries, such as camas, skunk-cabbage roots, and wapato. Both Coosans and Siuslaws cultivated tobacco. Most groups wintered near the ocean and moved upstream in summer to fish for salmon, hunt, and trap.
Key Technology Women made cattail and tule mats and various twined, decorated baskets. Men made weapons and hunting and fishing gear, including canoes. Most tools were made of wood, plant fiber, shell, or bone.
Trade Both groups traded mainly with their immediate neighbors.
Notable Arts Baskets and carved wood items were the principal arts.
Transportation Most transportation was by water and therefore by canoe, of which there were three main types. One was 15-20 feet long and flat bottomed, with both ends slightly raised. Another, often obtained in trade from the north, was larger and favored for ocean fishing; it was flat bottomed, with an undercut bow and pointed prow. The third type was a shovelnose canoe for bay and river travel. Most canoes were made of red cedar.
Dress Most clothing was made by women from skins and various fibers. Both sexes wore leggings and moccasins but usually only for travel and in cold weather. On such occasions, they also wore headbands and waterproof fur or fiber capes. Men generally wore breechclouts or shorts and often shirts and caps. Women wore shirts and skirts or one-piece dresses and woven hats. Everyone wore rain capes of cattail or shredded bark. Wealthy people were likely to decorate their clothing. Some people wore tattoos, primarily for measuring dentalia strings. The Kuitch wore large beads in their noses and flattened the heads of their infants.
War and Weapons Some hunting gear doubled as weapons.
Contemporary Information
Government/Reservations The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Inc., is based in Coos Bay, Oregon. The Coos tribe adopted its first constitution and by-laws in 1938 and has its own land (6.1 acres) and cemetery.
Federal recognition was restored in 1977 to the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Oregon, and in 1980 they received 3,630 acres of federal land. The mid-1990s tribal enrollment was roughly 2,900. A nine-member Tribal Council governs these Indians.
The Coquille Indian Tribe, composed of Miluks and Upper Coquilles, is also based in Coos Bay and has a land base of 6.2 acres. The 1993 population was 630.
Economy The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians work with the federal government on excavating and preserving archaeological projects. Logging, lumber, fishing, and service industries constitute major economic activities. Economic activity at Siletz is overseen by the Siletz Tribal Economic Development Corporation (STEDC) and centers on the timber industry. There are also a smokehouse and a bingo parlor. A casino is in the planning stages.
Legal Status The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians is a federally recognized tribal entity. The Coquille Tribe received federal rerecognition in 1989. The Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Reservation is a federally recognized tribal entity. The Coos Tribe of Indians is federally recognized within their confederation with the Lower Umpquas and the Siuslaws.
Daily Life Over the past 30 years, the Coos tribe has formed several organizations to preserve its culture, the most prominent of which may be the Oregon Coast Indian Archaeological Association. The research center/museum is open on the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Reservation, which also sponsors a salmon feast in August. With the Bureau of Land Management, they are planning a $20 million interpretive center. In the mid-1970s, Indians influenced local schools to adopt programs and curricula relating to native culture. The Siletz Reservation holds a powwow in August; a museum/archive is in the process of being established.
