Our Homeland
The people of the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla Tribes
once had a homeland of 6.4 million acres in what is now northeastern
Oregon and southeastern Washington. In 1855, the Tribes and the
United 
States Government negotiated a
Treaty in which the Tribes "ceded,"
or surrendered possession of, much of the 6.4 million acres in
exchange for a Reservation homeland of 500,000 acres.
As a result of surveying and federal legislation in the late 1800s that reduced its size, the Umatilla Reservation today consists of 172,000 acres (158,000 acres just east of Pendleton, Oregon plus 14,000 acres in the McKay, Johnson, and McCoy Creek areas southeast of Pilot Rock, Oregon).
In the 1855 Treaty, our ancestors not only reserved land for our people to call home, but they reserved specific rights in the Treaty, which include the right to fish at "usual and accustomed" sites, and to hunt and gather traditional foods and medicines on public lands within the ceded areas. These rights are generally referred to as "Treaty reserved rights."
Our Tribal government works to protect the Treaty rights as well as the Treaty resources that lie within our 6.4 million acre ceded area.
Many of the documents below
are PDF files, viewable with Adobe Acrobat Reader
(available for free at the Adobe
web site)
Map of our Ceded Area
Map of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
Map of the Mission area
More detailed history of our homeland and Reservation
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