If everything goes as planned, members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) will soon be able to return to a land they haven’t had access to since 1855.

CTUIR and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife are hoping to co-manage the proposed Qapqápa Wildlife Area, a roughly 11,500-acre tract of land linking the Umatilla and Walla Walla National Forests.

CTUIR and ODFW received a $22 million grant from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to acquire the property and co-manage it as a wildlife area as part of the USDA’s State-Tribal Partnership Program.

The grant offers an opportunity to return land management of the area to its original stewards.

CTUIR is a confederation of three tribes of central Oregon: the Umatilla, the Walla Walla and the Cayuse. The proposed wildlife area is part of the land that was ceded by these three tribes in the Treaty of 1855.

“That land was the ancestral homeland of the tribes,” Anton Chiono, habitat conservation project manager, CTUIR Department of Natural Resources, tells Columbia Insight.

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