Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) Sites

In 1933, the Public Works Administration allotted $10,000 (about $203,000 in 2020 dollars) for the construction of three small schools on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation (home of five Shoshone-Bannock Tribes), one of which was the Lincoln Creek Day School. The schools were completed in 1935 and described by Rosalie Springfellow in early 1936: “Three fine school buildings have been erected on the reservation: one at Lincoln Creek, one at Ross Fork and one on Bannock Creek. Compared with the little red schoolhouse of a bygone year, this new school is a palace, with hardwood floors, insulated walls to keep out...

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allotted $2,000,000 in emergency rural rehabilitation funds to the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). Out of this sum, OIA sent $32,000 (about $607,000 in 2020 dollars) to the Swinomish Indian Reservation for an 18-house homestead community. The community was completed in the late summer of 1936 and helped relocate families away from nearby (and less stable) floating houses. The cluster of homes still exists today and is known as the “Swinomish Model Village.” In a special 1936 edition of Indians at Work (a publication of the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs), Martin J. Sampson,...

Built in 1940-41 to serve as a multi-purpose community center for the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, this tribal hall is the last known intact New Deal Indian Community Building left in Oregon. Its funding came through the Works Projects Administration (WPA), the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA), and the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC-ID). The hall was designed to support what was then an unorganized group of Indians in southwestern Oregon in addressing economic, social, health and political needs. The functional building provided an auditorium to seat 300, a kitchen for canning...