The Siletz Reservation is a 5.852 sq mi (15.157 km<sup>2</sup>) Indian reservation in Lincoln County, Oregon, United States, owned by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. The reservation is made up of numerous non-contiguous parcels of land in east-central Lincoln County, mostly east of the city of Siletz, between it and the Polk County line.
History
Establishment
In November 1855 President of the United States Franklin Pierce issued an executive order creating a reservation for the relocation of the indigenous peoples of the coastal region of the Oregon Territory. A 120-mile-long strip of land was designated for the Coast Indian Reservation. The reservation area was reduced and fragmented by the executive order December 21, 1865 of President Andrew Johnson and by the Act of Congress March 3, 1875. The splitting of collective lands into individual parcels took place at the Siletz Reservation more than a decade before the Dawes Act of 1887 forced division of communal tribal lands into individual plots of each to heads of households of tribal members, with any remaining acreage classified as "surplus" and sold to non-natives. This break-up of communal lands accelerated the process of atomization of the state's indigenous peoples. The work on these was performed "almost entirely by the Indians themselves, under direction of the government carpenter," the visitor noted. Land not already claimed by Native American families as individually-owned homesteads would at that time be available to non-Indian claimants.