The SWORP program is ongoing from 1995 and involves the copying and repatriation of 110,000 pages of archival documents from the National Anthropological Archives and National Archives in Washington, D.C. to forty-four Tribal Nations in the greater Oregon area.

---

Slideshow: The Southwest Oregon Research Project and its Meaning to Tribal Communities

---

  

SWORP contains information gathered from Native people, many who lived more than 100 years ago. Some of this tribal intellectual knowledge is in the form of linguistic manuscripts. The tribal names are written different ways by the early researchers and are represented below.

 In 1995 members of the Coquille Indian Tribe and graduate students at the University of Oregon went to Washington, D.C., to the National Anthropological Archives and the National Archives Records Administration, to find archival documents related to the tribal peoples of southwestern Oregon. They returned with 60,000 copies of pages from manuscripts, as well as microfilm, photographs, and maps.

Tualatin or Atfalati Kalapuya Indians. Tualatin is the contemporary placename.        

In 1998 members of the Coquille, Siletz, Coos, Siuslaw and Lower Umpqua, and Grand Ronde tribes, as well as anthropologists in the University of Oregon's Department of Anthropology, returned to the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives and National Archives in Washington, D.C., and conducted 6 weeks of research. As a result of this project another 50,000 pages of documentation were copied and returned to Oregon. SWORP II expanded the boundaries of the original project to include southwestern Washington and northern California, as well as more of a focus on northwestern Oregon.  

In summer 1999, David Lewis began indexing the two collections from SWORP I and SWORP II in the Knight Library. Over the next three years the two collections would be reorganized and amalgamated into one cohesive and coherent archive. In 2000 and 2001, undergraduate students would finish the Access data entry and file description in preparation for the publication of an Inventory to the collection. The inventory was published in June 2001 and given as part of potlatch gifts to 44 tribes in the greater Oregon area. The original SWORP Indexes/Inventories are preserved as part of the SWORP collection history.

The Coquille Indian Tribe of western Oregon organized two potlatches, the first in 1995 and the second in 2001. The first potlatches for the Coquille people in a hundred years, the gatherings brought together tribal representatives from throughout the greater Oregon area to reaffirm interfamilial connections. Substantial portions of the SWORP collection were given to these tribes as part of their gift.

Klickitat