Growing up on the Warm Springs reservation in the 1960s, Charles Jackson’s first job — after mowing neighbors’ lawns — was in the maintenance department at the tribe’s new hot springs. He spent the days jumping on and off the back of his grizzled supervisor’s Datsun pickup, emptying 50-gallon garbage drums. Then he realized that the lifeguards at Kah-Nee-Ta Village probably had more fun. Starting in 1966, he worked around the resort’s Olympic-size pool every summer, as well as part-time and on weekends while in high school. “I thought it was the greatest job a kid could ever have,” says Jackson, who is now a tribal elder at the age of 75. The Kah-Nee-Ta Hot Springs Resort is around 100 miles southeast of Portland, 50 miles from Government Camp, and 70 miles from The Dalles. Generations of Oregonians have trekked through the high desert to visit its mineral waters. Even if you’ve never been there, you’ve been there. Because while KahNee-Ta itself is 15 miles off of Highway 26 on the 1,019-square-mile Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, both those waters and the tribe are part of the same history and ecosystem as Mt. Hood and the Columbia River. In September of 2018, Kah-Nee-Ta was shut down — yet another economic blow to a consistently poverty-stricken Oregon community that had already lost its forest-products mill in 2016, and also a symbolic one given the water’s role in tribal culture. For the next six years it sat unvisited, if not entirely forgotten. Even as the tribe struggled to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was focused on securing $22 million in desperately needed federal funding to update the reservation’s water-treatment plant, Jackson and others were also taking steps to bring the hot springs back, this time with an outside partner. Renovated, reimagined and reopened in July of 2024, Kah-Nee-Ta remains owned by the tribe through its Warm Springs Economic Development Corporation, which also entered into a 15-year management and operations agreement with Mt. Hood Skibowl. It’s a natural pairing, both historically and geographically. Skibowl owner Kirk Hanna and his brother Derek Hanna — sons of car-wash entrepreneur Dan Hanna — grew up going to both Mt. Hood and Kah-Nee-Ta. In 1987 Kirk, who was then in his late 20s, purchased Skibowl out of bankruptcy and began to turn it into the day-trip and vacation spot it is today, including the addition of night skiing and the summertime Mt. Hood Adventure Park. Today Hanna has 10 loosely related companies, including the Collins Lake Resort, the Ratskeller bar and pizzeria at Government Camp, Mt. Hood Outfitters, and the Lake Simtustus Resort. “It’s a pretty soulful land,” says Kirk. “A special place. Just dropping in there and experiencing the water and the culture. There was a void when it shut down.” Tribal members have always come to Mt. Hood, both for fun as skiers and snowboarders (including school and community bus trips) and as ski resort employees. Their access to fishing and huckleberry picking around areas that lie within Mt. Hood’s resorts is also guaranteed in perpetuity by the Treaty of 1855, which moved three distinct tribes — Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute — onto a single reservation (thus, the “Confederated Tribes,” and a continued tradition of three different chiefs). When Skibowl began a series of renovations on the east side of the mountain, Kirk thought that the resort could also add some balance to a region where the river is still named after Columbus, and Government Camp by settlers to commemorate a U.S. cavalry regiment. “I kind of woke up and looked around … and understood that the history wasn’t told in the area,” he says. The Wiwnu Wash Mt. Hood Tribal Heritage Center opened in 2012, and each year since then, Skibowl has had a celebration on the mountain. Now the mingling of Oregon tourists with tribal members and traditions will happen once again year-round, at Kah-Nee-Ta. Shifting Waters The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs have always been known for being entrepreneurial. In Jim Souers’ opinion, the tribe was in the “top third of all tribes in the nation in terms of developing business enterprises on their reservations.” Souers, now the CEO of Warm Springs Economic Development Corporation, is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. But he was born in Central Oregon and grew up on the Warm Springs reservation (his father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Roads Department). Now 64, he still remembers how other tribes used to come to Warm Springs to learn about economic development. The mill that became Warm Springs Forest Product Industries was purchased by the tribe in 1962; it acquired and opened Kah-Nee-Ta around the same time. The springs had originally been allotted to the tribe when it moved to the reservation. It was then sold to a local non-Native doctor, who’d begun charging a few dollars for admission to what was then not much more than a hole in the ground. “Before Columbus found the Americas, our people were using these hot springs,” says Jackson. The tribe bought it back, taking advantage of Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. Economic Development Administration grants to develop tourism, as well as settlement money from the 1957 destruction of Celilo Falls — a historic fishing spot of both economic and spiritual significance — due to The Dalles Dam. Kah-Nee-Ta was originally owned and managed directly by the tribe; that eventually gave way to distinct business structures with independent boards, which is how the Economic Development Corporation operates today. In addition to Kah-Nee-Ta, it oversees a composite-products company that makes door cores (in 2009 it supplied them for Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building) and several other enterprises, including construction, environmental services and a cannabis company. Kah-Nee-Ta began expanding in 1972, with the addition of a golf course, a lodge, tennis courts and horse-riding trails. Then in 1995 came the Indian Head Casino, inside of the lodge. It all worked well enough in tandem, but, Jackson and Souers say, Kah-Nee-Ta Village (as the hot springs area is known) eventually came to be an afterthought compared to the casino. But Indian Head’s location 15 miles from town also limited its potential customer (and employee) base. After a failed attempt to relocate closer to the Gorge, Indian Head moved to a spot right on Highway 26 in 2012. And while the hot-springs village remained profitable on its own in the ensuing years, the emptied-out casino and vacant lodge put the overall endeavor in the red, leading to its 2018 closure. “The closure had a dramatic impact on the tribe,” says Souers, “especially as an employer.” Unofficially, he says, unemployment on the reservation was at 30% or higher between the closure of Kah-Nee-Ta and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (State unemployment data does not account for tribal unemployment, but the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey publishes estimated unemployment data every five years, with 13.2% for Warm Springs; in Jefferson and Wasco County, unemployment hovered between 4% and 5% in 2024.) Charles Jackson is currently secretary/ treasurer and a board member for the Warm Springs Economic Development Corporation. Known to his friends as Chas, he’s the third generation to be involved in tribal affairs, after his grandfather, Charlie, a cattleman who was the chairman of the tribal council for a lot of years, and his father, Vernon, who served as executive director/general manager of the tribe. Vernon was a key figure in the purchase of the mill, while his son was involved in much of Kah-Nee-Ta’s expansion, including the casino and the lodge. 43
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