 "Salmon with Spirit Face" tribal logo | |
| Formation | 2002 |
|---|---|
| Legal status |
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| Headquarters | Bay Center, Washington |
| Membership | 3,123 (2022) |
Tribal chair | Tony Johnson |
Main organ | Council |
| Website | chinooknation |
Formerly called |
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TheChinook Indian Nation is anunrecognized tribe in the U.S. states ofOregon andWashington that wasfederally recognized from 2001 to 2002. It consists of the five westernmostChinookan tribes: theCathlamet,Clatsop,Lower Chinook,Wahkiakum [hr;sh], andWillapa. Its headquarters is inBay Center, Washington.
The Chinookan people of theColumbia River had a vast trading network before and during European colonization. The trading center ofCathlapotle, established in the 15th century, was visited by theLewis and Clark Expedition. The governments of theOregon andWashington Territories negotiated treaties with Chinookans as settlers entered the region. The tribes that would become the Chinook Nation signed theTansy Point Treaty (1851), which would grant them land, but it was not ratified byCongress. Treaty negotiations at theChehalis River in 1853 failed. Chinookans were relocated to theGrand Ronde reservation in 1856, but the ancestors of the Chinook Nation refused. They were not included in negotiations ceding the region to the United States and began efforts toward recognition. In the 1920s, the tribe successfully sued to receive allotments of theQuinault Indian Reservation under an 1873 law.
The tribe petitioned for recognition in 1981, under theFederal Acknowledgment Process introduced by theBureau of Indian Affairs. TheCowlitz Indian Tribe supported their petition, but the Quinault Reservation opposed it. The tribe's federal recognition was signed byKevin Gover in January 2001, near the end ofBill Clinton's presidency. It was revoked in July 2002 byNeal A. McCaleb, afterGeorge W. Bush had taken office, saying that the tribe did not sufficiently document its uninterrupted existence. The Chinook Nation's unsuccessful attempts to regain recognition included a campaign for anact of Congress. A 2023 court ruling overrode a ban on re-applications for recognition and granted the tribe land claim settlement money promised in 1970.
The Chinook Indian Nation is governed by a chair and a nine-member council. Most members live near its traditional lands. The tribe works on efforts forcanoe revitalization andlanguage revitalization ofChinuk Wawa. The tribe's events include the Winter Gathering and the First Salmon Festival.
TheChinookan peoples historically lived along the LowerColumbia River, from the river's mouth on thePacific Ocean to the location of modernThe Dalles, Oregon. TheLower Chinookans, including theLower Chinook,Clatsop, andWillapa, lived near the mouth of the river; theUpper Chinookans, including theCathlamet, lived upstream; andMiddle Chinookans lived in a central region containingWillamette Valley.[2] The westernmost Chinookan tribes, the Cathlamet, Clatsop, Lower Chinook,Wahkiakum, and Willapa tribes, are the ancestors of the Chinook Indian Nation.[3]
The Chinookans ran a large trading network centered on the Columbia River. The largest unit of government was villages.[4] The village ofCathlapotle, near modernRidgefield, Washington, was established circa 1450.[5] It became a trading hub one of the largest settlements on the river.[6] The Chinookans first traded with Europeans by May 1792, when American merchantRobert Gray documented a visit to the region.[7] In October of the same year, the Cathlapotle Chinookans met and traded with explorerWilliam Broughton, who worked forGeorge Vancouver.[8] TheLewis and Clark Expedition entered Chinookan land in November 1804 and visited Cathlapotle for two hours on March 29, 1806. They said it had about 900 inhabitants.[9] The expedition was followed by a wave of white settlers. The United States and theBritish Empire both stakedclaims to the region; the former establishedFort Astoria in 1811, and the latter establishedFort Vancouver in 1825.[10]
Once Europeans settled the area, new diseases andthe introduction of alcohol led to higher death rates among the Chinook.[11] The Chinookan people faced severalsmallpox outbreak in the late 18th and 19th centuries and a deadliermalaria epidemic that began in 1830.[12] By 1850, the population of the Middle Chinookan region was the lowest since 1830. Cathlapotle had the highest death rate and was abandoned.[13] As the descendants of the Cathlapotle Chinookans became displaced and mixed with other tribes, multiple groups had connections to them, including the Chinook Indian Nation, though the five tribes had lived downriver from the village.[14]
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Chinook was originally the name of a village on the mouth of the Columbia. The first source to use the termChinook to label a region was a map by ethnologistHoratio Hale from the 1844Wilkes Expedition. He drew boundaries based on language, which were followed by later maps.[15] Earlier maps, such as Lewis and Clark's, had only labelled villages.[16]
After the establishment of theOregon Territory, the government was required to negotiate land with local tribes. TheDonation Land Act of 1850 established a treaty process, though some settlers had already been present. TheOregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs,Anson Dart, began negotiations with Middle Chinookans with the goal of evicting them, but failed.[17]
TheTansy Point Treaty of August 1851 was negotiated between Dart and seven groups of Lower Chinookans. The final treaty, signed by Chinook leader Huckswelt,[18] would grant the Chinookans land in the region, the right to hunt and gather within the region, services from theOffice of Indian Affairs, and compensation for relinquished land. The treaty was received byCongress in November. It was not signed due to opposition from Oregon delegatesJoseph Lane andSamuel Thurston, so Chinookans lost land to settlers without legal recourse.[19] Tansy Point was the only meeting of all five ancestral tribes of the Chinook Nation.[20]
TheWashington Territory was formed in 1853 with Territorial GovernorIsaac Stevens. He negotiated a treaty in 1855 at theChehalis River with 350 representatives of groups including the Chinook. Stevens planned on moving the tribes to a reservation spanning fromGrays Harbor toCape Flattery.[21] The Chinook and theCowlitz refused to sign it as Stevens's proposal would require them to relocate and live with the unfamiliarQuinault people.[22] Their rejection was motivated by anger at the result of the Tansy Point Treaty. Stevens got angry and refused further discussions.[21]
Dart was succeeded in 1853 byJoel Palmer, who continued his goal of evicting Middle Chinookans. After the tribes refused to move to the east of theCascade Mountains, Palmer planned a reservation atGrand Ronde in Western Oregon. The 1855Willamette Valley Treaty ceded the region to the United States. In 1856, Palmer required all Middle Chinookans to move to Grand Ronde in order to appease settlers. Some refused to join and stayed in the region, where they lacked representation and often married into other tribes.[19] The Chinook Indian Nation was formed from those who stayed near the Columbia River.[23]
The United States annexed most of the region in 1855 and 1856 through a series of treaties, including theTreaty of Olympia, which established theQuinault Indian Reservation. The Chinook were not involved in these treaties. TheShoalwater Bay Reservation was created in 1861 for some Chinook and Lower Chehalis people. However, legislation of the era only addressed a small segment of Chinook people or required them to move farther than they wanted.[24] The nation began pursuing legal representation in 1899.[25] Efforts to receive recognition continued to fail.[26]
The five tribes were included in the 1906 McChesney Rolls, a U.S. government census of Pacific Northwest tribes.[27] The Chinook Tribe wrote its constitution in 1925.[28] It is one of the region's oldest tribal constitutions.[29] Many of the tribe's children were sent to theAmerican Indian boarding schools ofChemawa andPuyallup, wherethey were forced to assimilate to White culture.[30] Under an 1873executive order byUlysses S. Grant, allotments of the Quinault Indian Reservation were granted to "fish-eating Indians", which included the Chinook. The Chinooks sued to receive allotments in 1926 and won the 1928 court caseHalbert v. United States [s], which was upheld in 1931 by theNinth Circuit Court. They received their first allotment in 1933.[31]
The nation continued to advocate for recognition by holding monthly council meetings and by maintaining enrollment lists, which began in 1926.[31] The State of Washington gave it the status ofnonprofit corporation in 1953.[28] In 1956, the tribe's chairman, J. Grant Elliott, wrote to oppose the construction of thePelton Dam on theWarm Springs Indian Reservation as he believed it would hinder access to fish for Chinook fishers.[32] In the 1970s, the Chinook lost their fishing rights after a federal court limited these rights to recognized tribes.[33] TheIndian Claims Commission ruled in 1958 that the Chinook Nation was the successor of the Lower Chinook and Clatsop people. In the Docket 234 decision on November 4, 1970, it awarded the tribe $48,692.05 for the land it lost in 1851. The money was placed in a trust without an agreement about how to distribute it.[34]
After theBureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) introduced theFederal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) in 1978, the Chinook Indian Nation began work on filing for recognition.[26] It began its petition in 1981.[33] The tribe's federal recognition effort occurred at the same time as that of theCowlitz Indian Tribe, which supported its effort. Both tribes consulted historian Stephen Dow Beckham and attorney Dennis Whittlesey.[35] The Quinault Reservation opposed the Chinook effort. It had a rivalry with the Chinook Nation as Chinook people owned a majority of land on the reservation.[29]
The Chinook's petition passed and was signed on January 3, 2001, one of the final days of thepresidency of Bill Clinton, by the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs,Kevin Gover.[26] The decision excluded "those members of the petitioning group whose Indian descent is exclusively from the historical Clatsop Tribe" on the grounds that the Clatsop had lost official status under theWestern Oregon Indian Termination Act and that they had joined the nation later than the other subgroups.[1][36]
A memo within the BIA raised doubts about the validity of the case on the same day as the decision.[26] Eighty-nine days later, the Quinault filed a claim to theInterior Board of Indian Appeals that the Chinook did not meet the requirements of the FAP. The board decided on August 1 that this claim did not meet theburden of proof and affirmed the original decision. However, it said that part of the case was outside of its jurisdiction.Neal A. McCaleb, Gover's successor underGeorge W. Bush, received the case. On July 5, 2002, he revoked the recognition on the grounds that the tribe failed three of the seven FAP criteria:[37]
The petitioner failed to meetcriteria (a), (b), and (c) of the acknowledgment regulations—failing to demonstrate that it has maintained political influence over its members from historical times to the present [criterion (c)], that a predominant portion of its members comprise a distinct social community at present, or since 1950 [criterion (b)], or that it has been identified historically as an Indian entity by outside observers on a substantially continuous basis [criterion (a)].
The decision said that the tribe lacked documentation between the 1850s and 1920s.[31] Tribal chair Gary Johnson argued that the decision was arbitrary and that the tribe had almost 19,000 pages of documentation, equal to most recognized tribes. He said, "The government worked against Chinook all of these years and how can you expect us to have this perfect—and I guess I would use the term 'white man's government'—with paper trails over all this period of time. It ends up that people that are three thousand miles away are making decisions about us without even spending much time with us."[38]
The site of Cathlapotle fell withinRidgefield National Wildlife Refuge, run by theUnited States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). A team ofPortland State University (PSU) archaeologists led by Kenneth Ames confirmed its location in the 1990s.[39] The team contacted tribes with connections to the land, as required by theNational Historic Preservation Act.[40] The Chinook was the only one of the four tribes they contacted that wanted an active role in the project; the Cowlitz andYakama were uninterested andGrand Ronde deferred to the Chinook.[14] After the Cowlitz gained federal recognition in 2003, they contacted USFWS to dispute the Chinook claim to Cathlapotle. They argued that the Cowlitz had lived in the area more recently, and that identity of the Cathlapotle Chinookans was uncertain.[41] The recently formedClatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes, which had split from the Chinook Nation, made another claim. USFWS held that the Chinook Nation was the main representative of Cathlapotle.[42] It agreed to include the Cowlitz in discussions about the area and to avoid referring to the people of Cathlapotle as Chinook.[43]
The tribe and the USFWS built a reproduction of aplankhouse as an attraction for visitors.[44] The Cathlapotle Plankhouse opened on March 29, 2005,[45] ahead of a bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Chinook Nation was hesitant about participating in the bicentennial as it focused on outsiders, and they were unhappy about the inclusion of the Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes. The tribe decided to participate because the event would bring it visibility.[46]William Clark's descendants donated a canoe to the tribe as a repayment for one stolen by Lewis and Clark.[47][48] The celebration included the Confluence Project, a collaborative project between artists, civic groups, and tribes from the Pacific Northwest, with six art installations designed in part byMaya Lin.[49]
The Chinook Nation decided to seek recognition through anact of Congress, which would be less costly and risky than suing the federal government. RepresentativeBrian Baird, who had attended the signing of the 2001 decision, joined this effort. He introduced H.R. 6689, "A Bill to Restore Federal Recognition to the Chinook Nation, and for Other Purposes", to the110th Congress in July 2008. The bill mentioned the Chinook's role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Tansy Point and Chehalis treaties, and the inclusion of four of the constituent tribes in the Western Oregon Termination Act. The bill was sent to theCommittee on Natural Resources and died down. Baird reintroduced it as H.R. 2576 in May 2009 and H.R. 3084 the following month. Baird, along with tribal councilor Phil Hawks, testified to the committee on July 15, but the bill failed again amid debates about the federal recognition process.[50]
The administration ofBarack Obama revised the FAP, which it called "broken", and eased rules on documentation by outsiders.[51] After Baird retired, the tribe met with Congress membersJaime Herrera Beutler,Maria Cantwell, andDoc Hastings, who all suggested that the tribe reapply under the new FAP.[52] However, this revision said that tribes whose petitions have been denied are banned from petitioning again.[53]
By 2010, the Chinook Nation had over 2,000 members.[23] According to Tony Johnson,[a] the tribal chair since 2013,[33] the Chinook Nation's unrecognized status hindered "economic development, the establishment of a land base, the preservation of our culture, the reinstatement of fishing and hunting rights, the ability to repatriate our ancestors’ bones and sacred items from museum collections, and the ability to better care for our community's health and well-being."[54] The tribe's lack of funding led to the closure of itsfood bank in November 2011, and it could barely cover the cost of its tribal office as of 2017[update].[52] Senate Bill 5433 of theWashington State Senate required schools to "incorporate curricula about... the nearest federally recognized Indian tribe or tribes", which excluded the unrecognized Chinook Nation.[53] As it is not covered by theNative American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the tribe has been unable to protect burial sites such as the Ero Boldt Cemetery, destroyed by a private landowner, and another site accidentally damaged by utility workers.[27] The Chinook has been ineligible for federal funding, such as a relief package during theCOVID-19 pandemic.[29] As it did not receive COVID-19 supplies, members had to get vaccines from neighboring tribes.[55][33]
In June 2015, the Chinook Nation launched the Chinook Executive Justice Recognition Project, directed toward Obama. Their goals were for Obama to recognize the nation via an executive order, to enact the Tansy Point Treaty, and to negotiate land for the Chinook. The project included a daily letter campaign to Obama, Clinton, and media outlets. The letters covered various Chinook-related topics and served as documentation of the culture.[56] In August 2022, it launched a campaign targeted at Washington's senators,Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell.[57]
The Chinook Nation sued the Department of the Interior in August 2017 on eight claims. The department moved to dismiss the case. District judgeRonald B. Leighton denied the tribe's claim that a federal court could grant recognition. The remaining claims included a challenge to the rule against re-petitioning and an argument that the department must give the tribe compensation for Docket 234.[58][25] The ruling ofChinook Indian Nation v. Bernhardt sided with the former claim, arguing that the BIA's ban on reapplications was unreasonable and beyond the power of the bureau.[59] The bureau reviewed the rule.[27] Courts ruled in 2023 that the tribe was entitled the land claims trust. The decision voided the BIA's 2011 suspension of trust fund distributions due to the status of the tribe.[60] Secretary of the InteriorDeb Haaland and Congress approved distribution of the money.[34] The trust was then worth $686,180. The tribe was unrestricted in its use of the money.[61]
The tribe worked with state and federal agencies, but its status prevented it from protecting land. It purchased land nearAstoria, Oregon with funding from donors including theOregon Community Foundation, theMeyer Memorial Trust, and theCollins Foundation. The land included a Chinookan village and a gathering place where the Tansy Point Treaty had been signed.[62] In November 2024, the tribe entered an agreement with the Columbia Land Trust to jointly care for land owned by the trust.[63]
The Chinook Indian Nation is based inBay Center, Washington. It is governed by an elected tribal chair and a council with nine members. It has committees on communications, culture, enrollment, fisheries, fund development, health and social services, lands, and scholarship.[11] The tribe's land claim spans from the Pacific Ocean to aroundOak Point, Washington in the east.[14]
The tribe has 3,123 citizens, as of 2022[update].[27] Citizens are descended from theLower Chinook,Clatsop,Willapa,Wahkiakum, andCathlamet tribes, as listed in the tribe's constitution.[64][11][25] The Chinook Indian Nation includes one of the largest populations with Clatsop ancestry.[36] Most citizens live near the tribes' historical homeland in the counties ofPacific andWahkiakum inWashington andClatsop andColumbia inOregon.[65] The tribal council discouragedtribal disenrollment in 2016.[66] The organization owns less than five acres of land, donated by members, as of 2017[update].[67]
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The Chinook Indian Nation participates in efforts to revive thecanoe tradition. The tribe considers canoes a vital aspect of its culture.[68] The revitalization has led to canoes being part of everyday activities as well as events and ceremonies. The most famous canoe revitalization event is theTribal Canoe Journeys, an annual gathering ofindigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.[69] Though members of the Chinook Nation had worked with the event since its creation in 1989, the nation began participating in Tribal Journeys in 2005, along with theConfederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The two tribes combined their resources and began jointly participating in the event. As both tribes increased their presence at the event, they began participating separately, though they continued collaborating.[70][71] Tribal Journeys has helped combatdrug abuse among the Chinook as anintervention method based on the culture's values, unlike common methods that were not designed for Native Americans.[72]
Chinook Jargon is aheritage language of the Chinook Indian Nation.[73] The organization works onlanguage revitalization using informal methods, unlikemore formal initiatives by Grand Ronde.[74] The annual First Salmon Ceremony celebrates the first salmon catch of the year.[27] The Cathlapotle Plankhouse is a cultural center that holds educational events. It was built by volunteers and is located in the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, near the site of Cathlapotle.[75] The tribe uses the plankhouse for events such as the Winter Gathering, a meeting of tribes.[76]
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