Native Americans in Shadows: Forgotten Tribes Seek Status : Cultures: More than 100 clans considered extinct by government are petitioning for federal status.

The pioneers who built Seattle in the 1800s took the name of a Duwamish Indian, Chief Sealth, for their city. While they were at it, they took nearly everything else the Duwamish had.

Skyscrapers rise where Chief Sealth roamed the evergreen forest. The Duwamish River, once wild and full of fish, is a virtual parking lot for tugboats and barges, its banks covered with concrete.

The physical signs of Duwamish culture are gone, literally paved over by white society. But what of the Duwamish people themselves? Did they survive? Did they scatter to the winds, or somehow hang together through the generations as a tribe?

Such questions are at the heart of a debate involving the Duwamish and more than 100 Native American groups nationwide. They never went to federal reservations, but neither were they wholly exterminated. Now their descendants are emerging from history’s shadows, asking the U.S. government to recognize them as tribes.

They often face an uphill battle. In the 1970s, the government declared the Duwamish tribe officially extinct, its blood lines diluted, its political influence faded, its families absorbed into white culture.

But if that is true, what does one make of Cecile Maxwell? Great-great grandniece of Chief Sealth and chairwoman of the present-day group that calls itself the Duwamish Tribe, Maxwell insists her culture is not dead--just buried alive by generations of white oppression.

“They always thought we’d go away,” she said. “But here it is, the end of the 20th Century, and we’re still around.”

Their continued existence may hang on a ruling expected soon from an obscure office within the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs called the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research.

Since the branch was created in 1978, its staff of anthropologists, genealogists and historians has received requests for federal recognition from 145 groups representing more than 100,000 Native Americans.

Recognized tribes get sovereign status, or the right to govern their own affairs, from enforcing traffic laws to operating high-stakes casinos.

Tribes also are entitled to federal aid such as subsidized housing, health care and college scholarships--which explains why established tribes, fearing competition for limited funds, often oppose recognition efforts.

The federal government already recognizes 515 Native American groups, including big reservation tribes known to any fan of Western movies--Navajo, Apache, Blackfeet, Crow.

Those seeking recognition are less familiar--the Wukchumnis of California, the Paugusetts of Connecticut, the Potawatomi of Michigan.

Some are landless; others have reservations recognized by local governments. Some have big headquarters and paid consultants; others have little more than a post office box.

Often, there is no dispute about individual members’ ancestry. The question is whether the group is a direct successor to a historic tribe or just a nostalgic social club. Documenting that can be difficult. Much Native American history has been buried, burned or blown away.

Holly Reckord, acting chief of the BIA’s acknowledgment branch, has said that it’s as if some tribes were on a train that entered a tunnel.

“We don’t see them,” she told a gathering of researchers last year. “Something’s happening. We didn’t see what it was. Did they go out some exit we don’t see? Did they die inside the tunnel?”

Further complicating matters are scholarly differences over basic definitions.

“One of the most ambiguous terms in anthropology is the word ‘tribe,’ ” said Kenneth Tollefson, a Seattle Pacific University anthropologist hired by the Duwamish to write their petition for recognition.

BIA regulations don’t exactly clear things up. They say any group seeking recognition must prove it has exercised political influence over its members and maintained a “substantially continuous Indian identity.” The group also must prove that a substantial number of its members live in a community viewed as Indian.

Interpreting such terms can keep researchers and attorneys arguing for years.

Some groups have spent more than a decade and $500,000 documenting their claims. Despite early predictions that the BIA would process 20 to 25 petitions a year, the rate has been less than one-tenth that. Since 1978, the agency has granted recognition to eight tribes and denied it to 13.

Petitioners, even successful ones, complain that the process is too long, too expensive, too complex, and too biased against them. Bud Shapard, the acknowledgment branch’s chief from 1978 until his retirement in 1988, now says he “created a monster” in writing the regulations.

“You’re excluding some very viable Indian tribes and taking only an elitist bunch who, through circumstances or luck, have ended up with the documents required by the BIA,” Shapard said.

The BIA defends its deliberate pace, noting that many delays are caused by petitioners. Also, if the agency granted tribal status more freely, “you’d be flooded with requests,” spokesman Carl Shaw said.

The Duwamish stepped up their recognition efforts in 1979, when a federal judge excluded them from an earlier ruling that awarded Puget Sound Native Americans half of all the harvestable salmon migrating past traditional fishing grounds.

The judge accepted BIA arguments that the Duwamish and four other landless tribes in Washington had not exercised sovereignty over their members and had not lived “as a continuous separate, distinct and cohesive Indian culture or political community.”

Tollefson argues that the BIA and the judge were looking for a community based on physical proximity, an outdated concept for a tribe whose land became a major city, he says.

The 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott was supposed to have provided reservations for the Duwamish, but Congress never approved enough land, Tollefson said. Many Duwamish fended for themselves, pushed farther and farther from their ancestral land as Seattle expanded.

Today, most of the 400 or so members listed on the Duwamish Tribe’s rolls are scattered over several counties. They are teachers, computer specialists and fishermen, fully involved in mainstream society.

But Maxwell says they still are a Native American community, too, connected by phone calls and faxed notices of funerals, by annual meetings and salmon dinners shared with cousins.

“Everybody knows everybody in Indian country,” she said.

Tollefson said it is surprising the Duwamish have stuck together at all through decades of discrimination aimed at driving them apart.

Because of mixed ancestry--there are few, if any, full-blooded Duwamish left--most Duwamish could join recognized tribes and receive economic benefits.

“But they don’t,” Tollefson said. “Their identity is Duwamish.”

The recognized Tulalip tribe, north of Seattle, opposes the petitions of the Duwamish and Washington’s other unrecognized tribes.

Tulalip chairman Stan Jones said the unrecognized tribes’ ancestors had a chance in the 1800s to move to reservations like the one his tribe now occupies. They stayed away, he said, hoping to avoid the reservations’ stigma.

“It’s nice to be an Indian now,” Jones said. “They say they want to be part of a reservation, now that it’s for economic benefit.”

The Duwamish were encouraged in April when the nearby Snoqualmie tribe, also declared extinct in 1979, received preliminary recognition from the BIA.

But Maxwell is girding for the worst. She said she has learned not to invest too much hope in a government that for so long tried to eliminate or ignore her people.

“If they rule against us, we will still be Duwamish,” she said. “We will still be Indian. They can’t take that away from us.”