A Question of Sovereignty

The Enumclaw Plateau, a stretch of horse and hobby farm country, is the sort of place people go to get away from it all. Trout streams tumble through grassy pastures dotted by country dream homes. Big-shouldered Mt. Rainier hulks on the eastern horizon, reminding everybody why they fled Seattle, an hour north.

Then you round a corner on the two-lane blacktop and, boom, there atop giant steel stilts sits a huge metal canopy shaped like a gull-wing spaceship just in from Alpha Centauri.

It is the roof of a 23,000-seat amphitheater being built by the Muckleshoot tribe. The theater is reviled by the Muckleshoots’ off-reservation neighbors, who want it and the thousands of concert-goers it would attract erased from their bucolic existence. The tribe, ironically, stands accused of ruining a pastoral lifestyle with its newfangled city ways.

On the surface, the fight seems like a simple not-in-my-backyard land use dispute: Somebody wants to build something; somebody else wants them not to. But although intensely local, the dispute typifies conflicts between tribes and non-Indians that are proliferating throughout the United States. And it raises deeper questions about the nature of Indian rights in the United States today. What exactly is an Indian nation? And what rights come with the territory?

“The Indian wars haven’t stopped,” says Clarence Bob, a member of the Lummi Nation in Washington state.

“They just changed the way they were fighting.”

Dull words in long legal briefs have replaced blades and bullets. The disputes number in the dozens and range broadly: slot machines and other Nevada-style gambling in California, fish quotas in Minnesota, local taxes in Alaska, casino revenue in Connecticut, police powers in New Mexico.

Whatever the specifics, almost all the conflicts arise out of 19th century treaty rights. In those treaties, tribes were given absolute control over their reservations. Control over land is a defining characteristic of sovereign nations. At least theoretically, that’s what the tribes are.

Opponents say the notion of such independence is an anachronism that makes no sense in the modern, integrated world.

The Enumclaw Plateau, with ready access to booming high-tech suburbs, Boeing factories and the playgrounds of the Cascade Range, is one of the fastest-growing portions of a fast-growing metropolitan region. Homemade signs along the highway advertise hints of farm life gone uptown. One place sells llama wool and burros. Another offers championship steers and paint ball supplies. Yet another advertises freelance software design.

The area was growing so quickly a few years ago, in fact, that local government stepped in to slow it down by buying development rights to farmland, ensuring it would remain agricultural.

The Muckleshoot reservation was established a century ago as all the land between the Green and White rivers, from Puget Sound to the mountains, about 75,000 acres. The reservation has been eroded by legislation, railroads and mismanagement; it is now 3,000 acres bisected by state route 164.

For most of the reservation’s existence, it had been remote. But over the last 30 years, the Muckleshoots have found themselves on an island in the midst of an economic boom that didn’t include them.

The Muckleshoots were among the beneficiaries of U.S. District Judge George Boldt’s 1974 ruling that Northwest tribes were entitled by treaty to half the annual harvest of salmon from Northwest waters. The fish harvests that followed were never rich enough to alter the tribe’s persistent poverty. But the Boldt decision had a huge symbolic impact; it was a sort of Indian economic bill of rights. It coincided with a Nixon administration push toward tribal self-government and initiated a period of economic awakening.

The Muckleshoots wanted a share of what they saw all around them: jobs. They found that the shrunken distances between them and a couple of million potential customers suddenly gave their land value. The competitive advantage they enjoyed was freedom from much government regulation.

No longer content to commute between dilapidated double-wide factory homes and plywood fireworks stands, the tribe plunged into modern commerce. The Muckleshoots have become bingo hall and casino operators, highway patrol officers, housing developers--and now, would-be concert promoters.

Last year the tribe, in partnership with a San Francisco-based firm, started building the amphitheater on a bank above the White River. The tribe did not consult neighbors or pay much attention to their objections. Neither were the Muckleshoots deterred by local government pleas to reconsider the project in light of any potential adverse impacts--mainly traffic.

Tribal leaders said their economic needs dwarf whatever minor environmental effects the amphitheater might have. Besides, they said, as a sovereign government, the tribe is not subject to local land use regulations.

“It’s very simple,” says John Halliday, the tribe’s director of economic development. “An elected government decided to put a civic institution within its territory. There’s nothing they can do to stop us.”

Opponents of the amphitheater found that hard to believe.

“We were very naive,” says Jill Jensen, a resident who opposes the project. “We kept thinking, if 50 people get up and say something, they’ll hear it and somebody will do something to stop it. But we can’t get even a return phone call. We truly feel we are without representation. Our government is working for the tribe, not us.”

Jensen and her neighbors have rallied, marched, petitioned and protested to every level of government they can find a fax number for. Their case is summed up by Chris Vance, a King County commissioner who has taken up their cause. Vance complains that if the Muckleshoots, in direct contradiction of local land use laws, decided to build a city of a quarter-million people on their reservation, they could do so.

“Asking Americans to accept this level of impotence is a violation of our civil culture. And it is simply wrong,” he says.

The Muckleshoot dispute could have occurred anywhere a reservation exists, but such disagreements are drawn more sharply in Washington.

This is due in part to the number of tribes in the state (about three dozen) and their nearness to large non-Indian populations. Even more, it is owed to the influence of Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), the bete noire of contemporary Indian rights. Or, as the tribes call him, the last Indian fighter.

For much of his 40-year political career, Gorton has been a patrician, cerebral presence, more inclined toward intellection than conflict. But for almost that entire time, Indian leaders across the country say, he has been their most persistent--and feared--opponent.

“The status of tribal governments legislatively and historically has never been an issue,” says Ron Allen, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “Now it’s in dispute throughout the country. And why it has surfaced primarily is driven by Sen. Gorton.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court recently reaffirmed a long-recognized tribal right to remain immune from civil lawsuits, Gorton renewed a campaign to have Congress remove such immunity by statute. This proposal, Allen said, “while cloaked in words of fairness, [is] designed to render Indian tribes impotent to protect their lands, resources, cultures and future generations, and extinguish hundreds of years of federal Indian policy that protects tribal self-government.”

Gorton says Allen protests too much. His bill has nothing to do with tribes’ abilities to govern their lands or themselves, he says; it merely holds them responsible for their actions in the same way other governments are.

Gorton, at the moment, does not have many allies on the federal level. The chances of his legislation passing any time soon are slight.

Indian leaders say what gets lost in most debates is a crucial distinction between the recognition of sovereignty and the granting of it. Indian sovereignty is not a gift from the white man, they say, but a power that tribes, as independent nations, reserved for themselves in negotiations with another nation, the United States.

The U.S. government generally has honored the concept, especially in recent years, but not without confusion.

Kent Frizzell, an aide to Interior Secretary Rogers Morton during the Nixon administration, tells of rushing to inform Morton that a federal judge in Washington state had just granted Indians half of all the salmon on the West Coast.

Morton, taken aback, ordered Frizzell to initiate an appeal immediately.

Frizzell replied: “We can’t appeal, Mr. Secretary, we were on the Indians’ side. We won.”

Even Indian leaders say the notion of individual nations existing within nations is at the least perplexing. How can Indians be both citizens of the United States and members of independent Indian nations?

Part of the problem is vocabulary. Despite what many Indians say, tribes are not truly sovereign.

The federal government, while encouraging tribal self-governance, reserves the right to legislate key aspects of its relationship with tribes, including the right to abrogate treaties. The result is that Indian tribes dwell in a kind of definitional twilight. They are what the Supreme Court has called dependent sovereigns--sovereign in some ways but ultimately subordinate to the United States.

In practice, within the confines of the reservation, tribes like the Muckleshoots can virtually ignore what state or local governments say, but must heed the federal government.

So when a federal judge ruled in May that the amphitheater had to have an environmental impact review, the Muckleshoots shut down work on the project, which had been scheduled to be completed next May. The tribe maintains it did so voluntarily, and if it doesn’t like what the study finds, that too can be ignored.

This of course leaves things no more resolved than they were before.

When the native tribes of the Northwest gathered 144 years ago to sign treaties with the new white government, Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe warned that whatever the immediate future of his people, they in the long run would be more easily vanquished than forgotten.

“The white man will never be alone,” he said. “Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”

It’s doubtful that Chief Seattle--after whom the city is named--ever contemplated an Indian future in which the alignment of three cherries sets lights flashing, buzzers buzzing and coins tumbling out of electronic gambling machines, but he has proved prophetic nonetheless.

The power of the dead does indeed haunt the living.