Northwest’s Chinook Indians Fight for Recognition

When the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the Pacific in the winter of 1805--wet, cold and heartily sick of venison and dried salmon--the locals took pity on them.

“They were huddled for over 10 days in total misery on the north side of the river in storms at a place they called Station Camp,” said Gary Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Tribe, now based just west of the site.

“Some Chinook people came along in a canoe and helped them out and continued to trade food with them and help them make it through the winter.”

These days, as the nation gears up for the 200th anniversary of the overland survey by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that opened the West to white settlement, the Chinook are battling for recognition by the U.S. government.

At the same time, they are being asked--”almost on a daily basis,” Johnson said--to participate in commemoration activities.

“They want their input, but they don’t want to recognize them,” said Dennis Whittlesey of Washington, D.C., the exasperated attorney who has worked on Chinook recognition for 22 years.

Bureau of Indian Affairs Director Kevin Gover himself has written to ask that the tribe take part, Johnson said.

Has Gover noted the irony of his request?

“I don’t know if he notes it, but we certainly do,” the chairman said in a recent telephone interview from tribal offices in the tiny, remote town of Chinook near the state’s southwest tip.

The Chinook do intend to participate, Johnson said.

“We see it as a real opportunity to tell our story,” he said.

“It would be terribly ironic if a tribe identified in the journals as having had direct and extensive interaction with the Voyage of Discovery were not recognized” during the bicentennial, said U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who has written to the BIA in support of recognition for the tribe.

By the time Lewis and Clark arrived, the Chinook had been trading for several years with ocean-borne visitors who wanted furs. But the surveyors were after “something not very intelligible: information,” said tribal historian Stephen Dow Beckham, a professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.

While other late 18th and early 19th century visitors had arrived by sea and then sailed away, the surveyors rafted in on the river, built Ft. Clatsop on the Oregon and stayed for months, “so the tenor of the relationship was a bit different,” Beckham said. “It must have caused them great wonderment. Why had these people come with their beads and fishhooks and copper kettles?”

The Chinook gave the visitors food, woven hats and a wealth of information about local flora and fauna, rivers and villages--and their own people.

It’s not clear why the Chinook were knocked off the list of federally recognized tribes.

“There is no act, no document, terminating the relationship,” Beckham said.

Whittlesey said the tribe was recognized until about 30 years ago, but somewhere along the line they became nonexistent.

The tribe filed a petition for recognition with the Interior Department in 1981. The BIA issued a preliminary decision against them in 1997, and the tribe appealed.

Johnson said the agency overlooked “a vast amount” of material submitted by the tribe and later found in a BIA desk drawer. The agency promised to use the additional documents in their review, he said.

BIA officials did not return repeated calls for comment.

Word is a decision has already been made and is awaiting Gover’s signature--expected before the Bush administration takes over.

In the meantime, “we just say that we are recognized--we have just been left off one list of acknowledged tribes,” Johnson said.

“We deal with all the state and federal agencies, and our tribal office is basically funded by a government grant,” he said. “Our families went to Indian schools and the Indian Health Service.”

And tribal members hold land allotments on the Quinault Reservation--a privilege extended under an 1887 law only to federally recognized tribal members.

The Chinook allotments were ordered under a 1931 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the Quinault reservation had been expanded in 1872--from 10,000 acres to 220,000 acres--to accommodate a total of eight tribes, including the Chinook. Chinook people own 52% of the allotted land at Quinault, Whittlesey said.

Allotment earnings--usually from the logging of timber on the land holdings--are passed on to the Chinook, as are earnings from trust accounts managed by the BIA, now being sued for billions in tribal funds lost to mismanagement.

The Chinook may have lost federal recognition in part because they have no reservation. That put them at a disadvantage during the Nixon administration, when policies of “self-determination” favored tribes with a land base, Whittlesey said.

The tribe has 2,110 registered members, but there are more, Johnson said.

They’d like a land base in “Chinook Country,” along the Columbia and Willapa Bay, he said. That’s a long way from the Quinault reservation, about 75 miles north on the Pacific Coast.