-[ Speaking native language ]
To all you people.
[ Speaking native language ]
You're my friends, my relatives.
[ Speaking native language ]
My name is Waqusqideb.
[ Speaking native language ]
I am Snohomish.
[ Speaking native language ]
Traveled in the Blue Heron Canoe.
And so I've been on the Salish Seas
on the coast of Washington and Vancouver Island
up the inside passage throughout Puget Sound.
We went so far past the inside passage;
was closer to Alaska than it was to Washington.
And I've been doing it for a couple of years.
And so I know a little bit about the Salish Seas; just a little.
And so I'm also the Father of the Blue Heron Canoe.
And I've got a feather, several other hats;
President of Sduhubs Cultural and Family Services.
I've been working with the Greater Kent Historical Society
and their museum down in Kent, and a few other hats.
The snow had stopped the Native gift making
that we are doing with Edmond College.
And I've been getting ready planning on the trip.
So for instance,
how am I going to get a moving van
where the nearest town is 11 miles away?
So I got to make arrangements for all that.
And so I've been working on that,
replacement of things like moving vans,
so I've been pretty busy.
And I got invited to this.
I don't understand much about it,
but I do recognize a face or two, and that feels pretty good.
So I wanted to introduce Snohomish tribal member.
I understand he's got two doctorates.
Only the one?
You know, they said that I have now three PhDs,
post hole diggers.
You don't have to laugh. They're not that funny.
And you're with some fellowships
and you've got a lot of awards and check out his bio,
it's pretty impressive.
But I want to introduce him. He's been to our meetings.
He's been -- I've taught class to his mom
and his sister and a few other things like that.
And so he's like a brother,
but I'm introducing him somebody that's up here
and he is up there.
So thank you, Josh Reid.
[ Applause ]
-Okay, so how am I supposed to follow that?
All right, let me just change things up here.
So I would like to take a moment
to thank several people for making tonight's talk happen,
including Nick Grall and Glennys Young
from the History Department. Along with, of course,
Mike Evans, my tribal chairman
of the Snohomish Tribe of Indians.
I would also like to thank the American Indian Studies Chair,
Chris Teuton,
who will be moderating the question-and-answer
session at the end of my presentation.
Now, I'm opening here with a two-part acknowledgement,
a variation of what many of you
might think you recognize as a land acknowledgement.
So today we meet on the historical
and contemporary lands of the Duwamish,
Suquamish and Muckleshoot
nations and other Coast Salish peoples
who call the water and coastline of the Salish Sea Home.
What I'm doing with this evening's acknowledgement
though, is more than just the usual token performance.
I began choosing to only provide a land acknowledgement
at public events like this
if I can also highlight an opportunity
for audience members to give to a local indigenous organization.
And tonight,
that organization is the University of Washington's
Marvin Oliver Memorial Endowed Fund
for Undergraduate Students in American Indian Studies.
The QR code on the screen
gives you all an opportunity to do this.
I also prefer to only give an acknowledgement
when I have a moment to unpack some important words within it,
which I would like to do now.
Peoples; I use the plural form of this word
when discussing indigenous peoples
because it highlights the diversity
of Native North America.
Many non-Natives mistakenly assume
that American Indians or First Nations peoples
are all one monolithic cultural group, the Indians, right?
Historical and contemporary;
too often non-Natives are comfortable studying
or thinking about indigenous peoples
in the safety of the past.
They mistakenly assume that Native peoples,
especially authentic ones, do not exist today.
Lands and waters;
for many indigenous peoples,
especially those in the Pacific Northwest,
both land and water
were important components of their homes.
They derived a rich living from the land, sea,
rivers, and lakes, and many still depend on these spaces
for their livelihoods today.
And nations; this word speaks to the particular association
that indigenous peoples have with the United States.
These are tribal nations
that have specific political relationships
with the larger nation state.
So that was Part 1 of the acknowledgement.
The other part is what I like to think of
as my accountability acknowledgement.
As a UW professor working on indigenous homelands,
I am accountable to supporting Native students
and the tribal nations with whom I work.
I do this in various ways on campus
through the classes I teach,
and the undergraduate and graduate
students I mentor
by donating annually to the Marvin Oliver Fund.
Beyond campus,
I do this by working collaboratively
with Native Nations,
by developing curricula for K through 12 schools,
and by serving as an expert witness at times
among other commitments.
And I would like to challenge each person here,
or every organization that does a land acknowledgement,
to consider ways that they are accountable
to indigenous peoples.
Just acknowledging a Native presence is no longer enough.
So opening with this two-part acknowledgement
is about more than just passively noting
an indigenous presence.
It highlights a few themes that I will touch upon this evening.
And more importantly,
it is a reminder that despite the United States
best efforts to erase Native peoples, we are still here.
So let's start with that erasure piece,
specifically ways that my ancestors avoided erasure.
Recently I was looking through a family archive
that my grandfather, Marvin Dailey,
had compiled decades ago when I came across this document.
Writing to the superintendent of the Chemawa Indian School
in Salem, Oregon,
Caroline Dailey explained in September of 1913 that,
"I have four children
and would like to enter them in your school.
The oldest is 16 years old and the youngest is seven.
I am a hardworking woman
and have no way of supporting them only by myself.
I am a widow." When she wrote this letter,
she was 46 years old and had three additional children
who were too old for school.
And technically she was not a widow,
but her husband lived in Port Angeles, probably for work,
and Caroline was on her own for years, a de facto widow.
She lived in a small four room house on San Juan Island
with all but one of her oldest children.
And this letter copy was bundled with a slew
of other documents in my grandfather's archives,
giving us a glimpse into the lives of my relatives
from more than a century ago.
Some detail Caroline's status as an Indian,
the health of her children, and her dire poverty.
For example,
this voucher from a local insurance agent attests
that Ted Dailey, one of Caroline's children,
is known and recognized in the community there
at Friday Harbor as an Indian
who needs to be taught at a boarding school because
the mother is financially unable to clothe and support him.
Ted was one of my maternal grandfather's uncles.
Others revealed Myra, one of the four children sent to Chemawa,
returned home in 1919
after having died suddenly of appendicitis at the age of 10.
Her older sister Gertrude, accompanied the body home.
This must have been a weighty responsibility
for this 17-year-old young woman.
They also revealed that Caroline identified
as a Mitchell Bay Indian,
a community there on San Juan Island of S'Klallam and Saanich
ancestry, and sometimes described herself
and her children as Lummi.
Her oldest son, Arthur Dailey,
married Martha Rethlexson, a Snohomish Indian,
who could also trace her ancestry back to a Cowlitz chief
on her maternal grandmother's side.
So the archive
that my grandfather left highlights the consequences
of 19th century federal Indian policies such as treaty making
and allotment
that drove many Coast Salish families like the Daileys
into precarity by the early 20th century.
A period that most historians recognize as the nadir
of indigenous sovereignty in North America.
Caroline was literally so poor that she couldn't feed
and clothe her four youngest children.
Her only solution was to enroll several
in an Indian boarding school,
which in the more than three decades
that it had been open
had already become an institution feared
by many Native families in the Pacific Northwest.
Tools of settler colonialism,
boarding schools like Chemawa
sought to erase indigenous languages, values,
and practices,
instead preparing Native children
to assume poorly paying menial jobs
and to firmly separate them from their homelands,
practices and livelihoods. More importantly,
and this is what I'm arguing with my talk this evening,
we see that these families leveraged
Coast Salish kinship networks
and the federal Indian bureaucracy
to stay in their homelands and survive settler colonialism.
These examples also highlight the role of indigenous women in
navigating these cross-cultural encounters and changes.
Indeed, their actions were instrumental for survival
amid these challenging circumstances.
Coast Salish families like mine
experienced varying degrees of success and failure
in the generations
after the United States extended its control
over the Pacific Northwest.
So I'd like to take us back to the early 19th century
when Coast Salish families thrived
from a highly mobile lifestyle across our homelands
in this part of what some now call the Salish Sea.
These weren't aimless wanderings,
these were purposeful
and regular moves to specific locations
where families held rights to harvest, hunt, and fish.
Generations of indigenous knowledge about being
at the right place at the best time
to pick berries when they were ripe,
to hunt mammals when they were at their fattest,
and to take salmon when they were spawning,
allowed Coast Salish peoples to experience good lives
without overtaxing their resources,
which we understood and continue to see as other than human kin.
We are all familiar with the ways
that Coast Salish families relied on a wealth of seafood,
especially salmon,
for both subsistence and commercial purposes.
Families spent the summer months living in small fishing camps
spread across a wide geographic area
where they could catch fish and preserve it.
One important food that we often overlook is camas;
a bulb plant cultivated by Native women in fields
that they owned and marked off with low rock walls.
It was harvested in the autumn and women
pit roasted or boiled the bulb.
It could also be dried and pounded into a flower.
Tastes a little bit like a sweet potato, but sweeter.
And prairies on Whidbey Island and the San Juans
were among the best camas fields across Coast Salish homelands.
And these weren't just natural prairies
that happened to have a few camas bulbs,
these were cultivated fields created
and maintained this way by the precise use of fire.
Before treaty times, Coast Salish peoples lived
as large extended families spread
across the entire Salish Sea.
And this map locates winter village sites of one
or more large long houses.
It's a little hard to see on the map.
Actually, it's a lot easier to see on the big old screen,
but you see the brown kind of long house tokens there
on the map,
that's marking all those various village sites.
So individuals commonly married someone from outside the village
and sometimes from distant communities.
These kinds of connections
were valued among Coast Salish peoples
who measured a person's wealth according to one's social ties.
Communities came together for various purposes;
to fish, to defend each other, to resolve conflicts.
They shared languages, cultural practices, and kin.
Some villages such as the one at today's Garrison Bay,
where my ancestor Caroline's mother had likely lived
were regionally cosmopolitan,
and Coast Salish families had lived there
for about 2,000 years at that particular village.
By the early 19th century,
that Coast Salish Village on northeastern San Juan Island
was home to Lhaq'temish, S'Klallam, Lekwungen,
Swinomish, Semiahmoo, Samish, Sooke and Saanich
peoples from what is today British Columbia and Washington.
From this village,
Native peoples fished at family-owned reef net sites
and cultivated camas in nearby prairies.
But in 1860,
as part of the military escalation
over the infamous Pig War
that settled the Pacific Northwest border dispute
between Great Britain and the United States,
British troops dismantled the village
to build their own garrison and parade grounds,
thereby dispossessing Caroline's maternal family.
Nineteenth century Coast Salish peoples maintained fluid
and complex sociopolitical boundaries.
As evident in my own ancestry,
many families had relatives from other communities,
and any single individual belonged to numerous communities
or even tribal nations as we come to know them today.
So think of it this way,
the Coast Salish homelands resemble the night sky.
Each family was a star,
a group of stars combined to constellations,
mapping family and affiliations
across various parts of our homelands.
But in the case of Coast Salish families and communities,
these constellations changed over time
or shifted as one's perspective did,
or reconfigured to make new groupings.
Specific Coast Salish societies;
these constellations thought of themselves
as being from a specific location
with well understood relations to myriad other places.
So let's consider one such constellation,
my people; the Snohomish.
By the mid-19th century,
Snohomish families could be found as far west
as the Chimacum Valley on the Olympic Peninsula,
on the southern part of Whidbey Island
and south of the Stillaguamish River to the Snohomish River
where they lived on both sides and up all its tributaries.
In the late fall,
our families came together at key village sites,
including Hibulb and S'Laks, a large village at Priest Point,
both just south of Tulalip, and several on Whidbey Island;
one at Sandy Point opposite of Tulalip
and another at the Southern Point on the Island.
In the 1790s,
Snohomish people began encountering non-Natives,
specifically the George Vancouver expedition,
which mapped much of our coastal homelands
and renamed the body of water,
what we called Welsh Puget Sound.
Many of these early encounters
benefited Coast Salish peoples like the Snohomish,
who gained access to valued trade goods.
Arrival of fur traders,
especially the Hudson's Bay Company,
increased to these interactions in Coast Salish homelands.
In 1827,
the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Langley,
the mouth of the Fraser River
in the northern part of the Salish Sea.
You can see it there on the map.
It was followed by Fort Nisqually in 1833
and Fort Victoria in 1843. In 1840,
the Hudson's Bay Company incorporated
the Puget Sound Agricultural Company designed
to supply the local fur traders with food and livestock.
And along with other regional Native communities,
Snohomish individuals provided these forts and traders
with fish, some of which was preserved in barrels
and shipped far outside the region,
and canoe loads of berries. Some labored in the forts,
while others occasionally ran afoul of the Hudson's
Bay Company when they poached the occasional livestock
that had dug up clam beds or camas fields.
And essentially Coast Salish peoples then saw
these fur traders as a new community,
just like any other people with whom they already had relations.
So they naturally valued establishing kinship connections
with Hudson's Bay Company employees,
thereby incorporating them into their constellations of kin.
Commerce and kinship with the newcomers
bolstered one's prestige.
There were also more practical reasons
for these inter-community marriages.
Interracial families acted as a bridge
to ease tensions and enhance a family's resources.
These early interactions though were more complicated
than just Native peoples meeting White British traders,
the Hudson's Bay Company employed many Kanaka Maoli,
Native Hawaiians,
and indigenous peoples from the Great Lakes region.
Some of these peoples remained in the Pacific Northwest
and married into our communities.
And in these early decades of the 19th century,
New England traders also visited the region coasting
along our shores to purchase furs
and fish from Coast Salish Peoples.
And with the California Gold Rush in 1849,
some Americans began squatting on Coast Salish lands
to set up sawmills that churned out lumber
and prefabricated buildings
for booming California towns and mining operations.
Mill owners employed local Natives to build the sawmills,
cut down the trees
and to mill the actual timber along
with provisioning these operations.
So the first several generations of encounters
though exposed Coast Salish peoples
to Eurasian crowd diseases, including measles,
1824 and 1848,
waves of smallpox epidemics in 1775, 1801 and 1853.
These epidemics likely brought the Coast Salish population
in Puget Sound
from an extraordinarily conservative estimate of 12,000
to just under 5,000 by the mid-19th century.
Survivors moved in with extended kin across our homelands
and reconfigured into new constellations
of political affiliations. And the first example,
this is probably the first example of my ancestors
leveraging these kinship networks to weather
the beginnings of colonial intrusions in our homelands.
Perhaps this is what brought that distant Cowlitz ancestor
north to Snohomish villages.
In the midst of this demographic crisis,
Coast Salish peoples encountered the next challenge,
the expansion of US settler colonialism.
White American settlers were profoundly different
from fur traders who depended on good relations
with Native peoples for furs to flow.
Settlers sought Native lands and direct control over resources.
And while early White settlements in the Salish Sea
depended on the goodwill and labor of Coast Salish peoples,
as increasing numbers of settlers came,
the outsiders then found indigenous communities,
especially Native nations,
as impediments and even threats to their ambitions.
So what unfolded then
is what scholars often call settler colonialism.
Defined simply;
settler colonialism is when invading colonizers removed
and replaced indigenous populations.
And at the root of settler colonialism
is the elimination of Native peoples, polities,
and cultures, and the theft of indigenous homelands.
The United States, much less Puget Sound,
was not the only place where settler colonialism happened.
It also marks Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
Siberia, Northern Japan, Israel,
and parts of South Africa and China among others.
And settler colonialism is not over.
It's still happening today.
So in 1846 United States and Great Britain
negotiated the boundary between their respective
and imperial holdings in the Pacific Northwest.
This is part of what was once called Oregon Country.
And they drew the line along the 49th parallel
before zagging southwest to the eastern outlet
of the Strait of Juan de Fuca
cutting across Coast Salish homelands and waters.
With the boundary then finalized,
the United States began encouraging White settlers
to move to the region,
specifically through the Donation Land Act of 1850.
So depending on certain conditions,
White male settlers could claim up to 320 acres,
double that if they were married.
Most claims focused on lands
that Coast Salish peoples had already cleared.
I mean, who really wants to go to all the bother
of cutting down a forest to begin planting your crops?
Take, for example, Whidbey Island, South Whidbey Island,
the homelands of many Snohomish families
consisted of thousands of acres of prairie.
Settlers thought this land would be better utilized
for fields and pastures,
not what they called Indian hunting grounds.
They ignored the reality
that these were property camas fields owned by Native women
whose families had managed them for generations.
And this is just one of many examples,
common throughout US history,
where the property of indigenous women
was rendered invisible for the benefit of White settlers.
Settlers also filed claims
to Coast Salish village sites such as
a Snohomish Skagit village at what is today Oak Harbor.
Captain Edward Barrington from Nova Scotia,
in fact, I think there's even a statue of him
around there somewhere,
purchased two of the original claims,
which included the village. He organized a group of settlers
to drive the Indians down to the beach,
making them carry away their houses.
As witnessed by one Snohomish boy recalling the scene
as an elder later in 1920.
Settlers also filed claims to forested lands.
What an experienced Snohomish lumberman recalled is
the nicest timber I think ever growed any place,
while they promptly cleared -- which they promptly cleared,
devastating the watershed for salmon
further impacting Coast Salish customary livelihoods.
By the time the act expired in 1855,
529 people had filed claims in Western Washington,
and those claims ranged in size from 60 to 640 acres.
In fact,
over 290,000 acres have been claimed
in what became Washington territory.
To put that in perspective,
that's like twice the size of Whidbey Island.
This is just in the first few years;
we haven't even gotten to the treaties yet.
These acts of violent dispossession
resulted in a variety of responses
from Coast Salish peoples.
Some replied with theft and violence,
such as an incident in the early 1850s
when several Snohomish men hired to take a settler
from Southern Puget Sound to Port Townsend
killed their passenger and stole his goods.
Others relied on their kin networks
to move to neighboring villages. For example,
this is what brought increasing numbers of Snohomish families
to Chimacum Valley on the Olympic Peninsula
in the early 1850s.
They had been pushed out of their homelands farther east.
Those initial kind of donation land act claims.
And as more refugees poured into the Chimacum Valley,
tensions increased,
which resulted in the Snohomish
expelling the Chimacum Indians with the assistance
of S'Klallams and Suquamish allies in 1857.
And just as they had done a generation earlier
with Hudson's Bay Company employees,
numerous Coast Salish women married settlers.
The Donation Land Act had incentivized White male settlers
to take Native wives
because they could then double their land holdings,
yet indigenous women could not file their own claims.
But Coast Salish women also had reasons to marry White settlers,
especially those filing claims
or purchasing homesteads carved out of a woman's
ancestral homelands.
This was one strategy used by Coast Salish people
to extend kinship practices to the newcomers
to create new constellations of kin
using settler policies to maintain indigenous connections
to ancestral lands. So this was the situation
that I see five generations back within my own genealogy.
Native women married White settlers;
their children then married other indigenous people
of similar ancestry. And it was not unusual
for these Native women to raise their children often alone
when White husbands either left them,
died or went elsewhere for work.
This was the situation for my own grandfather,
raised primarily by his Snohomish mother and
grandmother, and it's these women who taught him
how to catch and preserve fish.
So this was the historical context then
for the negotiations over the Treaty of Point Elliott of 1855
signed just north at Mukilteo
between territorial governor Isaac Stevens and Coast
Salish leaders representing thousands of people.
The Treaty of Point Elliott encompassed the lands north
of the red line shown there on the map.
Several generations of interactions with Whites
had brought some benefits,
but even more substantially demographic catastrophe
to many communities through diseases.
And moreover,
early settler pressure on Coast Salish homelands
had fueled rising tensions and violence.
The federal government had instructed Stevens
to negotiate land sessions with the territories' tribal nations
so as to make room for the increasing numbers
of settlers heading west.
This map shows those Stevens Treaties there
in Western Washington.
Now, Governor Stevens was an ambitious man
who inspired to national political office.
He was an ardent expansionist
who tied national policy and liberty for White men
to a realization of the nation's manifest destiny.
Equally troubling was that he perceived Indians
as inferior to Whites.
And just six years after negotiating this treaty
and several others in Washington territory,
US Civil War broke out,
and Stevens was commissioned into the army
dying on the battlefield in 1862.
Now, as most people know,
what the Stevens Treaties accomplished was
that they transferred millions of acres of land
to the federal government,
which in turn dispersed and sold these lands to settlers,
turned to profit.
But what is generally less well known
were the range of concessions
that Coast Salish leaders made the government agree to.
So oftentimes people ask,
"Why would native peoples sign these treaties?"
They assume that the federal government coerced
indigenous victims into giving away everything.
And indeed, the federal government often used
underhanded tactics to coerce Native peoples and nations
into signing treaties.
Government officials like Stevens threatened violence,
appointed leaders who did not have the authority
to sign over land, even forging signatures.
But just focusing on these shenanigans
relegates Native negotiators to the limited role of victims.
Instead, we need to examine these negotiations
within the historical context of the time,
then we can see how Coast Salish negotiators
like the seven Snohomish chiefs,
among many others who signed the Treaty of Point Elliott,
ensured that the treaties protected the interests
of their peoples too.
So, in 1855, the Treaty of Point Elliott
didn't seem like such a bad deal,
especially to Snohomish leaders and other chiefs.
Government officials created an initial set of reservations.
These small reservations, circled in blue,
were located around key villages.
Port Madison, the Suquamish Reservation.
Quilceda Creek, the Tulalip Reservation.
The southeast peninsula of Fidalgo Island,
where the Swinomish Reservation is.
And the island in the Lummi River,
the beginnings of the Lummi Reservation.
Along with a separate chunk of land at Tulalip for a school
to educate native children.
And these promises were all codified
in Article II of the treaty.
The Muckleshoot Reservation was established later
through two executive orders.
So government negotiators, though,
also told the thousands of assembled
Coast Salish families,
that in a year, they would receive a big reservation.
Stretching south to north
from what is today Edmonds to the Stillaguamish River,
around Stanwood, and east to the Cascade Mountains.
This is what you see that I've, kind of,
lamely tried to approximate on a map in PowerPoint.
So on this large reservation, Indians,
and their children and grandchildren,
would each get 80 acres of their own land.
That's what was promised. Government officials hoped
that they would later relocate all western Washington Indians
onto this large reservation.
Lots of ink back and forth between local officials
and the federal government, you know,
about the eagerness to concentrate us all
into one place where they could carefully keep an eye on us.
But Coast Salish leaders at the newly created small reservations
understood something very different.
That they could remain in their villages
and that they would not need to move.
And that this large reservation would then be enough space
for everyone else to have land, too.
Government officials also promised
that no whites would be allowed to settle these lands,
thereby solving the problem of American squatters
pushing native families off their homelands
and out of their villages. And more importantly,
native leaders in all the Stevens Treaties,
including the Treaty of Point Elliott,
reserved for themselves and their descendants in perpetuity,
continued hunting, fishing,
and gathering rights at all usual and accustomed places,
which included sites off reservation.
As I have argued elsewhere,
Washington's tribal nations would have never agreed
to the treaty terms
if these important rights were not recognized
by the United States government.
The treaties didn't create these rights.
Our peoples always had them in perpetuity.
We just codified them in the treaty.
So reserving these rights meant
that Coast Salish peoples could continue living
as they had for generations,
while maintaining relations with their homelands,
waters, and other than human kin.
So in return for the lands that they sold,
the government then promised to pay them $150,000,
which in today's money is about five million bucks.
And to provide a physician, medicines, carpenter,
farmer, agricultural tools, and a blacksmith
to support Coast Salish families.
The cash and skills
would allow our peoples to engage
with the emerging settler economy on our own terms.
So at face value,
the Treaty of Point Elliott wasn't such a bad deal,
at least as understood by the thousands of
Coast Salish peoples assembled there at Mukilteo in 1855.
All those present at the treaty negotiations
were official witnesses,
as understood by Coast Salish legal practices.
So it should come as no surprise
that these witnesses remembered what
government officials had said,
and taught their descendants about all the specific promises
that had been made.
Spoiler alert.
Problems with the federal government's
treaty promises emerged quickly. First problem,
the Senate took more than four years to ratify the treaty.
This meant that the first
several annuity payments did not arrive.
And remember,
this money wasn't welfare from a benevolent government.
This was payment for lands Coast Salish peoples had sold.
In fact,
none of the signatories of the Treaty of Point Elliott
saw those annuities until 1861,
and they certainly didn't receive them as cash.
Instead, they received cut rate trade goods,
such as poor quality blankets,
that the government agents were embarrassed to hand out.
As the Senate dithered, sound familiar?
Increasing numbers of white settlers
flooded onto Coast Salish lands.
Many Coast Salish communities then turned to violence
in what pioneers and subsequent historians
have called the territory's Indian War of 1855 and 1856.
White settlers became afraid
when Yakima's in eastern Washington
killed a government agent that fall.
They feared that all the territory's
tribal nations would rise up to exterminate whites.
I wonder what they were anxious about.
So the territorial government called up the militia.
And when the ranks were too thin,
government agents hired northern Indians to fill out those ranks.
Indigenous peoples from British Columbia and Alaska
to fight their ancestral enemies in Puget Sound.
So with this development,
along with the delayed ratification of the treaties
and continued white squatter violence against native peoples,
this led some indigenous leaders to support an uprising
that would force the government to negotiate a better deal
and to immediately expel whites from their lands.
But some indigenous peoples, such as many Snohomish warriors,
fought to protect white settlers,
believing that this would demonstrate to the government
that they deserved to have the treaty promises fulfilled.
We must always remember that there are hard decisions
that our peoples were trying to make
as they navigated these changing tides,
figuring out what would best secure
their sovereignty, their families?
Overall, the conflict really wasn't much of an Indian War.
As we can see from this very brief description,
this wasn't the racial conflict envisioned by settlers.
It was more like,
customary indigenous Pacific Northwest conflicts
where threats and a handful of symbolic deaths
were part of a broader negotiation strategy.
Then there was a second problem that emerged from the treaty.
The big reservation was never established.
Somehow, this large reservation from Stanwood
to Edmonds and east
to the Cascades never appeared in the final treaty document.
Even the federal Indian agents on the ground
in Washington Territory
seemed confused about what to tell Coast Salish peoples.
Or they just flat out lied when asked about the big reservation.
The Indian agent at Tulalip
told Snohomish families to come into the reservation
so they could get their allotments.
So many did. As they waited,
the agent had them work hard at clearing the new reservation
in preparation for farming.
But after waiting for six months for their allotments,
families drifted back to their ancestral villages
only to find that white settlers had claimed these lands.
Other agents told Coast Salish families living
on Whidbey Island
that a reservation would get created there.
One never was.
And as government officials began
to better understand the scale and complexity
of Coast Salish societies in western Washington,
they realized that there were many other communities
that had been left out of the Stevens Treaties.
For example,
my San Juan Island ancestors had been completely left out
of the Treaty of Point Elliott negotiations.
As Snohomish people and many other Coast Salish communities
waited for the big reservation
or for other new ones to get surveyed in the 1860s,
many were reluctant to relocate to the small reservation
at Tulalip and some of the other sites.
They feared that ancestral enemies,
the northern Indians from British Columbia
and southeast Alaska.
Who the government had recently hired to fight
against our peoples, could too easily raid the coastal site.
Moreover, many of the families
who had relocated to Tulalip were struggling
in near starvation conditions in those early years.
As late as 1875,
only 80 acres of marshland had been tilled,
which was not enough to support the families there.
So those already off reservation stayed away.
Gravitating to villages where they had extended kin,
such as those at Chimacum Valley and on San Juan Island,
in the case of my ancestors,
where they could still survive.
But life in these places also became challenging
as Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act
in the height of the Civil War.
And like the earlier Donation Land Act,
the Homestead Act also incentivized white settler theft
of native homelands. Native women,
like the Mitchell Bay and Snohomish
ancestors on both sides,
my grandfather's family, married white settlers as a way
to remain on their lands as life
on the reservation seemed too precarious.
Male settlers eagerly sought native wives in the territory
because these women helped them survive and even thrive.
By 1883, when the allotment process at Tulalip began,
four years before Congress passed the Dawes Allotment Act
to do this nationally,
there was not enough land for everyone eligible
for an allotment.
Coast Salish families living off reservation lost out.
Several of the documents in my grandfather's
archive note relatives on both sides of his family
were denied allotments at Tulalip,
where government officials had told them to apply.
Because, as you can see, no land available.
According to the superintendent in charge at Tulalip in 1914,
a few years after allotment had finished,
there are Indians who have no lands,
and for whom there is no land available.
There never was enough land reserved
to carry out the treaty pledges.
By the early 20th century then,
western Washington had what the federal government
officially called a landless Indian problem.
These were the Coast Salish families, like mine,
who had no allotments on the reservations.
They found themselves on the margins of both settler
and native societies.
And these landless Indians once again turned
to Coast Salish networks to meet this challenge.
And this time they organized politically at multiple levels.
In 1914, the landless Samish, Duwamish,
and Snohomish
formed the Northwest Federation of American Indians.
They thought that there would be strength in numbers.
The NFAI learned that allotments would be available
on the Quinault Reservation.
They urged families to apply for allotments there.
And in my grandfather's archive
are several of these applications,
as my relatives hoped to craft new relations
to people and lands on the coast.
And initially,
the Quinault Tribal Council was supportive
of hundreds of these allottees.
But the Office of Indian Affairs rejected these petitions,
deciding that only native peoples
on the Olympic Peninsula's west coast,
south of the Makah Reservation, would be eligible.
So then at the NFAI's urging,
the federal government appointed a special agent, Charles Roblin,
to help enroll landless western Washington Indians.
Another attempt to resolve this landless Indian problem.
And he began compiling a list,
stopping after he had identified over 4,000 names.
He literally just kind of threw up his hands in the air
and said, "I'm done."
And many of those names had never appeared
on reservation rolls before.
My ancestors appear on Roblin's list,
and it is through one of these names, Martin Rethlefsen,
that I am enrolled in the Snohomish Tribe of Indians.
In 1921,
the NFAI petitioned Congress to allow for a court
of claims case to sue the federal government
for failed treaty promises under the Stevens Treaties.
Specifically, the government's failure to provide
for Washington's landless Indians.
This resulted in the collection of thousands
of depositions from Coast Salish individuals,
some of whom had directly witnessed the negotiations
for the treaty of Point Elliott as children.
Remember all those witnesses tasked with remembering?
They didn't go away.
While the court of claims recognized the marked
and irrefutable failure of the federal government
to honor the treaty promises,
especially the failure to create the big reservation,
they decided against any remuneration.
Arguing that the claimants, the landless Indians,
had neglected to properly substantiate the monetary loss
due to those treaty violations. As one scholar wrote,
it was an instruction in federal Indian law.
As the NFAI was building its advocacy for landless Indians,
Snohomish families organized officially
as the Snohomish Tribe of Indians in 1917.
This was a deliberate political move
to make our tribe legible to the federal government,
just as the United States entered World War I.
And they began enrolling members.
By 1927, there were 973 Snohomish on the rolls,
many of whom had never received an allotment,
and many continued enrolling throughout the 20th century.
By the turn of the century,
enrollment had grown to 1,720 members.
So politicizing our constellations of kin
in the 1910s set the stage for continued
and ongoing efforts to get our status and treaty
rights recognized by the federal government.
There are many important developments
to detail in the last century,
but this is a subject for another time.
So as I conclude my talk this evening,
I want you to consider how this history of one Snohomish family,
mine, illustrates the efforts of Coast Salish peoples.
Particularly native women,
at maintaining and adapting our constellations of kin,
to meet the historical and continued
challenges of settler colonialism.
As outsiders stole our lands
and contested our very belonging in western Washington.
These matriarchs pursued customary ways
to live on the edge of empire in places like San Juan Island,
Chimacum Valley, and the foothills of the Cascades.
And their histories reveal strategies
of adaptation and persistence that mark the Snohomish nation.
Illuminating the creative ways
that Coast Salish peoples sought to make the best
of an increasingly difficult situation.
Thank you.
-I'd like to -- to begin,
just if we can just give Dr. Reed a hand again
and Chairman Evans for this wonderful talk.
That was an incredibly rich lecture,
and I really, really appreciate it.
There are things, after having lived here for 10 years,
I think I've learned a lot.
And I've talked to you a lot in our time together, Josh.
But that was really, really wonderful to hear.
You know, I think your talk for me really begs the question of
how these patterns continue today.
And how these strategies,
both in terms of strategies from a settler colonial perspective,
but also strategies from a Coast Salish perspective
in responding in creative, adaptive ways,
continue to this day.
So I'm wondering, as I'm sure some audience members are,
if you could take us maybe to say a little bit forward
to the present, to how these patterns continue.
-I need to make sure I keep my distance around mics.
Too close.
Yeah, you know, there are a variety of different ways.
You know, all Native nations adapt and change over time
as they begin to explore various ways
that they can continue
to exercise their self-determination.
And to really kind of,
as I -- you know, with that note that I ended on at the end,
to make the best
of an increasingly difficult situation.
You know, and so this -- you know, for us,
the Snohomish Tribe of Indians,
you know, part of that is, you know,
trying to gain that recognition, to gain that, you know,
kind of legibility in the eyes of the government.
Even though we signed the treaties,
we can track our histories, you know, pretty clearly.
You know, one of those challenges is meeting --
or one of the strategies is how we're going to meet that.
I'm not really the expert on federal recognition.
So there isn't too much more that I can say about that.
But beyond that, we're also pursuing ways that
we can continue just acting as a tribal nation, being ourselves.
You know, Mike referenced having my mom and sister
and my niece in a class.
The class he's talking about is a Lushootseed class
that they've been taking online.
Where he's teaching them how to speak the language.
You know, and so those are ways that we continue to, you know,
kind of, you know, practice our, you know, culture today.
-Thank you.
I have a question from the audience member.
Has delving deep into your family history
made you think differently about your previous work
on Makah histories?
-Yes and no.
You know, a lot of the history work that I did,
you know, the research that I did with Makah's up at Neah Bay,
involved a lot of family history.
You know, and that was part of what they wanted me to pursue.
And so part of what I'm finding
is a resonance between this type of historical research.
Where, you know,
our histories are maintained through family lines,
through our lineages.
And so doing that family history out at Neah Bay --
and it's work that I continue to do
when asked by the MCRC,
the Makah Culture and Research Center,
it's very similar to the approaches that I take
as I start to delve into my own family history.
And one of the other things, too,
that also struck me is, you know,
as I was preparing for this, you know,
for this talk this evening.
I was like, wow, I -- you know,
I don't know as much about Coast Salish history
as I do about Northwest Coast history.
Like the historiography,
the other scholarship that's written.
And so I spent a lot of time,
you know, frantically trying to, you know,
motor through the last 20 years of Coast Salish scholarship.
And you know, I'm going through this stuff last week,
and I'm like, wait a second.
Certain names are beginning to resonate.
And I'm flipping through this. I'm like, oh, my God,
that's my family that is written here in these pages.
You know, and that makes me kind of reflect on,
you know, some of the surprise or that, kind of, oh, wow,
or huh moment that,
you know, I imagine that a number of Makah readers
have also felt going through my book.
You know, and so, you know, it's --
I hope that I've done all those different histories justice.
And it's only by doing that kind of work in an accountable way
with tribal nations and with indigenous families,
that you can begin to do this work.
-Another audience member question.
Is it true -- the Roblin Rolls, is it?
-Yup.
-Did not count Indian women who married whites?
-No, that's not true.
I mean, my family members show up on the Roblin Rolls.
And as I discussed today,
there were a number of those ancestors
who had married non-natives there.
I'm sure that, you know --
again, he stopped when he hit about 4,000.
He was just like, you know, I can keep going, guys,
but it's just going to keep getting longer.
And until there's a solution, I don't know what more to do.
And so I imagine that a number of people
were not counted on the Roblin Rolls.
-I wanted to segue to this moment we're in
in terms of Coast Salish revitalization.
-Yeah.
-Having been here for 10 years,
I just see so many active things
that are happening in terms of language revitalization.
Community, you know, growth.
The growth of tribal nations in the region.
Tribal canoe journeys.
It just seems that there's a ton of energy at this moment.
Can you speak to that as a response
and, you know,
and just a way of thinking about this larger history
that you've been presenting?
-Yeah, I -- you know, hardly a week goes by
when I'm not pinching myself for being probably one
of the luckiest people in the academy,
for being able to be home to do the type of work that I do.
To work here at the University of Washington,
where I can continue working in community,
in my homelands, and with students from my homelands.
And you know, that is incredibly rewarding to see
and work with those students here.
At both the undergraduate and graduate level in some cases.
And then to see that,
you know, we teach Lushootseed finally once again on campus.
Through the efforts that, you know,
you and others on AIS have really pushed forward.
And all the great work that Tami Hohn does with bringing
that language to our students.
And then, of course, the UW Canoe Family.
I mean, that's just a huge deal
to have that happen here at the UW.
And to have our canoe family successfully,
you know, engage in canoe journeys.
And all the great, you know,
kind of kinship networks that are now being created as,
you know, the students are engaging with that.
All the great help that, you know,
Mike has provided our UW Canoe Family.
It's like,
you know, this is like literally what I'm talking about.
I focused on it historically,
but I see those types of same connections continuing today.
So it's a very exciting time
to be at home doing this kind of work.
-Are there -- we have time for one more question.
And I have the cards here,
but I was wondering if we could get a question
from the audience,
if there's any questions that we haven't addressed?
-Yup.
So he's reflecting on the Boldt decision, asking about that.
Which were, you know,
marking the 50th year anniversary
of that landmark decision. And his question is,
why isn't there a terrestrial version of that?
Why hasn't there been, you know,
like a push for the big reservation?
That's what the court of claims piece
was for back in the 1820 -- I'm sorry, 1920s.
And I think they finally decided it in 1935,
which in federal government time is actually really quick.
The Indian Claims Commission took a lot longer.
Federal recognition cases take a lot longer.
And so in some ways,
I think that was probably the closest equivalent to
that push to get that terrestrial piece recognized.
But think about what that would be.
You know, the Bolt decision, in common with,
made a -- you know, made an adjudication
that is what we all learned in kindergarten.
In common with means you share.
Sharesies means 50%.
So what's going to happen with the land piece?
Clearly, it's not 50%.
It wasn't a discussion about in common
with relative to the land.
That's very particular to fishing rights
in that clause in the treaty.
But part of the problem
from the federal government's perspective,
is that the big reservation never appeared in the treaty.
Even though it was discussed.
Even though it shows up in deposition after deposition
for that court of claims case in the 1920s and 1930s,
the federal government doesn't recognize that.
And that's a very common thing.
And so if there was going to be a court case like that,
and our Supreme Court would certainly give a thumbs
up to Native rights and restoration of homelands.
I have no doubt that that is exactly what would happen.
Yeah, I live in an alternate universe.
But you know, what that would practically mean,
is something that would shake the very foundation
of settler colonialism itself.
And I don't necessarily see that happening anytime soon.
And so we had that moment.
Whether that would have meant land restoration,
or at least big payouts, I'm not sure.
But it didn't happen.
-I'd like to close with a question
that's on a personal level. Josh, I know
that you teach at Friday Harbor Labs at some times.
You've taught a class up there at times.
-Yup.
-And that, as you all know, that's right near
where your family members land is.
So I just want to ask on a personal level.
When you're there teaching up there
and living on San Juan Island,
when you're teaching that course
and you're moving through these very lands
that your ancestor Carolyn Daly lived on with her family,
what is that experience for you?
And what goes through your mind
as you reflect on that history of your ancestor being there?
-You know, it's just more confirmation
that I'm incredibly lucky to be able to teach in my homelands.
That is literally in my homelands for, you know,
one side of my indigenous family,
one side of my Coast Salish family.
So you know, it's always been --
I wonder how much of this is just nostalgic hindsight
where I'm like, oh,
no wonder I've always thought
that San Juan Islands are amazing.
And I should just spend as much time up there
as I can possibly do so.
But you know, it does really resonate with me.
Yeah.
So it feels good to be up there working with students
and, you know, to literally be doing what I do in my homelands.
-Okay.
-Thanks. -Thank you. All right.
I want to thank you all for coming.
Let's give another hand --
-Thank you.
[ Applause ]