Land issues on ‘The Rez’

Like many people, my parents have a picture on their wall of their wedding day. Recently, one of our kids pulled the picture down for closer examination on a weekend visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s and noted a copy of the wedding announcement from The Everett Daily Herald taped to the back of the frame.

“First White Couple Married at Indian Mission” reads the headline, marking an important day in the lives of two young people linked in the ’40s and ’50s by summer cabins on the Tulalip Reservation.

What is unique about this moment in time in 1961 is that being white never was something my mom and dad noticed as being special that day. My dad grew up working for tribal members who owned and operated fishing resorts that have since shut down. His buddies and my mom’s friends farther down the beach were white kids and Indian kids alike. No big deal.

Even today, current nontribal residents at Tulalip weave their boats in and around tribal fishing nets on warm summer days, each usually offering a respected wave to the other as they share the water. Nontribal members watch tribal net lines as they serpentine along the water line, hoping to see a bump in a cork to know their tribal friends are having a successful set.

It’s a unique environment, for sure. Unique because since its formation, the Tulalip Reservation has been home to tribal and nontribal residents alike.

Recently, though, the Tulalip Tribes have been exerting more control over the land, water and beaches within the reservation borders. That effort is manifesting into something that probably earns more press than it deserves, as there really isn’t anything like a quarrel going on at all between those it most directly affects.

It would be better described as a dialogue between mostly friends and neighbors, with tribal members and nontribal members on both sides sharing a linkage to the same land, water and beaches that have been there since the reservation was formed.

If there is a conflict, it probably exists off-reservation and is rooted in two different cultural views of how humans interact with the land.

For background purposes, the conversation can be boiled down to this: Tribal treaty rights, argue the Tulalip Tribes, suggest that they control most activity on the shorelines up to the high-tide line and also define how the land within the reservation boundaries will be used. Fishing and access are the sorts of activity they’re chasing on the shoreline piece, for the most part.

But this position puts them on the front porches of many nontribal and tribal homeowners along the shoreline of many of the beach communities.

Roughly seven waterfront communities line the shores of the reservation and have gradually moved from a cabin environment to year-round homes, which are appealing, in part, because they require no ferry or long drive to enjoy. In most of these communities, homeowners have a deed to the land that describes what they own just as precisely as any other deed off-reservation.

The tribes point to treaty rights in support of their view, and the homeowners point to deeds in support of theirs. Which one stands tallest depends probably on which one you have in your hand and, to some degree, which cultural viewpoint you use as your frame of reference.

But how did this happen? Many wonder how a reservation can be owned by anyone other than a tribe itself.

Although the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855 established the Tulalip Reservation as the place where the tribal members would live communally and without interior boundaries, the Dawes Act of 1887 changed all reservations by allotting 160-acre parcels to individual American Indians, creating a grid of rectangular allotments within all reservation boundaries across the United States.

The Dawes Act required that the allotments be held by the assigned allottees for a period of 25 years. Thereafter, the allottees were allowed to sell their allotted lands. Many did and took advantage of an opportunity to sell their piece of the reservation and move elsewhere.

So a legacy of deeded land sales was left behind within the reservation boundaries. Some of it wound up in the hands of tribal members, and some wound up in the hands of nontribal residents. The nontribal residents tended to buy forested timberland and lots along the waterfront.

Throughout the United States, many allotments were sold to non-Native Americans until, in 1934, the U.S. government passed the Indian Re-organization Act regulating any future sale of allotments and giving tribes the first opportunity to purchase them.

Formed by the Indian Re-organization Act of 1934, the Tulalip Tribes are referred to as a federally recognized tribe. Prior to the Re-organization Act, there never was a tribe around these parts that referred to itself as “Tulalips.” The reservation is named after the geographic feature called Tulalip Bay, which sits dead center within the reservation’s borders. Members originally included several tribes of different names but having had some common linkage to the fishery tied to the various rivers in this part of Western Washington.

The Tulalip Tribes identify themselves as “successors in interest to the Snohomish, Snoqualmie and Skykomish tribes and other tribes and bands signatory to the Treaty of Point Elliot.”

The Tulalip Tribes expanded their land holdings beginning in 1934 from the original 44 acres of trust land surrounding Tulalip Bay to more than 12,000 acres, primarily through the acquisition of allotments.

Today, about 3,000 tribal members and 9,000 nontribal residents live within the reservation boundaries as private landowners, lessees on tribal property, allottees and tribal trust property residents.

Like any land description, there were some negotiations unique to particular parcels in the purchase and sale process of the various forms of property sales.

For example, most of the deeds on the shorelines describe the property line on the water side as “the meandering mean tide line,” which is roughly the halfway point between low and high tides. Call it a 5- or 6-foot tide and wherever that water line might be on any given day (it “meanders” based on the sand level and contour of the beach).

Should tribal members have the right to pass over this deeded interest in the beach to get to and from the shoreline? Can a waterfront homeowner re-build his bulkhead to protect his home without tribal permission? Do passers-by need permission to walk along the beach inside of the property line? What about docks and boat buoys out beyond the meandering mean tide line? And the real sticky one: Since nontribal residents have no vote in tribal government, then which government actually governs them?

These are the sorts of questions being bantered about as the tribes work to gain more control over land within their borders and along their shorelines.

Some of the properties being impacted by this effort are on leased land. Here, though, the situation is very different. Leases are leases. The tribes are being very fair to lessees whose leases they desire to terminate by notifying them well before the tribes are required to that they simply are not offering an extension of the lease beyond the current term.

Ultimately, the historic interconnection between tribal and nontribal types is probably why this land “quarrel” will work out — even if it takes a legal effort to get there. Both sides of this conversation are intermarried, in business together and generally respectful of each other, having dwelled together in this shared environment on “The Rez,” as both tribal and nontribal residents affectionately refer to it, since it was formed.

The Tulalip Tribes likely don’t want to give voting rights to nontribal residents to legitimize their land-use policies over them, and nontribal residents probably do not want to break the relative peace that has resulted in an enriched environment, one with one of the lowest crime rates in Snohomish County, and a place that uniquely respects human interaction with nature.

The trick is to recognize that there are two great cultures in play here. One great culture holds individual liberty and private property rights as fundamental to its way of life, and the other has a different history of how individuals relate to each other and the land, yet it is just as noble and respectable.

Drawing on each other’s strengths and enjoying the land and water together for generations to come is almost assured in the environment of mutual respect and understanding that exists amongst friends and neighbors on The Rez.