Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead

The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination

Laurie Arnold

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780295804378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bartering with the Bones of their Dead tells the unique story of a tribe whose members waged a painful and sometimes bitter twenty-year struggle among themselves about whether to give up their status as a sovereign nation. Over one hundred federally recognized Indian tribes and bands lost their sovereignty after the Eisenhower Administration enacted a policy known as termination, which was carefully designed to end the federal-Indian relationship and to dissolve Indian identity. Most tribes and bands fought this policy; the Colville Confederated Tribes of north-central Washington State offer a rare example of a tribe who pursued termination. Some Colville tribal members who favored termination wanted a life free from federal supervision and a return to the era when each band of the confederation managed its own affairs. Other termination advocates simply sought the financial payout that termination promised. Opponents of termination wanted to protect tribal identities and lands, hoped to preserve the Colville heritage and homeland for future generations, and sought to compel the federal government to live up to its promises. Laurie Arnold tells the story of those years on the Colville reservation with the perspective both of a thorough and careful historian and of an insider who grew up listening to the voices and memories of her elders. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N_jvwYb6z0

CHAPTER 1

“We want to be Indians forever.”

THIS story begins with the land. The Columbia Plateau served as home to bands of indigenous peoples long before the US government existed and even longer before that government named some of these peoples the Colville Indians. The plateau, roughly bounded by the Columbia River and the Cascade Mountain range in present-day Washington State, sheltered and sustained generations of people. Some of this plateau would be set aside for the Colville Indian Reservation in 1872, and, twenty short years later, more than one million acres of the North Half of the reservation would be lost to the very government that had deemed it reservation land in the first place. Loss of this land, through a questionable land cession, in many ways defined the Colville Indian Tribe throughout most of the twentieth century. In hopes of restoring the North Half to the reservation, the Colvilles engaged with several federal Indian policies. They accepted allotment. They rejected the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) but then created a tribal constitution and empowered a business council to act on tribal matters. One of the Colville Business Council's first major undertakings in the early 1950s was preparation of legislation to restore the beloved North Half of the Colville Reservation. What began as a restoration bill became a bill providing for both restoration and termination, which ultimately led to a series of termination bills written by the Colville Business Council and by various factions on the reservation.

The yearning, the acrimony, the bitterness, and the discord that took hold of the Colville Reservation and tribal members across the country for twenty years began with a good deed. Like most tribal communities, the Colvilles have a complicated land history and an even more complicated relationship with the government. The reservation was established by an executive order from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, the government's attempt at an efficient solution for dealing with the eight bands of non-treaty Indians that the reservation would include. The first executive order, signed in April, created a reservation that spanned roughly 3.5 million acres on both sides of the Columbia River all the way to the Pend Oreille River near present-day Idaho, and included white settlement areas near Kettle Falls and Colville, Washington. After howls of protest from non-Indian mill operators and shopkeepers who had arrived in the area not long before, President Grant adjusted the reservation boundary to the west side of the Columbia River, thus leaving the townsfolk outside the reservation.¹

The new reservation encompassed 3.1 million acres, from the Canadian border on the north and following the jogs and turns of the Columbia River for its eastern and southern boundaries. The western boundary had less physical or territorial finality to it, but it ran along streams and lakes, and nearly reached the foothills of the Cascade range. The Colville Indian Reservation became home to the newly anointed Colville Indians circa July 1872.²

This new collective seemed to barely acknowledge their new name. The Colville band lived closest to the white settlements and had well-established trade relationships with Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in Canada.³ This new designation required them to make few changes; they kept their name and stayed in nearly the same places, so at the time they likely felt little effect from the executive order. The Arrow Lakes band (also called the Lakes band), the nearest neighbor of the Colville band, were canoe people who fished and hunted along the Columbia on both sides of the US-Canadian border, and it is likely that they just kept about their business. The Lakes band also had longstanding trade relationships with HBC men and sometimes married these traders as well. Consequently each group had integrated non-Indians into their lives as much or as little as they individually deemed necessary.

The San Poil Indians, farther down the Columbia near what is now Keller, almost completely ignored the government men and other outsiders. They did not trade with whites, did not engage in Catholicism as did some in the Colville band, and kept to themselves in an area rich with game and fish.⁴ The most interior of the bands, they would rebuff government overtures well into the twentieth century.

The Nespelem band and the Okanogan band also remained in their usual areas, along the southwestern and northwestern edges of the new reservation, because the executive order included land they already considered home. The Okanogans traveled to and from Canada frequently, where they too enjoyed a good trade relationship with HBC.⁵

The Okanogans and the Nespelems historically had the most frequent contact with the neighboring bands of Indians who were now considered part of the Colville Indian Tribe and who would slowly begin to make their homes on the Colville Reservation. The Chelan, Entiat, and Methow bands had lived west and south of the Colville Reservation. These bands engaged in trade and intermarriage with some of the Colville bands, but had likely not considered themselves linked with the Colvilles in any more formal way. But because all eight bands were non-treaty Indians, and because the government wanted to formalize boundaries and land agreements, they all became Colville Indians.

Two later additions to the Colville Indian Reservation caused a stir among the existing tribal members. In 1884 the Moses band of Columbia Indians joined the residents of the Colville Reservation, a move coordinated by the US government without consulting the Colvilles.⁶ One year later Moses invited Chief Joseph, newly released from prison, and his band of Nez Perce Indians to reside on the Colville Reservation as well. Joseph, by some accounts Moses's cousin, had led a band of roughly 700 Nez Perce from their home in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon toward the Canadian border in flight from the US cavalry and in defiance of orders to move to the new Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. Nez Perce territory had cut a broad swath across present-day southeastern Washington, northeastern Oregon, and central Idaho. As white settlement expanded in Washington Territory in the 1850s, the US government sought to secure more land for settlers, and convinced the Nez Perce leaders to sign a treaty in 1855 setting aside nearly eight million acres as the Nez Perce Reservation but reducing the traditional Nez Perce land base.

Upon the heels of a gold rush, less than ten years later, the United States offered another treaty, shrinking the Nez Perce Reservation to fewer than one million acres and offering a hospital as well as financial compensation in return. Chief Joseph's father, Joseph the Elder, refused to sign this new treaty, and his band became a band of non-treaty Indians. The treaty bands settled on the Nez Perce Reservation in present-day Lapwai, Idaho, and the non-treaty bands stayed in the Wallowa Valley, a decision that ultimately led to Joseph's flight. When Joseph finally surrendered in the fall of 1877 after three months of evading the cavalry, he and his remaining followers were taken to Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas, then were settled in Indian Territory in Oklahoma for ten years. Upon their release, Joseph's band of non-treaty Nez Perce, as this group came to be known, could not return to their former home in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon. Even after being returned from Indian Territory, Joseph's band did not want to reside on the Nez Perce Reservation. Chief Moses offered Joseph and his band a new home on Colville land, and Joseph accepted.

Local resentment flared, and still lingers, over these two additions to the reservation. The eight original bands of Colville Indians did not consider Moses a native of their region. To them, he was a guest. Many tribal members regarded Moses's invitation to Joseph a cultural faux pas. In 1965 one tribal member expressed a sentiment that still resonates with some tribal members:

The Nez Perce were prisoners of war, and yet they were placed here on this reservation among us peaceful Colvilles. The Nez Perce fought the United States government, took many lives and cost the people a lot of money, but us Colvilles never fought the government—we was [sic] always peaceful. That's the way it still is today with them; trying always to get control and take over the reservation for themselves.⁷

The Colvilles, put together on a reservation without a choice, resented the government for negotiating with Moses and Joseph, and for adding these two bands to their reservation. Moses at least had kinship ties, but the Nez Perce had been aggressors in the region, and it is likely that some Colville Indians still distrusted them.

Thirty years after the Colville Indian Reservation was established, the last two bands who would become Colville Indians, the Wenatchi and the Palus, arrived on the reservation. White settlement had pushed them from their homelands to the south. Many of their relations resided on the Colville Reservation, and they chose to join their kin rather than suffer the advancing encroachment.⁸

The original bands of the Colville land base—the Colvilles, the Lakes, the San Poil, the Nespelem, and the Okanogan, all Salish language speakers—had kinship and trade relationships with one another, and, because of those ties, enjoyed loyalty shared among friends. Loyalty cannot be interpreted as unity, however. None of the bands could have anticipated the government's expectation that they cooperate as one group. Nor would they have imagined that the US government would force them to accept as neighbors the Nez Perce, a band of Indians who spoke a different language (Sahaptian) and who had acted combatively against smaller Indian bands as well as against the United States and some of its citizens. Despite being compressed onto one reservation, the bands would always maintain much of their individual identities. Each band listened to its own leaders, and, while the leaders may have cooperated across bands to interpret the motives of non-Indians, for example, each still advanced his own method for dealing with white neighbors. This sense of band identification and ongoing questions about how to define themselves as “Colville Indians” would have a tremendous impact on the termination debates of the 1960s.

The years following the establishment of the new reservation brought more attention from the government and more oversight of tribal lives and lifestyles. The new Indian agent, who arrived near the town of Colville shortly after the reservation was established, encouraged farming and cultivation rather than subsistence on hunting, fishing, and digging roots.⁹ Many Colvilles were reluctant to engage heavily in these practices or to rely on farming exclusively and continued some of their previous migratory practices as the seasons changed. Consequently, the Indian agent and the territorial governor reported that the Colvilles were not using the land.

It was, of course, a false statement. Members of the Colville bands hunted and fished across their homeland. They gathered roots and tart huckleberries from hidden spots near summer campgrounds at higher elevations. They traversed the land to find what they needed, and could trade with neighboring tribes if their homeland (or the agent) could not provide all they sought. The land and the rivers and the lakes of the Colville Reservation sustained the band members. Despite the tribal members' broad uses of the land and their cultural connection it, the difference in the interpretation of land “use” between the Indians and the government led to the single most distressing event in Colville history: the loss of the North Half.

In 1891 the government began negotiations with the Colville Indians to buy 1.5 million acres of the north half of the reservation (the North Half) and open it for settlement by the turn of the century. The House Committee on Indian Affairs deemed the reservation's vastness “no less an injustice to the Indians themselves than a menace to the progress of the surrounding commonwealth.” The committee determined that the Colvilles could learn only from the “well-ordered white communities” that would surround them, and that the Colvilles could begin to embrace and profit from new market economies that would emerge in response to the newcomers' needs. Congress agreed to pay 1.5 million dollars, one dollar per acre, for the land. An elder member of the tribe brought up the disputed land sale during discussions about termination and reminded tribal members of previous broken promises, “It was no more than a land steal and some of our teen-age boys were allowed to sign the so-called agreement between the Indians and the government.”¹⁰

Bills approving the sale of the North Half to the United States repeatedly died in congressional sessions, and fifteen years elapsed before Congress ratified the purchase agreement, but the North Half still opened for settlement as scheduled in 1900. A scandal erupted in 1904 when it came to light that a former Indian agent, A. M. Anderson, had coerced Colville chief Barnaby to participate in a scam to secure money from the Colvilles. Fired by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 for bribery, perjury, and forgery of an annuity payroll on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, Anderson induced Barnaby to sign a contract indicating he had power of attorney for 131 Colville tribal members. Anderson, as their broker, promised he would arrange payment for the North Half from Washington, and in exchange would take a ten-percent fee from the Indians. When questioned about it later, Barnaby explained that he had not read the contract, nor had it been translated for him, and that he had acted only on his own account, not for other Indians. He said he told tribal members what he had done when he returned home from seeing Anderson and that they had expressed little interest.¹¹

Despite Anderson's alleged connections in Washington, DC, he returned empty-handed. Many Indians would have rejected a payment anyway because they refused to give credence to the “land steal” perpetrated by the government. In 1906 in a letter to the Department of Justice, agent John McAdams Webster characterized the San Poil band in particular as being aloof from government interference:

They have always refused to enter into any agreement in regard to the disposition or sale of their lands; refused to be bound by the Government or other tribes who they regard as interlopers on their lands and they have consistently held to this. They announced then as they have always done that if the entire million and a half dollars were piled on the floor in front of them and they were told to help themselves not a penny of it would they accept. They stoutly claim ownership of the lands on which they have lived for generations and would not sell for any price but acknowledge the right of other tribes to barter with the graves and bones of their dead.¹²

By 1905, however, some of the bands grew progressively more frustrated at living with white encroachment while still being impoverished. Indians grew weary of seeing whites settle on good hunting lands and block good fishing areas. They witnessed white settlers receiving consideration from local and federal governments while Indians were punished for trespassing on lands that had always belonged to them. Major James McLaughlin, an Indian inspector, finally spent several weeks with the Colvilles at the end of that year to arrange for allotment of the South Half of the reservation and soothe tempers about the uncompensated loss of the North Half. Some Colvilles viewed McLaughlin's timing as manipulative, because he arrived at the coldest time of year, when most people stayed close to home, and he expected all of the Colvilles to travel to meet with him. This perceived power play created much bitterness and resentment. The policy of allotment emerged from the Dawes Act in 1887 and provided for individual Indian ownership of land in order to move away from collective tribal ownership of lands. The policy was designed to decrease collective tribal identities, which reformers believed would lead to increased Indian assimilation into the white culture, and also to remove land from tribal ownership and place it into the for-profit real estate market. Allotment impacted Indians and Indian land bases throughout the United States.¹³

In the course of allotment talks with the Colvilles, McLaughlin reassured the Colvilles that the government would honor allotment agreements for the South Half and would protect them from non-Indian encroachment until the allotment process had been completed. He also gave his word that once the Colvilles agreed to the South Half allotment, they would be paid for the ceded North Half as promised in 1891.¹⁴ One of those reassurances proved to be a promise he could not keep. When Congress finally passed the Colville Diminishment Act in 1906, the act that provided for purchase of the North Half, it did secure the reservation along its current 1.4-million-acre boundary. However, Congress refused a payout for the North Half lands. Instead, the act mandated that proceeds from allotments on the North Half sold to non-Indians would go into a government fund for “the education and civilization” of the Colville Indians. Those proceeds never made it into Colville coffers, and the Colvilles have as of yet received no compensation for the North Half.

The Colville Indians' collective experience with the federal government is not unique—for example, executive order reservations were created in Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and many tribal confederations grew out of several disparate indigenous communities being moved on to one land base—but it does have exceptional aspects. Because the bands did not present a threat to white settlement or to peace, the territorial and federal governments were able to put off dealing with them until late in the nineteenth century. In contrast to the first removal of Native Americans from their traditional homelands, which officially began under president Andrew Jackson in 1830, the bands of the Colville Indians enjoyed decades of relative tranquility from settler-related issues and associated political initiatives.

The Colville Indians also sidestepped the Dawes Act for two decades after its inception. While the North Half cession was pursued as part of the overall allotment program begun in 1877, the Colvilles did not face allotment on the South Half of the reservation until after the turn of the twentieth century.

The Colville Indians' rejection of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1936 represents another un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 - "We want to be Indians forever."
• Chapter 2 - "It is like giving your eagle feather away."
• Chapter 3 - "Soon buried in a junk pile of Cadillacs."
• Chapter 4 - "What is their future?"
• Chapter 5 - "Come back from your pilgrimage to nowhere."
• Chapter 6 - "Not another inch, not another drop."
• Conclusion - "We kept getting a little bit smarter."
• Appendix: Major Legislation Affecting the Colville Confederated Tribes
• Notes
• References
• Index