Category: News

By Julie Muhlstein, Herald Columnist

Courageously she stood, a blanket around her shoulders. Roxanne Chinook wasn’t alone in the Tulalip Tribes‘ Hibulb Cultural Center Longhouse.

More than 50 women and girls, elders to middle schoolers, crowded together on plank seats. For their ancestors, a longhouse was a place to hear stories. At Wednesday’s gathering, called “Lifting Our Sisters Up,” they listened and shared.

“The blankets are to cover you for protection,” said Deborah Parker, vice chairwoman of the Tulalip Tribes.

Then Chinook told her harrowing story, an account of being raped — by a non-Indian — on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon.

“I am a survivor of 13 rapes,” said Chinook, who works for the Tulalips’ Legacy of Healing, a victims’ advocacy program. Years ago, she tried hiding her pain in a fog of substance abuse. “Why did I make myself so vulnerable? Many women you see in Indian country who are hard-drinking, those are women carrying that kind of pain,” Chinook said.

It was a piercing, personal memory. And a camera was rolling.

A French film crew was in the longhouse Wednesday working on a documentary that will air on the Canal Plus network. “It’s like the HBO of France,” said Sabrina Van Tassel, the filmmaker visiting Tulalip with camerman Cyril Thomas. Van Tassel said the short film will air on a French show called “Butterfly Effect,” which examines issues in other countries.

The film’s subject is the Violence Against Women Act, which U.S. senators voted Tuesday to reauthorize. It’s legislation first passed in 1994. The law includes money for prosecution of violent crimes against women.

Last year, House Republicans did not support its renewal. One big reason the House rejected the measure was a new provision that would allow tribal police and courts to pursue and try non-Indians who attack women on tribal land. Federal law enforcement has jurisdiction in such cases, but access is limited at the very least by distance.

Legislation passed Tuesday by the Senate includes the tribal provisions. The House is now expected to take up the Violence Against Women Act, and Parker is pushing for equal treatment of crimes that happen on Indian reservations.

Last April, the Tulalips’ vice chairwoman was in Washington, D.C., where she spoke at a press conference with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in support of the law, which died in 2012 without a House vote. Interviewed in December by Herald writer Rikki King, Murray said Parker has become “the voice and face” of the issue. “I know it’s taken a lot of courage on her part, and I know it’s making a difference,” Murray said.

As she did in the nation’s capital, Parker shared her own nightmarish stories in the longhouse Wednesday.

“My aunt was being abused when I was baby-sitting her children. She was brutally raped,” Parker said. All she could do, she said, was protect the children by hiding with them in a closet. Parker also remembers being raped as a small child. “I was the size of a couch cushion,” she said. “I was choked and I was raped. I tell my story so that others can receive healing,” she said.

Parker stood beside her teenage daughter, Kayah George, and said “I can place one more woman beside me, and one of us will be raped.”

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., quoted by The New York Times on Sunday, cited statistics showing that tribal women are two and a half times more likely than other American women to be raped, with 1 in 3 Indian women becoming victims of sexual assault.

The French film crew has also done interviews on the Rosebud and Yankton Sioux reservations in South Dakota. “A lot of people ask why, why would French people want to know about this?” said Van Tassel. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Among four honored witnesses to Wednesday’s gathering, which included traditional songs and prayers, was the Tulalip Tribal Court’s Chief Judge Theresa Pouley. The court is part of the Northwest Intertribal Court System, established in 1979.

Pouley is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. “Let tribal court judges take care of crime on reservations. This isn’t about tribal court judges. This is about protecting our women,” Pouley said.

“I’m a Washington State Bar Association member. I should have to prove I’m competent or capable? Really? It’s time to stop having that conversation,” the judge said. “I never want to say to my granddaughter, ‘There’s a 1 in 3 chance you’ll be raped, sweetie.'”

By Bill Sheets, Herald Writer

TULALIP — For 50 years, Jaime Erickson’s family has been spending summers and weekends at their cabin on scenic Mission Beach.

Bruce Agnew’s family has had a cabin on the beach since 1925.

Mike Carey’s in-laws have had a place there for 90 years.

None of them own the beachfront property on which their cabins sit, however. They’ve been leasing the land from the Tulalip Tribes, and the tribes want it back.

The 24 tenants had to be out by the end of December and the cabins have to be gone by the end of March. The buildings — some basic, some funky, some quaint — are being taken apart and torn down, one by one.

“We’re all real sad. It’s a lot of memories,” said Erickson, 55, whose full-time home is in Everett.

The quarter-mile section of beach is located southeast of Tulalip Bay, below 59th Street NW, also called Mission Beach Heights Road.

The cabins are built right on the beach, up against a steep slope. Most of the bank has been eroding for years and slides have been an issue, Tulalip spokeswoman Francesca Hillery said.

The tenants, most of them on long-term leases of up to 30 years, were given notice in 2005 that they had to be out by the end of 2012 — more than seven years ahead of time, Hillery said. They were sent reminder notices again in June, she said.

The leases stipulated that any structures on the property be removed at the renters’ expense when the lease expires, Hillery said. The leases also were intentionally timed to end simultaneously, she said.

The tribes haven’t yet decided what to do with the beach but the most likely choice is to restore it to a natural state, Hillery said.

“The likelihood of doing anything other than restoring the beach doesn’t look good because of the instability of the slopes” and because of salmon recovery efforts, she said.

Hillery declined to comment on whether the public would have access to the beach if it is restored.

Erickson said the leases had been renewed so many times over the years that few thought they’d actually have to leave.

“Everyone’s in denial,” she said. “I never believed it.”

Residents said there is some anger about the situation, but at the same time, they understand the property isn’t theirs.

“A lease is a lease, unfortunately,” said Carey, who lives in Bellingham. “It is what it is.”

Only a few of the tenants live at the beach full time, Erickson said. For most, the homes are part-time dwellings. Still, the families have spent so much time at their cabins over the years that leaving and tearing them down is difficult.

“The tribe has been working with us very closely but the reality is my family has been there since 1925,” said Agnew, a former Snohomish County Council member. “Tribal members who are very family-oriented can certainly understand the tragedy in losing a place we’ve had since 1925 with irreplaceable family memories.”

The beach has a significant, colorful history.

The beach was named for a Catholic missionary church established nearby in the earliest years of the reservation, in 1858 by the Rev. E.C. Chirouse, according to Snohomish County historian David Dilgard.

In later years, the atmosphere at the beach was anything but pious.

Agnew, who grew up in Everett, said that early in the 20th century, his great-grandfather and others frequented fishing shacks on Mission Beach.

“The mining and fishing barons of Everett would go over and play cards and get away from their families,” he said. “They’d take tugboats out there and drink and gamble and carouse away from the watchful eye of their families on Rucker Hill.”

That tradition did not quite die out, according to Erickson.

The wooden decks on most of the homes ran together.

“It was just one big family. Everybody walked the deck and had cocktails with each other,” she said. “It was a fun, fun beach.”

The strip of sand boasts southwestern exposure with sweeping views of Whidbey Island, Hat Island, Possession Sound and Everett.

“The best time to be out there was with the storms and the connection with nature, the wild storms and tides,” said Agnew, who now lives on Mercer Island. “Where else do you find white sandy beach 45 minutes from downtown Seattle without railroad tracks in front and without a ferry to take? There’s no substitute for it.”

Some of the tenants are paying Carey, who has a construction business, to tear down their cabins with an excavator. He said most are paying him between $9,000 and $11,000.

Friends, relatives, acquaintances and charity groups have been salvaging fixtures and appliances, according to Erickson.

“It’s kind of a free-for-all. Everyone’s just coming out here and taking what they want,” she said.

Some are having their places taken down piece by piece and hauled away by boat.

“I’ve worked down here for 30 years on people’s places that I’m tearing down,” Gary Werner, of Lake Stevens said.

“I’m taking apart stuff I built for people.”

Agnew said it will be easier for tenants to accept their loss if the beach is restored to a natural condition.

“Anything other than that would be really sad,” he said.

Hillery said the tribes understand the families’ emotional connection to the beach. Tribal members also feel a connection, she said.

“It’s ancestral land,” she said. “It’s a very important cultural area to the tribe.”