Everyone has heard the jokes or seen the memes about ‘Indian time,’ the ones that explain why Natives are consistently late to dates, appointments, even their own get-togethers. Despite the jokes, the description of Indian time that resonates with me came from Tulalip elder tiatmus Raymond Moses. He told me that Indian time is about paying attention to the world around you. It’s about seeing the signs of the world and being ready when it is time to do what you need to do. That may be gathering or harvesting, or it may be spiritual work, but no matter what you are doing, when you are engaged in something, you have a duty to give it your full attention.
I’ve found that to be true on so many levels. Natives may be late to an appointment, but it’s usually because they devoted all of their attention to the last thing they were doing. And, while we may be late to appointments or social commitments, we’re in the woods when the berries or cedar are ready and we’re on the water when the salmon are ready.
Phenology, in my opinion, is a fancy western term for tiatmus’ version of ‘Indian time’. In late September, Northwest Indian College sponsored a Phenology workshop to educate about the causes of climate change and the impacts on native plants and tribal cultures.
I know what you’re thinking, this is interesting and all, but why should I care? You should care because those cultural timekeepers that we’ve lived by since time immemorium are out of sync due to climate change. The species that we rely on for physical, spiritual and cultural sustenance may move out of our legally defined territories as they search for climates that match their biology.
Our world is changing and we have the knowledge and political clout to make sure that our culture and the species that are integral to our culture, don’t disappear with it. We have the power to evolve with climate change, instead of being decimated by it.
Cultural timekeepers
Wikipedia defines phenology as: the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation). In Salmon Ceremony we learn about a messenger, a black and yellow butterfly who tells us when the kings are coming in. This is what phenology is for indigenous people. Our oral histories tell us how our timekeepers were given certain gifts and entrusted with certain duties, how both human beings and plants and animals all have mutual obligations. As indigenous people, our timekeepers aren’t just dry indicators of biological systems, they’re intimately tied to our values and identity, we consider them our relatives.
“When settlers came to our land, it was forested,” described Tulalip Rediscovery Program Coordinator Inez Bill. “When they seen out and looked at the land, it looked like it was not inhabited, so they didn’t think that anyone was here.
“When you think about our ancestors, they were bonded with our land, it was a spiritual bond. This environment provided for all of our needs, we didn’t need anything. There was an abundance of resources and the teachings and values our people lived by every day, that was our way of life.
“How to gather, how to hunt, how to make a canoe, everything was respected and it was a gift. It was a spiritual gift and if you didn’t take care of these gifts, you lose it. That’s specifically true of plant knowledge.”
Inez described herself as a conduit, not a bank of knowledge. To this day, the mutual responsibility between Indigenous communities and our environment, weighs heavy on her mind.
“I’m nobody, I’m nothing,” she quietly declared. “I’ve had the opportunity to have a number of people in my life that shared their knowledge with me and it made me a stronger person and they are now my roots. A lot of friends and family have guided my life and my spiritual people have helped with my spiritual walk. These are the things that are important when I talk about plants.
“My work with plants began with our summer youth. The kids loved being outside, they’d be in the woods and they didn’t want to come back. We’d learn how to make tea together, and teaching them how to do it correctly, they have to be in the right frame of mind, and the teachings and values that go with that.
“From my perspective, these teachings and values are very important when we look at plants and how we use them. We want them to be gifts for us, a lot of these foods nourish our body, but they also nourish the spirit. We need to do the best we can to treat it with respect and care. We have rules we follow when we harvest because we want to honor the plants that we harvest.”
Part of that respect includes sacrifice. Inez explained that this year she harvested very little because many species were struggling due to the drought. Brian Compton of Northwest Indian College followed up on the sentiment, recalling from his four decades of work in indigenous America the strong relationship between native plants and native people.
“It’s the idea that they’re our relatives,” he pointed out. “When your relative is suffering, you don’t damage it. This is another one of the dimensions that may not be recognized in the more dominant society. That deeply felt connection to, not just another life form, but a relative.”
Take notice, take action
Shifting baselines is a concept often applied to the Pacific Northwest and the Salish Sea. It’s the idea that compared to far more degraded areas, what we have here and now is abundant or healthy or normal. Oftentimes people move to the Pacific Northwest and gush about how green and beautiful it is. They see the forests and see them as signs of wilderness and vitality. However, compared to historic norms for this area, what we have is a fraction of a healthy environment.
Ask someone whose family has been here for generations and they’ll tell you that the second and third growth forests that dominate the landscape today support a far different host of animals and plants than an old growth forest. Someone whose grandparents fished in the 1950s knows that a handful of undersized silvers in a single set is not a sign of abundance. Someone who gathers berries and found only small seedy fruits this year, knows that drought is real and dangerous. Someone who passes on the traditional stories about seals and the lack of stories about sea lions, understands that our waters are vastly different now than they were in our ancestor’s times.
What do you do with that knowledge? Record it. Pass it on to your family members. Go into nature and recall the stories of your childhood. Explain to your grandchildren that the bamboo they love playing swords with (Japanese knotwood) is not from here, doesn’t belong here and it’s our responsibility to get rid of it.
If you don’t know, learn. Go outside and record the signs. As they shift from year to year, pay attention to what has changed. Live your treaty rights instead of just talking about them. Co-manage on a small scale. Make room in your manicured lawn for trailing blackberries, get to know and help eradicate invasive species.
Most of all, engage. Be a leader in your family. Be a leader in your tribe. Be an ambassador and a champion for our winged and finned and rooted relatives. Be a steward of our environment and help our tribe fulfill our responsibility to our world.
Be sure to keep watching the syəcəb, Tulalipnews.com and Tulalip TV (On and Off the Rez at www.tulaliptv.com) for more opportunities to learn about our environment, how Tulalip is evolving with climate change and how small contributions can lead to big change.
Raymond Fryberg, left, the father of the Washington state teenager who fatally shot four classmates and himself at Marysville-Pilchuck High School in October 2014, arrives at the federal courthouse in Seattle, Monday, Sept. 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
The father of the Marysville school shooter was found guilty of federal firearms charges in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
The father of the teen who killed four classmates at Marysville-Pilchuck High School last fall was convicted Tuesday of illegally possessing a half-dozen firearms, including the one his son used in the shooting.
Raymond Lee Fryberg Jr. was convicted of six counts of unlawful possession of a firearm. One of the firearms, a .40-caliber Beretta pistol, was used by 15-year-old Jaylen Fryberg to kill four classmates and wound a fifth. Jaylen then killed himself with the same handgun.
The federal jury deliberated for about a day after a three-day trial before U.S. District Judge James Robart.
The senior Fryberg appeared stunned by the verdict. He had tears on his cheeks as he huddled with his attorneys and family after the verdict was read.
Fryberg will remain free until sentencing, which is scheduled for Jan. 11. He faces up to 10 years in prison for each count.
Family members of some of the shooting victims sat behind the prosecutors when the verdict was read. They declined to comment as they walked in silence into an elevator on the 14th floor of the U.S. District Courthouse. After the doors slid shut, however, ebullient yells and whoops could be heard.
Fryberg’s Seattle attorney, John Henry Browne, said the criminal charges were retaliation for the school killings and had been “pushed by the families” of the victims.
While the school shooting was never mentioned during the trial, Browne said it hung over the proceedings like a pall.
“It was difficult to stay on task,” he said outside the federal courthouse.
While the sole issue was whether Fryberg knew he was barred from owning firearms, Browne said, prosecutors began their closing arguments Monday with a slideshow of the six firearms Fryberg had purchased, including the handgun used by his son.
“This was clearly piling on by the government,” said Browne, who intends to appeal the verdict.
A grand jury had alleged the senior Fryberg, a member of the Tulalip Tribes, purchased a number of firearms despite being the subject of a tribal domestic-violence protective order that had been issued in 2002. Fryberg, 42, pleaded no contest in tribal court to violating the order in 2012, according to federal prosecutors.
The government says that should have prevented him from purchasing firearms, but that flaws in the instant-background-check system allowed him to “slip under the screen” of several law-enforcement databases.
Prosecutors claimed Fryberg lied when he filled out firearms-purchase forms on which he declared, under penalty of perjury, that he had not been convicted of a domestic-violence crime.
During the trial’s closing arguments, Browne accused the government of appealing to the jury’s emotions by showing photographs of each of the six firearms — including the handgun used in the school shootings and two assault-style semi-automatic rifles — that Fryberg had purchased at the Cabela’s store in Tulalip after 2012.
Fryberg, Browne said, assumed the purchases were legal and pointed out that he was even able to obtain a concealed-carry permit for a handgun, which requires a more stringent background check than purchasing a firearm. Browne said Fryberg was never properly served with the protection order, and that there were questions about whether the order was ever filed with the court.
The police officer who was supposed to file it — who was the brother-in-law of Fryberg’s ex-girlfriend, who had sought the order — is dead.
Fryberg claimed he was never given a copy of the order and did not know it existed, despite his no-contest plea in 2012.
“He is not on trial for anything else,” Browne said. “Not for how many guns he owns,” or what they may have been used for. The government, he claimed, “is trying to turn this case into something it is not.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ye-Ting Woo said the issue was not whether Fryberg was able to purchase the guns because of “gaps in the system,” including the fact that tribal-court domestic-violence protective orders and convictions often are not entered into national databases.
“The system relies on the purchasers to tell the truth,” she said.
The investigation into Fryberg’s gun ownership began in October 2014, when the FBI was trying to determine ownership of the gun that was used in the school shootings. The senior Fryberg had purchased that gun from Cabela’s in January 2013, a year after a permanent protective order against him had been filed in Tulalip Tribal Court, prosecutors said.
A search warrant filed in U.S. District Court stated that agents found several firearms lying unsecured in the home.
A 1,400-page report detailing the investigation into the school shooting said Jaylen Fryberg apparently brought the handgun to school in a backpack. He texted several friends to meet him in the lunchroom that day, Oct. 24, and also sent a text to his father and other family members detailing his funeral plans.
Minutes later in the cafeteria, Jaylen Fryberg pulled out the Beretta handgun from the backpack and shot five classmates, killing Zoe Galasso, Gia Soriano and Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, all 14, and Andrew Fryberg, 15. All were shot in the head.
Nate Hatch, 15, was shot in the jaw and spent about two weeks in Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center.
The report indicates that Fryberg was angry over a breakup with a girlfriend, as well as a fight he had with a fellow student in the days before the shooting.
However, the team of investigators said it could not determine a definitive reason for the shooting.
Indigenous struggles against resource extraction are gathering strength in the Pacific Northwest
Under the breaking waves of Lummi Bay in northwest Washington, salmon, clams, geoducks and oysters are washed in rhythmic cascades from the Pacific Ocean. Just north of here is Cherry Point, home for three intimately related threatened and endangered species: herring, Chinook salmon, and orcas. It is also the home of the Lummi Nation, who call themselves the Lhaq’temish (LOCK-tuh-mish), or the People of the Sea. The Lummi have gone to incredible lengths to protect the health of this marine life, and to uphold the fishing traditions that make their livelihood inseparable from the life of the sea — continuing a bond that has connected them to the salmon for more than 175 generations.
Photo by Nicholas Quinlan/Photographers for Social ChangeThe Lummi Nation is currently fighting a proposal to build the largest coal export terminal on the continent at Cherry Point.
The Lummi Nation is currently fighting the largest proposed coal export terminal on the continent (read “Feeding the Tiger,” EIJ Winter 2013). If completed, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would move up to 54 million tons of coal from Cherry Point to Asian markets every year. The transport company BNSF Railway plans to enable the terminal by adding adjacent rail infrastructure, installing a second track along the six-mile Custer Spur to make room for coal trains.
The project is one of many coal export facilities proposed across the US by the coal extraction and transportation industry. In the face of falling domestic demand for the highly polluting fossil fuel, the industry is pinning its survival on exporting coal to power hungry Asia, especially China.
The Gateway proposal has sparked massive opposition from the Lummi, who say it will interfere with their fishing fleet, harm marine life, and trample on an ancient village site that has been occupied by the Lummi for 3,500 years. The village, Xwe’chieXen (pronounced Coo-chee-ah-chin) is the resting place of Lummi ancestors, and contains numerous sacred sites that the Lummi assert a sacred obligation to protect. The Lummi’s connection to their first foods, and to the village site that holds their ancestors’ remains, goes the very heart of who they are as a people, and the Nation has pledged to protect both “by any means necessary”.
The Lummi are no strangers to stopping harmful development. In the mid-1990s they managed to stop a fish farm in the bay; in 1967 they fought back a magnesium-oxide plant on Lummi Bay that would have turned the bay lifeless with industrial waste.
The new threat to the Lummi Nation is being proposed by the global shipping giant SSA Marine. The coal would be supplied by Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy — companies that mine in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It was also backed by Goldman Sachs until January 2014, when the company pulled its substantial investment from the project.
Jay Julius, a fisherman and Lummi Nation council member had attended the firm’s annual shareholders meeting back in 2013 and urged it to “take a look at the risk” of their investment.
Another coal export proposal of similar scale has been proposed in Longview, Washington about 235 miles south from Cherry Point. This has been opposed by the Cowlitz Tribe, who object to the impacts that coal would bring to the air and water quality along the Columbia River. This terminal would also create serious harm to another Native tribe at the point of extraction, 1,200 miles away in the Powder River Basin.
The Millennium Bulk Terminal in Longview is a joint proposal from the Australia-based Ambre Energy and Arch Coal, the US’ second largest coal producer after Peabody.
The terminal, which would export up to 48.5 million tons of coal annually, would be supported by Arch Coal’s proposed Otter Creek Mine in southeastern Montana (bordering Wyoming). If built, the mine could produce an estimated 1.3 billion tons of coal, and would span 7,639 acres along the eastern border of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. This would be the largest mine ever in the United States.
Photo by Mike Danneman Coal trains operated by BNSF would haul coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana to a series of proposed export terminals along the Pacific Northwest coast.
To connect the proposed mine to West Coast ports, Arch Coal and BNSF Railway want to build a new 42-mile railroad — called the Tongue River Railroad — through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Members of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and their allies have pledged fierce resistance if regulators approve the mine and the railroad, which they say, would have significant impacts on public health and the environment. According to BNSF, anywhere from 500 pounds to 1 ton of coal can escape from a single loaded rail car – on trains pulling 125 cars.
At a June hearing on the railroad organized by the US Surface Transportation Board, federal regulators heard nothing but fierce opposition to the proposed mine and its enabling railroad. A significant proportion of the Lame Deer community from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation turned out to the hearing. Their opposition to the project was echoed by local ranchers.
One rancher told the officials that they needed to understand the importance of history when they propose such unprecedented projects. “Northern Cheyenne history is very sad – it’s tragic – and they have fought with blood to be where they are tonight.”
“My ancestors have only been buried here for about four or five generations,” he said, but “we know of lithic scatters, we know of buffalo jumps, we know of stone circles, camp sites, vision quest sites… and it is my obligation as a land owner, even though I am not a member of this Nation, that we protect what is there.”
One tribal member, Sonny Braided Hair, was more explicit in his history lesson. “Let us heal,” he said, “or we’ll show you the true meaning of staking ourselves to this land.” He was referring to the Cheyenne warrior society known as the Dog Soldiers, who became legendary in the mid-1800s for holding their ground in battle by staking themselves to the earth with a rope tied at the waist.
Such concerns about sacred sites are too often validated. In July of 2011, before applying for any permits, SSA Marine began construction at a designated archeological site in the ancient Lummi village at Cherry Point, where the Lummi have warned of numerous sacred sites, and where 3,000 year-old human remains have been found.
Pacific International Terminals had earlier promised the Army Corps of Engineers that this site would not be disturbed, and that the Lummi Nation would be consulted before any construction began nearby. They also acknowledged their legal obligation to have an archaeologist on staff when working within 200 feet of the site, along with a pre-made “inadvertent discovery” plan if any protected items were disturbed. Despite all of these assurances, the company illegally sent in survey crews to make way for their terminal, where they drilled about 70 boreholes, built 4 miles of roads, cleared 9 acres of forest, and drained about 3 acres of wetlands.
In August, Whatcom County, Washington, (where Cherry Point is located) issued a Notice of Violation to Pacific International Terminals, and the Department of Natural Resources documented numerous violations of the state Forest Practices Act. The total fines and penalties, however, added up to only about $5,000.
That’s a small price to pay for early geotechnical information, says Philip S. Lanterman, a leading expert on construction management for such projects. According to Lanterman, the information provided by those illegal boreholes was probably a huge economic benefit to the planned project. Needless to say, the meager fines don’t come close to discouraging the behavior. For opponents this incident is just a taste of things to come, and one resounding reason to never trust King Coal.
In the face of such blatant violations of their treaty rights, several Native tribes in North America — from the Powder River Basin, through the Columbia River to the Salish Sea —have banded together and declared that it is their sacred duty to protect their ancestral territories, sacred sites, and natural resources.
In May 2013, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) unanimously adopted a resolutionopposing fossil fuel extraction and export projects in the Pacific Northwest. In the resolution, the 57 ATNI Tribes of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, southeast Alaska, Northern California, Nevada and Western Montana voiced, “unified opposition” to investors and transporters and exporters of fossil fuel energy, “who are proposing projects in the ancestral territories of ATNI Tribes.” The resolution specifically calls for protection of the Lummi Nation’s treaty-protected fishing rights, and the sacred places that would be affected by the Cherry Point project.
Indigenous resistance to these projects has been bolstered by allies in the environmental movement who have been fighting the export of US coal to foreign markets in the East. Of 15 recent proposals to build major new coal export facilities across the US, all but four (including Gateway and Millennium) have been defeated or canceled within the past two years.
In January this year, the Lummi Nation asked the Army Corps to immediately abandon the environmental review for Gateway Pacific and the Custer Spur rail expansion, stating that the project violates their reserved and treaty-protected fishing rights. If the environmental review is abandoned, the Army Corps would have effectively cancelled the project. In response to this letter the Army Corps gave SSA Marine until May 10 to respond, but later extended the deadline by another 90 days. Environmental reviews of the terminal and BNSF’s Custer Spur rail expansion are due in mid-2016, but it appears likely that the Army Corps will have rejected the Gateway Pacific terminal by then, rendering any rail expansion redundant.
Photo courtesy of Sierra ClubIn 2013, James launched a totem pole journey to build solidarity for Indigenous-led struggles against fossil fuels, including the struggle to protect Xwe’chieXen. Pictured here, ranchers, environmentalists, and members of the Northern Cheyenne totem pole blessing ceremony in Billings, Montana.
In order to keep the pressure on, leaders from nine Native American tribes gathered in Seattle on May 14 to urge the Army Corps to deny permits for SSA Marine. “The Lummi Nation is proud to stand with other tribes who are drawing a line in the sand to say no to development that interferes with our treaty rights and desecrates sacred sites,” said Tim Ballew II, Chair of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “The Corps has a responsibility to deny the permit request and uphold our treaty.”
The Lummi have clearly had important successes in stopping harmful development in the past. But with so much on the line for coal companies, can they really use treaty rights to stop a coal terminal of this size? “Without question,” says Gabe S. Galanda, a practicing attorney specializing in tribal law in Washington State. “Indian Treaties are the supreme law of the land under the United States Constitution, and Lummi’s Treaty-guaranteed rights to fish are paramount at Cherry Point.” If the Army Corps decides to deny their permit, Galanda says that coal developers would find it “very difficult if not impossible” to successfully challenge them. By contrast, he says, “the Lummi Nation would have very strong grounds to attack and invalidate” any approval that the Army Corps might grant to the coal exporters.
In a similar case last year, Oregon’s Department of State Lands denied a key building permit for Ambre Energy’s coal export terminal project in Boardman, Oregon. The terminal was planned directly on top of a traditional fishing site of the Yakama Nation. In both Boardman and Cherry Point, the coal companies have implied that the protected Indigenous sites that would be harmed by their projects either do not exist, or that the tribes using them are too incompetent to know their true location.
Just two years after filing paperwork with Whatcom County admitting that they had “disturbed items of Native American archeological significance”, Bob Watters of SSA marine wrote “Claims that our project will disturb sacred burial sites are absolutely incorrect and fabricated by project opponents.”
One of the Cherry Point Terminal’s most fierce opponents is the diplomat, land defender and master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James. James is the head of the Lummi House of Tears Carvers, and has created a tradition out of carving and delivering totem poles to places that are in need of hope and healing.
In 2013, James launched a totem pole journey to build solidarity for Indigenous-led struggles against fossil fuels, including the struggle to protect Xwe’chieXen. James traveled 1,200 miles with his totem pole in 2013 — from the Powder River Basin to the Tsleil Waututh Nation across the Canadian border. In 2014, he launched another 6,000-mile totem pole journey in honor of revered tribal leader Billy Frank Jr, a Nisqually tribal member and hero of the fishing rights struggle. Frank passed away on May 5, 2014 — the same day he published his final piece condemning coal and oil trains.
These totem pole journeys have gained international attention as pilgrimages of hope, healing, decolonization, and Native resistance to the extractive industries.
At the end of August, James concluded his third regional totem pole journey against fossil fuels, carrying the banner of resistance to many tribes who are standing up as fossil fuel projects get knocked down. He held blessing ceremonies in Boardman and Portland where coal and propane projects were recently shot down, passed through the Lummi Nation and Longview where coal has yet to be defeated, and ended in the Northern Cheyenne Nation at Lame Deer, where the community has rallied in opposition to a mine whose devastation would reverberate from Montana, down the Columbia River, and up to Cherry Point.
“There are many of us who are joining, from the Lakota all the way to the West Coast, to the Lummi, south to the Apache, up to the Canadian tribes,” said Northern Cheyenne organizer Vanessa Braided Hair at a recent Tongue River Railroad hearing. “We’re gonna fight, and we’re not gonna stop.”
Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight. Illustration by Jeffrey Veregge
Mega-quakes have periodically rocked North America’s Pacific Northwest. Indigenous people told terrifying stories about the devastation but refused to leave.
In the year 1700, on January 26, at 9:00 at night, in what is now northern California, Earthquake was running up and down the coast. His feet were heavy and when he ran he shook the ground so much it sank down and the ocean poured in. “The earth would quake and quake again and quake again,” said the Yurok people. “And the water was flowing all over.” The people went to the top of a hill, wearing headbands of woodpecker feathers, so they could dance a jumping dance that would keep the earthquake away and return them to their normal lives. But then they looked down and saw the water covering their village and the whole coast; they knew they could never make the world right again.
That same night, farther up the coast in what is now Washington, Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight, making the mountains shake and uprooting the trees, said the Quileute and the Hoh people; they said the ocean rose up and covered the whole land. Farther north still, on Vancouver Island, dwarfs who lived in a mountain invited a person to dance around their drum; the person accidentally kicked the drum and got earthquake-foot, said the Nuu-chah-nulth people, and after that every step he took caused an earthquake. The land shook and the ocean flooded in, said the Huu-ay-aht people who are part of the Nuu-chah-nulth, and people didn’t even have time to wake up and get into their canoes, and “everything then drifted away, everything was lost and gone.”
Here’s what geologists say: the earthquake that almost certainly occurred on the night of January 26, 1700, ruptured North America’s Pacific Northwest coast for hundreds of kilometers, from northern California, through Oregon and Washington, to southern Vancouver Island. Along this coast, the Juan de Fuca plate was pushing under the larger North American plate, had gotten stuck—locked—but kept pushing until it released, abruptly and violently. The earthquake that resulted was probably a magnitude 9, about as big as earthquakes get. The coast dropped by as much as two meters, and a tsunami brought floods more than 300 meters inland.
Geologists now know that the Pacific Northwest has been having these earthquakes and tsunamis irregularly every 500 years or so; their oldest record in sediments goes back at least 10,000 years. The evidence is massive: subsided marshes, drowned forests, sediment layers showing enormous landslides that flowed out on the ocean floor, seismic profiles of the Juan de Fuca plate, and satellite measurements of a coast deforming from the stress of a plate that’s once again locked. In the next 50 years, the chance of another magnitude 9 earthquake there is 1 in 10.
On Vancouver Island, the Nuu-chah-nulth people told tales of mountain dwarves inviting a person to dance around their drum. When the person accidentally kicked the drum—depicted in the illustration above by Nuu-chah-nulth artist Tim Paul—he got earthquake foot and his steps set off vast tremors. Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
In the cities of the Pacific Northwest, the impact will be terrible. Many buildings were built before architects knew the area had earthquakes; later buildings were built with short, sharp California earthquakes in mind, not the Northwest’s longer, larger ones. “The ground’s going to shake for three minutes,” says Thomas Heaton, geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the first to propose the area’s earthquake potential. “And [in simulations] it’s easy to come up with ground motion that would collapse tall buildings.” Then comes the tsunami, and “with magnitude 9 earthquakes,” says Heaton, “you always get tsunamis.” Governments of course know this: seismic networks and a tsunami warning system are in place; governments and institutions in the Pacific Northwest have emergency plans, are educating the public in how to respond, and have published evacuation maps; buildings and bridges that fail to meet the modern earthquake building codes are being retrofitted.
But all this—the governments’ plans for the next earthquake and geologists’ understanding of the ancient ones—happened only in the last few decades. For the same 10,000-plus years that the Pacific Northwest has been having the earthquakes, indigenous groups have been living there. They have known forever that what the ground did was sudden and violent, that it came accompanied with catastrophic floods, and that it made people die. The questions for us, living in the present, are obvious. What was it like? And what was the impact of millennia of repeated catastrophes on the indigenous groups of the region? The answers seem obvious too, but they aren’t; this turns out to be a story about stories—how they merge into histories, how fragile they are, and how urgent.
What the indigenous people knew all along, geologists have known only since 1984. Thomas Heaton was still in college in 1970 when geologists, who knew that the world’s largest earthquakes occurred where one tectonic plate descended under another one, first recognized that one of these subduction zones ran between the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. But the so-called Cascadia Subduction Zone had no record of ever producing large earthquakes. So, says Heaton, “they thought it was aseismic, just creeping.”
Then in the early 1980s, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was considering whether to locate nuclear power plants in Washington and Oregon, and, just to be sure, asked the US Geological Survey (USGS) whether the Cascadia Subduction Zone was safe from earthquakes. Heaton, then at the USGS, knew about subduction zones because he’d consulted for Exxon on oil platforms in earthquake-prone Alaska. He compared the Cascadia zone with known earthquake areas and told the NRC, “Well, maybe it is aseismic, but another interpretation is, it looks like Chile—which is also aseismic, except for the big ones.” Perhaps, Heaton suggested, the Cascadia zone had escaped earthquakes only because it was currently locked.
Heaton published his surmise in 1984, and within a few years, Brian Atwater, also at the USGS, and other geologists found evidence of moving ground and great floods. But building geological evidence into a credible theory can take decades, and in the meantime, a colleague of Atwater’s and Heaton’s named Parke Snavely had been reading stories from the Makah people in Washington that described what sounded like floods. One Makah story in particular resembled the 1700 tsunami. “A long time ago but not at a very remote period,” the story began, the ocean receded quickly, then rose again until it submerged Cape Flattery; canoes were stranded in trees and many people died.
Snavely told Heaton about the stories, and the two of them did something un-geoscientific: they decided to take the Makah story not as myth, but as history. That is, they assumed the Makah were describing a geologically-recent tsunami, compared the Makah narrative with their understanding of Cape Flattery’s geology, found the similarity between story and geology “noteworthy,” and published their findings in the scientific literature. After that, other scientists also went looking in the stories for history. A team of anthropologists, geologists, and indigenous scholars led by geologist Ruth Ludwin of the University of Washington took 40 stories collected from native groups along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They compared the narratives to what was known of the 1700 earthquake and tsunami, and found in effect, that the whole coast had been telling stories about it.
Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson—archaeologist and geographer, respectively, from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia—found other stories, most of them undateable, that were probably about other, even earlier earthquakes. The two scientists systematically plotted these coastal stories on a map of the archaeological and geological evidence of all Cascadian earthquakes and tsunamis. Along the coast—from the Yurok and Tolowa in northern California, the Tillamook in Oregon, the Quileute in Washington, to the Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island—were stories of Earthquake, Thunderbird, and Whale, or the mountain dwarfs and their earthquake drum. The Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, the Squamish in southern British Columbia, and the Makah in Washington each had stories about the earth shaking so violently that no one could stand, or the houses falling apart, or rockslides coming out of the mountains and burying villages. The Nuu-chah-nulth, like the Makah, told stories of the ocean receding suddenly, then flooding back powerfully and killing many, many people.
From the Tolowa people in northern California: one autumn, the earth shook and the water began rising. People began running and when the water reached them, they turned into snakes. But a girl and a boy from the village, both adolescents, outran the water by running to the top of a mountain where they built a fire to keep themselves warm. After 10 days, they went back down and the houses they lived in were gone, all that was left was sand, and all the people and animals were lying on the ground dead. The boy found food for the girl and then set out to look for people and a place to live. But the only people he found were dead ones. The boy came back and said he could find no one else for either of them to marry, so they’d better marry each other. They built a house and after a time, had babies. And many years and many generations later, there were many people who were “scattered everywhere and in every place there was a man living with his wife.”
Many scientific papers say that the indigenous stories are reasonable records, covering an unknowable amount of time, of earthquakes and tsunamis along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They also add that so much destruction repeated for so long must have had a terrific impact on the indigenous groups’ worlds—that given their history, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest would have taken catastrophe to heart. You might expect that they’d arranged their culture and lives around disaster. And further, you might hope that the impact on them would have some message, some advice, for us in the 21st century, waiting for our own disaster. But here’s where this storyline goes cold. Any such impact ought to show up in archaeological and anthropological evidence and it just doesn’t.
The people must have lost their houses and villages and livelihoods, they must have been ruined; but afterward they went back to living in the ruined places. McMillan went looking in the archaeological record for evidence of habitation and abandonment over the past 3,000 years in 30 excavated villages along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts. “The seismic events were catastrophic but short term,” McMillan says. “The evidence is all that the sites were reoccupied afterward.”
Illustration by Mark Garrison
Nor did the people ultimately change the ways they lived. Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, looked for evidence that after the 1700 earthquake the Tillamook people of Oregon changed what they hunted, what they ate, how their houses were built, and where they lived. “In the short term, the earthquake must have been horribly traumatic,” Losey says. But in the long term, “I don’t think it made a difference.”
Anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that not only was it normal to return to the life you already know how to live, but, as Losey says, it was also reasonable. The catastrophes came generations apart. The food that was gathered and hunted apparently rebounded quickly. And the architecture designed for seasonal mobility was generally single-story, made of flexible wood tied with cord, and might as well have been built to modern earthquake codes. “The First Nations did an entirely human thing,” Losey says. “They went right back and settled in harm’s way.” The Pacific Northwest turns out to be, in the long run, a place conducive to resilience.
So the clearest evidence of the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on the coast’s indigenous people has to be in the stories. Maybe the stories explain how to be resilient, how to outsmart disaster. Maybe they warn the children to warn their own children. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that killed 200,000 people in the Indonesian province of Aceh, killed only seven of the 78,000 people living on the island of Simeulue because the Simeulueans had been telling stories for generations of what to do during tsunamis. That may well have been the case in the Pacific Northwest, but the fact is, nobody knows for sure.
The reason is, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest didn’t write down their earthquake stories; the stories were told only face to face. And apparently they’re not told much, if at all, any more.
The only stories that we know for certain still exist are the ones collected and written down by ethnographers—the Yurok stories by A. L Kroeber, for instance, or the Makah stories by Judge James Swan—a century and more ago. Deborah Carver, an independent scholar, followed up the collected Yurok stories by tracking down the descendants of one storyteller and asking if they had heard the stories. “Nobody in the present had,” she says, except for one guy and his grandmother.
David Lewis, an anthropologist, independent scholar, and a member of the Grand Ronde tribe, never heard the old stories growing up, “only in my adult life,” he says, “since I’ve been working for the tribe.” And when someone did tell the stories, it was only “because I asked.” So the existing stories have the same caveats that archeological artifacts do: they’re incomplete, depend on what happened to be collected, and may not accurately represent the folklore at all.
The stories are incomplete in another, more fundamental, way: stories not written but told depend on having a culture that keeps telling them. In the late 1700s, Europeans began turning up regularly in the Pacific Northwest, bringing with them waves of epidemics, most notably smallpox. Since no one knew how many indigenous people lived there then, no one knows for sure how many died, but the estimates are shocking: they range from 30 to 95 percent.
Later Europeans continued what disease began. They wanted the coastal land, the fur of its animals, and the gold underneath it, and thus began the long indigenous history of resettlement onto reservations, re-education in government- and church-run boarding schools, and outright slaughter in warfare. Whatever the motives or intents of European explorers, government agents, fur traders, gold miners, and educators, their result was cultural scorched earth. Jason Younker is an anthropologist at the University of Oregon and a member of the Coquille tribe: growing up, he explains, “my father said to forget what I knew about being Coquille because it will do you no good.”
Kill the culture and the stories die. “If you think about the history of First Nations in the last couple hundred years,” says Losey, “huge amounts of the population were lost even before ethnographers could get to them. We have no idea how many stories existed—ethnographers published a few thousand—but certainly [there were] far more than were written down.” Ruth Ludwin, the geologist at the University of Washington who collected earthquake and tsunami stories, wrote that 95 percent of the stories were lost.
But even in the few stories that are left, earthquakes and tsunamis are still so vivid that the complete range of stories must have been full of them. “There was a great storm and hail and flashes of lightning in the darkened, blackened sky, and a great and crashing ‘thunder-noise’ everywhere,” said the Hoh people of Washington. “There were also a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters.”
Younker himself had heard at least one of the stories. He was about to leave home to begin a decade of graduate work in anthropology when his uncle took him to Sundown Mountain along the Oregon coast, and up to a high plateau, where they watched the fog coming off the ocean and moving up through a river valley. “You see, Jason, how the fog is coming in?” the uncle said, and told him a story. Not all that long ago, a great tide came in the same way, the water rushed up the valleys, drowned the villages, and covered the trees. Some people climbed into their canoes, along with long ropes they’d prepared, tied themselves to the tops of the trees, and rode out the flood. The people who hadn’t prepared long ropes were swept away and were never seen again. Younker thinks his uncle told him that story partly so that Younker could tell even younger people how to prepare, and partly to say, “make sure you keep your ropes long and your connections to home are well-maintained so you can pull yourself back to home. Because you really can’t separate the past from the present.”
Robert Dennis, Chief Councillor of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation in British Columbia, had also heard stories. When he was 11 or 12 years old, he used to visit his great-grandfather, who’d been chief of the Huu-ay-aht for decades. “He’d say, ‘I’m going to tell you things that might be important in your life, and this could happen again.’” One of his stories was about his great-grandfather who lived at Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One night the land shook, and a big wave smashed into the beach, and the people who lived on the bay were all killed. But the people who lived on high ground, the water couldn’t reach them, and they came out of the tsunami alive. Dennis thought his great-grandfather told him this story so Dennis could someday tell the story himself and because he also would be a leader responsible for his people. So years later when the Huu-ay-aht were planning a community center, they first consulted their elders, then they built the center not down in the flats but up on high ground. Now they have to stock it with food and emergency gear and keep it stocked. “I’m not going to rest,” says Dennis. “I’m going to keep pushing it. So we’re ready.”
The ground moves and doesn’t stop moving, and almost no one survives the tsunami. So get off the beach. Go up into the hills. Build on high ground. Tie your boats with long ropes. Make sure your children know, as Robert Dennis’s great-grandfather said, that this is “what this land does at times.” And don’t bother trying to separate the present from the past.
It’s a nightmare. Whether it happens to you or someone you love, or just someone in your community, it is a trauma with vast ripple effects. Rape. Sexual violence. Child molestation. Just naming the crime is uncomfortable, scary, traumatizing. Imagine if it happened to you, to your best friend or sibling, and it’s every parent’s worst nightmare to think it could happen to your child.
“Victims might hold onto an assault for years without saying anything,” said Tulalip Chairman Mel Sheldon. “In the past, when they found the courage, or the right situation came up where they could talk about it, the statute of limitations may have passed. There was no justice for them. This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”
According to the Department of Justice National Crime Victimization survey 284,350 people were victims of rape or sexual assault nationally. This doesn’t include domestic violence or intimate partner violence, which often includes a sexual assault component.
“We know Native American women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted,” said Tulalip Prosecutor Brian Kilgore. “It’s an epidemic and it drives a lot of the trauma and grief behind the drug epidemic.”
Only a fraction of sexual assaults are ever reported and fewer still are prosecuted. The reasons why are far from simple. They run the gamut from cultural norms to the physical, financial and psychological pros and cons of reporting. Particularly, since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known, or related to the victim.
A few of the lifelong effects of sexual assault include post-traumatic stress disorder, inability to form healthy attachments, sexual dysfunction, depression and anxiety. This is also further complicated by the reactions of those close to the victim when the victim discloses the crime. The fear of losing their support systems, or worse, being shunned or blamed for the assault, often stops victims in their tracks.
“This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”
– Mel Sheldon, Tulalip Tribes Chairman
“If you have 100 sexual assault victims, maybe 10 or 15 will get reported,” explained Aaron Verba, the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigator for the Tulalip Prosecutor’s Office. “You might file three and then when it comes to a guilty verdict, maybe you’re down to one. It really comes down to the cost for the victim,” he continued. “There’s a 99 percent chance that you were victimized by someone you know or are related to.”
Because the perpetrator is often part of the community, peers and family may be unwilling to believe the crime happened. In many cases not believing the victim is a form of self-protection, Aaron described. Families don’t want to see another family member as an offender.
“Everyone is victimized,” he said. “For the family, if they support the victim sometimes they have to admit, ‘I believe this bad thing happened to you and I may have unknowingly been involved in the grooming process.’ The family has to decide whether it’s safer for them to support the victim or the perpetrator.”
Oftentimes, it’s easier to simply deny that the crime happened, to blame circumstances or even blame the victim. Jade Carela, of the Child Advocacy Center.
“Why don’t they come forward?” she asked. “As a community member, I feel like the community support isn’t there yet. We have sex predators in our community that hold high positions or spiritual positions in our tribe. Victims have to wonder, ‘Why would I come out in a community that still holds these people up? I’m not going to get support.’ In the past when they were ready, the statute of limitations may have been up, and then it was too late.”
“It’s especially hard to disclose if a victim has seen another victim disclose and it went badly for them. Sometimes people justcarry that trauma around with them,” Aaron continued. “It’s a conversation we have with every victim that walks in here. Or they may be thinking I’m going to put this person away for the rest of his life, and you have to have an honest and frank conversation about the fact that we may not get 40 years, or even 30. This person may be back in the community in one year.”
Particularly in Native American communities, after the perpetrator serves time, community will be looking to reintegrate the person into everyday life. That means that the victim will likely encounter the perpetrator at community events, family events and everyday activities like going to the grocery store.
“When you sit down and tell people realistically what is going to happen, sometimes they change their mind,” said Aaron.
With all of the obstacles and potential fallout surrounding sexual abuse, there are just as many positive reasons to disclose a sex crime.
Brian explained that most rapists have a history of sex crimes, and unless they’re prosecuted, a future. Making sure that a perpetrator doesn’t hurt someone else is a huge incentive for some victims.
“Rape kits are expensive to test,” said Brian. “The State of Ohio had thousands of untested rape kits sitting on a shelf and they paid to have them all tested. When they did they found a pattern because most rapists are serial rapists. It’s not a comfortable thing to say, ‘I was raped,’ but there’s a good chance if they’ve done it to you, they’ve done it to other people. The only way to stop them is to shine some daylight on it.”
Removing the statute of limitations on sex crimes isn’t just an empty political move, said Jade, it’s a step towards justice, healing for victims and an overall healthier community.
“As a community, we can show these victims that we love them by not being secretive about this. We need to educate our children, and come forward. Know that from here forward, whenever you are ready, we can still prosecute the crimes that happened to you.
“We always talk about the drug epidemic,” she continued. “Drugs are a symptom, they’re not the cause. The root cause is that when these drug addicts were little kids, things happened to them. If we want to eradicate drug use on the reservation, what we need to do now is keep our children safe.”
Aaron agreed, “There’s an incredibly high correlation between drug use and trauma. If you poll all the people who come through our court for drug offense, I’m guessing that 99.99% of them would have some sort of emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse, or sexual abuse. Ultimately there’s a reason that you use drugs to change your reality, usually it’s because your reality sucks.”
Last, both Jade and Aaron agreed, disclosure is about healing.
“The women coming out now were children when this happened to them,” Jade said. “Hopefully, now they’ll feel safe enough to tell the reality about what happened to them so that they can get help. So that they don’t pass that on to their children.”
Aaron pointed to the new law as a sign of the changing times. But family support is going to be even more valuable.
“The important thing is how we support a victim,” he said. “When they disclose, they need to know they’ll be believed and someone will do something about it. The big thing about disclosure is that’s when you start healing. You can’t truly heal a wound until you take care of it, you can cover it up, you can ignore it or pretend it didn’t happen, but you can’t truly heal.”
Aaron also pointed out that sexual assault leaves scars that can take generations to heal.
“I heard once that it takes seven generations for sexual abuse to get out of a family,” he said. “That’s if the first person actually gets treatment, resolves issues and gets back to a somewhat healthy way. That person is still going to pass some of it on. You can’t not pass your life experiences on to your children, whether you know you’re doing it or not. We have people who have kept that stuff hidden for 30 or 40 years. The people on this reservation are still dealing with the effects of sexual abuse in boarding schools.”
This resolution is not retroactive. If the statute of limitations has already expired, the crime may not be prosecuted in Tulalip Court. However, Brian explained, it’s still worthwhile to report it.
“If you have DNA evidence, the federal statute of limitations runs from when you test the evidence,” he said. “For a lot of folks, the police may have a current file on the perpetrator, and any information will help them in their investigation. We can never promise that a case is going to be prosecutable, but we don’t know if it’s never reported.”
If you were the victim or witness of a sexual assault, or any crime, the first step is to call the police, regardless of how much time has passed. In emergencies always call 911. For non-emergencies you can reach the Tulalip Police Department at 360-716-4608.
“We were pretty amazed,” said archaeologist Robert Kopperl of the finds at the site. (SWCA Environmental Consultants)
Archaeologists working near Redmond Town Center have unearthed stone tools crafted at least 10,000 years ago by some of the region’s earliest inhabitants.
The project started off as nothing special — just a standard archaeological survey to clear the way for construction.
But it quickly became clear that the site near Redmond Town Center mall was anything but ordinary.
By the time excavations were done, crews had unearthed more than 4,000 stone flakes, scrapers, awls and spear points crafted at least 10,000 years ago by some of the region’s earliest inhabitants.
“We were pretty amazed,” said archaeologist Robert Kopperl, who led the field investigation. “This is the oldest archaeological site in the Puget Sound lowland with stone tools.”
The discovery is yielding new insights into the period when the last ice age was drawing to a close and prehistoric bison and mammoths still roamed what is now Western Washington.
The site on the shores of Bear Creek, a tributary to the Sammamish River, appears to have been occupied by small groups of people who were making and repairing stone tools, said Kopperl, of SWCA Environmental Consultants.
Chemical analysis of one of the tools revealed traces of the food they were eating, including bison, deer, bear, sheep and salmon.
“This was a very good place to have a camp,” Kopperl said. “They could use it as a centralized location to go out and fish and hunt and gather and make stone tools.”
Stone points excavated near Redmond Town Center have unusual concave bases. (SWCA Environmental Consultants)
The site was initially surveyed in 2009, as the city of Redmond embarked on an $11 million project to restore salmon habitat in Bear Creek, which had been confined to a rock-lined channel decades before. The work was funded largely by the Washington State Department of Transportation, as a way to mitigate some of the environmental impacts of building the new Highway 520 floating bridge over Lake Washington and widening the roadway.
The first discoveries were an unremarkable assortment of artifacts near the surface, Kopperl explained. But when the crews dug deeper, they found a foot-thick layer of peat. Radiocarbon analysis showed that the peat, the remains of an ancient bog, was at least 10,000 years old. That’s when things got exciting.
As they delved below the peat in subsequent field seasons, the crews started finding a wealth of tools and fragments. Because of the artifacts’ position below the peat, which had not been disturbed, it’s clear they predate the formation of the peat, Kopperl explained. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal fragments found with the tools confirm the age.
Only a handful of archaeological sites dating back 10,000 years or more have been discovered in Western Washington. They include 12,000-year-old mastodon bones near Sequim and prehistoric bison remains on Orcas Island from about the same time period. But neither site yielded stone tools.
“It’s hard to find this kind of site west of the Cascades, because it’s so heavily vegetated and the Puget Lobe of the big ice sheet really affected the landscape,” Kopperl said.
A handful of sites have been discovered east of the mountains with tools dating back between 12,000 and 14,000 years.
So it’s clear that humans have lived in the area since soon after the glaciers retreated, but a lot of mystery still surrounds the region’s earliest occupants and their origins.
By 10,000 years ago, the ice that covered the Redmond area was long gone, leaving Lake Sammamish in its wake. But the lake’s marshy fringes extended much farther than they do today, Kopperl said. Pine forests were dominant instead of the firs that are now so common.
Excavations in the 1960s at what is now Marymoor Park, just south of Bear Creek, revealed abundant evidence of people living there about 5,000 years ago.
In fact, most of the region’s streams and waterways were probably occupied or used by early Native Americans — just as they were later used by white settlers and today’s residents, Brooks said.
“It just shows you that humans continuously use the landscape, and that the places that people use today are the same places that people used yesterday,” she said.
Among the most unusual artifacts from the Bear Creek site are the bottoms of two spear points. The points don’t display the graceful fluting characteristic of what’s called the Clovis method of toolmaking. Instead, they have concave bases, which has only rarely been seen.
So perhaps the tools represent an earlier style that’s still not well understood, Kopperl said.
While great for archaeology, the serendipitous discovery at Bear Creek added to the cost of the restoration and delayed the project’s completion by about two years, said Roger Dane, of the city’s natural resources division.
Officials worked with the Muckleshoot and Snoqualmie tribes, whose ancestors might have been among the actual toolmakers, to ensure that the site is permanently protected, Dane explained.
The goal of the restoration was to return the creek to a meandering bed and add vegetation, woody debris and shallow areas to make it more hospitable for salmon.
“For a creek that runs through an urban area, it’s one of the more productive salmon streams in the area,” Dane said.
When Kopperl and his team are done analyzing the artifacts, they’ll hand them over to the Muckleshoot Tribe for curation. There are no immediate plans to display the artifacts publicly.
Construction at the site was completed this year, including addition of a thick cap of soil and vegetation over unexcavated portions to protect and preserve remaining artifacts.
Signs explaining the restoration and the site’s archaeological significance will be added next year.
The excavation also uncovered a single fragment of salmon bone, testament to the fact that the Northwest’s iconic fish has made its way up local streams for at least 10,000 years.
“Since finding the site was based on a salmon-restoration project,” Kopperl said, “it’s kind of like coming full circle.”
A nonprofit with close ties to a proposed coal terminal at Cherry Point is telling local and federal agencies that Lummi Nation plans to take over part or all of Cherry Point in an effort to “de-industrialize” an area that already includes two oil refineries and an aluminum smelter.
Lummi Chairman Tim Ballew called the claim a fabrication and a distraction from the tribe’s effort to halt Gateway Pacific Terminal through an exercise of its treaty rights to fish near Cherry Point and elsewhere in north Puget Sound.
“There’s just no way they could be blowing the cover on some plan we don’t have,” Ballew said.
Northwest Jobs Alliance wrote to the Whatcom County Planning Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last month, asking them to oppose a tribal takeover of Cherry Point.
“It has come to our attention that there are those who would de-industrialize the Cherry Point (industrial area), but this rather radical notion would not serve the public interest,” the Alliance wrote in an Aug. 12 letter to the Planning Commission. The letter was signed by Chairman John Huntley and President Brad Owens.
Not named in the letter was Craig Cole, who is listed in the state’s corporations database as the director of the Northwest Jobs Alliance. Cole also was hired to do public relations for Gateway Pacific Terminal’s proponent, SSA Marine.
Cole said on Friday, Sept. 11, he is one of more than 100 members of the Alliance.
“I am one of the directors and support its focus on family-wage job growth and retention,” Cole said, along with “the continued viability of the Cherry Point industrial area.”
The Alliance delivered its message to the public in a press release on Thursday, Sept. 10.
The release refers to “a plan by the Lummi Nation to annex Cherry Point to its reservation.” The Alliance equivocates on just how much land it believes the tribe would take, but in some of its statements the group assumes the worst.
“It would decimate the job and tax base of the county, in particular the budgets of the Ferndale and Blaine school districts and Fire District 7, for which Cherry Point industries carry much of the tax load,” Huntley said in the release.
“While the Lummi people themselves and their treaty rights deserve great respect, this ploy to snatch nontribal land is just plain wrong,” the Alliance said in an Aug. 20 letter to the Corps.
The Alliance points to a single page that it claims is a “Lummi Nation planning document” from 2012. The page describes a strategy that includes defeating the coal terminal, acquiring Cherry Point and placing it in trust.
Tribes can ask the federal government to acquire properties and hold them in trust for tribal use, even land outside a tribe’s reservation.
Lummi Chairman Ballew reviewed the document and said it did not come from the tribe.
“What they presented definitely has not been produced by the Nation,” he said.
Owens didn’t answer directly when asked by a reporter if the Alliance believed Lummi Nation wanted to tear down existing industries at Cherry Point.
“The indicators are that they’re in opposition to growth at Cherry Point, and that their goal is to acquire Cherry Point property and have it placed in trust,” Owens said.
Cole said the documented evidence of the tribe’s intentions said “in an unambiguous way” that the tribe is intent on taking Cherry Point land.
“Some of it is pretty direct,” he said.
Documents used by the Alliance to support its claim include a 2012 resolution by the Lummi Indian Business Council to acquire Cherry Point “in order to prevent any further projects” and protect the cultural value of the area “in perpetuity.”
The only property specifically mentioned by the tribe for acquisition was the terminal site, and only after the coal terminal project was defeated. The documents say any acquisition of the terminal site would happen through negotiations with its owner, SSA Marine — not through a forceful snatching of the land, as the Alliance stated.
Ballew, who was not chairman when the 2012 ordinance was approved but sat on the council, acknowledged that acquiring a portion of Cherry Point was “a part of the operative part of the resolution.”
“But the more significant policy statement in that resolution is to protect the site,” Ballew said. “That doesn’t mean necessarily that the tribe acquires the land.”
“As far as I know the property isn’t for sale, and we haven’t taken that into consideration,” he said.
Ballew emphasized the importance of protecting the tribe’s cultural heritage at the coal terminal location, which he said was the site of an ancestral village. For now, he said, the tribe is focused on protecting its fishing rights through its request to the Corps to stop Gateway Pacific Terminal.
“They’re fabricating a false conspiracy,” Ballew said. “This is a distraction to our request to the Corps to protect our treaty rights.”
The tribe says the terminal pier and up to 487 ships per year traveling to and from the port would do irreparable harm to tribal fishing. At full capacity, Gateway Pacific Terminal would export 48 million metric tons of coal a year to overseas markets.
In its letter, the Alliance asked the Corps to “publicly disassociate” itself from the tribe’s takeover plans and reject its request to halt the terminal project.
Corps spokeswoman Patricia Graesser said the agency continues to consider the tribe’s request.
“The Army Corps of Engineers is focused on evaluating the actual proposal we have in hand for the Gateway Pacific Terminal and not on speculation regarding what may or may not happen with regard to future property ownership at Cherry Point,” she said.
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article34980117.html#storylink=cpy
Partners from the Tulalip Tribes and a dozen other agencies and groups, including Marysville, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and NOAA, take in the view of the Qwuloolt Estuary on September 2, 2015. The levee was breached August 28, allowing the return of its native marshland.
By Micheal Rios, Tulalip News
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project took 20 years to complete. The finish line was crossed on Friday, August 28, when massive excavators and bulldozers breached a levee and reopened 354-acres of historic wetlands to threatened Puget Sound chinook salmon. The levee breach culminated what has been recognized as the state’s second-largest ever estuary restoration project.
“This is a great, great day. It’s been a long time coming,” says Kurt Nelson, Tulalip Tribes’ Environmental Department Manager, at the September 2 levee breach celebration. “I’ve been on this project for 11 years and there have been many challenges and hurdles, but we’ve gotten through them all. What we have now is a 354-acre estuary wetland complex that saw its first tidal flows in 100 years last Friday [August 28].
“If you watch the live-stream webcam in fast motion, you’ll notice it’s almost like this site is breathing. The estuary is flooding and draining, flooding and draining with tidal waters, like a lung does with oxygen. It’s a nice comparison to bringing some life back to an isolated floodplain that hadn’t seen that kind of life in a longtime.”
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project (QERR) is a partnership of tribal, city, state and federal agencies aimed at restoring a critical tidal wetland in the Snohomish River estuary. The Qwuloolt Estuary is located within the Snohomish River floodplain approximately three miles upstream from its outlet to Puget Sound and within the Marysville City limits. The name, Qwuloolt, is a Lushootseed word meaning “salt marsh”.
Historically, the area was a tidal marsh and forest scrub-shrub habitat, interlaced by tidal channels, mudflats and streams. However, because of its rich delta soil, early settlers diked, drained and began using the land for cattle and dairy farming. The levees they established along Ebey Slough, as well as the drainage channels and tide gates, effectively killed the estuary by preventing the salt water from Puget Sound from mixing with the fresh water from Jones and Allen Creeks.
For the past 100 years the estuary was cut off from its connection with the tidal waters and denied the ability to act as a restorative habitat for wild-run chinook salmon and other native fish, such as coho and bull trout. Through the cooperation of its many partners, this project has returned the historic and natural influences of the rivers and tides to the Qwuloolt.
The purpose of the project is to restore the Qwuloolt Estuary to historic natural conditions, while also mitigating some of the damage caused by the now defunct Tulalip Landfill on Ebey Island’s northwest edge. The former 145-acre landfill was operated on Tulalip Reservation land by Seattle Disposal Co. from 1964 to 1979 and become a Superfund site (polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations) in 1995, before being cleaned up and capped in 2000.
Qwuloolt will provide critical habitat for threatened Puget Sound chinook and other salmon, as well as for waterfowl and migratory birds. Native habitat and functioning tidal marsh ecosystem were lost when the estuary was diked and cut off from tidal influence. This project will restore tidal flows to the historic estuary and promote: Chinook, bull trout, steelhead, coho and cutthroat rearing habitat, salmon access to greater Allen Creek, migratory and resident bird habitat, water quality improvements, Native vegetation growth and restoration, and natural channel formation.
Trying to recover these critical estuary habits are crucial to migrating juvenile salmon for the salmon recovery effort in the Snohomish region. The Qwuloolt Estuary can now, once again, provide food and refuge for those fish. The intent of the project is to increase the production and quantity of those salmon that are extremely important to the Tribe and our cultural-economic purposes, as well as to the public and State of Washington.
“[Qwuloolt] is not only a nursery area for hundreds of thousands of juvenile salmon that migrate from the upper basins of the Snohomish that will come through this estuary and feed on various prey species and grow very rapidly, but also contributes to the survival of fish all over the Snohomish basin,” explains Nelson. “It will improve the water quality of Jones and Allen Creek, while being an extremely important bird habitat for migratory waterfowl, as well as restoring native wetland vegetation.”
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project is overseen by a planning team with representatives from the Tulalip Tribes, NOAA, USFWS, WDOE, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NRCS, and the city of Marysville. Representatives from each entity were blanketed at a September 2 event celebrating the levee breach.
The US Army Corps of Engineers were responsible for the levee construction and the levee breach, while the Tribes were responsible for the channels, the berms, the planting, and some of the utility work that needed to be done. From beginning to end QERR was all about partnership and working together in getting this project done. The US Army Corps of Engineers, the Tulalip Tribes, the city of Marysville, Department of Ecology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with the Puget Sound Partnership and Fish and Wildlife services, all played instrumental roles in completing this project and it could not have been done without the collaboration each and every partner.
“As evidenced here today, it really has been a tremendous collaboration between the tribes and federal, state and local governments to bring this project through and really make a significant change for our environment,” says Col. John Buck of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Over the past century we’ve seen this continuing degradation of our environment in the northwest and it’s through collaboration and partnership we can really affect change.”
*The Qwuloolt Estuary project cost $20 million. That money was obtained over a 17 year period that involved federal, state and tribal money. It also includes settlement and foundation money. Property purchase was $6 million, $2 million in planning, design, permitting and studies, $10 million on the levee, and another $2 million on constructing channels, berms and all the interior work.
Qwuloolt is:
Physical stream restoration is a complex part of the project, which actually reroutes 1.5 miles of Jones and Allen creek channels. Scientists used historical and field analyses and aerial photographs to move the creek beds near their historic locations.
Native plants and vegetation that once inhabited the area such as; various grasses, sedges, bulrush, cattails, willow, rose, Sitka spruce, pine, fir, crab apple and alder are replacing non-native invasive species.
Building in stormwater protection consists of creating a 6 ½ acre water runoff storage basin that will be used to manage stormwater runoff from the nearby suburban developments to prevent erosion and filter out pollutants so they don’t flow out of the estuary.
Construction of a setback levee has nearly finished and spans 4,000 feet on the western edge on Qwuloolt. The levee was constructed to protect the adjacent private and commercial property from water overflow once the levee is breached.
Breaching of the existing levee that is located in the south edge of the estuary will begin after the setback reaches construction. The breaching of the levee will allow the saline and fresh water to mix within the 400-acre marsh.
Other estuary restoration projects within the Snohomish River Watershed include; Ebey Slough at 14 acres, 400 acres of Union Slough/Smith Island and 60 acres of Spencer Island. The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project has been a large collaboration between The Tulalip Tribes, local, county, state and federal agencies, private individuals and organizations.
Contact Micheal Rios at mrios@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov
On September 3rd, the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors passed a resolution to remove statute of limitations on sex crimes.
According to Theresa Sheldon, Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors, “Removing the statute of limitations will give the power back to those who have suffered crimes against their spirit and bodies. Prior to this resolution, you only had three years to report a sexual violence crime to authorities. Now those years are no longer valid from this day forward.”
The Tulalip Tribal Courts started a new procedure this week. It’s hoped that it will help reduce crime, like the Marysville Pilchuck High School shootings.
Tulalip – and all tribal courts of law across the country – now have access to the federal crime database called the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
Before the Marysville shootings on Oct. 24, the U.S. Department of Justice did not allow tribal courts like the Tulalips to access the NCIC. Non-tribal police and courts use the database to check on the criminal histories and court orders of suspects.
A problem came to light when investigators determined that Jaylen Fryberg used his father’s handgun to murder four classmates in Marysville.
A Tulalip Tribal Court protection order barred Raymond Fryberg from owning firearms. But he was able to purchase a handgun from a licensed firearms dealer in 2003 because the court order was not entered in NCIC. The dealer sold Fryberg the gun because the federal background check came up clean.
“If the Tulalip Tribe had the ability to put that information into the system, it would have had the potential to eliminate the father from being able to purchase the weapon,” said Judge Richard Black.
Judge Blake is president of the National American Indian Court Judges Association.
Last month, tribal court organizations convinced the U.S. Department of Justice to allow tribal police and courts to have full access to NCIC so its officers and judges can review criminal histories and enter court judgments into the database.
While Tulalip leaders would not speak on camera citing the sensitivity of the Fryberg case, they confirm that this week tribal police and court officers completed training and they are accessing NCIC directly for the first time.
Judge Blake, who sits on a tribal bench in California, says the new rules mean better community safety both on and off tribal land.
“Without the ability for the tribes to input directly, it delays justice for the victims,” said Judge Blake.
