Trust, Land Issues, and Indian Claims

This triumvirate of interrelated issues have been and remain a constant focus for Hank Adams. It is in the retention and, in some cases, reclamation of aboriginal lands (and the resources appurtenant to those lands, waters, fish, timber, and so forth); the struggle to hold the federal and state governments accountable to historic diplomatic accords and specific and reserved rights retained in those accords; and the recognition of that vital force known as the trust doctrine—which generally means that the US has both legal and moral obligation to respect and protect the remaining rights, resources, and territories of Native nations—that Adams has labored tirelessly over the years.

The following selections vividly demonstrate how he has engaged these topics in a manner that has had lasting benefit for not only indigenous peoples, but also their treaty and trust partners, the federal government, and the states as well. In the process, we see Adams at his best when he is reminding the states of their limited rights in Indian Country, while at the same time showing the states and federal officials more just ways of dealing with aboriginal rights.

Testimonial

Hearing before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. US Senate. Ninetieth Congress, First Session on S. 307. A Bill to Amend the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, as Amended (February 15, 1967)

Statement of Hank Adams, Member, Board of Directors, National Indian Youth Council

Mr. Adams. Mr. Chairman, my name is Hank Adams. I am a member of the board of directors of the National Indian Youth Council.

I respectfully request permission to offer this statement into the record of these hearing in behalf of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and in support of extension of the life of the Indian Claims Commission for an indefinite period,* but with qualification relating to need for change in its operations and need for change in the policies which have applied to the disposition of awards.

Much has been said and written about the Claims Commission since its inception almost twenty years ago, which tend either to support or oppose it in nature and in purpose. Most have agreed that the Commission is preferable to individual authorizations by Congress to Indian tribes for bringing such suits against the United States.

But others, such as Reader’s Digest’s Blake Clark in the latter 1950’s have maintained, in effect, that if the Indians should have material need, this Nation should respond to its own sense of morality and meet such need. But in no case should this nation subject itself to the humiliation of bringing forth the remnants of a defeated people to make judicial demand upon the public for wrongs inflicted by one’s ancestors upon the other’s. In this line, humiliation becomes a one-way street.

Others assert that the Indian is entitled to his day in court in any case, win or lose, because that is the American way. America sustained in principle, interest does not extend beyond expression. Whether America may die in process or resulting action is of little concern to the expressor.

Some are even surprised in learning that the Commission exists, such surprise having extended even to a former US Attorney General in learning that the Justice Department at that time had twenty-three lawyers hidden away in its bureaus, arduously working in defense of the United States in denying the skeletons in the country’s closet.

Then come forth the lawyers and law firms, asserting that no money can be had by working with the Indians, but that money is less scarce in working with the Government. Nominal retainers from tribes for incidental advices may be tolerated, if, at the end of the rainbow, lies the pot of gold. Not many make a million dollars in a single whack—but some do, and some several times over—but ten percent is a slim price for the expense of waiting, and smaller yet in having been the ones to tolerate the clients for the duration.

Additional are those who humorously note that “we’re buying it back from the Indians.” They become alarmed, however, in learning that if all judgments were sustained in the claimed amount, it would approach in total the several billions spent in all the years since 1813 on the contingencies of this Nation’s “Indian policy.”

The Commission has demonstrated the fallacy of such notion, however, and it sometimes becomes confusing as to who is paying whom. The United States trying to regain any portion of those past several billion that it might, the Indians find themselves paying for such items as education they did not receive, schools they do not then own, or lands they did not surrender.

The public should be aware that claims are no great boon to the Indians, and that the approximately $200 million awarded, thus far has been of benefit to a limited number of Indians. The public should be aware that an excessive percent of these awards go to a selected band of lawyers and law firms; in amount, equaling almost double the $12 million for which this nation saw fit to spend on community action programs nationally this year on Indian reservations.

On the other hand, many tribes will benefit more each year, financially, under the nation’s War on Poverty, than they shall ever benefit from awards made through the Indian Claims Commission.

Perhaps the central issue involved in considering termination or extension of the life of the Commission is consideration of how Indians shall benefit from such awards and what these benefits shall be.

For some tribes claims judgments perhaps aren’t too meaningful in amount. Yet, for some of them, as well as others, these awards can provide the only gleam of hope in a bleak future, as created and sustained by a bitter past.

But in practice, this hope has gone the way of prior hopes and previous destroyed dreams. Tribes have found too often that the award is there in name only—at best a bookkeeping device and at worst the price of what remains theirs in the way of resources, community life, land base, and federal services.

The Kalispels of eastern Washington State and Idaho may well have continued to survive on an average per capita income of $96 per year, had they not received a $2.7 million judgment. The Bureau of Indian Affairs then discovered there were Kalispel Indians, and a new tribal name began appearing in proceedings of this Senate committee. No program has been or was offered previously for these people from either source. The bureau learned that the Kalispels could now afford to benefit, and the Senate subcommittee learned then that the Kalispels could now afford to be free.

Few people in America would permit themselves to be bought out with their own resources, but for the Indian it has come to be expected as a matter of course. And should the awards of the Indian Claims Commission continue to be used as the government’s money, merely as supplemental appropriations to the BIA’s budget, or even displacement, to sustain the proven failures, or failure-ridden programs, then perhaps the commission should be terminated.

Indians have been programed through a poverty program for the past 130 years, and the most obvious manifestation of this nation’s efforts is that they have failed. Permit the Indian communities to now stand as Indian communities, in large part to plan for themselves, but also to take advantage of the genius this Nation could bring to bear on the many problems confronting us in a mutual-help effort at finding solutions. Utilize the Claims Commission that the Indian may benefit from this nation’s strengths, and not forever be the lasting victim of its unwitting weaknesses.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a couple of statements on specific issues of the legislation.

Senator McGovern. We would appreciate having your statement.

Mr. Adams. First of all, we feel if there was any justification for having these claims entered against the United States in the first place, or that the United States agreed to consider them, they should not be dismissed without appropriate hearing and without some definite conclusion on an arbitrary date.

We see on the other hand, a need to expedite the action before the Claims Commission. We feel that it has been too slow perhaps, for understandable reasons in many cases, and in some cases not.

Senator McGovern. I am sure the members of this committee share your concern about protecting fully the interests of the Indian claimants. That is really the purpose, as I understand it, of this legislation. It is to see that these claims are not delayed interminably, that they are brought to trial and a judgment made, so that the Indians are not left waiting forever on claims that may have real validity.

Mr. Adams. Well, we think that there perhaps is need for some modification in functioning of the Claims Committee.

In consideration of them, we feel it is a very tough burden on a few men on the Commission, and that other means could be employed to perhaps speed this up; perhaps a lower level of consideration as a clearinghouse to bring them before the commission in final form, or in a more final form, so that the commission itself is not involved with so many of the things that are not necessarily a part of the final decision.

We feel that for the most part Indians are not being kept informed on their claims cases; that, in fact, frequently lawyers employed by the tribe or retained by the tribe lead tribes and Indian people on perhaps with undue optimism, and in fact sometimes false information as to time and amount of claims they might expect, and the working processes that are involved.

Second, we would think that there is a need for the Indians themselves to know the status of these claims. In listening to the testimony here today, I get the impression that few people know the status of all the claims at any given moment. I think in just a common course that the plaintiff would generally know what action is being carried on in his claim or court action—in this case the Commission action—and whether it is dormant, or whether it is in some stage or process.

We think there is then a poor, very poor, lack of communication, and this is perhaps largely on the part of the lawyers, but if others, such as even the commissioner, perhaps, himself, is not fully aware at any given moment of what the status of all claims are, it might be difficult for the lawyers to know also.

Relative to the element of needed additional power, I think it is a general feeling among many Indian organizations and Indian tribes that perhaps too much power has been consolidated in the hands of one or three men, the commissioner and his Associate Commissioners, and that to have all determinations made at that level or through that point has created some animosity toward the commission on the part of the Indians, generally speaking, I would say.

Additionally—relative to dismissing these claims—we do not think that should be done. We are aware also of continuing causes for claims that are evolving today. Although we would hope that there should not be such cases evolving—because when such cases evolve, it means that we are losing something—it appears at the present time, on the present basis that every once in a while you are going to have to set up one of these Claims Commissions for Indians: Washington State fishing rights, Alaskan claims, land claims. And in the Indian’s mind, for the most part, just compensation is a poor device for taking what is theirs.

Senator McGovern. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Adams. We appreciate your prepared statement and also your additional observations, and they are now part of the record.

Mr. Adams. Thank you.

Letter

February 28, 1971

The Hon. John N. Mitchell,

Attorney General of the United States

Attn: Messrs. Jerris Leonard & Carlton Stoiber

Department of Justice

Washington, DC

Mr. Attorney General:

Various officials of the Puyallup Indian Tribe, as well as ourselves, have requested of your Department and the Interior Department that a federal suit be initiated immediately to enjoin further state prosecutions of Indian persons arrested last September 9th on Puyallup Indian Reservation lands held in trust by the United States and subject to federal control and protections.

Even aware of possible difficulties in successfully prosecuting such an action, we are nevertheless extremely disturbed that your Department would consider the February 23rd rulings of the United States Supreme Court restricting federal interventions of enjoinder against state prosecutions under a doctrine of “Our Federalism” as having general application to the dependent Indian peoples, further as presenting insurmountable obstacle to success in such action as we’ve requested, and as foreclosing the possibility of favorable departmental action upon our request.

Although it is clear that Indian people have not been the object of federal concern in seeking to enjoin state prosecutions in recent times, it is as well clear that this has been result, generally, of a failure by the federal government to sustain its responsibilities and obligations to Indian people in a manner neither inconsistent with nor contrary to the recurrent doctrine of “Our Federalism,” at least not as embraced by the Constitution of the United States.

The relationship of Indian tribes, nations or people, to a ‘doctrine of our federalism’ has always differed from that of other people or citizens under the federal Constitution—as explicitly determined by the Commerce Clause and Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution.

Interestingly, the Treaty of Medicine Creek of 1854, with which this nation contracted Puyallup Indians, in its language distinguishes between the United States as a union of equal states making the treaty for each and all the states (in Article IV) and “the government of the United States” upon which the Indian Tribes agreed to “acknowledge their dependence,” an explicit provision of Article VIII.

We are appalled by the continuing attempts of the federal government to abdicate or abandon its obligations for providing protections to Indian people, and the attempts to absolve itself of its responsibilities by a basic failure to make frequent recurrence to fundamental principles inherent to the federal-Indian relationship and essential to the security of Indian rights.

The inapplicability of the recent supreme court decisions upon the federal-Indian relationship and the federal obligations inherent thereto is certainly not denied by any previous holding by that Court. Several landmark Indian jurisdiction cases decided by the US Supreme Court are instructive to the understanding that both in the infancy of this nation and at the present date Indian people require and are legally deserving and entitled to energetic federal protections. So you may understand our disposition and attitudes, we include several citations.

United States v. Kagama, (1886):

Because of the local ill feeling, the people of the States where they (the Indian tribes) are found are often their deadliest enemies. From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due to the course of dealing of the Federal Government with them, and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power. This has always been recognized by the Executive and by Congress and by this court, whenever the question has arisen.

United States v. Pelican, (1914):

Nor does the territorial jurisdiction of the United States depend upon the size of the particular areas which are held for federal purposes. It must be remembered that the fundamental consideration is the protection of a dependent people.

United States v. Getzelman, (1937):

The power of Congress to impose, extend, or reimpose restrictions on property of an Indian ward is plenary and not open to doubt.

The basic judicial regard for the relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes and Indians, and particularly for the character of jurisdiction arising therefrom and adhering to Indian people and their lands, was drawn by the US Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia, (1832). The late Felix Cohen, who was perhaps the greatest legal expert on federal Indian law this century, discussed the result and effects of that case on page 123 of his Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1942), as follows:

John Marshall’s analysis of the basis of Indian self-government in the law of nations has been consistently followed by the courts for more than a hundred years. The doctrine set forth in this opinion has been applied to an unfolding series of new problems in scores of cases that have come before the Supreme Court and the inferior federal courts. The doctrine has not always been so highly respected in state courts and by administrative authorities.

The present Puyallup Indian situation evidences an incredible departure by the federal government from its traditional and obligatory role as protector of a dependent Indian people and an absolute disregard of its trust responsibilities.

The US Departments of Justice and Interior, acting through US Attorney Stan Pitkin and Assistant Regional Solicitor George Dysart, oddly, have effectively reduced their responsibilities to that of protecting Puyallup Indians “from themselves” and “from each other” while proceeding to give extravagant exercise to that limited “responsibility.” The results have ranged from the ridiculous to the ludicrous.

It should be noted that prior to the arrest action against sixty-two persons, mostly on Indian trust lands, last September 9th—both the City of Tacoma and the State of Washington were agreed upon the position that if the lands were in fact Indian trust lands, or lands held in trust by the United States for Puyallup Indians, that state and local authorities would lack jurisdiction over the subject matter of fishing rights as well as lacking jurisdiction over the locus. The action of September 9 was taken, however, under an assertion of knowledge and understanding that the lands were neither held in trust nor owned by Indians.

The prosecution of Indians arrested upon the Puyallup’s trust lands occurs in violation of the Washington statehood Enabling Act, and its irrevocable ordinance and compact with the United States as incorporated in Article XXVI of the Constitution of the State of Washington, which, in pertinent part, provides:

The following ordinance shall be irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of this state:

…That the people inhabiting this state do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to…all lands lying within said limits owned or held by any Indian or Indian tribes; and that until the title thereto shall have been extinguished by the United States, the same shall be and remain subject to the disposition of the United States, and said Indian lands shall remain under the absolute jurisdiction and control of the congress of the United States.

Yet there remain basic and insurmountable difficulties associated with the defense of Indian lands and the character of their federal-Indian jurisdiction within the local courts of the State. Particularly, Pierce County judges have repeatedly refused to accept any notion or proof that there remain Puyallup Indian lands other than those bounded within the cemetery. The absence of any positive federal presence within the courts to support Puyallup Indian and tribal claims have always proven fatal to their cause at the local level.

The difficulties confronting Puyallup Indians are compounded when other federally-related Indians, not Puyallups, appear in court and attempt to raise jurisdiction issues. Yet the landmark ruling of Kagama clearly recognizes that the obligation of federal protection is one of national application wherever a federally-related Indian may go within Indian country. 18 U.S.C. 1151, 1152 and 1153 reflect a general application of federal jurisdiction over Indians, as is likewise asserted over any federally-related Indian by the various Courts of Indian Offenses—there has never been a localized application of the federal obligation of protection to limit it only to the local Indians, or to subject Indians from other states or areas to an exercise of state jurisdiction, when upon other Indians’ federally-protected lands.

Again, we believe that the power, duty, and obligation to provide protection to dependent Indian people places our situation outside the scope and limitations of the recent US Supreme Court rulings restricting federal intervention in state prosecutions. Furthermore, the situation of Puyallup Indians and the Puyallup Tribe has been made more difficult, complicated, extraordinary and extreme by improper actions and failures to act by federal authorities. It is time that the federal government now act properly and appropriately, as is its duty and obligation, to prevent further prosecutions of Indians arrested upon Indian trust lands last September.

Respectfully yours,

Hank Adams, SAIA

Memorandum

1976–1977

Trust Responsibility Issue (Proposed Study)

Issue: BIA Forest Management & Logging Practices (Quinault)

Background: Since 1921, the BIA has collected ten percent of all Indian timber sales receipts as reimbursement for their management of Indian forests and individual allotments in trust status, and in their performance of BIA trust responsibilities to Indians with timbered lands.

The heavily-forested Quinault Reservation, having 98% of its 150,000 acre reservation allotted to individuals, presents an excellent case for study of the BIA’s management of their trust responsibilities, to both tribal interests and individual interests—and where the BIA activity is Indian-financed. (The study has added implications for the common illusion that Indians are constant beneficiary of, or drain on, the public dole.)

Problems & Issues: For more than a half century, Quinault tribal members and congressional committees have questioned the timber management practices and purposes on the Quinault Reservation. A succession of national administrations have promised forthcoming changes or corrections in practices, but then acted to formulate new rationales for not changing in event that subsequent inquiries might be made or questions asked. Few improvements have ever been instituted, and the damages to water, fish, and forest resources have compounded through the years—at a damages cost of some unknown multiple of the more than ten million dollars. Quinaults have paid to BIA for their forest management and exercise of ‘trust responsibilities’. Among the issues to be studied are:

(a) The BIA’s processes in contracting timber sales; enforcement of contract provisions; and the issue of forced sales of lands as condition of logging scheduling;

(b) Improper methods of logging, as relate to concerns for reforestation, tribal interests in preservation of watersheds, fish resources and in-stream habitats, and stream quality;

(c) Scaling practices and revisions, and methods of determining market values of timber and prices paid to Indian allottees;

(d) The consideration of competing tribal interests and the benefits for individual timber owners in controlling BIA actions under claim of the proper exercise of trust obligations.

Both the US Forest Service and US Fish & Wildlife Service’s Northwest Fisheries Program have concluded highly-critical reports on BIA Forest Management on Quinault—showing massive destruction of natural resources, including new forests. Their reports have been limited, however, to their particular interest. A broader study would be useful, and might involve Task Forces Nos. 7, 2 & 3.

Letter

February 22, 1989

The Honorable Mark O. Hatfield,

United States Senator

The Honorable Sidney R. Yates,

United States Representative,

Chairman, House Appropriations

Dear Senator Hatfield and Congressman Yates:

I take the liberty, respectfully, of addressing you jointly, having formerly had the high personal privilege and honor of working in service with both of you during your tenure with the American Indian Policy Review Commission and my year’s employment as chairman of its Task Force on Trust Responsibilities and the Federal-Indian Relationship, including Treaty Review (1975–76).

I write to urge and request your active support and expeditious actions within the respective House and Senate Appropriations Committees for securing approval this year of the $77.25 million designated federal share for concluding the “Puyallup Tribe Indian Land Claim Settlement Agreement,” as accepted by a tribal vote on August 27, 1988.*

A ‘Settlement Act’ to authorize appropriations is the subject of hearings this week before the House Interior Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. One must anticipate favorable actions on the measure by those Committees and, hopefully, early passage by both bodies of the Congress.

The total valuation of the Settlement Agreement is $161,844,000—the non-federal share of assigned costs and contributions totals some $84,594,000 in new expenditures and specific land title transfers. This includes a State of Washington contribution of $21 million which, thus far, has been receiving remarkable support in the state legislature. (The responsible state House committee recommended its immediate appropriation by a unanimous bipartisan vote of 26–0, already. The lead sponsor is in the one-vote majority party of the Senate, where passage is virtually certain, but where timing in process is vulnerable to partisan bids at leveraging to affect other unrelated matters, unfortunately.) The remaining private sector ($11,460,000) and local government ($52,134,000) settlement contributions, in lands and funds and project costs, have each been approved and committed for consummation with the combined state and federal enactments. The valuation of direct benefits to the Puyallup Tribe and its members in specific funding and properties is roughly some $111+ million from the $162 million settlement total.

The Settlement Act prepared by Congressman Norm Dicks’ office, and introduced for himself and The Honorable US Representatives Foley, Miller, Unsoeld, Chandler, Morrison, McDermott and Swift of Washington’s congressional delegation, is very judicious in the selection of principal and salient terms to be given expression in the federal statute as distinguished from matters generally given force by incorporation of the negotiated agreement and the related technical documents. Continuing rights and protections for the Puyallup Tribe are made clear, and the miscellaneous provisions provides both clarification and certainty to certain points which might otherwise have become a new basis for needless contests or contentious disputes which the agreement should not have intended to engender. In short, it is a well-crafted Act—and dispels such possibilities.

It was 100 years ago this date that the Enabling Act for Statehood of Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota, and my own birth state of Montana was passed into law. On November 11, 1889, Washington’s admission into the Union was proclaimed by the President of the United States. Thus, a number of states celebrate their Centennials this year. The Puyallup Settlement Act presents itself at a most propitious historical moment—both for ending what has often been the most embittering of experiences, and for marking the promise and hopes and opportunities which may arise with utmost good faith and new beginnings.

A full fifty years of total prohibition against a harvesting of salmon on the Puyallup River and Reservation by tribal members preceded a five-year period of state court protected fishing after 1957, for example. The prohibition was reinstated in 1962 and continued, with only limited exceptions, until the Boldt decision was issued February 12, 1974. Even then, appeals and applications in the remand cases producing the Puyallup trilogy of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States (1968,1973,1977), with-held substantial benefits of the Boldt decision from the Puyallup Tribe until after the court affirmed the basic holding of US Judge George H. Boldt in its opinion of July 2, 1979. Ironically, the court’s decision, authored by Justice William O. Douglas in the 1968 Puyallup I, directly has provided the basis for the Belloni decision of 1969 in the Sohappy Case on the Columbia River (United States v. Oregon)—which, in turn, had established a “fair share doctrine” that became the remedy or result sought by federal attorneys in filing the case of United States v. Washington before Judge Boldt in September 1970. (That filing, too, was instigated by actions of Puyallup Indians attempting to assert their treaty reservation and fishing rights on the river within the city limits of Tacoma.) Thus, while these cases were restoring significant resources to the benefit of the other treaty tribes, machinations in the state and county courts continued the deprivations to the Puyallups almost to the very end of the 1970’s. Pierce County’s Judge William Brown produced a formulation allowing a total tribal harvest of far less than one fish (steelhead) a piece per tribal member—not even one fish per family, given current enrollment numbers. In point, the vindicated treaty rights and valued fish resources were last restored to the Puyallups—from among the federally recognized tribes—whose members had already suffered the longest and most complete deprivation. And, although the Puyallup Tribe might have been entitled to the greatest amounts in assessed damages for losses accounted to the prior denial of their treaty rights, claims for damages were waived in the Boldt case proceedings, in part as a price for the United States agreeing to pursue the habitat protection and related environmental issues embraced by the still pending Phase II proceedings of the United States v. Washington civil case.

My own direct and continuing involvement with Puyallup and Nisqually Indians and the Franks Landing Indian Community began twenty-five years ago this month, when I was organizing the beginnings of a national Campaign of Awareness on Indian Rights for the National Indian Youth Council, in association with the National Congress of American Indians and with the formal participation of more than fifty tribal governments. And it was eighteen years ago this month—in February 1971—that I hand carried title documents and other records into the offices of US Indian Commissioner Louis R. Bruce and Associate Commissioners Helen Peterson and Art Gajarsa, for several days requesting a determination of the status of the Puyallup Indian Reservation and its continuing existence. With the assistance of related inquiries entered by Senator Edward Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practices—and by columnist Jack Anderson’s associate Les Whitten—an immediate review was concluded and again the original external boundaries of the Puyallup Reservation were restored their formal recognition as having never been extinguished. (That determination was immediately communicated to Washington Governor Dan Evans, and formal Solicitor’s Opinions were issued in march and April 1971, preceding a federal lawsuit which fully settled the reservation existence question in favor of the Tribe.)

Favorable consideration for the Puyallup Settlement appropriations might also take into account the selfless and admirable character of tribal actions displayed in the period of re-establishing and developing its capacities of institutional self-government and services over the past two decades. Beginning in the early 1970’s, the tribe acted as a service agency in behalf of many non-Puyallup Indians from among the sizeable urban native American population of Tacoma and Pierce County, in addition to its own members. (In one instance beyond that, the Puyallup Tribe used its federal applicant eligibility status to secure program funds for an independent Asian American community organization in Tacoma, until that body established its won eligibility status.) Although budget restrictions have imposed some periodic limitations upon service beneficiaries in recent years, the inclusion of non-Puyallup Indians in programs continues—most notably in its highly-praised independent contract day schools and in its long-acclaimed alcohol and substance abuse in-patient and out-patient care facilities or program.

Perhaps one caution carrying to the present agreement is found in the Puyallup Agreement of 1876 reported by chairman Vine Deloria, Jr. and executive director Kirke Kickingbird in the Institute for the Development of Indian Law’s treaty and agreements series of the early 1970’s. In that congressionally-ratified agreement, the granting of a lengthy, reservation railroad right-of-way was made with promises of preference hiring of Puyallup Indians over both “whites and Chinese laborers,” and for the separate building of a tribally-owned railway spur and depot at which the Puyallups might ticket passengers and freight for transport throughout the rapidly developing United States. (Congress ratified the 1876 deal, or taking, in February 1893.) Nothing came to Puyallup Indians beyond a proclaimed perception of a most ‘lucrative’ promise or deal. And soon it was the Puyallup Indians themselves who were forcibly transported from the area of their lands, reservation, the non-existent depot and warehouse spur, and the negotiated right-of-way.

The agreement should foster an accelerated economic integration of the Puyallup Indians into the increasing wealth and investment or developmental potential of the area immediately surrounding them. Yet, certain aspects of the negotiations—particularly related to rejection of several tribal property siting or acquisition proposals—gave some portents of an unspoken commitment among non-tribal parties toward the imposition—perhaps, rather, the maintenance—of an economic and territorial apartheid or designed redlining against Puyallup Indians to restrict their movement or entry into various choice development, ownership, and rights utilization, sites.

For the non-Indian parties, economic projections and valuations have been made, publicly issued, and submitted to the federal and state legislative bodies, showing the expected gains and economic growth, returns and revenues, which can be anticipated as result of the settlement. The measurable economic return, in both short and long terms, is projected to be a sizeable multiplier to the immediate Settlement costs of $162 million—with a multiplier perceived for each constituent share. (For example, the State recoups its $21 million cost in as quick as two years.) These promising projections are, doubtlessly, realistic. One assumes that it is the stark forces of realism, also which explains why no one perceives a need to supply a work-up on perceived or anticipated multipliers in values to accurate to the Puyallup Tribe and its members in result of the Settlement.

This settlement, in fact, could provide opportunities for breaching the sad history where Indian monetary resources—particularly Claims Settlement Funds or Judgement Awards—are quickly expended or otherwise dissipated and diminished, are simply passed through to non-Indians, or are corruptly reduced when attracting the involvement of a nefarious range of unscrupulous political figures, lawyers, consultants, confidence artists, and businessmen. Examples are found from the Alaskan Native North Slope corporation at Barrow to the highest echelon of the Navajo Nation at Window Rock. A US Senate Office and the Office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs were in euphoric state at time of introducing $8 million of Sisseton-Wahpeton monies to a St. Elizabeth’s alumnus once tagged “criminally insane,” partly for his adeptness at confidence games.

The point of the preceding, in part, is to indicate that the Settlement does not stand in total isolation from other events, processes, and considerations. It is of considerable importance that state officials who possess the conscience and political courage to be something other than anti-Indian receive the necessary federal support to succeed in some of those efforts undertaken for the benefit of both non-Indians and Indians, or for all citizens. (And, it occasions also my appeal for your consideration of lending support to the continuing actions by US Representatives Norm Dicks and John Miller to have Puget Sound added to the bodies of water granted line item budgeting status for OMB and the Congress in requests and appropriations for clean up or clean water funding.)

Congressional policy of recent years has enabled Indian tribes to assume a greater institutional role relating to a number of public policy issues. But also because of the emergent—involved and quality—Indian leadership being demonstrated in numerous instances on these issues, that Indian tribal role is beginning to become institutionalized in the processes of government in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys an increasingly favorable public acceptance.

Not a century after Washington statehood commenced, the Puyallup Indian Settlement Act affords an opportunity to begin writing an uncharacteristically new or different chapter in relations between Indians and others in the region, a chapter of clear promise and more than marginal hope. Also, it can begin to eradicate remaining residues of bitterness born in unkind histories of thoughtlessness and racism’s political collectivism, while giving rebirth to the spirit in public policy that George Washington, as first President—and for whom the nation’s forty-second state endures as namesake—invoked as standard, or espoused toward Indian people, for “reflecting an undecaying luster on the national character.”

Thus, I urge your support for the Act’s immediate and full funding in the coming fiscal year.

Respectfully yours,

Hank Adams, SAIA