Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination

1. “We want to be Indians forever.” [Includes Image Plate]

3 Chapter 1 “We want to be Indians forever.” T his story begins with the land. The Columbia Plateau served as home to bands of indigenous peoples long before the US government existed and even longer before that government named some of these peoples the Colville Indians. The plateau, roughly bounded by the Columbia River and the Cascade Mountain range in present-day Washington State, sheltered and sustained generations of people. Some of this plateau would be set aside for the Colville Indian Reservation in 1872, and, twenty short years later, more than one million acres of the North Half of the reservation would be lost to the very government that had deemed it reservation land in the first place. Loss of this land, through a questionable land cession, in many ways defined the Colville Indian Tribe throughout most of the twentieth century. In hopes of restoring the North Half to the reservation, the Colvilles engaged with several federal Indian policies. They accepted allotment. They rejected the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) but then created a tribal constitution and empowered a business council to act on tribal matters. One of the Colville Business Council’s first major undertakings in the early 1950s was preparation of legislation to restore the beloved North Half of the Colville Reservation. What began as a restoration bill became a bill providing for both restoration and termination, which ultimately led to a series of termination bills written by the Colville Business Council and by various factions on the reservation. The yearning, the acrimony, the bitterness, and the discord that took 4 § Chapter 1 hold of the Colville Reservation and tribal members across the country for twenty years began with a good deed. Like most tribal communities, the Colvilles have a complicated land history and an even more complicated relationship with the government. The reservation was established by an executive order from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, the government ’s attempt at an efficient solution for dealing with the eight bands of non-treaty Indians that the reservation would include. The first executive order, signed in April, created a reservation that spanned roughly 3.5 million acres on both sides of the Columbia River all the way to the Pend Oreille River near present-day Idaho, and included white settlement areas near Kettle Falls and Colville, Washington. After howls of protest from non-Indian mill operators and shopkeepers who had arrived in the area not long before, President Grant adjusted the reservation boundary to the west side of the Columbia River, thus leaving the townsfolk outside the reservation.1 The new reservation encompassed 3.1 million acres, from the Canadian border on the north and following the jogs and turns of the Columbia River for its eastern and southern boundaries. The western boundary had less physical or territorial finality to it, but it ran along streams and lakes, and nearly reached the foothills of the Cascade range. The Colville Indian Reservation became home to the newly anointed Colville Indians circa July 1872.2 This new collective seemed to barely acknowledge their new name. The Colville band lived closest to the white settlements and had wellestablished trade relationships with Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in Canada.3 This new designation required them to make few changes; they kept their name and stayed in nearly the same places, so at the time they likely felt little effect from the executive order. The Arrow Lakes band (also called the Lakes band), the nearest neighbor of the Colville band, were canoe people who fished and hunted along the Columbia on both sides of the US-Canadian border, and it is likely that they just kept about their business. The Lakes band also had longstanding trade relationships with HBC men and sometimes married these traders as well. Consequently each group had integrated non-Indians into their lives as much or as little as they individually deemed necessary. The San Poil Indians, farther down the Columbia near what is now Keller, almost completely ignored the government men and other outsid- “We Want to Be Indians Forever.” § 5 ers. They did not trade with whites, did not engage in Catholicism as did some in the Colville band, and kept to themselves in an area rich with game and fish.4 The most interior of the bands, they would rebuff government overtures well into the twentieth century. The Nespelem band and the Okanogan...