||| FROM SPIRIT EAGLE |||
While appreciating Michael Riordan’s letter to the editor to the Islands’ Sounder regarding the Lummi totem pole journey to Orcas Island, there is something of a misconception I would like to clear up:
The Lummi Nation did not use Orcas Island as a place where they came fishing, they actually lived here, year-round, from time immemorial. There were year-round villages around the island and burial areas around the island that are documented by the Washington State Department of Archeology.
Madrona Point was one of those areas. The Lummi had villages in Deer Harbor, Doe Bay area, and Eastsound. They fished the waters and buried their dead here in the Islands. Over the years I have read the accounts of the Lummi history by non-Indian people in the islands that gloss over the fact that the Lummi People lived here year-round. The San Juans were their homeland.
One family with a large number of children were the only ones living on Sucia Island, and after the Treaty of 1855 was signed, government agents came and forcibly took their children to the Hell that was Chemawa Indian School where many, many died from abuse and heartbreak, and the parents could do nothing about it. I interviewed Native Elders who lived through the Chemawa Indian School experience and that which happened to these children, nowadays, would be called severe abuse and neglect.
When Western Washington was opened up to non-Indian immigrants, the Native People were taken from their Ancestral Lands and their way of life eventually succumbed to what we have today.
The People are rising though, now, but I ask everyone to never forget, this was not a fishing ground, this was their home, and the place where their Ancestors are buried. Can you imagine the heartbreak? Walk here, softly, upon our Mother Earth.
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Thanks for reminding our islanders about the history and lineage of the Lummi on Orcas Island, Spirit Eagle.
Hopefully, the new Coast Salish mural at the landing will be one more reminder. It helps to be educated on Treaty Rights, too. I learned a lot from this: “Treaty rights are an inherent right. Treaty rights were not given to tribes, it’s a common misconception that the government gives Native Peoples special rights. That’s the exact opposite of how it works. Tribes are sovereign nations, they give up rights and they retain rights. Treaty rights are rights that are not given up by tribes and they’re upheld by the federal government as part of their trust relationship with the treaty tribes. The tribes’ right to self-govern is the supreme law of the land. It’s woven into the U.S. constitution as well as many legal decisions and legislative articles. The constitution says, congress has the power to make treaties with sovereign nations and that treaties are the supreme law of the land.”
And yet, the U.S Government did not consider the Native American Tribes as Sovereign Nations, until recently. The Constitution was not written to protect the Native Peoples’ Rights to their land. Every treaty that had been made with Native Peoples here in the U.S. was broken. It wasn’t until relatively recently that treaties were made and kept. And of course, renegotiated for less land for the Natives. So much of the land was sold or given away by the U.S. Government to immigrants from other countries, the railroads, etc.
In the last century, the U.S. Government offered to buy land from the Native Tribes, but since some of the Tribes did not agree to this, and the pittance the government offered them was refused, technically the titles on many lands are still not Clear, because of this. -Spirit Eagle