The ‘slow-motion genocide’ of the Chinook Indian Nation
As time moves on, elders pass and children grow up, tribal members’ fight for federal recognition while mired in bureaucracy.
Before the pandemic, the cedar plankhouse called Cathlapotle would have been full of stories and fire. Every winter, the Chinook Indian Nation and neighboring tribes hold their annual gathering here, on their ancestral lands on a Columbia River floodplain, where red-winged blackbirds sing from the cattails and yellow-and-orange-eyed sandhill cranes strut on stilted legs. It’s not far from the remnants of a village also called Cathlapotle, a major Chinookan trading town established around 1450 that once held as many as 16 plankhouses.
On sunny days when Cathlapotle is in use, the cedar beams glow warmly in the shafts of light streaming through the roof’s smoke holes. People gather round the fires at the center, with a row of chairs for elders and children. The air echoes with talk and songs, and the smell of sweetgrass filters in from outside. But this winter, Cathlapotle was silent, nestled in untrodden green grass and fog, its doors closed.
Like other communities, Chinook tribal members have had to adapt to pandemic-induced isolation. Though scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest, people have recently gathered most Thursdays on Zoom, joined by members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and others.
One Thursday afternoon in early March, a group of Chinuk Wawa language teachers, basket-weavers and storytellers called in from their homes on the Grand Ronde Reservation, in Portland, Eugene and Willapa Bay, to share ikanum, or traditional stories. In consonant-heavy Chinuk Wawa, they caught up with each other and read aloud an ikanum translated from the Kathlamet dialect of Chinook. It recalled a time of hunger on the edge of spring, when the salmon people went up the Columbia and met with their aunties, the big and little wapato, and their uncles, the skunk cabbage and the rushroot.
The stories are important for cultural continuity and the way they bring people together. “It really defines the whole way we look at the world,” Tony Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation, told me outside tribal headquarters in the tiny town of Bay Center, in southwestern Washington. “Every landform here, every creek, every inlet has a connection to these stories. So if you know these stories, you see this place in a very different way.”
For over 120 years, the Chinook Indian Nation has been trying to prove its sovereignty to the United States government by seeking formal federal recognition. Official status acknowledges the tribe’s sovereignty and the federal government’s obligations to it as generally outlined in treaties. With federal recognition comes health care through the Indian Health Service, education through scholarships, and access to land through creation of a reservation. Today, there are 574 federally recognized tribes. Hundreds of others are unrecognized, though, with varying claims of legitimacy. The process for the Chinook has involved decades of litigation, petitions, congressional legislation and appeals to presidents — yet the tribe is still unrecognized. The impersonal bureaucracy obscures the personal urgency and pain that tribal members feel as time moves on, elders pass and children grow up.
The pandemic has exacerbated the Chinook’s lack of the kind of social safety net recognized tribes possess. While the COVID-19 mortality rate of Indigenous people is almost 2.5 times that of white people, unrecognized tribes have not received any of the $8 billion in government aid passed by Congress last spring. Nor have they received priority for tests or vaccines. Instead, they have to rely on neighboring tribes like the Grand Ronde and the Shoalwater Bay Tribe to vaccinate their elder knowledge-keepers. Chinook tribal members sometimes refer to the lack of recognition as slow-motion genocide. “Explain how it’s not genocide,” Johnson said to me. “Someone explain to me how it’s not.”
