TULALIP — Over the past several years, the Tulalip Tribes and Snohomish County have been hashing out an agreement that will allow them to work more closely together on a variety of issues, especially land use.
On Tuesday, people on the Tulalip Indian Reservation who are not Native American packed a county Planning Commission meeting to demand the deal be scuttled, or at least watered down.
They are concerned that the county was ceding jurisdiction over their properties to the tribal government. They said the tribes wanted to take their land back, and were employing bullying tactics to get it.
“The county is the entity that provides land use permitting and code enforcement,” said Ralph Plummer, who lives on Mission Beach Road in Tulalip. “I reject the notion that the tribe has any jurisdiction over either of those.”
The comments got to the heart of a conflict that goes back to the establishment of the reservation in 1855.
Land owned by the Tulalip Tribes is held in trust by the federal government on their behalf. But non-tribal residents, who outnumber tribal members on the reservation, hold title to their properties and are subject to local and state taxation.
Snohomish County claims jurisdiction over land owned by non-Indians on the reservation. The Tulalip Tribes claim jurisdiction over all the land within the reservation boundaries.
Both governments agree to disagree on this point, and have pledged to work together to make it easier on the non-Indian people on the reservation who need local government services but find themselves stuck between two separate authorities with their own land use codes.
The issue before the planning commission was a proposed addition to the county’s comprehensive plan about the Native American tribes living in the county.
County officials, including senior planner Alison Hodgkin and planning commission chairman Daniel Strandy, both emphasized that the text, if adopted by the Snohomish County Council, would not change development regulations, jurisdiction or zoning maps on the reservation.
Instead, the proposal was intended to set a framework for further communication about those issues.
“This policy would allow the county, the tribes and the public and leadership to explore what those programs might look like in the future,” Hodgkin said.
Any specific changes to regulations or zoning would have to go through the regular public process, Hodgkin said.
Many speakers at the commission meeting weren’t buying that.
“It’s setting up a method of sneaking things in through the back door,” said Cindy Pancerzewski, another resident of Mission Beach.
People raised other complaints, such as slow issuance of permits by the tribal government, or being subject to a government in which the non-tribal residents have no representation.
More than one speaker referred to the eviction of non-tribal members from Mission Beach after their leases of beachfront property expired in 2012.
Owners had to demolish or ship away by boat cabins and houses that some of them had owned and enjoyed for multiple generations.
Tribal chairman Mel Sheldon Jr. acknowledged the lack of trust between the residents and the tribes.
“While we’re working well with the county, we’ve somehow not kept our citizens with us as well informed as we could have, and the other night is an example,” Sheldon said.
Tribal members and nonmembers want the same thing, a good quality of life on the reservation. But some differences of opinion will be unavoidable.
“We understand that we’ll be misunderstood as we exercise our sovereignty,” Sheldon said.
At the top levels of government, both the tribes and county see closer collaboration as the only way to improve their relationship.
“How do we want our shorelines to be managed? How do we get there without fighting about the issue?” said Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers.
“I see some sort of shared planning process and permitting process as a potential solution to this,” Somers said.
A checkerboard reservation
The Treaty of Point Elliott gave the tribes that comprise the Tulalips a permanent home in exchange for ceding millions of acres in Western Washington to the U.S. government. An 1873 executive order from President Ulysses S. Grant established the boundaries of the 22,500-acre reservation.
In 1887, the Dawes Act, also known as the Allotment Act, changed the rules.
In the name of assimilation, the government divided the communally held reservation into private lots and allotted the parcels to individual Indians. Those who accepted the lots and moved off the reservation were awarded U.S. citizenship.
But individual ownership of the lots, known as fee title, eliminated tribal ownership. The lots left over after allotment to tribal members were opened up to homesteading or sale to non-Indians.
Subsequent federal laws that addressed allotment, inheritance rights and farming hastened the transfer of land from Indian to non-Indian hands. Sometimes this happened in legal sales, sometimes through subterfuge or coercion.
In the end, non-Indians owned more than half of the Tulalip reservation lands.
The allotment era ended in 1934 and tribes could reorganize and reassert their sovereignty. But many reservations, including Tulalip, had become a jumbled checkerboard of parcels owned by both Indians and non-Indians.
It’s a situation Somers said he’s very sensitive to as the county enters into talks with the Tulalips to untangle it.
“It’s really a bit of a mess created by history,” he said.
Modern problems
The mess continued through the decades, further complicated by the status of the shoreline, which the Tulalip Tribes insist was not included in the original allotment. Beachfront landowners again claim the tribes have no jurisdiction, but find themselves having to deal with the tribes to work on bulkheads or docks over environmentally sensitive tidelands.
Steve Ahmann has a house on Mission Beach. His bulkhead was damaged in a November storm, and he said he’s about to start the process of trying to get it repaired. Based on the experience of his neighbors, he’s not optimistic.
“The tribe claims jurisdiction over the tidelands, so the tribe doesn’t like barges to be parked on their sand during construction,” Ahmann said.
Ahmann’s family has owned the property for several generations. Some of the families along the beach bought their properties during the allotment period from the original Indian owners.
Work on the shoreline is slow when the tribes review each project, sometimes taking years, some neighbors said.
It does take time, and the Tulalips take their role as environmental stewards seriously.
“We have had examples where we’ve told the county that a project can’t go through as it’s proposed. And that’s where the landowners feel some resentment,” said Julia Gold, an environmental program analyst with the Tulalip Tribes.
That irks those who believe the tribes have no authority over the shoreline on their properties.
Ahmann said that the tribes have tried to tie issuing permits to the landowners signing a lease for the beach. That would mean he’d implicitly agreed to tribal jurisdiction, he said.
“They can’t lease what they don’t own,” Ahmann said.
Reconciling codes
In a 2013 agreement, the county and the tribes committed to finding where they could develop common policies governing land use, including code enforcement and data sharing.
Reconciling zoning differences was another aspect of that.
“The first thought was just make the county zoning consistent with the tribes’. It’s an easy path,” Somers said.
But the original plan looked at down-zoning on certain undeveloped lots. Most of the interior of the reservation is still forested, and the thought was to use a handful of 40-acre lots as test cases.
Ahmann’s family business has owned two of those lots of second-growth forest since the 1950s. He manages them as forest lands, but said he may later want to subdivide and sell or develop the properties, as many owners of rural tracts do.
The lots’ zoning under the county code would allow him to subdivide the lots into four single-family parcels. If the county down-zoned the lots to match the zoning called for by the tribes, he would have been limited to two lots per 40 acres.
Somers decided against the down-zoning plan given the loss of value the land would suffer. “It’s a pretty harsh action on the property owner,” he said.
Rather than push it forward, he said, “Let’s take some baby steps first and get some policies in place.”
“It’s too much too soon.”
The experience led Ahmann to be more wary, and he likened the threat of down-zoning to other practices that would limit his property rights, such as being required to lease the shoreline.
For shoreline issues, Somers conceded there are gray areas in the law that stemmed from the creation of the reservation.
“That’s something the county can’t solve. That one is going to end up being solved by the courts,” Somers said.
Time immemorial
A phrase that often gets used when Native Americans talk about their roots and ties to the land is “Since time immemorial.”
It’s more than just a poetic turn of the phrase. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a Native American in a country that, for much of its history, worked to extinguish that identity.
It’s also inextricably linked with reservation lands that are all that is left of what was once Native Americans’ wide-ranging territories.
Rochelle Lubbers, the Tulalip Tribes’ executive director for administrative services, attended college, worked and got a masters’ degree in public administration before returning to the reservation where she was born.
Many non-tribal residents aren’t even aware that the tribal government has its own planning department, GIS mapping services and other functions, she said.
Getting non-tribal residents on the reservation more comfortable using tribal services would be a start to a closer working relationship.
What isn’t on the table is any relinquishing of tribal sovereignty. Tribal chairman Sheldon said that while it works to build better relationships with non-tribal members, Tulalip does have a policy to buy back land when it becomes available.
“When you think about the hundreds of thousands of acres that were given up in exchange for 22,500 acres, yes, we’d like to have as much of it back as we can,” Sheldon said.
The tribes have built a robust government with non-tribal participation — nonmembers are able to serve on boards and commissions or as jurors in tribal court proceedings, for example — that can protect the rights of members and nonmembers alike.
None of that would diminish tribal members’ connection to the land.
“Unlike other people who come and go, our children will live here for generations to come, and it’s important for land use practices to reflect that,” Lubbers said.
“This is the only land we’ll ever have.”
That view, running up against traditional property rights, put the planning commission between the proverbial rock and a hard place on Tuesday.
“It seems to me there is a lot to be resolved and a larger portion of it is about trust,” said planning commissioner Douglas Hannam.
The commission passed the measure after stripping out some of the language some reservation residents objected to, although the county executive has the ability to reinsert that language before it goes before the Snohomish County Council in August.
That will be followed by another public hearing in September, at which many of the same issues in the ongoing conflict between property rights and tribal sovereignty will be brought up again.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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