Righting Wenatchi wrongs

By Linda Ashton

Associated Press

YAKIMA – Twice the U.S. government promised the Wenatchi Indians rights to their homeland, and twice the government cheated them.

More than a century later, members of this now tiny band are scattered across Eastern Washington. They are barred from fishing in the Wenatchee and Icicle rivers, and Leavenworth, the Bavarian-theme tourist town, sits on a portion of their ancestral land in the North Cascades.

Mathew Dick Jr. of Nespelem, a great-grandson of the Wenatchis’ last chief, John Harmelt, and several other tribal members are renewing efforts to get the government to recognize the tribe’s rights.

“I think they need to follow through on their promises,” Dick said. “I think it’s important to all the people of the United States that the United States government keeps the promises it makes.”

Dick was in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to meet with the state’s congressional delegation, armed with a new documentary called “False Promises” that recounts the history of the tribe that once numbered between 1,600 and 2,000 people.

Seattle filmmaker Rustin Thompson’s documentary will be aired on PBS stations in Seattle and Yakima Feb. 21.

“I had never heard of the group of Wenatchi Indians. I only thought it was a town and a river,” Thompson said. “And right smack in their aboriginal homeland is this Bavarian La-La Land of knickknacks and willkommen signs. There’s no evidence they ever existed.”

In 1855, the Wenatchi tribe, known as the P’Squosa in their own language, signed a treaty with the U.S. government giving them a 36-square-mile reservation at the confluence of the Icicle and Wenatchee rivers and guaranteeing their hunting and gathering rights in an area called the Wenatchapam fishery, according to Richard Hart, an independent historian from Winthrop on whose research the documentary is based.

But the site was never surveyed, and an Indian agent eventually ordered the markers moved high into the Cascades, where the winter snow was deep and fewer fish returned to spawn.

White people began to settle in area, and the Great Northern Railroad built its route through the Wenatchapam fishery without obtaining a right of way, according to Hart.

In 1893, the secretary of the interior, responding to white protests about the proposed reservation, called a meeting of the Wenatchis and the nearby Yakama Indians to try to get them to give it up.

At the meeting at Fort Simcoe, Indian agent L.T. Erwin promised the Wenatchis their fishing rights along with land allotments of at least 14,000 acres in the Wenatchapam fishery area.

The Yakama, led to believe the Wenatchis were satisfied with the arrangement, then agreed to cede the Wenatchapam reservation land to the government.

“They were tricked into selling it,” Dick said.

“I think if you would read all that we’ve got – about six boxes, 2 feet high – it would get you really mad, to think you guys had an agent like that back then.”

In 1894, Congress ratified the agreement, but Erwin never made a single land allotment to the Wenatchi. Two years later, each surviving member of the Wenatchi tribe was offered $9.30 apiece as their share of the land cession payment. They refused to accept.

By the turn of the century, all of the Wenatchis’ homesteads had been taken over by white people.

In 1931, more than 250 Wenatchis met at Cashmere and voted to hire a lawyer to sue the United States, but in 1935 the U.S. government blocked the lawsuit by voiding the Indians’ contract with their lawyer.

The Wenatchis’ fight ended when Chief Harmelt and his wife died in a house fire in 1937, but their daughter, Celia Ann Dick, spent a lifetime telling her children the story.

She died in 1997, but not before Mathew Dick “made the promise to her that I would do all that I could to finish the work John Harmelt started.”

The Wenatchis were excluded from the historic federal court decisions in Washington and Oregon that granted the Northwest’s treaty tribes rights to half the salmon in regional waters.

“The question as to who was a treaty tribe in most cases was pretty clear,” Hart said. “The parties signed the treaty and moved to the reservation, as a result they were a treaty tribe.”

But the Wenatchis never got their reservation, although a number of their descendants live on the Colville Confederated Tribes reservation in northeastern Washington and some live on the Yakama Nation reservation in central Washington.

In the case United States vs. Oregon, U.S. District Judge Malcolm Marsh classified all of the 12 Indian tribes and bands that make up the Colville Confederated Tribes as nontreaty tribes, Hart said.

“From a standpoint of history from the Wenatchi, it is clearly historically wrong,” Hart said. “Unfortunately, it … makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the tribe to sue.”

Dick said the Bureau of Indian Affairs advised the Wenatchis to work out the matter of fishing rights with the Yakama Nation, which as a treaty tribe has fishing rights in the Wenatchapam fishery.

After several frustrating attempts at negotiation, Dick said, the Yakama have agreed to meet again in Portland, Ore., in two weeks.

Today, about 28 percent of the land that would have made up the Wenatchi reservation is publicly held.

“As it happens, the Wenatchapam fishery, that location is now a federal fish hatchery,” Hart said.

Dick said he has been working with U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office, as well as Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. George Nethercutt.

“Right now, we’re in a fact-finding mode,” said Jed Lewison, a spokesman for Cantwell, D-Wash.

“Senator. Cantwell has been clear – the U.S. government has a moral obligation to improve the welfare of Native Americans throughout the nation. In this particular case, the office is looking forward to seeing what we can do to help make sure these concerns are addressed.”