Glenwood fights Indian land petition

Concerned area residents held a community meeting in Glenwood last week to get word from County Commissioner David Sauter about the issue.

Sauter assured the gathering that the county was taking steps to settle the matter once and for all. Also at the meeting were County Prosecutor David Quesnel, County Sheriff Bob Songer, and a staff member from federal Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler's office.

Herrera Beutler has not only weighed in on the issue; she has been proactive in helping the county bring the issue to authorities.

"I am pressing the governor's office to provide information to the community about the process and what this means for the community," Herrera Beutler told The Sentinel. "I am also coordinating meetings for Klickitat County Commissioner Dave Sauter with the Bureau of Indian Affairs so the folks of Klickitat County get the answers they deserve. We'll keep working on this as more information becomes available."

Her office added that it is still gathering information at this stage, but if the tribe is claiming new land under this process, they would consider that to be an error.

"All this should have been a done deal back in the '60s," says former Klickitat County commissioner Joan Frey. "That dispute was settled and I think $2.1 million was given to the tribe to relinquish all rights to what we refer to as Tract D, which takes in Glenwood, and so they accepted the money, ceded all rights to it."

But according to Frey and other sources, about every five years in the intervening decades the Yakama Nation has made new moves to take Tract D.

"When I was commissioner, it would appear in different forms quite frequently," Frey recalls. "You would get a new issue of state maps, and there they would identify the Glenwood area as Yakama Nation.

“And we would get it corrected. There was some effort a while back when the tribe wanted to have some say in alcohol transactions, and we had to stop that.

“We hired outside legal counsel to do a paper identifying the history and the current governance on Tract D Glenwood. It is not, not, not in the Indian Reservation, and, to this day, when you drive over from Trout Lake to Glenwood, your GPS through Google incorrectly informs you you're going into the reservation

“And, then as you leave in a southerly direction, it tells you when you're going out. So it has just been a never-ending vigil, and every time we have said no and we have prevailed."

(Yakama Nation Tribal Chairman and Public Relations/Media Committee chairman JoDe Goudy was called for comment for this story, but did not respond.)

The tribe's most recent action was to approach Gov. Jay Inslee last year for a proclamation outlining jurisdictional rights regarding tribal and non-tribal residents in and around the area, a requisite step in submitting its retrocession petition.

Inslee signed such a proclamation in 2014, along with a letter addressed to a Department of Interior official.

Frey is bewildered that Inslee could have signed the proclamation. "There was some research done back when Gov. Inslee was a congressman," she states. "He requested information on Tract D. So, in my opinion, if he saw a map he should have known darn well what was going on."

The Sentinel has acquired numerous documents showing the tribe's ceding of Tract D.

Frey says while the tribe does not contest those documents ("They can't," she affirms), it does choose to ignore them and hope that inertia and lack of public awareness will land Tract D in their borders.

The documents largely parallel the contemporary history of the tribe, beginning with the establishment of its reservation in the treaty of 1855 between two sovereign nations, the Yakama and the U.S. The boundaries in northwestern Klickitat County indicated in that treaty were lost at some point and redrawn in 1890. Then in 1904 Congress reset the Yakama boundary in the area, which held for a long time.

"In 1927 congress passed an act that there could be no changes to reservation boundaries once they had been set by Congress except by an act of Congress" asserts Glenwood resident Wayne Vinyard. "They established that any future boundary changes for reservations would have to go through them."

In 1946 a new agency called the Indian Claims Commission was established to serve as a judicial panel between tribes and the federal government.

The commission could make restitution decisions regarding tribes and could not address boundary questions.

The Yakama Nation brought restitution issues to the commission and included the 1904 boundaries established by Congress and upheld in a case brought before the Supreme Court in 1913.

Then a subofficial assistant attorney named Nealey wrote a non-binding legal opinion on the commission's actions, stating that since the commission had accepted the tribe's description of its boundaries, then the boundaries must indeed be as the tribe described and not as they had been adjusted.

"So that was his legal opinion, you know," Vinyard said. "You can buy a legal opinion from any attorney, and that's all it was, a legal opinion."

Matters became more confused in 1972, when Richard Nixon signed an executive order for a 21,000 acre tract, part of Gifford Pinchot National Forest, to be changed.

"He deeded it back to the Yakama Nation," Vinyard states. "It was a short page-and-a-half document and most of it is legal description, and it says absolutely nothing about the surrounding 97,000 acres. But once Nixon conceded that, then the Department of Interior publicized, 'Well, then he changed the boundary.'"

Vinyard and his neighbors in Glenwood sprang into action. "We got involved and we wrote our congressmen, and our congressmen went to the chairman of the Indian Claims Commission, Mr. Cookendall, and he wrote a very extensive letter. His letter made very clear that the Indian Claims Commission had no authority to change any boundaries.”

Vinyard's history of events is corroborated by documents The Sentinel has obtained.

In 2012 the Washington Legislature passed House Bill 2233. Part of that bill explicitly stressed that the rights of citizens potentially in the path of any boundary adjustments shall not be abridged.

The law stated the governor must consult not just with the tribes after 90 days of receiving a petition but also to talk to the counties, elected officials of the counties, cities and towns affected by that petition. "Nobody has yet said a word to us," Vinyard said.

Residents of the area are concerned about legal jurisdiction issues if their land goes to the tribe.

"If that happens, whether you're in Tract D boundary or driving on your way to Toppenish or the White Swan area, if the Department of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs writes it retroactively, approves a retrocession according to their matrix — now this is just my understanding — it would give the tribe full jurisdiction over all non-tribal members too,” said NVinyard.

“Whether it's a traffic ticket, a divorce, or a criminal action, suddenly you're tribal courts. And that's our concern."

Vinyard says he's sad about an unnecessary conflict between non-members and the tribe.

But he also thinks the tribe has a long-term strategy.

"My thought is that they'll wait for political winds to change, wait until guys like me die off and the passage of time.

“If you tell a lie long enough, it will eventually start to stick,” he said.