The 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, which defines political relationships between the modern-day United States and over 20 Pacific Northwest tribal nations, has its roots in 1792, when siʔaɬ, a Duwamish and Suquamish boy of about 6, watched foreign invaders anchor a ship festering with diseases in what’s now called Miller Bay, Washington. The boy watched with his village — thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of relatives, according to the contemporary Suquamish Tribe. The captain was English, and couldn’t speak any of the region’s languages. Sixty-three years later, the boy had grown to become Chief Seattle. Only 272 Suquamish people survived, and the colonizers had established their own territorial government. A treaty was perhaps the only way for Chief Seattle to negotiate lasting protections for his descendants.
“Chief Seattle signed that treaty with the government after witnessing so many deaths that he had (to be) looking out for survival for future generations,” said Rob Purser (Suquamish), director of treaty rights for the Suquamish Tribe. “There wasn’t no way of fighting your way out of that problem.” Leaders, he said, had to work with the colonial government and make some promises in exchange for land. But today, as in Chief Seattle’s time, non-Native governments routinely ignore or reinterpret treaties, leading to dynamic, ongoing conversations involving Native ancestors, the U.S. courts and contemporary tribal nations.
Negotiations required layers of interpreters: one to translate from English to Chinook Jargon, a trade language with a limited vocabulary, and others to translate from Chinook Jargon into local languages like Muckleshoot and Lushootseed leaving convoluted final translations. Over 80 Indigenous leaders signed the document, which today affects issues ranging from fishing rights to education and medical care. The Suquamish Tribe has defended the treaty in the Supreme Court nine times, Purser said, and won every time. “It was Chief Seattle’s wisdom, looking at the situation his people were under, to try to protect future generations.”
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Joshua L. Reid (Snohomish), history and American Indian studies professor at the University of Washington: “Coast Salish peoples had, and continue to have, different ideas of what constitutes property, what constitutes ownership. Simply put, it’s more a system where people belong to places rather than people own places in that fee simple property way that United States property concepts observe. But that doesn’t mean that Native peoples didn’t know what negotiations and treaties were. People in the Puget Sound region had heard of the Douglas treaties, which the British colonial governor had signed and negotiated with different First Nations around the Vancouver Island area. So they knew of those negotiations and understood that ‘we reserve certain things for us, we extend certain rights to non-Natives, and there are land cessions.’”
Andrew Gobin (Tulalip), director of treaty rights for the Tulalip Tribes: “Our people saw what was coming, and they had the wisdom and the foresight to protect the things that are important to our people in our way of life, because truly, our entire culture is protected in the treaty. The rights to hunt, fish and gather protect everything. Your usual and accustomed place are your family village sites, so you’re protecting your bloodline, your heritage, you’re preserving family connections, that oral tradition of handing teachings down from one generation to the next through practice, through going and doing these things. When you look out at the land and water, you see every aspect of our culture.”
Gobin: “Treaty rights are knowns: We know what is obligated, we know what is protected. And yet … if the tribes weren’t there to stand up and voice the concern, then (federal agencies) just move forward like (the treaty) doesn’t exist.”
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Purser: “The government didn’t give us nothing. No tribe got gifts from the government. We reserved those treaty rights in exchange for land. And that’s the same all across the U.S.”
Reid: “There were still, demographically, many more Indigenous peoples here than settlers at the time of the signing of the treaties. … There were plenty of times that Natives successfully fought back or chased settlers out of these homesteads that they were laying claim to. … This loomed large in (Washington Territory Gov. Isaac) Stevens’ mind, because he knew that if Native nations banded together, they could push the settlers out. He had real motivation to try to get these treaties negotiated and signed to prevent something like that from happening.”
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Reid: “Some depositions of oral histories that were collected in the 1920s from individuals who were kids or young teens who were there at Mukilteo and were elders by the 1920s, gave oral accounts that their fathers and grandfathers or grandmothers and others shared with them as they were growing up. One of the things that comes across consistently in dozens and dozens of these depositions from many different tribal nations was that Stevens had promised that there would be a large reservation created in western Washington of such size that every Coast Salish person, man, woman, and child, would receive 80 acres. So Native peoples were like, ‘OK, this is a clear statement of protecting our land rights.’ As it turned out, that big reservation that dozens of Coast Salish peoples talk about in these depositions, it doesn’t appear anywhere in the negotiation notes. That’s one of those examples of the power dynamic at play — that the United States was powerful enough to ignore some of these key promises that were made in the negotiations.”
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In a landmark 1974 decision, Judge George H. Boldt interpreted this phrase to mean that treaty tribes can harvest 50% of the fish in Washington state. He wrote, “There is no indication that the Indians intended or understood the language ‘in common with all citizens of the Territory’ to limit their right to fish in any way. For many years following the treaties the Indians continued to fish in their customary manner and places, and although non-Indians also fished, there was no need for any restrictions on fishing.”
The boundaries of what a tribes’ “usual and accustomed” fishing grounds is still being argued today based on the Point Elliott Treaty; this year the Quinault Tribe sought access to fishing grounds in Western Washington, arguing they fall under “usual and accustomed,” and in 2021 the neighboring tribal nations of the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe went to the courts to try and prevent their fishing of the Skagit River, arguing it is outside their usual and accustomed grounds.
“From a Coast Salish perspective, fishing isn’t just the simple act of putting a fishing pole in the water and yanking a fish out.”
Reid: “From Stevens’ perspective, fish didn’t become property until you caught it and brought it into your boat or net, whereas from Indigenous perspectives, fish were people. They were more-than-human people who were part of the larger community of the Salish Sea. They weren’t property in the sense that, when you caught it, it became yours to do with whatever you wanted. It was more that fish gave themselves to Coast Salish peoples, because of these reciprocal relations, protocols of respect. And if Coast Salish people didn’t respect salmon, then salmon would disappear, wouldn’t give themselves to the people, to put it simply. And so, of course, there were all these elaborate protocols and practices in place around the proper treatment of salmon, so that salmon would give themselves to people. From a Coast Salish perspective, fishing isn’t just the simple act of putting a fishing pole in the water and yanking a fish out. Fishing included all those protocols, the reciprocity, the preparation that went into it and all the management structures. So, when Stevens would say something, and then it would be kind of clumsily translated into Chinook Jargon, that ‘this paper secures your fish,’ they really thought that it meant all of that, the management oversight, the protocols, the reciprocity, the relationality. So that’s where you see a disjuncture between different understandings of what fishing meant.”
Gobin: “Our language is verb-based. The parts of our language are tied to specific actions or something that happens. The word that we use for salmon is tied to something that happens every year. The way that the word is constructed, it means something that happens on a yearly cycle, and how that translates across our culture is that the times of the year are specific to where we are in that cycle of salmon.”
Purser: “The Boldt Decision was the biggest positive court decision in Indian Country, period, because it took an old treaty — at that time, they argued it was old and outdated, no longer needed — Judge Boldt took that treaty and recognized it’s a living document, ruling it the supreme law of the land. And what that did is that brought back to life all treaties across the U.S. that were signed. Their federal court said that those are living documents and they need to be upheld.”
Gobin: “These are the types of things that we deal with in policy, how these historic agreements move into current events, ongoing issues, and emerging issues. We’re always looking at climate change, one example being sea-level rise. Our rights are place-based. Our rights, preserved under the treaty, exist in our usual and accustomed places. Well, with sea-level rise, we get displaced of our usual and accustomed places, or with our land-based rights, which are on open and unclaimed lands. As environments shift, our people get displaced. Or as development happens, wildlife populations are displaced, and if they move outside of areas reserved under the treaty, then they become inaccessible.”
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Reid: “Concepts of family, like fatherhood or brothers or children, or even concepts of friendship, those meant two different things. From an Anglo perspective, the ‘Great Father’ (what negotiators called the U.S. president) wields paternalistic power over his children. From an Indigenous perspective, that father only can exercise that power if he takes care of his children. When Chief Seattle would acknowledge the Great Father, Stevens got very excited and thought, ‘This means the chiefs are submitting to the power of the United States.’ Chief Seattle was actually bringing the president of the United States and other U.S. officials into the larger political family of Coast Salish peoples, and that came with all kinds of rights and responsibilities that the United States just blindly ignored in subsequent generations. ‘Friendship’ operated that way, too. Friendship was understood within this Coast Salish parameter of a wealthy person has friends in many places. And so, when Chief Seattle and the other Coast Salish leaders were calling Stevens and Simmons and settlers ‘friends,’ what they were trying to do was bring them into that network of relationality where you’ve got rights and responsibilities, you feed your friends, you support your friends, you ally with your friends. You don’t take their lands, screw them over, and shoot them dead.”
“You don’t take their lands, screw them over, and shoot them dead.”
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Purser: “(The promise of a school and a clinic) is definitely what was in the treaty. That’s not what happened. We had to buy our own school. We’re buying our own medical facilities. None of that was ever provided.”
Anthony Hillaire (Lummi), chairman of the Lummi Nation: “In our efforts to take care of ourselves, in no way do we ever or will we ever let the United States of America off the hook of their treaty and trust responsibility to us. … We have to do the work to ensure that they’re following their own law. And it gets quite frustrating because we see that in health care, we see that in education, we see that in salmon recovery and co-management of our national resources — and the list goes on.”
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Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that treaties are the “supreme law of the land.”
Reid: “From a settler perspective, treaties were one-and-done-type documents, and the continuing relevance of them was up for debate, which is flat-out wrong. Treaties are the supreme law of the land. Most non-Natives assume that treaties were a figment of the past and are best kept in the mid-19th century. But from Indigenous perspectives, that’s not at all what a treaty is. A treaty is something that, of course, was negotiated and signed at that place in time, but that it brought the United States and non-Natives into perpetual relations with Indigenous peoples, and that actions need to happen to continuously maintain them. Those are two radically different understandings and approaches to treaty making and treaty processes. One of the most compelling things that I’ve heard a tribal leader say recently was Lisa Wilson, Lummi Tribal Council member. She had mentioned that treaties are for all of us. They aren’t just for Indian people in western Washington. The treaties bind all people, Native and non-Native, together around these ideas of relationality, of how to interact with each other.”
Purser: “Defending treaty rights today is an everyday challenge. … A big reason is the lack of knowledge, the lack of education. People moving in (to our area) know nothing about tribes. (In the) Boldt Decision days, there was so much misinformation put out about tribes and treaties and Indians, and we’re still dealing with (that) misinformation that the public was fed. There’s a lot more (people) now that know the history and have compassion for Natives and understand the struggles they’ve been through. There’s still a lot that don’t know. That’s been the challenge, educating people as they come in. My department works government to government. … It’s a constant education with them. Because they retire. They work 40 years, retire, and they hire new people and we start all over, educating them on treaty rights. … Everyone that comes in has to learn all about the treaty rights and Natives.”
Note: This story was updated to correct that Chinook Jargon is a 50-word trading language when it included more words, though it is limited in its vocabulary.
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This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Treaty talks.”
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