by Adam Willems
In January 1855, representatives of the United States government and those of Indigenous tribes located in the western portion of the Washington Territory — the Duwamish, Suquamish, Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Lummi, Skagit, Swinomish, and others — signed the Treaty of Point Elliott. Among other stipulations, the treaty granted fishing rights and designated reservations for Indigenous signatories in exchange for the end of armed resistance against the settlers and state actors dispossessing them. Although it was ratified in 1859, the treaty was not honored by the federal government. Indigenous fishing rights were only upheld in court in the 1974 Boldt Decision, and it took about as long for the Nooksack, Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle, and Stillaguamish tribes to secure reservations of their own; the Duwamish tribe still remains without a reservation on its ancestral lands.
Key to continued Duwamish disenfranchisement and the long delay of formal sovereignty for hundreds of other tribes is the onerous process of federal recognition. When the federal government formally acknowledges an Indigenous tribe, its government and citizens gain access to a broad swath of political and material tools: funding as well as substantive legal authority over courts, land, health, foster care, adoption, and beyond. Recognition further offers “psychological validation,” according to members of federally recognized tribes, due to its legal affirmation of a Native American identity; it also establishes formal guardrails for state-to-state interactions with local, state, and federal government entities. But for the tribes who didn’t automatically secure recognition after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 — among them the Duwamish, who still do not have federal or state government recognition — the process to gain recognition and its attendant benefits has been socially and financially costly. It’s also been profoundly unjust.
The conditions for gaining recognition are reflective of the settler-colonial politics guiding them, explains Dr. Olivia Chilcote in Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians. A member of the federally unrecognized San Luis Rey Band, Chilcote asks how, in the wake of concerted efforts by settlers and the state to eliminate them, unrecognized tribes can be reasonably expected to furnish written proof that demonstrates the uninterrupted existence of a tribe for over a century. The fallacy keeps hundreds of unrecognized tribes, the plurality of which are in California, from securing federal acknowledgment, and creates an artificial hierarchy among Native communities that ultimately benefits settler-colonial agendas. “Equating membership in a non-federally-recognized tribe with extinction reiterates colonial narratives of vanishing Indians and places control of Native identity into the hands of the federal government,” Chilcote concludes.
In a conversation with the Emerald, Chilcote, associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University, describes the personal and political intentions of her book, outlines the state of the federal recognition process under the Biden administration, corrects narratives surrounding “tribal fraud,” suggests ways to stand in solidarity with unrecognized tribes, and affirms these tribes’ inherent sovereignty — whether the federal government recognizes them or not.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
To what extent are the ways the San Luis Rey Band has reacted to not being federally recognized similar to the practices that other unrecognized tribes in the U.S. are undertaking?
This experience is something that affects, you know, around 400 different tribes in the whole country. (There are 574 federally recognized tribes, and approximately 400 unrecognized tribes.) But there are certain realities of the way that colonization and genocide happened in California specifically that have made it especially difficult for tribes here. During my research, I did think about the commonalities between tribes in California and tribes like the Duwamish: how they were party to a treaty in the 1850s that [was] later unratified [or not honored]. I thought comparatively about that moment of being party to a treaty, and how that is without a doubt an indication that the federal government recognized that tribe as another inherently sovereign government. How can the tribe be party to a treaty and then not have that [federal] legal status [today]?
How the federal government prioritizes certain forms of settler documentation over others serves this very pragmatic and disenfranchising goal. The U.S. government signs a treaty and doesn’t ratify it, rendering it “null and void.” Anthropological documentation or the lack thereof also then serves as evidence of whether a tribe “went extinct,” justifying not granting its citizens any form of federally constituted political recognition. With that in mind, how did you approach writing your own book insofar as it is in itself a documentation of a tribe’s existence, as well as a documentation of the documentation process?
That’s a cool kind of meta way of thinking about it. I came to my research because of my position of being so ingrained in my own tribe. I had always grown up around this issue of recognition as well as people in my tribe — and my mom specifically — doing a lot of research. I have done a lot of research with my mom and others in my tribe too, and it really set the stage for pursuing my book project and this research. While all these different pieces of documentation were going on, they weren’t ever really put together in a succinct way, telling a specific narrative from our own perspective and on our own terms. I very much felt like I wanted to create something for my tribal community, specifically to have a go-to resource on what all of this stuff means, what our specific history is, how we became an unrecognized tribe, and the various struggles that we’ve participated in over the decades.
I also created the book for the purposes of recognition by the federal government. It’s unfortunate to say, but sometimes people who have academic credentials are taken more seriously than those who don’t. I sort of felt like it was my responsibility to use my educational background and the credentials that I’ve earned to try and provide some of that credibility to the way that our story unfolded over time. I was also very attentive to the fact that a lot of the documentation is coming from settler archives and is presented in a way that’s legible to a settler government. The research that I did with my tribe and the documentation that was created by the tribe itself — the oral histories and interviews that I did — were a way to reorient the story away from the settler archive and to ground it much more in our own narrations of our experience and our history.
But this is an issue that so many other tribes confront. I wanted it to also be a resource for other tribes as well as government agencies, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the topic. Some of the info published about this topic, or federal recognition in general, is a little bit outdated now, since the regulations changed in 2015. There hasn’t been much [that has] come out about it [since then].
A far more cost-effective resource, it seems like, than most others out there. The process of federal recognition and applying for it seems like this prohibitively costly undertaking that requires years, if not decades, of work — volunteers, expensive consultants, and so forth.
I’m uniquely positioned as an academic. Not all tribes have someone in their community who has the skills or credentials to do that. A lot of times, tribes have to outsource some of that work to anthropologists or genealogists or historians. But I’ve very much tried to align my career and the expectations of that with also this goal of helping my tribe.
Among others, you correct two key misconceptions that govern how tribes are or aren’t federally recognized. One is this double bind of being expected to demonstrate the documented continuity of a tribe since 1900 if the entire purpose of the settler project is discontinuity. The other misconception is the idea of “tribal fraud,” this idea that people cosplay as Indigenous for clout or material gain. That misconception gets in the way of a less byzantine application process by raising the burden of proof on unrecognized tribes. How much do you anticipate the federal recognition process becoming less onerous as these narrative corrections become more common sense?
I don’t necessarily see it changing in the short term, because the federal acknowledgment process was just revamped in 2015. The 2015 updates were trying to address some of those long-standing issues, but I haven’t really seen any kind of real changes. Granted, now we’re seeing some more transparency; they’re updating the [Office of Federal Acknowledgment] website every day. And the review process itself is now a two-phase process to try and speed up the way that these decisions are being made, but even since 2015, I still don’t see a greater number of tribes becoming recognized through that process. So I am not too optimistic that there will be changes seriously taken into consideration in the short term. Tribes not being able to make it through this process is something that’s been coming up since this process was created in 1978.
Where does that leave the San Luis Rey Band and other unrecognized tribes in the interim?
It leaves us back in the same position once again. This work is within a settler framework that is meant to exclude and not recognize tribes, but tribes still want to just get an answer, and so they’re still going to play the game of trying to meet these criteria and make the case, make the arguments, present the evidence that’s being required, and see what happens. Even if they’re denied, then they’re going to keep being a tribe, because they were still a tribe this whole time and functioning as such, maintaining that inherent tribal sovereignty and community. We know who we are and we know that we’re a tribe. But regardless if the federal government recognizes that or not, we’re still going to continue just how we always have as a community.
I would love to see more coalition building among unrecognized tribes and sharing of best practices on not just getting recognition but also on what it’s like to function as an unrecognized tribal government. What have certain tribes done to provide for their communities, for their people? What resources are out there? What avenues have they taken to protect their culture? And even more mundane things: What databases do they use for tribal enrollment? I’d like to see more of those positive interactions and more open sharing around what it means to be from an unrecognized tribe. It can be isolating, and it’s hard to identify with others about it. I would love it if my book were involved in facilitating something like that happening.
You write in the book about how the San Luis Rey Band has been particularly effective in working with park and land management departments when working around Native burial sites, because those are the primary state-to-state interactions that the Band has access to. Not at all to put a positive spin on this, but it seems there are skill sets that unrecognized tribes possess that recognized tribes maybe don’t need to develop as consistently due to the outlets they have available for expressing political sovereignty.
There are some things that unrecognized tribes have really had to do in terms of advocacy to ensure that we are having our voices and interests heard, and are having the opportunities to have government-to-government relationships with state and local governments. A big part of that has been a lot of the cultural resource-management work that unrecognized tribes participate in. Speaking to what I know about the California experience, most of the unrecognized tribes here are situated in a lot of urban areas or coastal areas, which are constantly being subjected to development. Unrecognized tribal territories have to contend with how we are able to still try to protect and preserve our territories and ancestors and cultural items and village sites that are being impacted by these kinds of developments. I think unrecognized tribes have had to expend a lot of time and effort on figuring out how we can have a say in the impacts being made to our cultural patrimony and to our land. Some of that advocacy work that my tribe has been really involved in at the state level has surrounded legal processes around development to ensure that there is consultation being done with tribes. In California, there are over 30 different state statutes covering multiple codes within the government that make space for and can be applicable to tribes that do not have federal recognition. There are so many unrecognized tribes here, so it’s an issue that comes up over and over again. The activism and the hard work that unrecognized tribes have done throughout the state ensure that we’re not being left out of these really important conversations and that we are still able to have access to certain state initiatives and laws.
There are these ways that you are going to bat very committedly through political channels to expand political recognition, and yet, at the same time, your tribe has an endowment that’s basically being held by the federal government until you receive official recognition.
It’s baffling in some ways. We were party to a lawsuit against the government for the loss of our aboriginal water rights, and yet, in receiving that settlement, we aren’t able to access that because of our political status. Having an unrecognized tribe party to this lawsuit that’s unable to access those funds really sets up this dynamic that doesn’t fully make sense.
Add to that the ways that legalization of tribal gaming has increased the burden of proof on unrecognized tribes. Reading about that brought the “capitalism” part of “racial capitalism” into stark relief.
The popularization of tribal gaming really changed the landscape for recognition. Various scare tactics and misinformation also arose because of it, really obscuring the fact that the unrecognized tribes have been pursuing this status in one way or another long before gaming was a valuable economic enterprise for tribal governments. We didn’t just pop up out of nowhere and decide, “Oh, we just want [federal recognition] because we want money.” It does really put into stark relief the economic influences that are involved in federal recognition. I’m also thinking of the funding and resources that are made available to tribes through the government. There’s a long-standing scare tactic that says that the more tribes get recognized, the fewer resources there will be. That [narrative] really only serves the purpose of the government and doesn’t address the reality of the situation.
You mentioned that having unrecognized tribes come together would be a productive form of solidarity. I’m wondering what other ways individuals or groups showing up for unrecognized tribes feel particularly compelling to you.
I think a big one, of course, would be donating their money to tribes. There’s Real Rent Duwamish, and the Fernandeño Tataviam Band here in Southern California has something called AcknowledgeRent. They’re accepting donations from people, which I think is really smart, especially in this time where land acknowledgements have really become something that’s taken off. A land acknowledgement is kind of hollow if there’s not action attached to it. With these unrecognized tribes that are located in very urban areas, very populated places where the population might not even realize the tribe is there because they don’t have a reservation, they then utilize the concept of the land acknowledgement and the action attached to that to try and generate support for whatever it may be that the tribe needs.
And then if there are any kinds of events or other initiatives that these unrecognized tribes are participating in, then advocate and endorse those initiatives — whether that means showing up at city halls, or if there’s a petition that needs to be signed, or contacting representatives, elected officials. It’s also important to educate ourselves and others on these issues. Take the time to really try to learn about the tribe and their particular historical experiences. If you see that something is happening and the tribe’s not being involved related to specific issues that would be of importance to the tribe, make it a point to always be thinking about how you can be supportive of a tribe.
With my book, one of the goals is that people will read about my tribe’s specific history and experience with federal acknowledgement and become more aware of the topic itself.
Adam Willems is a Seattle-based journalist and researcher. Adam's work has appeared in The Stranger, Seattle Met, WIRED, and elsewhere.