Tribe’s purge prompts request for fed intervention
EVERSON, Wash. — In the snow-packed driveway of Saturnino Javier’s home, a dozen extended family members gathered last week with drums formed from cedar and animal skin, intoning the prayerful songs they had learned growing up in the Nooksack Indian Tribe.
For decades, Javier and his family have seen the tribe in northern Washington as their people, their home. But they are now among more than 300 people who are being disowned by the tribe, on the losing end of a bitter disenrollment battle that has torn apart families and left dozens of people facing eviction in the middle of the coldest Washington winter in years.
In recent days, the tribe has mobilized its police force to begin removing Javier, who lives with his three children, and others from their tribal homes after having already cut off educational aid, health services, financial stipends — and whatever remained of what was once an expansive sense of community.
“The main thing is identity,” Javier said last week in the stove-heated living room of the three-bedroom tribal home he has lived in since 2010, a traditional cedar-woven hat hanging from the wall beside him. “Your whole life, you think you are Nooksack, and then, bam, they are saying you are not Nooksack.”
In an Indigenous community that has always championed Native Americans’ sovereign rights and independence from federal oversight, the outcast Nooksack members are so outraged they are petitioning the federal government to intervene. The Biden administration, which made a commitment to honoring tribal self-determination, now faces thorny questions over whether it should take the extraordinary step of challenging tribal sovereignty on an issue so fundamental as how the tribe chooses who gets to live on tribal lands.
“On the face of it, for sure we want sovereignty,” said Michelle Roberts, another expelled Nooksack member who faces eviction. “But when that sovereignty is used as a tool to bully people and take advantage of the system, to kick them out of their tribe or to take any kind of services or anything away from them, then that’s when it needs to be controlled somehow.”
A tribe of about 2,000 people, the Nooksack fought for decades, starting in the 1800s, for federal recognition and rights to the territory they had long inhabited. The tribe now has trust land and a small reservation, bringing in revenue from a casino, a convenience store and a gas station. Tribal members have treaty rights to fish salmon along the namesake river that flows out of the Cascade Mountains.
Tribes around the country have moved in recent years to trim their membership rolls, scrutinizing family trees and cutting out those deemed to have tenuous or insufficient ties to tribal heritage in an effort to strengthen tribal identity. The disenrollment fights have escalated as casinos and other businesses have brought in new revenue, development, growth and job opportunities.
For the Nooksack, whose casino has not been a big money earner, the 306 members who have been purged say their family group was singled out for disenrollment by rivals who, the outcasts say, wanted to maintain tribal leadership and access to the lucrative tribal jobs that come with a grip on power. Opposing groups in the tribe have long feuded over those issues as control has swung from side to side.
Nooksack leaders have said the expelled people are descended from a tribal band based in Canada and should never have been enrolled. None of them had direct ancestors who were included in a crucial tribal census that was undertaken in 1942, and Ross Cline, tribal chairman, who has led the eviction effort, said the tribal leadership’s responsibility now was to preserve the tribe’s land and resources for qualifying members.