Schitsu'umsh: The Lake They Won Back in Court

The people who call themselves Schitsu'umsh, which translates roughly as 'those who are found here' or 'the ones who were found here,' have occupied the shores of Lake Coeur d'Alene and the surrounding Palouse country for at least eight thousand years. The evidence comes from both archaeological record and from an oral tradition that the Coeur d'Alene Tribe has maintained and continues to hold as its highest historical authority. The lake was their larder and their road: a source of fish, waterfowl, and camas root, navigated by canoe across a hundred and thirty-five miles of shoreline before the miners arrived.

The miners arrived in the eighteen eighties. The Coeur d'Alene Mining District, centered on what is now the Silver Valley northeast of the lake, extracted silver, lead, and zinc in quantities that made Idaho one of the most productive mining regions in North America. What the mining district also extracted was roughly seventy-five million tons of metal-laden tailings, which washed downriver and settled into the bottom of Lake Coeur d'Alene over a century of continuous operation. By the late twentieth century, the lake held one of the highest concentrations of metal contamination of any body of water in the country. The food sources the tribe had used for thousands of years were no longer safe.

In two thousand one, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the submerged lands beneath Lake Coeur d'Alene belonged to the tribe, not the state of Idaho, confirming that the lake itself was part of its treaty-protected homeland. It was the culmination of years of litigation and a clear statement that treaty protections had a real meaning in federal court, not merely a historical one.

The lake's remediation is ongoing. The contamination embedded in the lake's bottom sediments will not be fully addressed in any single generation. The Schitsu'umsh are still here.