Chalaat: The People of the Hoh River

The Hoh people know themselves in their own language by a name that translates roughly as people of the Hoh River. Their connection to the river valley runs back thousands of years, predating the old-growth forest itself in cultural memory. The Hoh River, carrying glacial meltwater from the Olympic Mountains to the Pacific, was not simply a home but the center of an economy, a spiritual geography, and a way of life built around salmon, cedar, and the rhythms of the coast.

When the United States government negotiated treaty relationships with western Washington tribes in eighteen fifty-five, the Hoh were included in the Quinault Treaty, a treaty the article of record says was not signed with their knowledge. But when the time came to relocate to the Quinault Indian Reservation to the south, the Hoh refused. They did not believe they had agreed to permanently leave the Hoh River, and they stayed in the valley. The federal government eventually recognized their position: in eighteen ninety-three, President Grover Cleveland signed an executive order establishing the Hoh Indian Reservation at the mouth of the Hoh River, a small reservation on the Pacific Coast of Jefferson County, now a little over eight hundred acres.

The Hoh Reservation is among the smallest in the country by area, and the tribe is among the smallest by enrollment. But the Hoh have maintained treaty-protected fishing rights on the Hoh River for more than a century and have worked consistently to protect the water quality and salmon habitat that the river fishery depends on. The success of those efforts is inseparable from the health of the Hoh Rain Forest through which the river flows, a forest that Olympic National Park has protected since nineteen thirty-eight.