The Hoh Tribe Inside the Park

The Hoh Tribe's reservation was established in eighteen ninety-three at the mouth of the Hoh River. It encompassed roughly eight hundred thirty-seven acres on a narrow strip between the river and the Pacific coast. The Hoh people had lived in this corridor for thousands of years. The reservation gave them legal title to a fraction of their ancestral territory.

Forty-five years later, in nineteen thirty-eight, Olympic National Park was established around it. The tribe did not lose its reservation in the process. What it gained was a new neighbor that controlled the land on three sides and the management decisions that came with that land.

The relationship between the Hoh and the park has been contentious and cooperative in alternating episodes for more than eighty years. NPS decisions about river flows, elk hunting, trail routing, and access corridors directly affect treaty rights that predate the park's existence by decades. The Hoh have treaty-reserved rights to fish, hunt, and gather in their usual and accustomed places. Some of those places are inside the park. Negotiating what that means in practice has required sustained legal and political effort from the tribe.

In twenty twelve, the tribe completed the first expansion of its land base in its modern history: thirty-seven acres added to the reservation. The number sounds small. In the context of a tribe that had not gained any land in a century, it was significant.

The Hoh Rainforest, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors per year to experience its silence and its moss, sits a few miles east of the reservation on land the Hoh managed, fished, and hunted for thousands of years before the park was named. The interpretive signs in the rainforest visitor center do not say much about this. The Hoh Tribe's website does.