The Yakama Nation: Fourteen Bands, One Territory, One Century

The eighteen fifty-five Treaty of Walla Walla was negotiated over nine days in June, in a climate of urgency that the United States government had deliberately created. Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens had a deadline: he needed the land cleared so that the transcontinental railroad survey could proceed. He pushed negotiations fast enough that translation was incomplete and consensus was unclear. What the fourteen bands that signed away their territorial claims were agreeing to, in detail, was disputed almost immediately.

The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation brings together fourteen constituent peoples: the Yakama, the Palouse, the Pisquouse, the Wenatshapam, the Klikatat, the Klinquit, the Kowwassayee, the Methow, the Sekamish, the Shyiks, the Skin-pah, the Wahkiakum, the Whe-eh-lah-pum, and the Yakama proper. They ceded more than ten million acres. They reserved a reservation of approximately one point three million acres on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, and they reserved something Stevens apparently did not consider significant: the right to fish at all usual and accustomed places in perpetuity.

Every dam on the Columbia was a violation of that promise. The fish ladders at Bonneville were a political gesture, not an ecological solution. The drowning of Celilo Falls in nineteen fifty-seven erased the most significant Yakama fishing site on the river. The federal government paid twenty-six point eight million dollars and called it settled.

The Boldt Decision of nineteen seventy-four used those same eighteen fifty-five treaty words to restore half the salmon to the treaty tribes. The Yakama Nation today has approximately eleven thousand enrolled members. They run their own government, their own court system, their own schools, and their own fish hatcheries. The fishing goes on. The treaty they signed in nine rushed days in eighteen fifty-five turns out to say exactly what they said it said.