Toppenish: Murals and the Yakama Nation

Toppenish sits within the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington's Yakima Valley, and the town has found an unusual way to tell its own history: outdoor murals painted on building exteriors throughout the downtown. More than seventy large-scale murals depict scenes from the region's past, including Yakama people fishing salmon, the arrival of the railroad, hop-harvesting crews, and the cavalry campaigns of the late eighteen hundreds. The mural project began in nineteen eighty-nine and has grown into one of the most extensive outdoor historical mural programs in the Pacific Northwest.

But the bigger story is the Yakama Nation itself, whose reservation of over one million acres surrounds the town. The Yakama were signatories to the Treaty of eighteen fifty-five, which reserved critical fishing and hunting rights, rights the tribe has spent generations defending in court, most recently in cases affirming their access to off-reservation fishing sites.