Tulalip Tribes Uplands Strategic Plan
dəxʷtix̌ dxʷ čəɬ ʔə ti t̕aq̓t dxʷʔal ti ʔiɬlaq ʔaciɬtalbixʷ
Introduction
“Every stone and every stick carries the story of my people.”
We are the Tulalip Tribes. We are the direct descendants of and successors in interest to the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish, and other allied tribes and bands signatory to the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855.
For thousands of years, our Coast Salish ancestors relied on an expansive and diverse landscape and a rich network of intertribal trade to secure resources and materials for our sustenance and culture. These resources were spread across the high mountains, inland freshwater river valleys, brackish estuaries, and the tidal and coastal salt waters and islands of the Salish Sea.
Our people have been here since time immemorial. Throughout our ancestral lands, we continue to hunt and fish, to gather plants and other culturally significant natural materials, to carry out sacred ceremonies and social gatherings, to carry on the teachings of our ancestors and hand them down to future generations.
The Tulalip Tribes have a sacred trust to protect our lifeways and lands. From whitecap to whitecap, the mountains to the Salish Sea — we are entrusted with the protection of our ancestral lands and waters that have shaped our people, a responsibility that has been handed down from generation to generation.
Our Connection to the Uplands
“My father, Victor Moses Sr. used to say ‘the hills are calling me’ like he was homesick for the mountains”
—Kelly R. Moses, sduuxʷ qidə (knife man), Tulalip tribal member and traditional carver
The upland mountains of our ancestors are sacred lands and remain vital to us. We consider the uplands to be the hills, mountains, river valleys, and inland valleys of the Cascade Range and foothills — well inland from the Salish Sea coastline.
The uplands have sustained us by providing foods, shelter, material goods, and spiritual inspiration — while also being home to our ancestors, our villages and camps, and part of the vast landscape across which we lived, traveled, and remain connected to today.
Our cultural, social, economic, and spiritual connections to these places are sustained not only by customary law and protocol, but also by the treaty and over a century and a half of legislation, case law, and other formal legal protections. Today, these connections are integral to the health and lifeways of our people.
1855 Treaty of Point Elliott
With the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855, our Tulalip ancestors ceded millions of acres of our ancestral lands, but reserved our rights to continue our culture and way of life. The reservation of the Tribes’ rights to hunt and gather is outlined in Article 5 of the treaty, referring to the “privilege of hunting and gathering roots and berries on open and unclaimed lands.” Like fishing rights, these reserved land-based hunting and gathering rights are rights Tribes have always possessed, and not new rights granted by treaty. This provision of the treaty has been interpreted by the courts to mean hunting and procurement of all animals and plants used and gathered at treaty times.
The right to take and harvest resources also brings with it a right to have those resources available in healthy, sustainable numbers — now and forever.
Understanding Treaty Rights: A Legal Perspective (Sustaining Our Culture Series)
Uplands Strategic Plan: Protecting the Uplands for Future Generations
Since treaty times, upland landscapes have changed greatly as the human population has swelled, habitat diversity has decreased, and plant and animal populations have been greatly diminished.
Alarmed by these changes, and threats such as regional land management practices, overcrowding of our ancestral areas, and global climate change, we developed the Uplands Strategic Plan . The Plan will serve as a framework to guide our actions, both internally and in working with our external agency partners and trustees, to protect our culture and lifeways, and the health of the upland ecosystems they depend on.
The Plan is a set of tools for outside entities (federal and state agencies, other regional and local jurisdictions, and non-profits) to use in ensuring that treaty rights are part of all decisions regarding upland management. It is aimed at protecting, recovering, and sustaining treaty resources in the uplands for Tulalip Tribes today and for future generations.
This StoryMap is meant to introduce the threats to the uplands and actions that are central to the Plan to protect these sacred resources. We encourage you to explore the Plan as it includes important histories, context, and expectations for non-tribal land managers and land holders that cannot be fully understood in a summary.
Traditional Lands and Displacement
“It seemed to them as if nature had made the valley for the explicit purpose of planting crops, grazing livestock, and pleasing the eye…. Much less obvious to the pioneers was the fact that Indians had very consciously shaped this environment through fire.”
The Tulalip Tribes are the direct descendants of and successors in interest to the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish and other allied tribes and bands signatory to the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot. With the signing of the treaty, our ancestors reluctantly agreed to relocate to the newly created Tulalip Reservation. For many of us, this meant the loss of our home and required relocation to the reservation, leaving the places where our ancestors were buried. The Tulalip Reservation became home to resident and displaced Snohomish, but also to displaced tribal people from many other nations in what is today western Washington State: Snoqualmie, Skykomish, and Stillaguamish peoples, but also entire families from Skagit, Duwamish, Suiattle, Samish, and other tribes. Within a few years, we gathered together, forming an integrated Coast Salish community here, north of present-day Seattle, on a small reserved portion of traditional Snohomish lands.
The background image shows an altered prairie (baqʷab) near Mt Si, Snoqualmie Valley, WA. In many places throughout the uplands, and lowland areas too, our ancestors created and sustained meadows and prairies through the use of fire. The open grasslands that supported our communities for millennia were, in the eyes of settlers, land to be claimed as homesteads and turned into farms, pastures, and towns.
Past and Present: Rising Challenges of Our Times
Note: Click on red buttons below to view locations in the adjacent interactive map. Click button again to return to full view.
Tulalip Reservation
As is the case for most Western Washington treaty tribes, our relatively small reservation (22,000 acres) cannot, by itself, furnish all of the places, foods, medicines, and materials needed to sustain our culture and livelihood. Our ancestors knew this at the time the treaty was signed, and ensured that our rights to continue our way of life on our ancestral lands outside of the reservation were acknowledged and maintained.
The Tulalip Reservation is located north of Everett and west of Marysville, and is bordered to the southwest by Puget Sound.
Prime Hunting Grounds Lost
Elk meat has long been a dietary staple for us, as well as a source of medicine, materials, and cultural and spiritual sustenance. Since contact with early settlers, elk herds have been greatly diminished.
Historically, one of our best elk hunting areas was in the Sultan River basin in the Skykomish River watershed. This area, as well as others, were overhunted by settlers and miners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The “Sultan Elk Basin” disappeared instantaneously with the construction of the Culmback Dam, which flooded the valley to form Spada Reservoir. The reservoir supplies drinking water for the City of Everett. With the loss of key hunting grounds, tribal members must travel significant distances to harvest elk.
Residential Sprawl and Recreation
Recreational use of the uplands has spiked to levels unimaginable a generation ago, with visitors hiking, biking, skiing, fishing, and hunting for sport. While this is sustainable in small numbers, the cumulative impact of millions of people is massive.
Recreational uses of the uplands often displace traditional spiritual practices or adversely affect natural resources. Continuous, heavy use negatively impacts wildlife, which has been documented by the Tulalip Tribes in a recent report .
The uplands are bisected and carved up by major interstate highways (Highway 2 and Interstate 90), railroads, and logging roads. All of these provide faster, easier, and deeper access to the uplands for people now living in the metropolitan areas and traveling to vacation in western Washington. Below are just two examples of areas with a huge volume of recreational users.
Climate Change and Wildfire
Climate change is resulting in major impacts on the uplands, and we are seeing and feeling those changes sooner than models predicted. Climate shifts impact the uplands by creating warmer, wetter winters with less snowpack, resulting in more flooding. These winter impacts are amplified with warmer and drier summer months, dramatically increasing the risk of wildfire and diminished water supplies.
When Euro-American colonists changed management of forests and meadows from sustained habitats to commodities managed to maximize profit, we were forced to discontinue our traditional land practices like cultural burning. Now the risk of wildfire is acute due to monocultures of dense, small trees, and increasingly hotter and drier summers.
A Cultural Perspective on Climate Change
Wildfire affects all people in the region, not just our tribal people. In 2022, crews battled the smoke and flames of the Bolt Creek Fire for over a month. Skykomish Valley residents suffered through terrible air quality and nearly 15,000 acres were burned in the Skykomish River Watershed. After the flames were out, the legacy of the fire left the danger of landslides and flash floods, and invasive species continue to threaten this important headwater area.
“There is no escaping it. It is impacting our local area, our country and the entire world… As native people, we live closer to nature than anybody else, and that means that we are going to feel the effects of climate change before anybody else does. If we don’t prepare for them, our way of life will disappear.”
—Ryan Miller, Executive Director, Tulalip Tribes Department of Treaty Rights and Government Affairs
Imagery from before (left) and after (right) the 2022 Bolt Creek wildfire. Imagery source: Copernicus/Sentinel-2
Protection Strategies to Preserve Cultural Activities
“You know, for a lot of people, they assumed that through the treaties, the government gave us something. But the treaty itself said these rights were reserved. And that was defined in there too, that there was nothing ever granted to the tribes. These were rights that had always belonged to us, and they were further secured with the treaty.”
—Ray Fryberg Sr., sdətalq, Tulalip Elder
Despite many disruptions, our people remain critically connected to the upland mountains and valleys of our ancestors. Our reserved treaty rights encompass more than an opportunity to gather plants, hunt game, or harvest fish. Having a meaningful role on the ground in the stewardship of these resources, as we have for millennia, helps revitalize our peoples’ connection to these lands, and the reciprocal relationships we maintain in caring for the natural world.
Below are four important examples of cultural activities we continue in the uplands. Our activities in the uplands change with the seasons and reflect how our people and our ancestors moved through the landscape. Each of the examples below shows a different lifeway of our people, the seasonality, and a protection strategy that is needed to ensure that we can sustain a relationship of reciprocity between our people, plants, animals, and all that is in our environment.
These are meant to illustrate a few of the ways we exercise our treaty-reserved rights and continue our culture. We encourage you to read the Uplands Strategic Plan in full to better understand how managers and partners can support Tulalip cultural activities, increase awareness, and improve management.
Harvesting Cedar Bark and Wood
Cedar is vital to Tulalip material and spiritual culture. It continues to be sought by Tulalip carvers for artwork and for canoe making, and is used by a new generation of basketmakers, weavers, and artisans of basketry, jewelry, regalia, clothing, and other items.
Because the lowlands have been largely developed, the majority of western redcedar grows in the uplands on state and federal public lands.
Cedar Pulling
Examples of Strategic Approach:
Monitor tribal harvest of cedar to ensure Tulalip tribal members are able to exercise their treaty rights for gathering; work cooperatively in research, inventory, and monitoring to ensure the long-term sustainability of cedar and other plant resources.
Gathering Mountain Huckleberry
For thousands of years, huckleberry has been an essential food, medicine, and trade good to the tribal Coast Salish peoples of this region, including Tulalip ancestors. Annual gathering and processing of large quantities of mountain huckleberries has been an integral part of the seasonal round of our food gathering activities as well as our social, cultural, and spiritual lives today.
The Harvest: Mountain Huckleberry
Examples of Strategic Approach:
Develop a multi-jurisdictional huckleberry management plan; increase active management for these resources; create additional co-management areas with tribes; integrate prescribed burning, including broadcast burn to open additional areas; use completed huckleberry habitat modeling for our area.
Elk Hunting
Like many resources, elk are a source of food, medicine, materials, and even cultural and spiritual sustenance. Elk herds are much smaller now and their distribution is very different today than at treaty times. Elk abundance is greatly diminished in the Skykomish and Snoqualmie River watersheds, closest to the Tulalip Reservation.
“The Middle Fork Snoqualmie River valley is an example of an area that just basically got overrun [with people], and now nobody goes up here and really hunts anymore....It’s become harder and harder to find areas where you can truly hunt.”
—Jason Gobin
Examples of Strategic Approach:
Explore use of seasonal closures and directing recreation away from known summer elk habitat to reduce disturbance.
Accessing Sacred Sites
Our elders always say, “Never forget who you are and where you came from. That is where our ancestors lived, and we still have that strong connection to the places where their bones still lie.”
Many of our tribal members continue to revisit old village sites, burial sites, and other sacred places for spiritual and traditional purposes. As the population increases, increasing numbers of visitors to public lands threaten the integrity of living cultural sites and archaeological resources; the privacy of, access to, and the pristine nature of some of these areas; and their general suitability for tribal spiritual and ceremonial activities.
Examples of Strategic Approach:
Close specific areas temporarily as needed for privacy and to avoid public disclosure of sensitive tribal information associated with such sites.
Thinking About the Future
Considering that so much change continues across the landscape, ensuring that our longstanding connections to the uplands remain intact for our future generations will require proactive and strategic planning on our part and on the part of local, state, and federal land managers and other partners to secure that future.
Mountain Camp provides opportunities for youth to connect with mountain culture
We urge agencies to manage lands and projects affecting tribal interests in a manner consistent with our treaties, federal Indian law and policy, our government-to-government agreements, and with the priorities that we have identified in this strategic plan. Below is a condensed list of some of our expectations for public land management agencies in light of their obligations to treaty tribes in the upland areas:
- Protect treaty resources, know the status of treaty resources, and manage them to meet tribal needs and ensure their conservation.
- Recognize and account for impacts of growing public use and recreation on our shared landscapes.
- Improve public understanding of treaty rights and federal agency trust responsibilities and what this means on the ground for visitors to these public lands.
- Update land management plans to better reflect tribal interests and rights, and agency obligations to them.
- Work in partnership with treaty tribes to preserve, enhance, and designate special tribal areas on public lands for access to resources and places of special concern.
We ask those who use and cherish our public lands to read our strategic plan, educate yourself on the history of this land, and be mindful and respectful as you access and use it.
Wish to learn more about the language, culture, and homelands of the Tulalip Tribes? Please visit these websites for more information:
Disclaimer: This StoryMap does not depict, identify, or define the scope or extent of any legal entitlement of rights of the Tulalip Tribes under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, inherent, or otherwise. The Tulalip Tribes reserves all rights and claims with respect to all such rights, including but not limited to the location of usual and accustomed fishing areas, location of hunting and gathering places, and the allocation of harvest opportunities. Nothing in the StoryMap shall affect any such rights or claims of the Tulalip Tribes and any use or construction of this StoryMap to affect such rights or claims or to use such as precedent is unauthorized and improper.
