A Rift Among History’s Voiceless

In all his school years, Skokomish tribe member Denny Hurtado heard almost nothing about the history of his own people, aside from cursory mentions of Indians on Thanksgiving and Columbus Day.

“From the eyes of history,” Hurtado said, “we were mostly invisible.”

That could change if state legislators pass a bill that would require all public schools to teach Native American history. It would affect every grade in which Washington state or U.S. history was taught.

The measure, proposed by a Native American lawmaker, has received overwhelming support in the state Legislature. Its passage would make Washington one of a handful of states -- including Montana, New Mexico and Wisconsin -- with such a law.

Hurtado, 55, is director of a state office in charge of Native American students and curricula. Current law encourages schools to include Indian history but does not require it, leaving it to the districts to determine what is taught on the subject, if at all.

Hurtado said the proposed law was crucial to the well-being of native students and to relations between Native Americans and other groups. Telling a more complete history, he said, one that includes the perspective of the territory’s original inhabitants, is “a hundred years overdue.”

But in recent weeks, the bill has run into opposition, and the most vocal criticisms have come from an unexpected source: Native Americans.

Several prominent but federally unrecognized local tribes -- among them the Duwamish, Snohomish and Chinook -- say the measure would exclude them from school curricula and would, in time, result in erasing them from history.

“It would be another way to make us disappear,” said Cecile Hansen, chairwoman of the Duwamish tribe, whose ancestors were the first inhabitants of what is now Seattle. The state’s biggest city is named after the tribe’s most famous chief. Hansen said excluding the Duwamish from history would amount to a kind of genocide.

Nearly 100,000 Native Americans live in Washington, about a quarter of them school age. The federal government recognizes 29 tribes in the state but has denied that status to at least seven tribal groups.

Federal recognition of an Indian tribe carries economic, political and social benefits such as healthcare and money for housing and education. Recognized tribes also can set up gambling facilities. To become federally recognized, a tribe must meet certain criteria, such as proving that it has been in continuous existence as an organized political entity.

The Duwamish, which has 600 enrolled members, has been twice denied such recognition.

The rejection has been a source of torment for the tribe, whose Chief Sealth signed an 1855 treaty ceding the territory in exchange for a reservation and other provisions. Many Duwamish and related Suquamish people scattered and assimilated into other tribes. The remaining Duwamish never got a reservation, in part because the government claimed most of the members had left.

Among the tribe’s descendants is Democratic state Rep. John McCoy, the sponsor of the bill and Washington’s only Native American legislator. McCoy, an enrolled member of the Tulalip tribe north of Everett, traces his lineage back to the Duwamish and Snoqualmie people.

It was not his intent to exclude anybody, McCoy said.

The story of the Duwamish people would be told, he explained, by the neighboring recognized tribes that include members who have Duwamish ancestry.

In the works for more than two years, McCoy’s bill would require students to take coursework on tribal history, culture and government to graduate from high school. School districts would be asked to work with tribes whose reservations fell within district boundaries to come up with tribal history curricula.

This is a major point of contention. None of the seven unrecognized tribes has a reservation, and so would probably be excluded from discussions with school districts. “And we’re not interested in other tribes speaking for us,” said Hansen, who has launched an e-mail and telephone campaign to oppose the measure.

Mike Evans, a council member for the Snohomish tribe in north Puget Sound, said the law as written would “create a fence between the haves and the have-nots,” essentially discriminating against landless tribes.

Leaving out the stories of Washington’s unrecognized and landless tribes also would undermine the intent of the law, Evans said. The theme of a “more complete history” echoes repeatedly in this debate.

David Beaulieu, president of the National Indian Education Assn. in Alexandria, Va., and an advocate of the bill, said the goal of the proposal wasn’t to revise history, as some critics had said. The intent was to include in history texts what had too frequently been left out. The Indian story, he said, was part of the nation’s story.

“We’re talking about American history,” said Beaulieu, a Chippewa Indian from Minnesota.

Hurtado said he hoped that the conflict between the state’s recognized and unrecognized tribes can be worked out for the good of all.

Non-Indian people who know the history of local tribes, he said, would be less likely to be hostile toward native people.

For example, students who learn that fishing and hunting rights were negotiated in treaties with the federal government in exchange for large tracts of land would be less prone to accuse Native Americans of receiving special rights in the harvesting of fish and game in the region, Hurtado said.

Another goal of including Indian perspectives in history would be to uplift native students.

The dropout rate among the state’s estimated 25,000 Native American students tends to follow national rates at about 30%, double the national average. One reason, according to government studies, is that native students often don’t see any connection between school and life.

“They don’t hear about themselves, they don’t hear about their stories or their contributions to the building of this nation,” Hurtado said.

“If all they hear is once there were these people and they were annihilated, what kind of message is that?”