Kwaiailk

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Traditional territory of the Kwaiailk and today's reservation in the northwest of the USA

The Kwaiailk or Upper Chehalis among the as Native Americans called Indians in the United States . They live in Washington State , but have become part of the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation , the United Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation . While the Humptulips , Wynoochee and Quinault are close to the Kwaiailk or Upper Chehalis , the Satsop are close to the Lower Chehalis . They form a dialect group of the southwest coastal Salish .

The Upper Chehalis or Kwaiailk lived mainly above the confluence of the Chehalis and Satsop Rivers , the Lower Chehalis below. The Kwaiailk are four groups, or tribes, who lived between Cloquallam Creek and the upper reaches of the Chehalis River. Originally the name only referred to one of the four groups.

Within the Kwaialk, a distinction is made between the two dialects Oakville Chehalis and Tenino Chehalis.

history

Their way of life was very different from the fishing-dependent Lower Chehalis , which are culturally more clearly attributable to the coastal Salish , because they lived on the edge of the mountains and on the prairie. To encourage the growth of berries such as cranberries , they burned the grass every two to three years, thereby helping to maintain and expand the grassland. On the other hand, they collected clams and caught flounder in Puget Sound .

The Kwaialk traded intensively with their neighbors and obtained goods via various routes, such as the coveted seal fat and certain mussels (dentalia), which they exchanged from the Makah , for example .

Before 1800 the Kwaialk started to keep horses. When in 1824 an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) noted that the "Halloweena Nation", unlike the coastal tribes, kept horses, he probably meant a group of the Kwaialk. When HBC built Fort Nisqually in 1833 , the Kwaialk traded with society there and across the Columbia . Some tended the sheep of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company , an HBC company. At the beginning of the 19th century, 1,500 to 2,000 members of the closely related tribes of the Cowlitz , Nisqually and other groups were expected . In the middle of the century, however, there were only 215 Kwaialk that had suffered particularly badly from epidemics. In 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes estimated the number of Lower and Upper Chehalis together at around 700, and in 1854 the ethnologist George Gibbs reckoned 216 after another epidemic had led to mass deaths.

During the Puget Sound War , which was closely related to the ruthless Indian policy of Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens , Indian agent Sydney S. Ford relocated a group of Kwaialk from what is now Centralia to Ford's Prairie . Some of the around 400 Indians who lived there briefly had served as scouts in the US Army .

Since Governor Stevens had not come to an agreement with the Kwaialk, Washington withdrew the country without compensation. Instead, the Chehalis reservation was established, which comprised 4,224.63 acres . It was at the confluence of the Black and Chehalis Rivers and was established on July 8, 1864 for Chehalis, Chinook, and other tribes. Some Kwaialk refused to enter the reserve even though it was in their traditional territory; instead they moved to the Cowlitz and Nisqually . In 1886, 3,753.63 acres were declared public land and another 471 acres were designated as school land . 36 Indians moved into the homesteads for which the land not reserved for schools was intended.

Over the next few decades, the Kwaialk either merged with the white population or moved to the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation .

In 1951 the Lower and Upper Chehalis and other tribes sued against the expropriation of their territory. They succeeded in recognizing the Confederate tribes of the Chehalis as the legal successors of the earlier tribes, whose fate was very difficult to reconstruct in detail, especially since the official documents always claimed that all the Indians intended lived on the reservation. In 1963, the Indian Claims Commission finally decided that the Kwaialk are entitled to 320,500 and the Lower Chehalis to 517,700 acres ( totaling approximately 3,400 km²). Compensation to the Confederated Chehalis Tribes was $ 754,380.

See also

literature