Quinault (people)
The Quinault (also Qinaelt) are an Indian tribe with around 2,500 members living in the west of the US state of Washington . They speak a dialect of the southwest coastal Salish and live in the Quinault River valley and on the Pacific coast between Raft River and Joe Creek on the Olympic Peninsula .
The name of the tribe goes back to a village at the mouth of the Quinault River.
history
The Quinault Indian Nation consisted of the two tribes of the Quinault and the Queet, as well as descendants of other coastal tribes such as the Quileute , Chehalis , Chinook, and Cowlitz .
Culturally, the Quinault stood between the Makah , which specializes in marine mammals, and the coastal Salish of the Juan de Fuca Strait in the north, and the salmon- catching groups in the south of the lower Columbia .
The giant tree of life (Western Red Cedar) supplied them with wood for canoes, fibers for clothing, planks for houses and much more.
The nobility of the tribe preferred a flattened head shape, and therefore the heads of these children were deformed accordingly from an early age.
First contacts with whites
The Quinault had their first contact with whites on July 13, 1775, when they attacked a Spanish ship. The two Spanish ships Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (short: Señora ) and the Santiago had been sent to explore the Pacific coast and place them under the Spanish Crown. Under the leadership of Bruno de Hezeta , the Spaniards landed near what is now Grenville Bay and claimed the area as Nueva Galicia on behalf of the Viceroyalty of Peru . Bruno de Hezeta, Father Benito de la Sierra, Don Cristobal Revilla, Don Juan Gonzales and Juan Perez were the first whites to set foot on what would later become Washington territory . They named the place of the ceremony in Grenville Bay after the Spanish viceroy Rada de Bucareli . The Santiago was under Bruno de Hezeta, the Señora Bodega y Quadra .
The landing site was called Punta de los Martires by the Spaniards because, according to the description of Bruno de Hezeta without cause, Quinault warriors killed seven of the people sent by the Señora to get water and firewood. This is where Point Grenville is located today . Bodega had cannons bombarded the Quinault warriors attacking in canoes, killing several of them.
But the losses on the part of the Indians were to be much more serious. Historian Robert Boyd has estimated that in the 1770s smallpox raged so violently among the Indians of what would later become Washington state that 11,000 of its 37,000 residents succumbed to the disease. (See also: Smallpox epidemic on the Pacific coast of North America from 1775 )
Lewis and Clark estimated about 800 Quinaults proper and 200 Calasthocle in 1805 . In 1854, the white settler James Swan believed that the Quinaults who lived upstream had never seen a white man.
The Quinault Treaty
The Quinault signed the Treaty known as the Quinault River Treaty with the Indian agent MT Simmons on July 1, 1855 . On January 25, 1856 signed Governor Isaac Stevens the same terms as the Quileute where her reserve has been set (reservation). It is still unclear today whether the two chief chiefs had previously held such a position or whether they were only asked to sign the contract. Therefore the question of whether there were such high chiefs among the Quinaults remains unanswered. In the 1860s, troops were stationed in a log cabin on the Quinault.
The reservation was extended on November 4, 1873 by order. It covered approximately 842 km² and was located in northwest Grays Harbor County and southwest Jefferson County . It formed a wedge-shaped stretch of land on the Pacific coast below Lake Quinault on both sides of the Quinault River .
First settlers
In the 1880s, large numbers of whites first moved into the country. On February 17, 1892, the president approved the distribution of the land, which ended with the last of the 2,340 approvals in 1933. There was no tribal land now. The Quinault refused to farm and refused to send their children to school.
In 1885 there are said to have been only 102 Quinaults, in 1888 only 95. The 1910 census, however, determined 288 Quinaults, probably including the Quaitso or Queet . In 1923 the Indian Office counted 719 residents on the Quinault Reservation, along with several other tribes, but the estimate for 1937 alone was 1,228 Quinaults. The movements of families that belonged to several tribes and that moved between these kinship groups are difficult, and often cannot be clarified at all.
On November 14, 1903, the Quinault met in Granville and drafted a petition demanding compensation for settlement and for the land lost by a railway line. San-le-tum - Chief Mason -, the Traditional Chief, Johnson Wakenas, Joseph Capoeman, Harry Shale, Tethlolah (also called Billie Mason) were the headmen of the tribe who signed the petition.
From 1907 Queet and Quileute were also allowed to live in the Quinault reserve, and from 1911 the congress also allowed Hoh and Ozette to do so . In 1932, the Supreme Court also granted the Chehalis, Chinook, and Cowlitz this right. Up until 1933, exactly 2,340 residential properties (allotments) had been allocated, so that the entire reserve was now privately owned.
In 1916, Johnson Waukenas achieved the expansion of teaching at the Taholah Day School beyond elementary levels . Until then, students who wanted to learn more had to go to the Cushman Indian School in Puyallup or the Chemawa Indian School in Salem , Oregon . In the 1920s he became the tribe's spokesman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs .
Furthermore, most of the Quinault refused to become farmers and many refused to go to school. Chief Wakeenus said he would rather hang than send his children to school ("I would rather hang than send my children to school.").
In the 30s and 40s the Quinault tried for the first time to profit from the beginning tourism. Florence and Charles Strom opened a restaurant, the Riverside Cafe , which attracted new visitors with the expansion of the road from Moclips to Taholah . The family was a member of the Indian Shaker Church .
Mattie Howeattle, who was born in 1861, passed down a significant portion of family songs and stories. Since they often belonged to families among the Coast Salish , she would always announce the name of the owner before she began to tell. She died at the age of 106.
Current situation
The tribe's executive committee continues to operate under the rules of August 24, 1922. It accepted the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, but no reorganization occurred.
In 1975 the Quinault adopted a new constitution transferring power to an eleven-member business committee . They were paid $ 25,000 for the land the Queet, Quileute, Hoh, and Quinault had ceded in the Quinault River Treaty.
The tribe maintains a casino and tourist center at Ocean Shores, the Quinault Beach Resort . There is also a small fishing industry in Taholah , many of which work in the timber industry.
Since 1990 the Quinault have exercised their own authority (self governance). The tribe has a reservation police, a tribal court with a chief judge and associated jurisdiction. Today Fawn R. Sharp is President of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah.
The majority of the reservation's residents live in this place on US Highway 109 and Queets on Highway 101. In 1984 the tribe had 1,623 members, in 1989 already 2,260. The Quinault Nation had exactly 2,453 registered members in 2000. In 1988 (?) The tribe closed several miles of its area along the coast because conditions there had become intolerable for the tribe.
The ten other tribes on the reservation formed the Quinault Allottees Association in 1968 . The Supreme Court allowed this association to sue the United States for mismanagement even though the group was not recognized as a tribe.
See also
literature
- Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown: A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest , University of Oklahoma Press, 2nd ed. 1992, pp. 174-177, ISBN 0-8061-2479-2
- Wayne Suttles (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Volume 7: Northwest Coast. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1990, ISBN 0-87474-187-4
Web links
- Homepage of the Quinault Indian Nation
- Bruno de Hezeta (Heceta) party lands at future site of Grenville Bay and claims the Pacific Northwest for Spain on July 12, 1775
- University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections - a treasure trove of historical sources and photographs for the American Northwest
- The Quinault Beach Resort
Remarks
- ↑ See the illustration on HistoryLink.org: Smallpox epidemic ravages Native Americans on the northwest coast of North America in the 1770s .
- ↑ The text of the treaty: Quinault Treaty, 1856 ( Memento of the original of September 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Quoted from Ruby / Brown, p. 176.
- ↑ According to (PDF, 172 kB): Business Council / Committee Members, Witnesses, etc., of the Quinault Reservation - Quinault Council ( Memento of the original from September 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 175 kB).
