Satsop
The Satsop among the as Native Americans called Indians in the United States . They live in southwest Washington state and are part of the Chehalis Confederation of Tribes , but are not recognized as a tribe. They were so close to the Lower Chehalis that some ethnologists declared them a sub-tribe. They form a dialect group of the south-western coastal Salish , to which some granted considerable independence.
The Lower Chehalis and Satsop lived on the Satsop River .
history
The Satsop lived mainly on the resources of the sea. They acted as middlemen and traded inland in mussels, fish and seal fat. The Lower Chehalis, and with them the Satsop, established trade contacts at the beginning of the 19th century with both the Lewis and Clark expedition and with the men who had been sent to Fort Astoria by the Pacific Fur Company . In 1846 the USA enforced their claims to the area against Great Britain, the Hudson's Bay Company , which had dominated until then, had to withdraw.
In 1855 negotiations began between Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens and the Lower Chehalis, as well as other tribes. However, no result was reached. Nevertheless, the government appeared to the Chehalis Confederation of Tribes as if a treaty existed and as if the group were a "tribal confederation".
From 1864, a 4,224.63 acre reservation was created for the Chehalis around Oakville in Chehalis County , later Grays Harbor . Two years later, 230 Chehalis lived in the area, in 1855 a total of around 5,000 Indians had lived here. This population collapse was caused by epidemics such as smallpox , measles and flu .
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 , which declared land to be "homesteads" and thus released the Chehalis' land for privatization from 1866 onwards.
In 1906, the tribe filed several petitions with the federal government for compensation for the lost land. However , they were dismissed with claims that the Chehalis signed the Tansey Point Treaty of 1851. But these contracts had been drawn up by Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs Anson Dart without her presence. In 1909 parts of the reserve were confiscated for public purposes.
In 1951 the Lower Chehalis and other tribes sued against the expropriation of their area. They succeeded in recognizing the confederate tribes of the Chehalis as legal successors of the earlier tribes, including the Satsop.
The reserve
The Chehalis reservation is located in southeast Grays Harbor County and extends to Thurston County . Its circumference is approximately 17 km², of which only half a percent (24 acres ) is owned by the tribe, and another 7.1 km² is privately owned by Native Americans. The Chehalis Confederated Tribes , which are made up of the Lower and Upper Chehalis , the Cowlitz and the Wahkiakum , live in the reservation today . In 2000, 691 people lived in the reserve.
literature
- Robert H. Ruby / John A. Brown: A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest , University of Oklahoma Press 1992, pp. 185, 39–42 (Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation)