Laura
Woodworth-Ney

Ask a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe what defines his or her tribal identity, and you’ll most likely be presented with a list including culture, language, oral tradition and a connection to the land. That final point, says Laura Woodworth-Ney, has been at the heart of contentions with state and federal governments for more than 100 years.

Woodworth-Ney is the author of Mapping Identity: Creation of the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, 1805-1902, recently published by University Press of Colorado. The book traces the formation of the northern Idaho reservation from the Jesuit missionaries who entered the region in the 1840s to the creation of the reservation boundaries 50 years later.

Creation of the Coeur d’Alene reservation involved input from several sources, including the Jesuits who had established missions in the region, tribal leaders and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials. In mapping out a reservation that eventually whittled about 5 million acres down to an area just one-sixteenth that size, Woodworth-Ney claims they also mapped out a tribal identity.

“The federal government and tribal leadership decided who was a tribal member and who could live on the reservation,” said Woodworth-Ney, who is a professor of history at Idaho State University. “For the Schitsu’umsh, that mattered. It’s a relatively small tribe, so when the chief decided who was a member and who received benefits, he was arguing who was and wasn’t a ‘Coeur d’Alene,’ a French term applied to the tribe by non-Indians and adopted by the tribe in the mid-19th century. The result was a demarcation of tribal and territorial identity.”

Part of that tribal identity, historically, has involved a claim on Lake Coeur d’Alene. Coeur d’Alene tribal members, also known as the Schitsu’umsh or “discovered people,” had fished that and other nearby lakes for hundreds of years, setting up their permanent villages along the lakeshores and the banks of the rivers that fed into them. When they entered into talks with the federal government in the 19th-century, land and mineral rights dominated the language of the agreements, since federal negotiators were most interested in timber and mining opportunities.

The agreements do not mention “water rights,” and mention the lake directly only when referring to navigation. Although the tribe released only a portion of its lake and rivers in the agreements of the 1880s, the State of Idaho absorbed the entire lake. In 1991, the tribe decided to take legal action to regain ownership of the lake and the surrounding watershed, and thus begin efforts to repair the environmental damage caused by years of silver mining and other industry. Over the preceding century, about 72 million tons of mine waste found its way into the watershed, devastating the area’s ecology. It was time, the tribe said, to repair the damage.

“All of the territorial issues, not just the lake but tribal rights to aboriginal territory, matter because agreements made in the 19th century have bearing on how land policy is executed in the present,” Woodworth-Ney said. “The history of what the state or federal government intended is very important today as we to try to discern what everyone thought they were agreeing to.”

Recently, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the tribe’s understanding of those agreements, at least in part, and ruled that ownership of the southern third of the lake was never intended to be transferred to the federal government. While that area does not include the resort area on the north shore, it is still a significant step forward for the tribe.

While the Coeur d’Alene tribe continues to wrangle over legal right to the northern section of the lake, it has ramped up its efforts to institute cleanup of both the southern and northern portions. The Silver Valley today is the nation’s largest Superfund site, with a $200 million price tag. Coeur d’Alene leaders, however, assert that the damage extends far beyond the 21-square-mile Superfund designation and could actually cost upward of $1 billion. Working with the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department and other agencies, the tribe has taken a leading role in creating strong stewardship programs for the areas under their control.

Loss of lake control evolved over several years, as the tribe’s land holdings were slowly whittled down from a 5 million-acre territory spread across portions of Washington, Idaho and Montana. In the late 1880s, the Dawes Severalty Act provided for the allotment of a specific amount of land to each tribal member, usually 160 acres per head of household. The Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation was allotted in the first decade of the 20th century; after allotments were made, the remaining acreage was then sold to non-Indians, reducing tribal holdings by 1934 to just 62,400 acres. The allotments also had the effect of removing tribal members from the lake and river regions, since most of the allotted acreage was located away from the waterways. Since that time, the tribe has slowly been buying up more land as they have expanded gaming and other industries. With holdings covering 345,000 acres of mountains, lakes, timber and farmland and a present-day reservation of 69,000 acres, the tribe is slowly regaining lost territory.

Land ownership has always been an important issue for the Coeur d’Alene people, and they have put forth a great deal of effort to protect that right. At one point, Woodworth-Ney contends, tribal members even went to great lengths to appear to be “assimilated” into white society so that their claim to their aboriginal territory would not be challenged. Consequently, the Coeur d’Alene tribe did manage keep a significant portion of its aboriginal territory, a portion much wealthier than the desolate areas so often allocated to other tribes.

“That’s why it created controversy,” said Woodworth-Ney. “There are two ways to look at that: either the assimilation policy was successful in that it resulted in the maintenance of a relatively wealthy land base, or it was a failure because they eventually lost a lot of territory through negotiation and an emphasis on farming. They were able to keep the Palouse region, but in agreements of 1887 and 1889, they released the rich, forested territory in the northern part where the Coeur d’Alene resort is today.”

That trade-off sent a message to some tribal members that, at least to tribal leaders, farming was more important than the traditional hunting and gathering. That leadership position alienated some tribal members interested in sticking with the old values or who lived along the northern portion of lake. The topic continues to be controversial to this day.

“As a historian, what’s interesting,” said Woodworth-Ney, “is that all reservation negotiations to some degree defined tribal identity; and they used non-Indian definitions of identity to do that.”

Woodworth-Ney’s book is available through Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.