Federal government findings

The federal government has determined repeatedly that the Cowlitz Tribe did not have a historical presence in Clark County or southern Cowlitz County.

According to the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1969 [1] and the Department of the Interior’s Office of Federal Acknowledgement (OFA) in 1997 [2], the Tribe’s geographical, historical and cultural nexus is located along the Cowlitz River. The ICC established that the Cowlitz Tribe’s area of exclusive use and occupation included approximately 2,500 square miles primarily in Lewis and Cowlitz counties.

The Cowlitz Tribe has repeatedly attempted to claim that Indians historically living in the Lewis River area (the border separating Clark and Cowlitz counties). However, the ICC—and later the OFA—specifically stated that the Cowlitz Tribe had no claim to the Lewis River Indians. The ICC declared that the Tribe’s anthropologist Verne F. Ray was the only authority that equated the tribes in that area with the Cowlitz. [3]

When the OFA examined the Cowlitz Tribe’s petition for federal acknowledgement, which was written by historian Stephen Dow Beckham and filed in 1987, its researchers found claims regarding the Lewis River Indians similar to Ray’s. They concluded, “the CIT’s inclusion of the Vancouver Indians or Lewis River Band histories and citations to support their petition is not accepted by the BIA.” [4]

A third historian, Michael Lawson, observed that Beckham’s work appears to have relied heavily on Ray, “despite the fact that these interpretations have previously been rejected and repudiated by the Indian Claims Commission and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” [5]

Even as far back as the mid-1800s, the federal government believed the Cowlitz Tribe to be located north of the Cowlitz River—which enters the Columbia River in present-day Cowlitz County, north of Clark County. An 1876 DOI map produced to accompany a paper researched years earlier by George Gibbs, a surveyor, ethnologist and linguist specializing in the culture of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, locates the Cowlitz Tribe primarily in Lewis County and northern Cowlitz County. [6]

Read excerpts from these findings.

NIGC issues aberrant opinion
The one inconsistency in the federal government’s documentation of the Cowlitz Tribe’s location is the restored lands opinion issued in 2005 by the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC). That controversial opinion broke with precedent and counted an area with which the Cowlitz Tribe had only the most tenuous of connections as the Tribe’s lands.

Tellingly, the information with which the opinion was developed was furnished almost entirely by the Cowlitz Tribe, with only the most cursory nod given to input from other sources.

See “The Restored Lands Opinion Fact Sheet” for more information.

The Tribe’s self-declared location
The Cowlitz Tribe’s own application for federal acknowledgment placed its historic villages along the Cowlitz River. The southernmost village was at the site of modern-day Kelso, Wash., 25 miles north of the proposed casino site.

Read about the Cowlitz Tribe’s historic villages.

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