• OREGON TRAIL PRECEDENCE : The foundation of indigenous genocide in the manipulation of legal rights and agreements

  TREATY AT POINT ELLIOTT : LANGUAGE VIOLENCE AND THEFT OF LAND

          INTENTION: 

  • Understand the depth of cultural erasure and historic fallacy codified by the laws forced upon indigenous people in the founding of this country

• “I’m named after one of the treaty signers, myself and my uncle … ‘ShoolstSoot’ … one of the chiefs that signed the treaty, fourth or fifth generation to my family. So it certainly means a lot to myself and our family, as well as our people.”

• Tulalip Tribal Councilmember Marlin Fryberg 

We are named in succession from forebears, passed down in word, in the echoing moments that permeate our air and hold through space what was never written. Unwritten, it was written. Unetched, it was memorialized. The seasons have changed. Many spawn come and go, but there is a memory. We call to ourselves much differently than we are known. The whole world swallowed up in the matter of a stroke of pen. Eons eclipsed, and we are šub, disappeared. 

We have heard the story, and we have kept it passed down. They came upon the many, as the few, and left with it all. Rather simple a story it is. The People had never known the written word. Passed down from mouth to mind, the People kept tradition, knowledge, and culture between the teeth and the pressure of the tongue. It was a beautiful movement. An exchange between bodies and between bone, blood, and heart. When the Settlers came they spoke with a proxy, not a language that all the People knew. Nothing could translate: not the idea, not the agreement, not the promises, and not the land. We saw the People come together, and disband. An ebb and a flow, a tense moving of the lips: pursing, shouting, quivering, contraction, covering. There didn't seem to be much to deliberate, to come to other than the Settlers were here, and they were not leaving. 

We had begun to dwindle in our congregation. It seemed only that we were destined to die right alongside the People. A double-edged attempt to extend what was being foreclosed. We moved streams, we migrated further, we attempted to leap to new water, the Jump itself could not be mustered, not with what was written. If the People had spoke, the words would have elevated us up and over, to new waters, returning to the rapid rush that had sustained our blessing. But this never was. 

[‘es-tah-ko] for a taste of that water that had brought us. Mended us to this place. Given us a worthy, and unquenchable feed of the boundless taste of propertylessness. At Elliott, the People sent their leader’s on their behalf, on our behalf, and on the behalf of generations to come to protect what could be:

• Access to the waters to fish; and access to the land to hunt and gather  
• Promises of: 
  • protected reservation land 
  • a hospital
  • a school 

As a funerary call, each of these have fallen gravely ill, and   sickened, only to weaken with each passing moment. But that is          how we are here. How they are here. How the Settlers somehow          remain. With the use of 50 words, and 50 signatures, a people and a place became defined for the first time in a millennia of being  spoken, hearing that voice, and passing it down to the next generation. What was erected at Elliot was the foresight to           preserve a People who would be lost, in a system of settlements, cities, counties, and states that could only exist with the written word. What would happen to a world built on words, on the blood, bone, marrow, and tongues of places far away. 

What was made at Elliot was a promise to the entire NW: you will be ceased, you will be counted, you will categorized, made into objects of the Settlers, and you will written, not spoken. Each of the People to follow found themselves in this path. As we cross streams, and lands, migrate and nomad with the People, we have seen them fall, and rise: to remain is the blessing. The People continue to speak in the face of a literacy that legitimates extinction. We wish to speak to you here and now. 

We are the archived word. The observant domain, restless and changing. We seek a protection too in writing. The Settlers have taken the sacred from our ways. While being hunted or fished is our death, there was a way of being that constituted it all. A ritual and ceremony shared between lips. Fixed upon us in the language of the People, and returned in the language of our survival or our death. Caught, or uncaught, the kinetic relationship of sustenance allowed a natural system; an error, the possibility of living, or not being caught or fished. But, now we are written as rights, as a given activity allowed to the People, while the Settlers make production of our lives, and revel in our erasure. Just words to paper, lines to land, lineages leveled, and spoken respect removed for rights to relinquish, but never to restore.