In exchange for all of the ceded Indian lands, the federal government agreed to provide limited supplies, educational services, medical care and modest monetary compensation. Indians also reserved the right to continue to hunt, gather, and fish without interference in traditional areas off their reservations.
In the treaties, tribes relinquished claims to most of the land they occupied and at the same time reserved a number of smaller “reservations” near their winter village sites. The treaties were legal contracts negotiated between equals: the sovereign Indian governments on the one hand and the Unites States on the other.
#WEAVING TIDES INDIGENOUS ORG FREE#
The treaties were necessary to extinguish title to land in order to free it for white settlement. In 1854, several years after European settlers began to establish themselves in the Puget Sound area, the United States government elected to make treaties with Tribes in what was then known as Washington Territory. Entrepreneurs also began building sawmills to harvest the vast stands of virgin timber on Suquamish lands, including mills at Port Madison, Port Gamble and Port Blakely. The Suquamish cut and delivered logs to the mills to support themselves. Settlement intensified in the 1850s after Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act that opened Suquamish and other tribal lands to non-native settlement. In 1841 the Unites States Exporling Expedition, led by Charles Wilkes, entered the Puget Sound, further documenting Suquamish culture. Fur traders and missionaries were the first and were then followed by permanent settlers traveling over the Oregon Trail. Over the next fifty years, the Suquamish adapted to a changes brought on by the entry of non-natives into the Puget Sound. The various groups of Indians on Puget Sound treated the strangers in equal manner, trading them fresh venison, fish, native berries and roots for beads, cloth and iron. They recorded, over a two-week period, evidence of habitation from Whidbey Island south to what is now Olympia, WA. Now, Captain George Vancouver and the men of the ship Discovery had come to map the Puget Sound in preparation to claim ownership. Rumors of strangers in odd sailing craft had been arriving for ten years from Indians further north and west toward the Pacific.
#WEAVING TIDES INDIGENOUS ORG FULL#
The American Revolution had just resulted in the birth of the United States, the French Revolution was in full swing, and the Industrial Revolution was beginning. It was in 1792, three hundred years after Columbus landed in the New World, that the original inhabitants of the Puget Sound region gained their first direct knowledge of Europeans.
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