On the land along Tansy Creek, an old Sitka spruce stands as a witness. The tree was already growing when Chinook leaders gathered at Tansy Point 175 years ago to negotiate treaties with the United States. It has remained through generations of change, through the displacement and loss experienced by the Chinook people, and through the long fight for the federal recognition the nation says it was promised.
Now, as the Chinook Indian Nation prepares to return to Tansy Point on Aug. 15 to commemorate the 175th anniversary of those treaty negotiations, the tree will still be there. For Chairman Tony Johnson, that matters. The Chinook Indian Nation recently had the tree cored to confirm its age. It predates the 1851 treaty negotiations.
“These trees are witnesses to both the events that are happening today, but also this thing that happened 175 years ago,” Johnson said.
The tree witnessed the negotiations. It has witnessed the Chinook people return to the land. And Johnson hopes it will witness many more generations doing the same. That continuity is at the heart of what the commemoration means to the Chinook Indian Nation.
Tansy Point is not simply the location where treaties were negotiated. It is a place where Johnson believes the ancestors of today’s Chinook people gathered together — a rare point in time when the people of the five tribes that make up the Chinook Indian Nation were all present.
The Chinook Indian Nation descends from five tribes: the Clatsop and Kathlamet in Oregon and the Lower Chinook, Wahkiakum and Willapa in Washington. All five negotiated individual treaties with the U.S. at Tansy Point. The treaties were different in their details, Johnson said, but the Chinook leaders approached the negotiations from a position of strength.
“They were not our people groveling to the United States,” he said. “This is our people proudly representing our long heritage and history.”
A gathering of ancestors
The significance of Tansy Point reaches beyond the treaties themselves. Johnson said the leaders who participated in the negotiations wanted their communities to understand what was happening. They brought men, women, children and elders together so they could witness the negotiations and understand the decisions being made.
By that point, disease and displacement had already devastated Chinook communities. Johnson estimates the population had fallen to roughly 10% or less of what it had been before introduced diseases and other disruptions. That loss, he said, made something historically unusual possible: people from all five tribes could gather together in one place.
Centuries earlier, the population of the five communities would have been too large for everyone to fit at Tansy Point. But after generations of disease and displacement, the communities were small enough that their people could gather. For Johnson, that makes the place even more significant.
Tansy Point became one of the first treaty councils in which those communities participated, and their leaders made a deliberate decision to bring the community with them.
“They made sure to bring every man, child, elder, woman, auntie, uncle, grandmother, grandpa,” Johnson said.
The gathering was not simply an event for political leaders. It was something the broader community was expected to understand and remember. One example Johnson points to is the request from Clatsop leaders that river traffic be stopped before negotiations concerning their lands and waterways began.
To Johnson, the request demonstrates the position from which the Chinook leaders negotiated. They understood the land as theirs. They understood their communities as sovereign. And they approached the U.S. accordingly.
“This was a negotiation between sovereigns,” Johnson said. “We approached it in a dignified way.”
Treaties not ratified
The treaties negotiated at Tansy Point were never ratified by the U.S. For the Chinook Indian Nation, that unresolved history continues to shape the present. Johnson is careful to distinguish the failure of those treaties from any failure by the Chinook people. The nation negotiated in good faith, he said. Its leaders gave their word intending to honor the agreements they made. The United States did not ratify the treaties.
“That was not our doing,” Johnson said. “This is a failure of the United States to live up to its fundamental responsibilities.”
Johnson said the lack of ratification has had consequences that continue today, including the Chinook Indian Nation’s lack of federal recognition. He sees that status not as the result of the Chinook people failing to maintain their identity or political community, but as the result of a decision made by the United States.
The Chinook Indian Nation has continued to organize, govern and maintain its connection to its ancestral lands. Johnson said many of today’s tribal leaders can trace their family lines directly to the leaders who negotiated and signed the Tansy Point treaties.
That continuity extends beyond the treaty negotiations. Johnson pointed to the Chinook people who came together in the 1890s to hire the nation’s first attorneys, those who wrote the first Constitution in the 1920s and those who rewrote the Constitution in 1951. Again and again, he said, descendants of the same families have carried the work forward. The fight for recognition is therefore not a new political campaign. It is part of a much longer history of Chinook leadership.
Bones of their ancestors
Johnson also connects the nation’s continued presence on its ancestral lands directly to sovereignty. He said the United States attempted to move the Chinook people away from their homelands — including efforts in 1851 to move them east of the Cascade Mountains and later efforts to move them north toward the Olympic Peninsula.
The Chinook people refused.
“We said we were staying with the bones of our ancestors,” Johnson said.
That decision, Johnson said, helped preserve something that cannot be separated from the Chinook people’s identity: their connection to place.For generations, Chinook people have continued to return to their lands, tell their stories, maintain their traditions and teach their children. That connection is what Johnson sees when Chinook citizens gather at Tansy Point today.
“By continuing to be in our own places, that’s a direct expression of — and I think undeniable proof of — our sovereignty,” he said.
The U.S. can debate the nature of its relationship with the Chinook Indian Nation, Johnson said. But it cannot erase the fact that the Chinook people remain connected to the mouth of the Columbia River.
“As long as we maintain this connection,” he said, “no other nation can claim to be the sovereign nation from the mouth of the Columbia River.”
History can still be felt
That connection is also why the physical act of gathering matters. Songs, ceremonies, stories and time spent together on the land give younger generations an opportunity to experience history rather than simply hear about it.
The Aug. 15 commemoration will bring Chinook citizens together with non-Native community members and witnesses from other tribal nations. For Johnson, those gatherings carry an important responsibility. The Chinook people have a tradition of witnesses — people invited to observe significant events and return to their own communities with what they saw and experienced. Those witnesses can then tell others what happened.
It is a form of oral history, but it is also a way of strengthening relationships among sovereign tribal nations.Johnson said he is thinking not only about the people who will attend this year, but about the youngest people who will be there. Those children may one day be the elders who tell their own grandchildren about the day they stood at Tansy Point.
“They will be able to speak firsthand to what they saw 50, 75 years from now,” Johnson said.
That is how history survives. Not simply in documents, but in people who remember being there.
Recognition as fairness
The Chinook Indian Nation’s continued fight for federal recognition is another part of that history. For Johnson, recognition is fundamentally about fairness. He points to neighboring Native nations with similar histories and experiences that receive the benefits and opportunities associated with federal recognition while the Chinook Indian Nation does not.
“Our neighbors with the same history, same experiences, same issues are afforded the benefits and opportunity that comes from federal recognition, while we are not,” Johnson said.
He believes recognition would also allow the United States to properly fulfill its responsibilities to the Chinook people. But Johnson’s argument extends beyond the nation itself. He sees a federally recognized Chinook Indian Nation as something that could benefit the entire region. The Chinook people think about the place as a whole, he said — the communities, lands, waterways, plants and animals.
A restored Chinook Indian Nation, he believes, could help bring resources and Indigenous leadership back into decisions affecting the Columbia River region. The potential benefits, he said, extend to the environment and to the people who live throughout the region.
“Chinook, a restored Chinook, will benefit all of it,” Johnson said.
History measured in generations
For visitors coming to Tansy Point, Johnson hopes the commemoration changes their understanding of time. He grew up hearing that the history of the United States on Chinook lands is “a blink in the eye” compared with the history of his people.
One hundred seventy-five years may sound like a long time. To the Chinook people, it is not. The people who stood at Tansy Point in 1851 are only a few generations removed from those alive today.Their descendants have maintained oral histories reaching back to the treaty negotiations and beyond.
The Chinook people have remained.
“We want people to come to visit to know that the Chinook Indian Nation approached these treaties as a strong people,” Johnson said. “That strength, despite the United States’ neglect, has been maintained.”
And they are still here.
“We are proudly continuing to live here on our place, on our land,” he said. “We want people to know that we are not going anywhere.”
What is carried forward
For future generations of Chinook people, Johnson sees the 175th anniversary as both a commemoration and a challenge. The connection between today’s Chinook people and the ancestors who gathered at Tansy Point can only survive if that connection is remembered and practiced.
Young people, he said, cannot give in to ways of living or thinking that diminish their relationships to their families, their stories or their lands. Knowing those connections intimately changes the way a person understands history.
It makes 175 years feel close. It also creates an opportunity to share something with the people who now live alongside the Chinook people. Johnson said the Chinook Indian Nation’s history, teachings and relationship to the land could ultimately be a gift to its neighbors — if the nation has the security and recognition necessary to share them.
Knowledge is not simply a collection of stories. It is a way of understanding the land. And Johnson believes that understanding could change how people treat the place they call home. But there is also caution. The Chinook Indian Nation has lost much over generations, Johnson said. Today, its songs, dances, words and stories are among the things that remain.
“We can’t give away what is our last bit of wealth,” he said.
For those who want to learn more about Chinook history and the nation’s relationship with the land, Johnson offered a different kind of invitation: stand alongside the Chinook people in their fight for justice and restoration. That support, he said, can help create the conditions in which the nation can share its knowledge more freely.
Witnesses to the future
There is something fitting about returning to Tansy Point after 175 years. The Chinook leaders who gathered there understood the importance of having people present to witness what was happening. Their descendants are carrying that tradition forward. People will gather again.
Chinook citizens will stand on the same land their ancestors stood on. Young people will see it. Elders will remember it. Visitors will listen. Representatives from other tribal nations will witness it and carry what they experience back to their own communities.
And the Sitka spruce will still be standing. A tree that was there when the treaties were negotiated will be there when the Chinook people commemorate them. It has witnessed 175 years of history.
Now, it will witness another generation.
“We often say this to our kids in the family,” Johnson said. “You’re going to be able to say that you saw this.”
