Chinookan peoples

Map of traditional Chinook tribal territory.

The Chinookan peoples have long had a community on the lower Columbia River. These lower Columbia Chinook tribes and bands re-organized in the 20th century, setting up an elected form of government and reviving tribal culture. They first sought recognition as a federally recognized sovereign tribe in the late 20th century, as this would provide certain treaty-promised benefits for education and welfare. The Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected their application in 1997.[16] Since the late 20th century, the Chinook Indian Nation has engaged in a continuing effort to secure formal recognition, conducting research and developing documentation to demonstrate its history. They are referred to in government and historic accounts, but treaties signed at Tansy Point in 1851 were not acted upon by Congress through a formal ratification process. This inaction caused the Chinook territories defined in the treaties to remain unceded. Nevertheless, these territories were taken by the federal government. If Congress had formally ratified the treaties, a reservation would have been established, which would have meant automatic recognition.[17]

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Interior recognized the Chinook Indian Nation, a confederation of the Cathlamet, Clatsop, Lower Chinook, Wahkiakum and Willapa Indians, as a tribe, according to its rules established in consultation with other recognized tribes. The tribe had documented continuity of their community over time on the lower Columbia. This recognition was announced during the last months of the administration of President Bill Clinton.[18] Since the 1930s, individual Chinook people have had Allotments on the timber-rich Quinault Reservation in Grays Harbor County, Washington. The Quinault appealed recognition of the Chinook in August 2001, and the matter was taken up by the new administration.[16]

After President George W. Bush was elected, his new political appointees reviewed the Chinook materials. In 2002, in a highly unusual action, they revoked the recognition of the Chinook and of two other tribes also approved by the previous administration.[19] Efforts by Brian Baird, D-Wash. from Washington's 3rd congressional district, to gain passage of legislation in 2011 to achieve recognition of the tribe were not successful.[1] In his decision on a lawsuit filed in late 2017, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton ruled recognition could only be granted from Congress and other branches of government, but largely sided with the tribe; Leighton denied seven of eight claims by the Interior Department to dismiss the case, including a challenge to a 2015 rule that bars tribes from seeking recognition again.[20] The Chinook Indian Nation's offices are in Bay Center, Washington. The tribe holds an Annual Winter Gathering at the plankhouse in Ridgefield, Washington. It also holds an Annual First Salmon Ceremony at Chinook Point (Fort Columbia) on the North Shore of the Columbia River.[21] In 2019, the Chinook Indian Nation purchased ten acres of the 1851 Tansy Point treaty grounds.[22]

Cathlapotle Plankhouse, a full-scale replica of a Chinook-style cedar plankhouse erected in 2005 at the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, which was once inhabited by more than 1200 Chinook people

Illustration of the interior of a Chinookan plankhouse

Chinookan-speaking groups include:

• Lower Chinook (at the mouth of the Columbia River in modern Washington, part of the unrecognized Chinook Indian Nation)
• Kathlamet or Cathlamet (Cathlahmah) (at the mouth of the Columbia River in modern Oregon and Washington, part of the unrecognized Chinook Indian Nation)
• Clackamas or Cathlascans (″Those along the Clackamas River″, inhabited the Willamette Valley on the eastbank of the Willamette River as far as the Willamette Falls, above and below the Falls themselves on either bank, and along the Clackamas River and Sandy Rivers. Lewis and Clark estimated their population at 1800 persons in 1806. At the time the tribe lived in 11 villages and subsisted on fish and roots. By 1855, the 88 surviving members of the tribe were relocated to the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon)
• Clatsop (around the mouth of the Columbia River and the Clatsop Plains in northwestern Oregon, Chief Coboway welcomed Lewis and Clark; by 1840, the number of Clatsop Indians was 200, in 1850 the number was down by half; today predominantly part of the Chinook Indian Nation as one of its officially confederated tribes; some others part of Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and the recently organized, unrecognized Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes)
• Clowwewalla, also (Willamette) Falls Indians or Tumwater Falls Indians (controlled the Willamette Valley, Oregon, perhaps a subgroup of the Clackamas, may have included the Cushook, Chahcowah, and Nemalquinner of Lewis and Clark, who estimated that they numbered 650 in 1805–6. On this basis Mooney (1928) estimated there might have been 900 in 1780. They were greatly reduced by the epidemic of 1829 and in 1851 numbered 13 and are now apparently extinct. Maybe some survive as Clackamas as part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon)[23]
• Wasco-Wishram
  • Wasco (known also by their Sahaptin name as Wascopam, lived traditionally on the south bank of the Columbia River, Oregon, they were divided into three subtribes: the Dalles Wasco or Wasco proper (near The Dalles in Wasco County), the Hood River Wasco (along the Hood River to its mouth into the Columbia River, sometimes divided into two bands: the Hood River Band in Oregon, and the White Salmon River Band in Washington). In 1822 their population was estimated to be 900, today 200 tribal members out of 4,000 of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs are estimated to be Wasco)
  • Wishram (a Yakama-Sahaptin term), their autonym as Ita'xluit was the source of transliteration as Tlakluit or Echelut (Echeloot) (lived traditionally on the north bank of the Columbia River, Washington, Wishram village or Nixlúidix ("trading place") near Five Mile Rapids, was the center of the regional trade system for Pacific Coast, Plateau, Great Basin and Plains tribes, in the 1700s, the estimated Wishram population was 1,500. In 1962 only 10 Wishrams were counted on the Washington census, today they are predominantly enrolled in the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation)
• Chilluckittequaw or Chiluktkwa (living on the north side of Columbia River in Klickitat and Skamania counties, Washington, from about 10 miles below the Dalles to the neighborhood of the Cascades. In 1806 Lewis and Clark estimated their number at 2,400. According to Mooney a remnant of the tribe lived near the mouth of White Salmon River until 1880, when they removed to the Cascades, where a few still resided in 1895, today sometimes considered as White Salmon River Band of Washington of the Hood River Wasco subtribe)
• Watlata or Cascades Indians (lived downstream from the other Wasco groups and were divided in two groups, one on each side of the Columbia River and at the Cascades of the Columbia River and the Willamette River in Oregon; the Oregon group were called Gahlawaihih [Curtis]). The Watlala, whose dialect is the most divergent dialect of the Wasco, may have been a separate tribe though identified as Wasco since 1830, and enrolled as "Ki-gal-twal-la band of the Wasco" and the "Dog River band of the Wasco″ in Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs)
• Kilooklaniuck[24] (extinct as a tribe)
• Multnomah or Cathlascans (living in approximately 15 villages on Sauvie Island (Wappatoo / Wapato Island) (hosting a total of 2,000 people who built and resided in cedar log houses 30 yards long by 12 yards wide), other villages were located along Multnomah Channel and in the Wapato Valley near the mouth of the Willamette (Multnomah) River into the Columbia River and generally along the western Willamette riverbank, also known as Wappato / Wapato people after Wappato/Wapato (Indian potato), an marsh-grown plant like a potato or onion and important staple food for Native peoples, today part of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, a minority are enrolled in the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon)
• Skilloot[25] (occupied both sides of the Columbia River, between the Washougal River (from the Cascades Chinook placename: [wasiixwal] or [wasuxal], meaning "rushing water") and Cowlitz River; Clark mentioned one village of 25 houses, made of wooden planks with straw roofs. Altogether, the Corps estimated the Skilloot population in 1806 to be about 2,500. An 1850 population estimate put the tribe at about 200 surviving members. The Skilloot no longer exist as an independent band.)
• Wahkiakum, Wackiakum, Wac-ki-cum or Wahkiaku ("tall timber in reference to the plank houses", another source gives ″region downriver″,[26] lived in two villages along the Elochoman River on the north bank of the Columbia River, Washington, opposite of the Kathlamet in Oregon; sometimes considered a Kathlamet village group under the leadership of Chief Wahkiakum, part of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and of the unrecognized Chinook Indian Nation)
• Willapa Chinook (along the north bank of the Columbia River in southwestern Washington around southern Willapa Bay, from Cape Disappointment to Grays Harbor, today enrolled in the federally recognized Shoalwater Bay Tribe and the unrecognized Chinook Indian Nation)

In the 21st century, a large proportion of Chinook people live in the regions surrounding the towns of Bay Center, Chinook, and Ilwaco in southwest Washington and in Astoria, Oregon.

Books written about the Chinook include the novel Boston Jane: An Adventure by Jennifer L. Holm

Lower Chinook chief from Warm Spring reservation (1886).

• Comcomly, chief in the early to mid-19th century
• Charles Cultee, the principal informant to early 20th-century anthropologist Franz Boas on his language and tribal studies, especially for Chinook Texts.
• Ranald MacDonald, mixed-race son of Archibald McDonald, a Scottish Hudson's Bay Company fur trader, and Raven, Chief Comcomly's daughter, in Astoria, Oregon, was the first Westerner to teach English in Japan, in 1847–1848. He taught Einosuke Moriyama, who served as one of the chief interpreters during negotiations between Commodore Perry and the Tokugawa Shogunate
• J. Christopher Stevens, American diplomat and lawyer who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Libya from June 2012 to September 2012. He was killed when the U.S. consulate was attacked in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012[27]
• Catherine Troeh, historian, artist, activist and advocate for Native American rights and culture. An elder of the Chinook tribe, she was a direct descendant of Chief Comcomly.
• Chief Tumulth, signed the 1855 treaty that created the Grand Ronde Reservation; he was later killed by Gen. Philip Sheridan's forces[28]
• Tsin-is-tum, "Princess Jennie Michel", a Native American folklorist. Called "Last of the Clatsops."

Drawing of a Chinook dugout canoe from a memoir of the Oregon Country published in 1844

• Chinook salmon
• Chinook (wind)
• Boeing CH-47 Chinook
• Neerchokikoo

• Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia Published by University of Washington Press, 2013 - ISBN 978-0-295-99279-2
• Judson, Katharine Berry (1912). Myths and legends of the Pacific Northwest, especially of Washington and Oregon (DJVU). Washington State Library's Classics in Washington History collection (2nd ed.). McClurg. OCLC 10363767. Oral traditions from the Chinook, Nez Perce, Klickitat and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chinookan.

• Chinook Indian Nation, official website
• Who's Who in the Chinook tribes
• Lewis and Clark PBS