Contested Claims and Negotiation over the Sequalitchew

• In Event: Negotiations and Renegotiations of Space and Resource Use in Pacific Northwest Aboriginal History

Abstract

Scholarly discussions about sovereignty over land and resources normally revolve around acts of the state. In the southern Puget Sound during the nineteenth century key acts included the Treaty of 1818, the Treaty of 1846, the Land Donation Act, and Medicine Creek Treaty, yet control of actual resources—animals, plants, and streams such as the Sequalitchew—operated largely outside the realm of the state. This paper examines the shifting interplay between local and state authority in legitimizing claims to the Sequalitchew from 1833 to 1854.
During the mid-nineteenth century, a Nisqually community, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), and American settlers vied for control of the Sequalitchew. When the HBC built Fort Nisqually in 1833, it made legal claim to the area under the joint occupation provision of the Treaty of 1818. The HBC planned to harness the Sequalitchew for mills, but the local Nisqually limited the HBC’s access because of its own important material and cultural claims to the stream. Over the next decade the Nisqually and the HBC employees negotiated cohabitation. By 1843, the fort’s agricultural focus and tempered relationship with Native residents enabled the HBC to move its operations nearer the Sequalitchew, but a mile upstream. This mutually accommodating arrangement gave the HBC livestock access to water and also prevented the disruption of the downstream Sequalitchew fishery.
The balance of power altered in the late 1840s, when American settlers began to claim lands along the Sequalitchew for mill purposes under the Treaty of 1846 and Land Donation Act. State authority can be overemphasized, however, because the Nisqually had not ceded the area and the treaty between Britain and the US specifically recognized the HBC’s claim. The new developments threatened Native and HBC’s interests, and again negotiations occurred largely outside the state.

Author

• Corey Larson, Simon Fraser University