Tribe Says Lake Source Of Culture Showing Indians’ Dependence On Lake For Livelihood May Help Prove Ownership

Coeur d’Alene tribal members took the stand Monday to tell a federal judge how important rivers and Lake Coeur d’Alene are to their traditional culture.

For food and spiritual matters, the water played a vital role, tribal members said. The Coeur d’Alene Indians even have a holiday just to celebrate water potatoes.

Each summer, the tribe’s children attend a summer camp on the lake where they learn cultural traditions, such as building a sweat lodge and digging for water potatoes.

Tribal member Maryann Hurley said the tribe’s children are taught to adapt but not lose their traditional ways.

“The only way I can survive is: Don’t forget the old ways, even though you are taking up new ways,” she said.

After praying in the sweat lodge, the Indians would jump in the water, tribal elder Lawrence Aripa explained.

“It’s a practice that’s always been among our people,” Aripa said.

The tribe joined the U.S. Justice Department in suing the state of Idaho for tribal ownership of the southern end of Lake Coeur d’Alene. The trial is in its second week before U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge.

If it wins, the tribe will have the power to regulate fishing and other uses on that portion of the lake.

Anthropologist Roderick Sprague testified that the Coeur d’Alenes relied on fishing for about a third of their food supply and decorated the graves of their dead with parts of canoes. The tribe used cattails and tule plants, both of which grow in wetlands, to build their lodges, he said.

These practices continued through 1873, when the tribe was negotiating with the United States for its reservation, Sprague said.

Part of proving the tribe’s ownership may depend on whether they needed the lake’s resources and whether government negotiators knew that when establishing reservation boundaries in an 1873 agreement.

During cross-examination, state deputy Attorney General Steven Strack questioned that dependence. Using old documents, Strack found references to a shift in subsistence practices when the horse was introduced - long before the Jesuits arrived and began teaching the Indians to farm.

With the horse, the tribe became more dependent on hunting buffalo, Strack quoted another expert as writing.

Sprague said he disagreed on that point. While Strack pointed out several other passages that indicate the tribe was heavily into farming in the 1870s, Sprague said most of the farming was at the direction of the Jesuits.

By 1873, Sprague maintained, the transition to agriculture among the tribe “was barely evident.”

Also crucial to the tribe’s case is whether the government intended to include the bed and banks of the lake in the reservation. Tribal attorney Ray Givens called Gerald Willett, a semi-retired professor of surveying, to the stand to establish that intent.

When surveying the original reservation boundaries, the surveyor had special instructions to draw a straight line through the northern portion of Lake Coeur d’Alene to the mouth of the Spokane River, and a line down the middle of the Spokane River.

Normally, surveyors drew a meandering line around any navigable waterway, because it constitutes a public highway of commerce to be regulated by government.

The fact that the government surveyor did not meander the line indicates that most of the lake and half of the Spokane River were included in the reservation - including submerged lands, Willett testified.

The survey map also shows the reservation had 598,000 acres within its boundaries, which necessarily had to include the bed of the lake, he said.

The U.S. government and tribe are fighting only for the southern third of Lake Coeur d’Alene because the government contends the tribe sold the northern part of its reservation to the government in 1889.

The tribe’s case for the entire lake was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. The justices ruled the tribe cannot sue the state.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: LAWSUIT The tribe joined the U.S. Justice Department in suing the state of Idaho for tribal ownership of the southern end of the lake.