Daniel Beekman: Wave of disenrollments by WA’s Squaxin Island Tribe roils community

May 28—KAMILCHE POINT, Mason County — The Squaxin Island Tribe’s health clinic is named after Sally Brownfield’s late mother, who spent decades working to obtain quality care for members of her Native American community.

But Brownfield will no longer receive subsidized care at the clinic, because the tribe disenrolled her and dozens of other longtime members this spring, becoming the latest in a growing number of tribes in Washington and across the country to carry out membership purges in recent years.

Although Brownfield, 75, is a prominent advocate for Native education and worked alongside her mother to help build up the tribe after it secured federal recognition in 1965, Squaxin officials say the women should have never been enrolled because they didn’t meet criteria in the tribe’s constitution — including descent from a select group of local ancestors.

Squaxin Island Tribe disenrolls dozens

The Native American tribe based northwest of Olympia took action this spring after an enrollment audit.

Sources: Esri, Squaxin Island Tribe (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

“We are in this position because we have chosen to follow the constitution,” Squaxin Chairman Kris Peters said. “As difficult as that may be.”

Washington has been less affected by disenrollments than some other states, but the trend could accelerate here if other tribes follow the Squaxin example, said David Wilkins, a University of Richmond politics professor who researched and wrote a book about disenrollments. The Nooksack Indian Tribe in Whatcom County disenrolled more than 300 people in 2016, leading to bitter disagreements and almost a decade of legal wrangling.

“There’s always a domino effect,” said Wilkins, a member of the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina. “Everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”

Disenrollment means Brownfield can no longer exercise harvesting rights on the Salish Sea beaches where her relatives dug clams for generations. She can no longer vote in Squaxin elections. Others are losing their subsidized housing at the tribe’s headquarters northwest of Olympia.

The changes have shaken up people like Brownfield, who have seen their deeply held identities denied. Some are questioning the motivations at play, pointing to money-driven disenrollments elsewhere, and calling for a boycott of the Squaxin casino. The tribe has about 1,300 members and an annual budget of about $150 million.

“It’s painful for us being disenrolled and it’s painful for those who know right from wrong, those who know who we are,” Brownfield said.

The controversy has also shaken up Squaxin leaders like Peters, who says he has lost sleep and shed tears in recent months. He describes the disenrollments as a sad yet necessary step to undo past mistakes and protect the tribe’s integrity, saying outsiders should respect its sovereign nation status rather than rush to judgment about an internal matter.

“We’re doing it right and it’s none of your business,” Peters said, summing up his message to the world. “Our tribe has been drug through the mud on this, and the thing is, the majority of our people agree with what we’re doing.”

Family history

Brownfield descends from a Native woman named Saspolitsa, she says, who had a daughter northeast of Olympia during the turbulent mid-1800s, when some Native groups were battling European American settlers.

After Saspolitsa died, Brownfield says, her daughter moved to live with relatives near Kamilche Point, where the Squaxin Island Tribe is headquartered today. The daughter married a white man and their family stayed at Kamilche Point, says Brownfield, who grew up there several generations later.

Brownfield’s relatives faced discrimination; for example, her grandfather and his siblings were taken to Native boarding schools meant to obliterate their culture, she says. They sought at points to affiliate with multiple tribes. But they lived for generations in a mixed community at Kamilche Point rather than move to any of the region’s Native reservations, the closest of which had been established on isolated Squaxin Island by the Treaty of Medicine Creek.

That became more important in 1965, when the Squaxin Island Tribe’s constitution restricted membership to people who carry a certain amount of Native blood and who descend from ancestors named on a number of historical land-allotment and census lists.

Although Brownfield was raised by people who called themselves “Kamilche Indians,” she says, her direct forebears don’t appear on the crucial lists.

“There are so many stories like that,” said Alexandra Harmon, an emeritus professor of Native American history at the University of Washington and previously an attorney for tribes. “When people of mixed ancestry were choosing how to identify themselves or the government was making choices about who to count as Indian, there was no way they could anticipate the circumstances that determine tribal identity or membership today.”

Despite their uncertain status, Brownfield and her relatives contributed as the newly recognized Squaxin Island Tribe added properties and programs at Kamilche Point. Brownfield says they fought for fishing rights, worked on land deals, set up flea markets and ran summer camps for kids.

Resources were meager then, before the tribe opened gas stations, cannabis stores, a cigarette factory and a casino-resort. At one point, Brownfield and her mother were public health workers funded by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. They paid house visits to sick and elderly tribal members.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the tribe decided to enroll Brownfield, her mother and other community members with various ties. It’s what many smaller tribes were doing in that era as they fortified their institutions, Wilkins says.

Brownfield became a public school teacher, then a specialist in Indigenous education who helped create state curricula and brought early childhood learning programs to the Squaxin Island Tribe, among other endeavors. She served on the tribe’s enrollment committee until last year.

Tribe’s role

That’s when Squaxin officials hired a consultant to audit Squaxin membership. They didn’t set out to target certain people like Brownfield; they were simply responding to concerns raised over time by some members about inconsistent enrollment decisions, says Peters, who served as the tribe’s police chief and head administrator before he was elected chairman in 2020.

Also last year, the tribe changed its membership law, removing a clause from 2010 that said members already enrolled couldn’t later be disenrolled.

“Really, these are roll corrections” cleaning up previous errors, said Peters, who serves on the board of trustees at The Evergreen State College in Olympia and teaches Indigenous studies as an adjunct professor at the college.

The chairman traces his descent to Squaxin ancestors from Mud Bay, just down the road from Kamilche Point. It’s where Peters grew up, hunting and fishing with his father, and where he still lives.

Peters is proud of what the tribe has accomplished in recent decades, starting businesses and expanding services to members while continuing to grapple with the legacies of poverty and trauma imposed by colonization.

“We have these big, beautiful administrative buildings. We have actual roads. We have actual homes,” he said. “We’ve been able to reinvest in our people.”

Because those gains are precious, they must be reserved for genuine Squaxin people, Peters says. And now that the tribe has developed, it must be governed by its constitution, in line with other sovereign nations, he says.

“As an elected leader, I’m going to follow the law every time, whether I agree with what the constitution says or not,” he said. “I don’t get to choose.”

That’s what the disenrollments are about, according to Peters, who says Brownfield lacks evidence for how she outlines her ancestry. Some people who enrolled in the tribe knew they were stretching the truth, Peters says.

“That’s wrong,” he said about such people receiving benefits. “Because as much as we have, we’re still limited. We can’t take care of everybody.”

“Incredibly emotional”

Tribal citizenship questions can prove complicated, involving webs of claims and relationships that stretch through time and space.

The Squaxin Island Tribe has disenrolled people with various backgrounds, on various grounds. For example, Jamie Queen worked for the tribe until recently and says she descends from the sister of a woman on the tribe’s original land-allotment list; the tribe says that link isn’t direct enough.

The tribe hasn’t released its enrollment audit, so the details aren’t publicly available. Peters says fewer than 50 people have been disenrolled, whereas Brownfield and Queen say they suspect the number could be larger.

“They have a big hot mess” because disenrolled people are losing their housing and benefits, like access to subsidized health and child care, said Queen, describing disenrollment as contrary to traditional Native culture.

Wilkins, the University of Richmond professor, also views disenrollments as misguided. They’re almost always economic or political power plays, although tribes may produce documentation to justify their actions, says Wilkins, who had counted disenrollments by 80-plus tribes across 20-plus states by the time he published his book in 2017.

Wilkins hasn’t studied the Squaxin case specifically. He says the general circumstances resemble those surrounding problematic disenrollments in California, partly because each member is paid an equal share of the small tribe’s business profits. Brownfield and Queen have raised money as a factor, with the tribe preparing to develop a hotel in downtown Olympia.

Peters vehemently denies the idea, saying the tribe’s critics are exploiting prejudice against Native people and playing “public opinion games.” Squaxin member payouts won’t increase because of the disenrollments, he said.

Whereas some other tribes have shed members for unethical reasons, “The money piece has absolutely nothing to do with this,” he said.

Disenrolled people can appeal their cases in the tribe’s court, and Brownfield has hired a Seattle-based attorney to do that. The tribe’s constitution says enrollment corrections may be made with approval from the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the agency has been “closely monitoring” the tribe’s actions, spokesperson Joshua Barnett said. But the principles of tribal sovereignty limit the agency’s authority; it has neither approved nor disapproved the tribe’s membership actions at this point, Barnett said.

“One of the core, inherent sovereign rights of tribes is to control their membership,” said Dylan Hedden-Nicely, director of the Native American Law program at the University of Idaho and a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Tribes do need to have criteria for tribal membership and yet, given the tortured history of colonization, “there are going to be people left out,” Hedden-Nicely added, comparing disenrollment stress to debates over U.S. citizenship.

The Squaxin situation worries former council member David Whitener, although he remains enrolled and isn’t sure what exactly is behind the changes. With so much at stake, “It’s incredibly emotional,” Whitener said.

Brownfield and Peters agree about that much. Brownfield’s emotions swell when she visits the cemetery where her parents are buried.

“The hardest part for me to reconcile is them erasing people, people who have done so much,” she said, standing by her mother’s grave.

Peters acknowledges Brownfield’s contributions to the tribe, whether she’s Squaxin or not. The disenrollments are weighing on everyone, he says.

“Not only have I studied trauma and Indigenous history, I’ve seen it,” he said. “I know the healing we’re trying to go through, and this sets us back a bit. We have to work really hard to wrap our arms around our community.”