Everett Herald: Tribes seek greater clout

Everett Herald:

Tulalip Tribal elder Ray Moses keeps the stories his ancestors gave to him.

He tells how the whale pushes the reluctant salmon back into the rivers, how the beaver tried to woo the field mouse.

Moses, 75, saves these old stories, passes them on.

In his pocket he keeps another story. It too is from the past, but this, he explains, is also the future.

It is a folded, dog-eared copy of the Treaty of Point Elliott. He takes it out, holds it up in the sunlight, waves it at passersby.

“People don’t know that we have these rights. They need to know this.”

To the treaty tribes – today’s Tulalip, Stillaguamish, Lummi, Swinomish and others – the 1855 pact signed by Mukilteo’s shore tells everyone what belongs to them forever.