| Tribal
Hunting - It is our life!
Jeff Shaw, North Sound Information Officer, Northwest Indian
Fisheries Commission
How important
is hunting to the Swinomish way of life? Chester Cayou Jr.,
a respected Swinomish tribal hunter, has a quick answer. Cayou
chuckles. “It is our life,” he answers. And it
has been since before anyone can remember.
He and
other Swinomish hunters are dedicated to preserving that way
of life. Once a year, Cayou gathers a group of a dozen or
so young hunters from the 800-member tribe to go on a ceremonial
journey, a quest to bring back game for tribal elders and
provide wildlife resources for use in traditional and sacred
practices.
The meat
gathered will be distributed to tribal elders and local spiritual
leaders for use in religious ceremonies. No parts of the animal
– not the hooves, the antlers, nor the hide –
will be sold or wasted.
“In
the wintertime, we use the game for longhouse ceremonies –
we pow-wow every night,” said Cayou, stressing that
elk meat is a traditional and essential staple food. “A
lot of our elders, that’s all they’ll eat –
the traditional Indian food that we give them.”
Wildlife
resources have always been central to the cultures of the
treaty Indian tribes in western Washington. As traditional
foods, deer, elk and other wildlife remain important elements
of feasts for funerals, naming ceremonies and potlatches.
Hides, hooves, antlers, feathers and other wildlife parts
are still used for traditional ceremonial items and regalia.
Like salmon and shellfish, the tribes reserved the right to
harvest wildlife in treaties with the U.S. government.
Wildlife
still provides important nutrition to Indian families on reservations
where unemployment can run as high as 80 percent. If a family
cannot provide for themselves, tribal community hunters help.
Men like Cayou plan ceremonial hunts. Glen Edwards, a Swinomish
tribal council member who also sits on the tribe’s fish
and game commission, harvests waterfowl. They hand out game
to elders who have grown too infirm to hunt, or to families
without a hunter.
Edwards,
who taught his own sons traditional hunting techniques and
modern safety measures, taught many of the tribe’s youth
the same techniques. Now, these young people go on traditional
hunts with Edwards and Cayou, donating the wildlife they harvest
to Swinomish elders. “This food is a real treat for
people who don’t have hunters in their family, especially
elders who grew up on wild game,” said Edwards. “It’s
good to see these young kids taking an interest in hunting,
and in donating their game.”
Unfortunately,
the quality and quantity of the habitat upon which the wildlife
resources in western Washington depend for their survival
are declining rapidly. Where virgin forests once stood there
is now urban sprawl. Deer and elk herds have been squeezed
into smaller and smaller areas of degraded and fragmented
habitat.
Swinomish
hunters now have to plan weeklong trips to find game, because
harvestable wildlife has disappeared from their traditional
hunting grounds. But these trips will continue, because a
community and a culture depend on it.
This doesn’t
mean that the tribes are harvesting lots of elk: far from
it. “We don’t impact the resource like some people
think – we just take what we need,” said Edwards.
“Last year, we took one elk. That’s hardly anything.”
Western
Washington treaty tribal hunters account for only about 1
percent of the total combined deer and elk harvest in the
state. According to statistics for 2001-2002, tribal members
harvested only 640 deer and 307 elk – about one percent
of the total deer and elk take. More deer and elk die as road-kill
than are taken by tribal hunters.
Tribal
hunters, Edwards says, sometimes unfairly get bad press. “If
a tribal member does something wrong, it gets put in the spotlight,
and all the Indian hunters are lumped together with one bad
apple,” said Edwards. “Some people talk about
Indians commercializing hunting – that doesn’t
happen. If one of our hunters tried that, the hunting commission
would take away that individual’s hunting rights automatically.”
As a sovereign
government, each treaty tribe develops its own hunting regulations
and ordinances governing tribal members. Many tribes work
with WDFW on their regulations and harvest data.
Tribal
hunters must obtain tags for each big game animal they wish
to hunt and are required to report all harvest. If a tribal
member is found in violation of tribal regulations, he is
cited into tribal court. Penalties can include fines and loss
of hunting privileges.
“Hunting
was and is a way of life to us,” said Edwards. “It’s
important to us to preserve that tradition.” |
