Their plans to build a Las Vegas-style casino on the reservation land garnered several opponents including Clark County, the city of Vancouver, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, owners of private cardrooms in La Center, a group calling itself Citizens Against Reservation Shopping and three neighbors of the reservation land. Over the past 12 years – since a developer first purchased the 152-acre property outside La Center for the Cowlitz tribe – Cowlitz leaders have been fighting for legal approval of the reservation. “Drums sounded and elders strode around in red woolen honor robes, bedecked in antique abalone shells … It was a day to celebrate, but it was a day not without controversy.” “The air was thick with burning sage and anticipation,” Dupres wrote for Indian Country Today media network. In December of 2014, a federal judge cleared the way for the Cowlitz reservation, taking the land into federal trust for the Washington tribe.Ĭhristine Dupres, a Cowlitz Tribal Council member and author of the book, Being Cowlitz: How One Tribe Renewed and Sustained Its Identity, gathered with her fellow and sister Cowlitz on the tribe’s new land in late December to celebrate the judge’s ruling. Landless for more than 160 years, the Cowlitz is a tribe that has fought to retain its identity as its members scattered, settling with other tribes and finding homes many miles away from their ancestors’ aboriginal lands. “I’m glad we were able to provide that for her.”Ĭertainly, the reservation has been a long time coming for the Cowlitz people. “We’ve lost a lot of elders, waiting for this (reservation) to happen, but this elder knew that the tribe got their land back. On this particular day, the Cowlitz leader is caught between celebration and sorrow – celebration because his people finally have land to call their own sorrow because the tribe’s eldest member has passed away.Ī positive man, Iyall finds the silver lining: Before she died, this 108-year-old Cowlitz woman, born two decades before the start of the Great Depression, knew that her people had been victorious.

It is a rainy morning in late April, less than two months after his tribe signed a formal agreement with the federal government for a 152-acre reservation near La Center, and Cowlitz Indian Tribe Chairman Bill Iyall has come to his tribe’s Vancouver offices to discuss plans for the land.

Cowlitz casino gas station