Hunting where their ancestors did

YAKIMA, Wash. — Invariably a hot-button issue, off-reservation tribal hunting is even more so in rural areas like the Nile, where many residents are hunters themselves and know precisely when each of the state’s game seasons begins and ends.

A Rocky Mountain Elk at the Oak Creek Wildlife Area feeding station, outside Naches Wash., on Feb. 1, 2011. (TJ MULLINAX/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Tribal hunters, though, aren’t bound by those same state-set hunting rules or seasons, which occasionally creates confusion — and, occasionally, the risk of confrontation.

That’s why state wildlife enforcement officers held a public meeting earlier this month in the Nile, to defuse any rising unrest in the heart of one of nine Yakima-area game-management units (GMUs) in which the westside Muckleshoot Tribe has over the last two years established elk and deer hunting seasons.

About 50 people showed up, some of them asking the very emotionally-charged questions that led those Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement staffers to call the meeting in the first place.

“They were kind of running on bad information,” officer Alan Baird said. “Well, maybe not bad information, but they didn’t have the total picture.”

The picture is pretty simple, actually. If the Muckleshoots’ forebears hunted in these areas in the old, pre-treaty days — which, according to tribal authorities, they did — their tribal hunters are within their rights to hunt there.

That was the Washington Supreme Court’s 1999 precedent-setting ruling in State v. Buchanan. The case stemmed from a January 1995 incident in which three members of the Nooksack Tribe in northwest Washington were found on state land within the Oak Creek Wildlife Area loading two bull elk into the bed of a pickup.

Attorneys for Donald Buchanan, the Nooksack hunter charged in that case with possessing big game during a closed season, argued that the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott gave tribal hunters the right to hunt elk on “open and unclaimed lands.” The court ruled tribal hunters could legally hunt not only on treaty-ceded lands, but on areas that had been “actually used for hunting and occupied (by the tribe) over an extended period of time.”

The Muckleshoots are only one of at least five westside tribes talking with the WDFW about establishing hunting seasons in traditional hunting grounds. And how they verified their ancestors’ traditional hunting range was entirely up to the tribe, said Nate Pamplin, who heads up the WDFW’s wildlife program.

“We’ve asked for what supporting material would support their assertion that that area was used and occupied over a period of time. That’s the Buchanan test, if you will,” Pamplin said. “We’re not in a position, nor do we have any authority to essentially adjudicate a tribe’s traditional hunting area. What we’re doing is looking at the evidence they’re providing and … essentially using our enforcement and prosecution discretion.”

Many non-tribal hunters feared the Washington Supreme Court’s 1999 Buchanan decision would lead to decimation of the state’s elk and deer populations. But reports from 20 primarily westside tribes whose harvest is monitored by the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission show that’s not the case.

(Note: Yakama tribal hunting is not reported to the commission.)

Tribal hunting harvest has fluctuated since 1999, as has non-tribal harvest, but hasn’t climbed. In the two years prior to State v. Buchanan, reported tribal harvest averaged just over 700 deer and just under 400 elk. The averages in the 10 years since then: 622 deer and 333 elk. The tribes’ combined deer-and-elk harvest is typically around 3 percent of that of non-tribal hunters; for elk, tribal hunters typically account for 4 to 5 percent of the state’s harvest.

“I can pretty much assure you that the Mucklshoot tribal harvest would never negatively impact the (elk) population,” said David Vales, a Muckleshoot tribal wildlife biologist.

“The tribe’s goal is longterm sustainable populations of animals. We cut our regulations based on sound biological principals — those are key words we fall back on any time we’re thinking about changing regulations. It has to be good data.”

Data is easier to collect west of the Cascades, where the tribes all report harvest, Vales said, and Muckleshoot hunters are required to report any harvest within 10 days and, even if a permitted hunter doesn’t take an animal, he must report that within 15 days of the close of the season.

Muckleshoot wildlife biologists have for 14 years conducted radio-telemetry research and now monitor nearly 250 collared animals (elk, deer and cougar), and “have worked with the state cooperatively” to establish wildlife population goals, Vales said.

Typical of the tribe’s responsive game management was the 2007 season, when the Muckleshoots basically shut down mountain goat hunting in response to harvest numbers from other tribes. They also did a midseason 2009 closure for does during the tribe’s either-sex deer hunt, and the tribe’s season has remained closed for does ever since because of concerns about population numbers.

But for all of that science-based game management by tribal biologists, though, it’s a few isolated involving tribal hunters — especially around the state’s winter elk-feeding areas — that “left a lot of people really upset,” said Ty Brown of Naches. “They’d drive up there on a weekend to see the elk and there would be three fresh gut piles right there in the hay.”

In those cases, though, the tribes’ responses have typically been in line with state enforcement efforts.

After Yakama hunters shot a bull near the Nile-area Clover Springs feed site in January 2002, the tribe expanded the range and time of its feed-area “winter sanctuary” guidelines to prevent a repeat. And after a Muckleshoot hunter took a bull at Clover Springs last winter, the Muckleshoot tribe amended its guidelines to match the Yakamas’ winter feed-area closure.

“Now the Yakamas and the Muckleshoots both, according to their tribal law, it’s illegal to hunt at those (feed-site) places,” said George Pickard of Naches, who, like Brown, attended the Nile public meeting. “I don’t know if you could call that hunting or not. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Even were there not feed-site controversy, though, the different guidelines governing tribal and non-tribal hunters would always be a contentious subject.

“Really, that’s what the gist of everybody in that (Nile meeting) room’s frustration was,” Brown said, “that it’s not a fair system for all sportsmen.

“From my perspective, I see people who have played by the rules and gone through the application process, the special permit process to, say, draw a special bull tag. They’ve paid their money and built up their points and still can’t get drawn, and in the wintertime they see Native Americans driving down the highway with four big bulls in the bed of their truck.

“That’s where the frustration comes from.”