PUYALLUP RESERVATION — The Puyallup Tribe announced plans to open a new shipping terminal in Tacoma that it says would be the first tribally owned deep-water port in the country, able to accommodate some of the world’s largest shipping lines.
Puyallup and the Northwest Seaport Alliance signed an agreement Monday solidifying the tribe’s plans to build a new pier, now known as the Puyallup Tribal Terminal, on the Blair Waterway at the Port of Tacoma.
The tribe plans to build the pier on about 22 acres of tribal property adjacent to the port’s existing East Blair Terminal 1. The tribe will fund the construction of the new terminal, and be responsible for ongoing maintenance and repairs; the terminals will be jointly marketed and operated, according to the agreement.
The new terminal is expected to be completed in three to five years and cost about $200 million.
The Seaport Alliance is a partnership of the ports of Seattle and Tacoma.
The Puyallup Tribe is one of the largest employers in Pierce County and offers services for the community including a cancer care center and an opioid treatment clinic that are open to all.
It’s been a long fight, carried over generations, for the Puyallup Tribe to become the economic powerhouse it is today — there was a time when all the tribe owned was the cemetery, Chairman Bill Sterud recalled from his first year on tribal council in 1978.
The partnership with the Seaport Alliance will include a tribal employment and development program. Operating income generated by the tribe and adjacent Seaport terminal will be divided between the tribe and the Seaport Alliance. The goal is to share the revenue 50/50.
The terminal is anticipated to open the door for a program with Chief Leschi High School and a South Sound maritime skills center to provide pathways for younger tribal members.
The main imports to the current pier on the East Blair Waterway are cars and heavy equipment that are driven off vessels and transported across North America.
The Puyallup terminal will feature similar capabilities, and will allow ships to connect to electric shore power while being unloaded. Connected ships can turn off their engines while docked and reduce air pollution, including greenhouse gases.
The port will work alongside the tribe to finalize the design, permitting and construction processes.
“I think about the fight for land in this country, and how people lose blood and lives over it — it’s always going to be a fight for land, because land is who we are as people, land is our history, land is how we make a living, and land is how we ensure economic opportunity is available for all people,” said Rep. Marilyn Strickland, D-Tacoma, who worked on legislation that moved additional land at the waterway into a trust for the tribe’s economic development.
Tacoma’s port economy sprouted up around the tribe, while long excluding the Puyallup from the economic benefits.
“We’ve had to do some things out of the ordinary,” Sterud said at the water’s edge earlier this year, describing the Puyallup Tribe’s long fight to restore, clean up and reclaim land, and position the tribal nation as a leader. “This is huge.”
Past the Puyallup Tribe’s waterfront restaurants and seaplane terminal on Ruston Way sit some old relics of Commencement Bay’s past, like equipment from the Dickman Lumber Mill.
The mill’s pilings, coated in toxic chemicals, were among the last remnants to be removed. The chemicals, according to the state, have been shown to reduce growth and immune function in young salmon, in addition to posing a threat to human health through exposure to vapors or direct contact.
Heavy metals like arsenic and lead from the former Asarco smelter’s stacks coated a region spanning 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound basin, according to the state. The pollution is still being removed.
Viewed from the concrete onramp from Ruston, Pierce County, on a tour in February, white clouds billowed from various industries on the acres of pavement near the bay.
If you go back to the 1890s, Sterud said, looking out the car window, this shoreline was just a bunch of smokestacks, and who knows what they also dumped into the water.
“It makes me wonder what my ancestors thought about it,” he said. “Of course, they had their own problems, like their homes were taken and their land was stolen.”
In the 1880s, the U.S. government took the tribe’s land and divided it into allotments among tribal families.
Taxation, leases, misunderstandings of property laws and blatant injustice would lead to almost the entire reservation leaving tribal ownership, according to the Puyallup Tribe Historic Preservation Department.
Some people were killed in crimes never solved, and their land purchased soon after, according to a history shared by the tribe. In some cases, banks would assign “guardians” to Puyallup land owners and would then sell the lands.
By 1950, there were only about 10 families who still owned their assigned allotments in part or in whole, according to the department.
“The state of Washington decided that we couldn’t fish (by the terms outlined in the Medicine Creek Treaty) anymore, so anybody that went out to (fish) would get arrested,” Sterud said. “Total destruction of the reservation is what they wanted. There’d be nothing left. There were some pretty powerful tribal leaders back then that started the battle.”
Puyallup tribal members staked out armed fish camps, defending their right to fish on the river named for their people. They staged an armed takeover of the Cascadia Diagnostic Center, the former Cushman Indian Hospital, and succeeded in getting it deeded to the tribe. First the tribal offices stood on that ground, and today one of the tribe’s casinos is there.
The tribe wasn’t finished.
A 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling would affirm that the tribe owns all former riverbed lands from the mouth of the Puyallup River to the Puyallup city limits.
The tribe would then serve eviction notices notifying dozens of landowners that they were trespassing on tribal property. The letters, written by then-Chairman Frank Wright Jr., cited the ruling.
“We had to sort of wake up the powers that be,” Sterud said.
The Land Claims Settlement of 1990, an act of Congress, restored some of the tribe’s lands, like along the Blair Waterway, and provided the promise of jobs and training, as well as some funds to establish and operate businesses. The lawsuits the tribe had filed and won, claiming ownership of land that had long been occupied by non-Indians, set the table for the settlement.
The Puyallup Tribe of Indians have a long history of working and living on the water, Sterud said at a news conference Monday.
“Many people talk about prosperity only in terms of dollars,” he said. “For us, prosperity is about generations, about families. It’s about community. Prosperity means we can sustain what we’ve built for all time.”
