DEMING, Washington – The knock came exactly at 5 p.m. on April 1.
The loud bang-bang seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot ranch home. I watched as Elizabeth Oshiro shuddered and then took a deep breath, trying to reclaim some of that oxygen, before walking to the door.
Oshiro, 56, knew the time had come to let go. She had to say goodbye to a house where she cared for her aging parents until they died. Goodbye to a house where she watched her four children, now adults, showered with love from those same grandparents. Goodbye to a house that meant so much more than four walls.
Just hours before, Oshiro and her husband, Jack Fidow, were packing up mementos. Framed family photos, including Elizabeth’s high school senior picture. Special trinkets. Her parents’ crucifixes. Kukui Nut beads from her Japanese father’s birthplace – Hawaii. As the clock ticked, so did their pace. Still, Oshiro was intent on calling their bluff. She didn’t believe they would show up to evict her at the exact deadline she was given to vacate the premises.
Until they did.
The ‘they’ I’m referring to are the leaders of the Nooksack Indian Tribe. Oshiro was once a member of that Native American tribe. Once a part of the family. Once welcome to live on their tribal land.
Until she wasn’t.
Oshiro’s mother, Olive Oshiro, had lived in that house for 25 years. She said goodbye to her husband of 61 years in that house. At the age of 88, Olive Oshiro passed away last June. She would never know the outcome of the efforts to save her home. But prior to her death, she shared her wishes that her house remain in the family.
“Before she died, my mom told me never to give up the fight and to fight until the end,” Oshiro told me. “I’m doing what she asked me to do.”
Nooksack 306: ‘We Belong’
Tucked among the spruce and fir trees – with the snow-capped Cascade Mountains towering in the background – this northwest Washington pocket, just a few miles from the Canadian border, is a collection of quiet, winding two-lane roads. It’s a place where both residents and spry, wandering dogs have the freedom to trot in the middle of those roads unless a slow-moving car or a truck carrying timber needs to pass. The Nooksack River’s gentle flow whispers a history of salmon fishing for survival and Indian land stolen by settlers who found their way to America.
I’m here to tell the story about another great injustice suffered by the Indigenous people from this region. Not one of stolen land, but one of stolen homes. There’s no need to try to transport ourselves back to colonialism. Though steeped in a similar history of exploitation, this is a modern-day pilfering of culture, humanity and belonging. There is no happy ending here, but I eventually did find the essence of what it means to be ‘family.’
They are called the Nooksack 306. They were raised as members of the Nooksack Indian Tribe and they self-identify as such. But in 2016, they were stripped of their tribal citizenship and benefits because tribal leaders said they could not prove ancestry of at least one-quarter Nooksack blood. The involuntary process is referred to as disenrollment.
Their rallying cry is: “We belong.”
Some of these people lived in Indian Country. It was land hard-fought-for by their ancestors. The reservation was intended to offer safe, affordable and quality homes for tribe members. It was meant to offer social services including health care, educational aid for youngsters and financial help for the low-income. Free fishing licenses. Small monetary gifts around the holidays to help those a little light in the pockets. Moreso, these homes represented a sacred link to their ancestral homelands and customs.
“It’s been very disheartening,” said Michelle Roberts, Olive Oshiro’s granddaughter. “Not only did they disenroll us, trying to take our identity, but they also took our homes from us.”
A complicated history
The original lands of the Nooksacks span from the Nooksack River in Washington up to southern British Columbia, Canada. In the 1800s, even as Nooksack bands were considered First Nations Canadian, members fought for federal recognition and land rights in what was then called Washington territory, named after President George Washington. Washington territory would eventually become the state of Washington.
The United States formally recognized the Nooksack Tribe in 1973. For decades, the Nooksacks built a community – mostly on reservation land held in trust by the federal government. Nooksack members, some of whom lived in Seattle or surrounding areas, began migrating back to Indian Country as their parents and grandparents aged.
There are roughly 570 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States, including about 30 in the state of Washington. Mass disenrollment, particularly in the Pacific Northwest region, has become increasingly common in the past 20 years.
The elimination of tribal members is more prevalent in small tribes with casinos on their land. Tribal gaming exploded in the early 1990s, after Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988 to recognize tribes’ sovereignty over their casinos.
Reservations are some of the poorest and most underserved areas in the country. The addition of casinos offered Native Americans much-needed employment and income opportunities.
The dirty little secret though, according to experts, is that some in tribal leadership want to split the money among fewer people. Thus, disenrollment.
“Historically, when you were born into a tribe, or you were adopted into a tribe, or captured and brought into a tribe, you became that tribe,” David Wilkins, a University of Richmond professor who focuses on American Indian studies, told me. “That was who you were. And no Native individual had the right to tell another Native individual that you no longer belong here.”
‘Everybody is related‘
Nooksack Tribe officials have argued that those who were disenrolled descended from a Canadian tribal band. They could not prove Nooksack descendancy – the need to have at least one-fourth blood – and were incorrectly enrolled in the 1980s, the tribe said.
Because of one woman.
Her name was Annie George. She is the ancestral link to most of those disenrolled by the Nooksack Tribe. George, born in 1875, was the daughter of British Columbian Nooksack tribal leader Matsqui George and his wife, Maria Siamat.
Days after Annie’s birth, her mother died. Her father remarried Madeline Jobe, who was also Nooksack, in 1880. Annie was raised by her father’s new wife, an action that resembled adoption and conformed to Indigenous kinship customs, according to her descendants.
“That’s the whole point of belonging to a Native nation is the concept of kinship,” Wilkins said. “Because everybody is related. So the idea that a tribal government could decide that a Native individual or group of Native individuals, like the Nooksack 306 were no longer Nooksack was just something that historically just did not happen.”
But for whatever reason – probably a lack of record-keeping at the time – Annie George did not appear in the 1942 federal census of the Nooksack Indians, nor was there a record that she was granted a land allotment − forms of documentation used to verify lineage.
Annie George died in 1949. The Nooksack tribal council would not and still will not recognize her belonging.
Chatter about who belonged − and who did not − began spreading throughout the Nooksack reservation in 2012. They didn’t believe it was real. But it became quite real in 2013, and by 2016 the tribe had disenrolled the Nooksack 306. If one could not prove descendancy, renewal membership cards were denied. And then came the eviction notices.
You are no longer from here. You are no longer a citizen. You are exiled. You are disowned. You have no home.
In short, it comes down to blood quantum – a faulty tool used to determine a Native American’s ancestry – or their degree of Indian blood. It was first used at the turn of the 20th century by the U.S. government to force Indigenous people to assimilate and to limit their citizenship. It was a way to renege on treaty and land pacts. It was theft and manipulation.
That it is now used as a weapon to pit family against family is possibly more devastating.
“For us, there is no such thing as quantum,” disenrolled Nooksack member Michael Faulks told me. “Quantum was something that was made up by the U.S. government very early in our culture, to say how much are you? It was like if you had one drop of Black blood in you, you were considered Black. But with us, they wanted to weed us out very slowly over the next generations by using the blood quantum. You had to be so much native in order to be Native American, and they wanted us to eventually breed ourselves out.”
The knock
It was Jesse Madera who knocked on the door – exactly at 5 p.m. on April 1.
He works for the tribe as the housing maintenance lead. He also holds a seat on the tribal council. Madera had another maintenance employee, Devon Roberts, with him.
Oshiro repeatedly called Madera by his first name. She knew him because he was once a friend; she used to hang out with him and his wife. He’s just Jesse.
“I’m almost done,” she told him. “I’m not leaving the house until I get all my stuff out. Sorry, but I’m not done and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. I’ve been working at it all day long and all week. It’s only me and Jack packing up stuff so it takes a while.”
“We’re just here to do our job,” Madera told her. Based on the court order – at 5 p.m. on April 1 – the house was now under tribal possession, he said. Oshiro told him to go get the police. “They’re literally right here,” Madera said.
But he softened and began negotiating terms. Maybe he could allow them to keep packing but would have to change the locks and swing back by later that evening to ensure the home was empty. Maybe he could come by to unlock the house the next day to allow them to load up their remaining belongings.
It was his job to secure the home, and “make this as professional and courteous as possible,” he said. “It’s a court order. Orders are orders.”
“I still need time to finish moving my mom’s stuff,” Oshiro said. “I’m not going to leave until I get that done.”
She asked him if he was going to drag her to jail. Madera’s response: “Why would I do that?”
“I’m just trying to get my stuff done,” Oshiro implored. “I’m not saying that I’m not leaving; I just need more time to do it.”
Finally Madera and Oshiro reached an agreement. They would change the locks to the front and back doors immediately and come by later that evening to ensure the home was secure. Madera would also meet Oshiro and her husband back at the house to unlock it the next day if they needed to finish up. He also promised to not disturb the belongings under a large canopy outside of the house that still needed to be packed.
“I didn’t know what I was going to feel,” Oshiro told me moments after they left, new locks installed. No keys for them. “I guess it’s kind of shock. He decided to work with me. I don’t think he liked what he had to do today.”
Oshiro would become the last of the Nooksack 306 to be evicted.
‘Money, power or greed’
Olive Theresa Oshiro was enrolled as a Nooksack Tribe member on Oct. 28, 1983. She’s beaming on a membership ID from 2018. Enrollment No. 0840. Her daughter, Elizabeth, was also enrolled. No. 841. Elizabeth Oshiro can remember going to take her enrollment pictures – like a driver’s license renewal – every year.
It was always a day of celebration, a day of belonging.
Indian tribes operate with sovereign authority over their members and territories. That sovereignty typically worked with little drama until Indian casinos came online. Then money began to flow.
“My understanding with disenrollment is that it either comes down to money, power or greed,” Faulks told me. “They want to be in charge of the tribe itself, where they want those positions. Also, when it sometimes comes down to the casino money, they want to be able to provide for a smaller group of people and give them a bigger distribution.”
The Nooksack Tribe is certainly in the casino business, albeit diminished in recent years. The tribe once owned two casinos. But Nooksack River Casino, which opened in 1993, was shuttered in December 2015 after a legal fight over millions in unpaid debt the casino incurred for building renovations. The Deming-based casino was demolished earlier this year.
Nooksack Northwood Casino, located in Lynden, Washington, opened in 2007. The small gaming center is in a remote area, just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. When I visited, a handful of people inside were smoking cigarettes and pulling slot levers at 10 a.m. A border patrol agent was posted in his vehicle on a road adjacent to the casino’s parking lot.
Nooksack tribe members are not paid per capita, meaning they do not receive individual proceeds specifically from gaming. But financial entitlements and required supportive services such as paid healthcare can make all the difference for enrolled tribal families struggling to make ends meet.
Additionally, being Nooksack means looking out for family – honoring the seven generations before their existence and the seven generations after it, Faulks explained. This social and familial contract is how these people were raised. Family over everything.
“Our seven generations behind us is where we get our cultural beliefs, and how we carry ourselves,” Faulks, 42, told me. “And as this generation, we’re supposed to look seven generations in front of us to make sure that they’re taken care of.”
Still, the Nooksack argument has been simple and unwavering: The tribe possesses sovereign immunity, and any state or federal court systems lack jurisdiction to dictate what happens within the tribe. The disenrolled could not provide documentation. And there is a waiting list of proven Nooksack members who need the housing once occupied by them.
But these evictee houses remain sitting empty. Lawns and areas around the homes are scattered with discarded bicycles and a tricycle with a Spiderman mask affixed to the handlebars, basketballs, work boots, fishing poles, grills, old tools and outdoor furniture. Quick, incomplete and unaccepted departures.
Though most of the Nooksack 306 lived off tribal property, more than 20 households have been evicted. Time and again their attorney, Gabriel Galanda, tried to intervene. He filed claims in courts ranging from local tribal court to the Washington Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court that these families were being treated unjustly and inhumanely.
In particular, Galanda said some of the disenrolled, including elders like Olive Oshiro, were part of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development-backed rent-to-own program. After paying rent for 15 years, they were supposed to be granted deeds to their houses, those built with federal tax credits for low-income residents. But the Nooksack Tribal Council held strong − only enrolled members could live in reservation homes.
The United Nations first issued a public statement in 2022, and issued subsequent statements calling for the Biden administration to act when he was still in office.
In 2023, U.N. experts sent a letter to then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken questioning any “measures taken” by U.S. and Nooksack officials “to ensure compliance with international human rights obligations…including through exploring feasible alternatives to the forced evictions.”
At every turn, Galanda was slapped down. Sovereignty. The tribe had the right to dictate its course of action regarding disenrollments and evictions. Tribe officials ultimately kicked Galanda out of all legal proceedings, stating he didn’t have a right to practice law in tribal court.
RoseMary LaClair, chairwoman of the Nooksack Tribal Council, has not responded to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Charles Hurt Jr., the tribe’s senior attorney, told me he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the tribe.
After Galanda was barred from practicing on Nooksack land, the families were forced to represent themselves in tribal court. These are not people with law degrees or any legal training. They did their best to file briefs and to testify about their plight. They, too, were slapped down.
“The cold, hard truth is that this country and all systems of its government – federal, state and tribal, executive, legislative and judicial – do not genuinely care about the fate of Indigenous humanity,” Galanda told me. “There’s not an actual conviction and compassion toward Indigenous human existence, meaning fundamentally, whether an Indigenous person is breathing or not, is living a free life or not, has a roof over their head or not, has food in their family’s mouths or not.”
Canada to the rescue
As evictions for some of the Nooksack 306 became more imminent, the elders in particular got more anxious. Where are we going to go? What are we going to do?
Some families, having exhausted all legal recourse, were ordered out of their homes on Nov. 29, 2024 – one day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. They needed a lifeline. Plans were already in the works, and had been for about four or five years.
When the Shxwhá:y band of Nooksacks in British Columbia heard of the cruelty happening to their family in Washington, as the legal battle ensued with an unsure outcome, leadership immediately confirmed the historical enrollment in their tribe so they would be eligible for housing. Because the border between Canada and the United States means nothing to them. What matters is family.
The Shxwhá:y band, around 500 members, bought land in Whatcom County in Nooksack, Washington, near the original Nooksack reservation in Deming. They would not tolerate the elders being displaced and vowed to give them shelter. They built houses stateside and others on their Canadian reservation in case they needed additional resources.
While they don’t have the protections of being on a reservation, there are no mortgages on the houses. They were built and purchased with cash. They purposely kept the rent low so the elders wouldn’t be strapped.
For Robert Gladstone, elected chief of the Shxwhá:y Village, family comes before anything else. He can remember visiting relatives in Washington as a boy in the 1970s, tailing the grandmothers through the mountains as they looked for cedar wood to use to weave artful Native baskets. The elders would share stories and sing songs in their Coast Salish language, Lhéchelesem.
“You’re a good little boy,” they would tell him in Lhéchelesem.
They taught him about how life was different in the United States compared to Canada, about the history of the tribe, about the relatives who had passed on.
“I love these people,” Gladstone told me. “They instilled in us a sense of who and what we are, a sense of cultural identity and strong cultural law. That is the foundation. The concept of disenrollment was just foreign to our way of thinking.
“When I heard they were being disenrolled, I knew it was an attack upon the grandmas,” he continued. “And I loved them and respected them – they were our everything. People were under attack. The family was under attack. The culture was under the attack. Identity was under attack. The histories that they taught us, not from some book, were under attack. It was natural that we had to do what was right.”
What was right in Gladstone’s eyes was to build another homeland. The economic base in Canada was strong, he said, so leaders made the decision to allocate resources to build families in Washington a raft – in the form of homes.
The essence of a real family.
“It wasn’t a question ‘Can we?’ or ‘Should we?’ Gladstone told me, tears of frustration welling. “We must. That was the only thing that was in our minds. We must, and we would. We would, with the help of God Almighty, we would do what we had to do.”
Rebuilding in Nooksack
I’m in Nooksack, Washington now, walking from house to house in this neat cul-de-sac filled with newly-constructed homes. I’m meeting other family members and the elders. Auntie Norma Aldredge and her husband, Eugene – known as “Mom and Pops.” Auntie Wilma Rabang, who goes by Auntie Billie, and her husband, Francisco – who friends call Cisco. And Grandpa Mike, the patriarch, the man who is now living with dementia.
Grandpa Mike, whose formal name is Michael Rabang, is 82. He often struggles to remember it, but he was the elder who instead of buying meat from the store would hunt weekly in the forests to feed his extended family. Venison. Elk. Buffalo. He would deliver the game from house to house, proud of his haul.
He was the man who cooked for every family gathering – wedding, funeral, graduation or birthday. He’s the man who taught his nephews and grandchildren how to garden and grow food.
Today, Rabang, a frail, gangly man, sits quietly in the corner of a gray sectional with his legs crossed watching CNN while smiling periodically. But it’s been challenging for Rabang to navigate his new surroundings. He was comfortable in his old house; he knew every nook and cranny. Here in Nooksack, those nooks and crannies are confusing. Rabang has wandered away a few times, sometimes carrying a backpack. He just walks out the door. When a family member corrals him in the new neighborhood he simply says: “I’m going back home.”
“That was one of the hardest things to do – to tell him that we can’t stay here anymore,” a tearful Faulks said, referencing when it became clear Rabang would be evicted from the home where he lived for 19 years.
Because everything here is about the elders, about family. I understand why. Yes, it’s certainly about the seven-generations pledge. It’s certainly about the culture. But it’s also because they are welcoming and kind. Upon meeting them, immediate hugs are shared. I feel an inexplicable ethnic connection, one that reminds me how I was raised in a Black family – to be generous with food and love when visitors arrive.
Fried rice made with hot dogs, bacon and eggs, along with water, soda and other salty and sweet snacks are laid out for me and a USA TODAY photographer. They happily give us a tour of their homes to share their rich history: family photographs, decorative walking sticks and other tribal art.
Some of the artifacts, particularly those woven baskets, haven’t been unpacked yet because they are still settling into their new houses. But the baskets signify home. They represent the generations of ancestors who made the baskets to haul salmon and shellfish, to carry supplies and to gather nuts and berries. These baskets represent a cultural and spiritual connection to their land, rivers and forests. And to their people.
Nooksack isn’t far from Deming. It’s about 10 miles from the reservation homes where they used to live. It might as well be light-years away. In many ways, the living conditions of the newly constructed and spacious homes seem downright opulent compared to the rundown houses they fought to keep.
The new digs don’t take away the pain. But Roberts and Oshiro said the generosity of the Shxwhá:y people – their new-old family – has helped in healing.
“My blood will never change,” Oshiro told me, crying. “In my heart I’ll always be Nooksack.”
There’s a sense of relief to be settled, of course. These family members have lived under a cloud of uncertainty for more than a decade. But the rights of these Indigenous people have been trampled. Like they were during European colonization. Like they were during manifest destiny. Through treaties made in bad faith. The actors are different, but the outcome is the same: removal and displacement.
This time, sadly, it was by so-called family.
Suzette Hackney is a national columnist. Reach her on X:@suzyscribe
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Nooksack 306 lost their tribal membership and their homes
