Louisa Enick: Sauk Suiattle Squatters & Sovereignty, 1855-1935

Louisa Enick was born to Sauk-Suiattle parents in the shadows of the Cascade mountain range around 1878 as settler-colonists eager to capitalize on timber and mineral extraction worked to push the Sauk-Suiattle out of the homelands marked by the rivers that gave them their name. Like many other Sauk-Suiattle people of her generation, Louisa used diligence and stubbornness to resist dispossession and she filed a public domain allotment claim in 1903 so that she could raise her family on tribal homelands without being pressured to relocate onto the reservations established in neighboring Puget Sound tribes' names. Because federal and state agents mishandled Louisa's allotment paperwork, her land claims were diminished over the next two decades, but she used letter-writing campaigns and surveyor records to assert her land claims until she died in 1924. Her daughters continued to press the family's land claims after their mother's death, and though they did not succeed in retaining all of their privately-owned lands, the family contributed greatly to the Sauk-Suiattle effort to achieve federal recognition of lands that persisted until achieving success in 1972. Still only a tiny portion of their former territory in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the Sauk-Suiattle reservation is home to some of Enick's relatives near Darrington, Washington. This chapter chronicles Louisa Enick's remarkable persistence in documenting and asserting her land claims--a habit she passed on to daughters and relatives who continue working today on behalf of Sauk-Suiattle sovereignty.