Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell Travels to Indian Country
Indian tribes on the Olympic Peninsula have been a positive, assertive presence, from the Lower Elwha Klallams’ long, successful fight to remove two salmon-destroying dams from their river, to the Quileutes’ fight to move their village out of tsunami danger.
They will talk to Jewell about issues ranging from economic development to protecting coastal villages from climate change.The tribes from the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas will join U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell for a regional tribal summit on Thursday at the House of Awakened Culture in Suquamish.
A former CEO at REI, Jewell was invited to the summit by U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., and representatives from the tribes.
Jewell is boss of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the federal government’s point person on Native American issues.
She has made one controversial call in Alaska, giving thumbs-down to construction of a road that would give the native village of King Cove, in the Aleutian Islands, access to an airport and medical facilities at Cold Bay. The road would cross a national wildlife refuge.
Jewell has also faced an unusual aspect of climate change, namely threats to native villages located along the Pacific Coast.
The Quileutes worked out a land exchange that will move village offices and a school to higher ground. On the Bering Sea coast in Alaska, ice is forming later in the year, which leaves villages to bear the full brunt of fierce late fall storms.
Jewell and Kilmer will be meeting with the Port Gamble S’Kallam tribe, the Jamestown S’Kallam tribe — headed by a former president of the National Congress of American Indians — the Lower Elwha Klallas, the Quileutes, the Suquamish, the Hoh, the Quinault and the Skokomish tribes.