Puyallup Tribe of Indians

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Puyallup Tribe of Indians traces its formal existence to 1936, but its roots reach back far earlier to a world built around salmon runs and Southern Lushootseed words carried only in the voice, never on paper. Today the tribe counts approximately 4,000 citizens, yet only about 2,500 of them live on the reservation itself, which holds a total population of 41,000 people. The vast majority of those residents are not Puyallup. What does it mean to govern a homeland where more than 96 percent of the people living there belong to a different nation? How did a tribe that nearly lost its territory in the 19th century build one of the largest casinos in Washington state? And what is the Puyallup Tribe doing to save a language that had only one fully fluent speaker left as recently as 2008? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Land, Treaty, and Settlement

  ›

  Under the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek, the United States arranged with the Puyallup and several other tribes the cession of vast stretches of land and the removal of their populations to reservations. The treaty's architects and the Puyallup people held such different understandings of property that, as the source puts it, they did not fully understand each other's positions. The tribe lost most of its historic territory but retained rights to fish, hunt, and gather on the ceded land.

  By the mid-19th century, European Americans were arriving in greater numbers, and neighboring jurisdictions gradually carved territory inside the reservation's boundaries. Today the city of Fife and the unincorporated community of Fife Heights lie entirely within the reservation, as does much of the Port of Tacoma. The largest city on the reservation is Tacoma, with a population of 219,346. Other communities inside the reservation's boundaries include Waller, Milton, Edgewood, Puyallup, and Federal Way. The reservation itself spans 73.935 square kilometers, straddling parts of Pierce County and a small section of King County.

  The long unresolved question of land rights came to a head in 1989-1990, when the Port of Tacoma and the Puyallup Tribe reached a settlement worth $163 million, enabled by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians Settlement Act of 1989. It became one of the largest Indian land claims settlements of the 20th century, and it gave the tribe a financial foundation that would reshape everything that followed.

• 3. Government and Self-Rule

  ›

  The Indian Reorganization Act of 1936 authorized reservation tribes to create their own governments, and the Puyallup Tribe acted on that authority by writing a constitution and establishing the Tribal Council. The council started with five elected members. In 1991 it expanded to seven, the size it remains today. As of February 2024, Chairman Bill Sterud leads a council that also includes Vice Chairwoman Sylvia Miller, Annette Bryan, James Rideout, Anna Bean, Monica Miller, and Fred Dillon.

  The Tribal Council functions as both the legislative and executive branch of government. Its role extends well beyond administration: the council frequently makes public statements on topics ranging from tribal law and environmental protection to civil rights activism.

  Alongside the council stands a fully separate judicial branch. The tribe operates three courts under one roof: the Puyallup Tribal Court, the Puyallup Tribal Court of Appeals, and the Puyallup Tribal Children's Court. The tribe's laws define these courts as separate from and equal to the Tribal Council, a structural choice that mirrors the separation-of-powers principle at the heart of American constitutional design. The constitution the tribe wrote in 1936 established that co-equal relationship, and it has held.

• 4. From Fishing to Casino Economy

  ›

  Fishing was never simply an industry for the Puyallup. It was surrounded by ritual and spirituality, woven into the culture in ways that made federal pressure to adopt European-style family farming feel fundamentally alien. The tribe resisted that pressure, staying close to fishing even as economic and social shifts in the 20th century made it harder to rely on a single livelihood.

  For a time, cigarette sales became a significant revenue source. Because the reservation is sovereign territory, the tribe was not required to collect state taxes, allowing them to sell at lower prices to non-Native customers. That arrangement eventually gave way to a negotiated agreement with the State of Washington in which the tribe and state share tax revenue from cigarette sales.

  The bigger economic turn came in 1996, when the Puyallup opened the Emerald Queen Casino on a paddlewheel riverboat berthed in the Port of Tacoma. The riverboat cost $15 million and could hold 2,000 people. In 2004, as part of a deal with the Port to free up the waterway for commercial shipping development, the tribe closed the boat operation. The Emerald Queen sat docked and unused until 2023, when it was sold to a barge operator based in Seattle.

  The tribe kept the Emerald Queen Casino name and expanded to two land-based locations, in Tacoma and Fife. The Fife location built on a Best Western hotel the tribe purchased in 2004; after renovation, that casino opened in early 2005. A major expansion in summer 2007 added two parking garages, a pool, a spa, new administrative towers, a ballroom, and a larger gaming floor. The Tacoma location grew even more dramatically: a new 310,000-square-foot, multi-level structure opened on the 8th of June, 2020, following a $400 million expansion that included five restaurants and a 12-story, 170-room hotel. The entertainment venue at the Tacoma location, run in collaboration with Brian Halquist Productions, Inc., hosts the Battle at the Boat boxing series, the longest-running casino boxing series in the Pacific Northwest. In the 21st century, a majority of the tribe's income flows from gambling and the hotel, restaurant, and retail facilities built around it.

• 5. Beyond the Casino Floor

  ›

  Marine View Ventures, the tribe's economic development branch, has expanded into gas stations on the reservation and, in the early 21st century, invested in a partnership for a large container facility at the Port of Tacoma. When completed, that facility will be the largest of its kind in the Northwest, connecting the tribe directly to the shipping trade.

  The tribe has also moved into Washington state's legal cannabis market. Its first recreational cannabis store, Commencement Bay Cannabis, operates in Fife, directly adjacent to the casino.

  Perhaps the most visible recent venture is in professional sports. Since 2021, the Puyallup Tribe has been a sponsor of Seattle Sounders FC, a Major League Soccer team, with the tribe's logo on the team's jerseys. In 2025, the tribe collaborated with the Sounders to create a new jersey incorporating Southern Coast Salish weaving patterns and a Southern Lushootseed motto. Then in 2023, FIFA announced that the Puyallup Tribe would serve as a local sponsor for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Seattle. They are the first indigenous people to sponsor the World Cup.

• 6. Saving Twulshootseed

  ›

  Lushootseed is a Coast Salish language spoken by many peoples across the Puget Sound region. It splits into two dialects, Northern and Southern. The Puyallup speak the Southern dialect, which they call Twulshootseed, from the Puyallup name txʷəlšucid. For most of its history, Lushootseed existed only as a spoken language. Writing came in the modern era, when Lushootseed-speaking elders worked with linguist Thom Hess in the 1960s to create an alphabet.

  The decades that followed were hard on the language. By 2008, when Vi Hilbert, the last fully fluent speaker, died, the survival of Twulshootseed as a living tongue was genuinely in doubt.

  The tribe responded with the Puyallup Language Program, a dedicated department built around a clear set of objectives. The program aims to create physical spaces it calls "language nests," where only Twulshootseed is spoken and English is absent. It also helps individuals build personal language-learning plans rather than depending on a single centralized program, and it works to grow Twulshootseed use across schools, homes, workplaces, and the broader community. The program operates the Puyallup Tribal Language website, which offers free learning resources, background on the language, and classes for tribal members. The Sounders jersey introduced in 2025, carrying a Southern Lushootseed motto, is one measure of how far that revival effort has reached.

• 7. Notable Citizens

  ›

  The Puyallup Tribe has produced advocates whose influence extended well beyond the reservation. Ella Aquino, who lived from 1902 to 1988, was a treaty rights advocate and a prominent leader in the Native American community of Seattle. Ramona Bennett, also a treaty rights advocate, served on the Puyallup Tribal Council itself. Herman Dillon, who lived from 1931 to 2014, served as a former chairman of the council.

  Robert Satiacum, born in 1929 and died in 1991, was a treaty rights advocate whose legacy is complicated: alongside his activism, he was also convicted of embezzlement of tribal funds, attempted murder, and child molestation. His son, Robert Satiacum Jr., carried on a different kind of public life as a political and environmental activist. The younger Satiacum served as an Electoral College elector and became a faithless elector, casting his vote contrary to the popular vote outcome in his state.