Yakima Agency Indians Protest Government Austerity
Tribal leaders challenge federal budget cuts and the encroachment of non-Indigenous residents on reservation land.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The services of Miller Bachrodt, of the Yakima Indian agency, have been dispensed with for the winter and the mill closed down. This is in compliance with instructions from our poverty-stricken government at Washington to cut down expenses in every quarter. The Indians held a council on Saturday last and forwarded to Washington a protest against the shutting down of the mill, and against the recent surveys by which a strip of land several miles wide is declared outside of reservation limits. The Indians also petitioned the department to forbid residence on the reservation to squaw-men and half-breeds.
“The Indians held a council on Saturday last and forwarded to Washington a protest against the shutting down of the mill, and against the recent surveys.”
This 1890 report highlights the recurring tension between federal administrative control and Indigenous sovereignty. The protest against the seizure of reservation land prefigures decades of legal and political struggles over land rights in the Yakima Valley.
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