The Struggle for North Yakima’s Beet Sugar Fields
Federal authorities authorize the leasing of Yakama Reservation land to a sugar beet corporation, setting strict conditions for tribal employment and long-term land improvements.
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.
At the instance of Representative Jones, the secretary of the interior has granted authority to the North Yakima Indians to lease their unimproved allotted lands, amounting to about 1,500 acres, for a term of ten years. A corporation desires to erect a beet sugar factory at North Yakima but will not build unless it has assurance that it will be furnished with a stated quantity of beets. The department insists that Indians shall be given employment in the beet fields and will require lessees to put up improvements to the value of $500, such as barns and fences, which will become the property of the Indian owner at the end of the lease. It is also stipulated that at the end of the ten years, at least ten acres of each 80 shall be planted in alfalfa for the benefit of the Indians.
“The department further insists that Indians shall be given employment in the beet fields.”
This reflects the complex history of tribal land management in the Yakima Valley, where resource extraction and industrial agriculture frequently intersected with federal policy. While framed as economic development, these arrangements often codified the dispossession of Indigenous land use in favor of regional industrial growth.
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