Yakama
Nation | Active
1684 CE to 2215 CE
The Yakama is a Native American tribe with nearly 10,851 members, inhabiting Washington state.
Yakama people today are enrolled in the federally recognized tribe the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The Yakama Indian Reservation, along the Yakima River, covers an area of approximately 1.2 million acres (5,260 km²).
Today the nation is governed by the Yakama Tribal Council, which consists of representatives of fourteen tribes.
Many Yakama people engage in ceremonial, subsistence, and commercial fishing for salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon in the Columbia River and its tributaries within land ceded by the tribe to the United States.
Their right to fish is protected by treaties and has been re-affirmed in late twentieth-century court cases such as United States v. Washington (the Boldt Decision, 1974) and United States v. Oregon (Sohappy v. Smith, 1969).
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The quarrels between the United States government and various indigenous peoples continue in Oregon and Washington Territories with the ongoing Cayuse War (1848-55), the Rogue River Wars (1855-56), and the Yakima Wars (1855-58); in Florida with the third Seminole War (1855-58); in the northern Plains with the Sioux; and in the Southwest with the Navaho and Apache War of 1860-65.