Muckleshoot Indian Tribe

Background

The Tribe's history page says the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is composed of descendants of the Native people who inhabited the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup watersheds of central Puget Sound for thousands of years before non-Indian settlement, and that among Puget Sound tribes the Muckleshoot alone holds rights under two treaties, the Treaty of Point Elliott and the Treaty of Medicine Creek. A reservation was created by an executive order of January 20, 1857, after a council on Fox Island in 1856, and a 1868 order to widen it between the White and Green Rivers never got signed during the impeachment of Andrew Johnson; in 1904 the reservation was allotted to sixteen families and no land was left in tribal hands, so the Tribe reorganized under the Indian Reorganization Act and adopted a constitution in 1936. By 2020 the reservation totaled nearly 4,000 acres, and the Tribe also owns the Tomanamus Forest, 105,000 acres of working forest land in King, Pierce and Lewis counties. The Tribe's own language page gives the Lushootseed alphabet as 41 sounds. The Tribe calls itself Seattle's host tribe, greets visitors in haʔɫəčiləxʷ, and in 2023 saw Alaskan Way renamed Dzidzilalich, the largest Duwamish village in what is now Seattle, a name meaning a little place where one crosses over.

Visit and learn

Muckleshoot Indian Tribe's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Mount Rainier National Park

The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe says it descends from the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup peoples, and that it is the only Puget Sound tribe holding rights under two treaties, Medicine Creek and Point Elliott. Source

Programs

• Muckleshoot Language

  The Tribe's language site places Muckleshoot within the Salish language family, which it splits into Coast Salish and Interior Salish, and within Lushootseed, the language of what is now called Puget Sound, which it splits into a northern and a southern group. It records that Lushootseed was a term coined for the language, that the ancestors had no name for it and called it our Indian Language, and that Muckleshoot has coined its own term for the language spoken at the Tribe. The same page adds that the Muckleshoot speak the southern dialect.

  https://muckleshootlanguage.com/about·language

Sources

• https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-01-30/html/2026-01899.htm
• https://www.muckleshoot.nsn.us/history
• https://www.muckleshoot.nsn.us/language
• https://www.wearemuckleshoot.org/
• https://www.wearemuckleshoot.org/muckleshoot-today

Checked September 2026.

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