Bill would move Hoh Indians to higher ground

HOH INDIAN RESERVATION — If anything is a certainty on the Hoh reservation, it is rain.

Blinding sheets, gentle showers, a slow drizzle in the trees: It comes in different forms almost every day. The Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic Peninsula gets more precipitation than anywhere in the continental United States, up to 14 feet a year.

Floods happen so often that the wood-plank structure housing the tribe's administrative offices is permanently surrounded by sandbags, as are several buildings nearby. Half-a-dozen homes on the reservation have been abandoned or washed away by the constant flooding, not to mention the occasional tsunami.

Alexis Barry, the tribe's executive director, keeps wader boots next to her computer.

"Where before, maybe a large flood used to be a 10-year event, the last few years it's been almost an annual event," Barry said.

"It's just wet all the time."

So fed up are this tribe's 133 resident members that, after 106 years at the Hoh River's edge, they have started a bid to move — not just a few houses but their entire village — to higher ground.

If passed as expected, a bill scheduled to be introduced in Congress will award 37 acres of nearby Olympic National Park to the Hoh tribe and allow members to consolidate and place into permanent trusteeship other new lands they have purchased. The move would double the size of the reservation and place its inhabited areas well out of the way of damaging tides and floods.

In exchange, tribal leaders pledged not to log or hunt on the national park lands scheduled to become part of the reservation.

"We ... certainly understand their need to have housing and other facilities outside of the flood zone and outside of the tsunami zone, so we have been working closely with the tribe to help develop language that will reflect both the tribe's needs and interests that the park has," park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said.

The Hoh reservation is 28 miles south of Forks, Clallam County — the dark and rainy setting for the popular teenage vampire series "Twilight" — and straddles the only coniferous rain forest in the continental United States, one of the jewels of the Western national-park system.

The tribe took title to the reservation in 1893, but the Hoh River has since shifted half a mile to the south, endangering homes and tribal buildings as it makes its final hurtle into the Pacific.

"I used to live right there," Amy Benally, the tribe's director of health and wellness programs, said recently as she stood in what once was the center of the village. Now there is nothing but a couple of boarded-up houses and piles of driftwood.

Some of the village disappeared during a tsunami many years ago, former tribal Chairwoman Mary Leitka said.

"We've actually had two of them," she said. "The earliest one I can remember, it was in the 1950s. We had just got a fish house down at the lower river, and all of a sudden ... the park ranger (was yelling) ... 'You've got to get up to higher ground, because a tidal wave is coming.' "

Leitka said the tribe ran up on a hill and watched as the sea retreated far back from the beach.

"It was amazing. I'd never seen it get dry like that. And then all of a sudden we seen that wave coming, and it ... came right up the river and grabbed that new fish house and took it right out."

Leitka and other tribal leaders think road construction and widespread logging in the hills outside the reservation worsened flooding in more recent years by pouring debris into the river. Even the newer houses — built on somewhat higher ground — are seeing the river edge closer every year. In 2006, floodwaters inundated the area around the tribal headquarters and several homes.

Recently, widespread flooding across Washington again had tribe members working the sandbags.

Thanks to gambling revenues distributed to every tribe in Washington, even those such as the Hoh that do not have a casino, the tribe has been able to buy two large tree farm parcels adjacent to the reservation. The state has donated an additional parcel.

Adding the 37-acre corridor that is part of Olympic National Park will make the lands contiguous and allow the tribe to put its administration and other government buildings, a new fire station and the bulk of its housing on higher ground.

A new clinic and police station have been built on land the tribe owns outside the flood zone, near the proposed new tribal village.

Still, Barry said, the move will take years.

"It's a huge endeavor," she said.

Federal officials said the legislation authorizing the park-land transfer likely will win final passage soon.

"Since it's safety-related, and all parties appear to be in agreement, all that's required is an adequate hearing," said George Behan, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who is sponsoring the legislation.

The relocation plan touched off a renaissance for the tribe of 220 registered members. Hoh who fled the reservation years ago are beginning to move back.

"Now that we're moving out of the flood zone, we're eligible for grant funding again, and that has made all the difference," said Benally, who returned to the reservation a year ago after a 14-year absence.

"It has opened all kinds of new doors. There are people coming back we haven't seen in years, saying, 'What can we do to help?' "