On Dec. 26, 1854, over 60 leaders from Indian tribes in western Washington signed the Medicine Creek Treaty, which established boundaries for a number of reservations, including one for the Puyallup Tribe. Over the next century the tribe would lose ownership over much of the land within the reservation.
In the mid-1970s, the tribe began to assert it rights of ownership over land within the historic boundaries of its reservation. After a series of lawsuits that began in the early 1980s, the Puyallup Tribe, the Port of Tacoma, and the cities of Tacoma, Fife, and Puyallup entered into a long negotiation that culminated in the comprehensive settlement of the tribe’s land claims in 1990.
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