Three households received eviction orders after a tribal court hearing Friday in the latest chapter of a bitter conflict over Nooksack tribal enrollment. The residents must move out of their homes by 8 a.m. Nov. 29.
It’s been nearly a decade since the tribe revoked the citizenship of several hundred people, disputing a common ancestor’s Nooksack status. The disenrolled, all members of the same extended family, contest the validity of their expulsion.
Among them are seven households, made up of more than 20 people, living in Nooksack Indian Tribe low-income housing through a federal tax credit program.
The tribe has told the residents they must move out on the basis that their lack of Nooksack citizenship is disqualifying for the program. Now, three households are without legal recourse after a fight in the courts to keep their homes, said Michelle Roberts, one of the residents who received an eviction order.
“You try to prepare yourself,” Roberts said, “but when it actually happens, it’s still shocking.”
The other cases are still pending.
More than 200 tribal members are currently in line for Nooksack housing, according to a news release from the tribe. Of those on the waitlist, some are homeless and 15 are elders.
The Nooksack Tribal Council sent a statement through spokesperson Abby Yates in response to an emailed list of questions and a request for an interview.
“The primary concern of the Nooksack people is the safety and wellbeing of our citizens,” the statement read in part. “We have people who are not Nooksack citizens and not low income refusing to leave our housing.”
‘No choice’
At Friday’s hearing, Roberts read an emotional statement about the treatment of her family.
“We have been persecuted, wronged in every way that justice stands for,” she said.
Chief Tribal Court Judge Doug Hyldahl thanked Roberts for her comments, but said he had “no choice” but to issue an eviction order at this point after more than two years of litigation.
In an interview prior to the hearing, Roberts said several of her family members facing eviction are elderly. Her dad has dementia, she said, which will make moving to a new place difficult.
“What’s going to happen to them when they’re sitting in their homes and they’ve got armed tribal police or sheriffs or whoever pounding on the door trying to remove them physically?” she asked. “I just fear that their health is not going to be able to withstand that.”
In October, after a Tribal Court ruling against the residents, the tribe publicly offered the households an extension on their evictions through the end of the year.
Roberts, writing on behalf of the family, presented a counteroffer: residents would occupy the homes “until we pass on or move away, at which time they will automatically go to the Tribe,” among other provisions.
An attorney for the tribe responded the counteroffer was “completely unacceptable.”
“You and your clients have denied hundreds of qualified Nooksack Tribal members of the housing they have deserved for the past eight years while you employed delaying tactics to remain in housing for which you are not qualified,” the tribe’s lawyer wrote. “Your counteroffer would continue to deny Tribal members of housing for years to come.”
A conflict over eligibility
Roberts has lived in her home near Deming for 17 years. The house is part of the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program.
When she moved in, staff from the Nooksack housing authority told her that after 15 years, she would get the deed to her home “no questions asked,” she said.
If they choose to, owners in that program can allow tenants to buy their homes after a 15-year waiting period. A 2005 copy of the Nooksack housing authority’s policies says the program “is structured to be a rent to own program for 15 years.”
But in a recent news release, the tribe argued “this is not a ‘rent-to-own’ program. Instead, if the tenant at the end of 15 years qualifies for the program, that tenant has the opportunity to take ownership of the unit.”
In a later release, the tribe wrote that “because Ms. Roberts attorney (sic) has litigated against the Washington State Housing Finance Commission,” the commission was preventing the homes from transferring ownership.
“In other words, the disenrollees, not the Tribe, are blocking the conveyances from happening,” the tribe wrote.
The family sued the commission and Nooksack housing authority in 2022 in an attempt to stop the evictions, wrote Margret Graham, a spokesperson for the commission, in an email, noting the suit is suspended.
She added: “The Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) has not suspended conveyances for any reason, and the tenants’ lawsuit does not prevent the Nooksack Tribe from moving forward with the process to sell eligible units to eligible residents. The Commission remains at the ready to assist the Tribe through that process.”
The tribe has also said the households do not qualify because most are not low-income and have other housing options, pointing to housing developed in Whatcom County by Shxwhá:y Village, a Canadian First Nation, which family members are also a part of, as one example.
“This is not about them being elderly or unable to find housing,” the tribe wrote in its statement to Cascadia Daily News. “This is about them being spiteful and stealing resources from Nooksack citizens, as they have done for decades.”
Roberts, who is on the Shxwhá:y Village Council, said those homes are not ready yet. Some may be ready by the end of March, she said.
Her understanding when she moved in was that residents had to qualify as low-income to get into the program, Roberts said, not that they had to maintain low-income status.
Legal strife
After the families received eviction notices in 2020 and 2021, they launched legal defenses. Roberts represents her family in court, though she is not a lawyer. In 2016, the tribe disbarred the family’s attorney, Gabe Galanda, and others from his firm.
Since then, the family has been unable to secure legal representation, Roberts said, apart from a period of time when the Northwest Justice Project took on two of the households’ cases.
Galanda said the tribe “winnowed down” the list of admitted lawyers in Nooksack Tribal Court when he was disbarred and that the last list he’d seen only contained lawyers employed by the tribe.
The tribe did not respond to questions about lawyers approved to practice in Nooksack Tribal Court.
In Galanda’s view, two of the judges who ruled against the family in the eviction cases had conflicts of interest.
One judge, Charles Hostnik, issued rulings for some of the households, Galanda said, and then later presided over an appellate court case for other households.
Another judge, Rajeev Majumdar, presided over two different appeals, each for a different cohort of the households, according to court documents reviewed by Cascadia Daily News.
“That wouldn’t happen in any other court system,” Galanda said. “You’d be predisposed in the second opinion, or second case, based on your ruling in the first one.”
A staffer who answered the phone at the Nooksack Tribal Court referred Cascadia Daily News to the tribe’s spokesperson.
Cascadia Daily News reached out to Hostnik’s former firm Thursday, but did not hear back from him prior to publication.
Majumdar declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate as the cases are still active.
In response to a motion for recusal brought by the second cohort of households whose case Majumdar heard, he wrote the facts in the two cases “were not identical, nor were the presentations or evidence reviewed by the trial court judges.”
“Judges often hear the same legal arguments on different sets of facts,” Majumdar wrote, “and the facts determine whether the law and arguments apply or do not.”
Not ‘walking away’
In its Nov. 13 statement, the tribe wrote the households facing eviction “have a long history of threats and intimidation.”
“We are concerned about the physical safety of their neighbors,” the statement continued, “and for the careers and physical safety of law enforcement and their families.”
The tribe cited an interview with a family member who said “it’s going to get ugly” if evictions take place and a 24-year-old Los Angeles Times article that referred to a crowd of family members confronting the Tribal Council over an enrollment audit in 1996.
Galanda has countered that it is tribal officials and law enforcement who have intimidated the family members, not the other way around. He noted a 2019 lawsuit in which he represented a Nooksack father and daughter accusing a tribal judge and police of a harassment campaign after the father spoke out against the disenrollments. That case ended in a settlement.
One former Nooksack council member was the target of digital sexual harassment after she publicly supported the disenrolled family.
Before Friday’s hearing, Roberts said the family intends to “stand our ground” in their homes and continue seeking outside intervention.
“We just don’t feel like they have the right to take away our homes that we should own,” she said. “Walking away just wasn’t an option for the family to do.”
In an interview after the hearing, she said that is still the plan, but indicated that could change if the health of older family members doesn’t allow for it.
“We always had that hope that a miracle would happen,” she said — a miracle she now feels is out of reach.
Meanwhile, the tribe stands behind its original position: “we need our housing,” its statement read.
Sophia Gates covers rural Whatcom and Skagit counties. She is a Washington State Murrow Fellow whose work is underwritten by taxpayers and available outside CDN's paywall. Reach her at sophiagates@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 131.
