Elizabeth Oshiro is the self-proclaimed “last man standing.”
In November, her household and six others faced eviction from their homes in a rural Deming neighborhood after years of conflict over Nooksack tribal enrollment.
Only her family remains — but not for much longer. A recent court order gave Oshiro and her daughter until 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 1 to vacate the premises.
Their departure will mark the end of a painful saga that’s attracted widespread media coverage and even calls from United Nations human rights experts for federal intervention.
In 2013, the tribe began the process of stripping around 300 people of their Nooksack citizenship, contending a common ancestor did not meet the proper criteria. The expulsion was finalized after a lengthy legal battle in the midst of which the tribe disbarred the family’s attorney, Gabe Galanda, and fired a judge who ruled it did not follow due process in doing so.
Disenrolled family members have always maintained they are Nooksack.
The latest dispute comes down to the conditions to live in Nooksack low-income housing as part of a federal tax credit program. Seven disenrolled households occupied homes in that program as of last fall.
Because the family no longer holds Nooksack citizenship, the tribe argues, they don’t meet the “Native family” requirement to remain in the program. The head of a household or their spouse must be enrolled in a federally recognized tribe to be considered a Native family, according to a 2023 court document.
In a November news release, the tribe wrote it had more than 200 Nooksack citizens on the waiting list for housing. Of those, some were homeless and 15 were elders, the release read.
Met with eviction orders, six of the disenrolled households moved out of their homes in recent months. The final case has taken longer because the household’s head, Olive Oshiro, died last June while the legal fight was ongoing.
Elizabeth Oshiro is Olive’s daughter. In January, a Pierce County Superior Court authorized her to distribute “the estate’s interest in” the home “by personal representative’s deed” between her mother’s three heirs.
She is determined to remain in the home until she and her daughter are forced to leave.
It’s what her mom would have wanted, Oshiro said. “She told me to never give up fighting.”
Nooksack tribal spokesperson Abby Yates declined to comment.
End of the road
Michelle Roberts, a family member who was evicted last year, said she’d hoped Oshiro would get a different outcome.
“It’s just slowly chipping away at the last little bits that we have to grasp on,” she said.
Family members believed they’d eventually own the homes they rented through the federal housing program, which allows owners to transfer properties to tenants after 15 years. However, a state audit late last year found that no tenants have assumed ownership of their homes through the program anywhere in Washington.
Roberts represents her family in tribal court despite having no legal background. Gabe Galanda, the lawyer who was disbarred by the tribe in 2016, still serves as an advocate for the family and informal adviser.
After Olive Oshiro’s death last year, a tribal court told the family to “form an estate,” Galanda said. He helped them open a probate proceeding with a lawyer in Tacoma, Peter Kram.
Kram explained the Nooksack tribe doesn’t have a probate code, meaning it is not possible to open probate proceedings in its court system. Probate proceedings can be opened anywhere in the state, he said, and he was not aware of any tribes in Washington with a probate code.
His office notified the tribe, the Nooksack housing authority and the tribe’s partner for the housing project, financial advising firm Raymond James, of the probate proceeding, according to a document reviewed by Cascadia Daily News. But, Kram said, none of those parties showed up to any hearings or communicated with him.
The Pierce County court awarded Olive Oshiro’s heirs the deed to the house.
A Nooksack appeals court, however, later dismissed the Pierce County ruling as invalid. Judges wrote the state Superior Court does not have jurisdiction over the tribe and that “the Estate is bound by the decedent’s decision to litigate the ownership of the property in the Nooksack Tribal Court,” which ruled against her.
“Indeed, failure to bring the existence of [the eviction], the adverse ruling by the Nooksack Tribal Court and the pendency of this appeal to the attention of the Pierce County Superior Court is a possible fraud upon that Court,” the Nooksack judges wrote.
The appeals court upheld the earlier ruling against the family. Raymond James did not respond to a request for comment.
At Oshiro’s final eviction hearing, Roberts read a statement reasserting her family’s claim to Nooksack membership. She objected to the appeals court’s characterization of the probate proceeding.
“We did exactly what the appeals court told us to do,” she said. “We are not the frauds in this situation.”
Judge Charles Hostnik told her he had limited authority at this point given previous rulings against the family.
“This case and the companion cases have been very difficult cases for all parties involved,” he said, “including the judges that have heard these cases.”
Mixed feelings
Late last week, Oshiro and her daughter, Olivia, were almost finished packing to leave. The pair plan to join other family members in housing developed in Nooksack (the town, not the reservation) by Shxwhá:y Village, a Canadian First Nation which some of the disenrolled belong to.
“I want to see how they’re going to get me out,” Oshiro said, sitting on the couch in the living room.
Outside, the neighborhood was quiet. “It’s half empty now,” Oshiro said. She doesn’t believe anyone has yet moved into the homes her family left behind.
In happier times, the family used to have potlucks and invite neighbors to kids’ birthdays. After the disenrollment conflict began, everything changed. People told the family to “get out” in public and the kids were bullied at school, Oshiro remembers. Even some of her close friends started shunning her.
“It’s really sad,” she said. “You have this whole big tribe that you belong to, and all of a sudden you have nobody.”
Her mother planted a rhododendron bush next to the front porch that’s not yet in bloom. Oshiro asked her brother to dig it up and plant it in his yard in Kendall.
Leaving brings up mixed emotions for both Oshiro and her daughter.
“It’s kind of like a — I don’t want to say relief — but it’s something lifted off my chest, so to speak,” Oshiro said. “It’s been a rough 12 years.”
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.
