Its members have been handcuffed, dragged over rocks, tear-gassed and jailed for their political stands. They’ve crossed the country so many times in the cause of tribal sovereignty and Indian civil rights that the Landing is regarded in Indian Country as a spiritual center of the Indian rights movement.

Through it all, Landing members have been engaged in a far less-publicized political struggle, one now on center stage because of a lawsuit currently in federal court.

The opponent? Their own tribe.

Frank’s Landing is located at the mouth of the Nisqually River, traditionally part of the Nisqually Tribe’s area of influence.

Billy Frank, the Landing’s most famous member, is a Nisqually, as was his father, Willie Frank, the Landing’s namesake.

But Frank’s Landing’s little 19-acre patch of federal trust land doesn’t physically lie within the boundaries of the Nisqually Reservation, and, in 1994, Congress bestowed on it the unusual designation of “self-governing Indian Community.”

Those were fighting words to the Nisqually Tribe, which views Frank’s Landing much as mainland China views Taiwan. The harder Frank’s Landing fights for its independence, the tighter the tribe holds on.

In February, the Nisquallys filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Chris Gregoire and members of the nearby Squaxin Island Tribe, objecting to a smokeshop at the Landing, which they say is illegally operated and undercutting profits at a Nisqually smokeshop eight miles upriver.

The outcome of the lawsuit will affect the future of the Landing, which abuts Interstate 5 and has great potential for commercial development.

More broadly, though, the lawsuit will help determine exactly what it means to be a “self-governing Indian Community,” a determination that could send consequences ricocheting throughout Indian Country.

“Often times we like to think of the notion of sovereignty as being like pregnancy,” said Keith Harper, the Landing’s Washington, D.C., lawyer. “You can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t be a little bit sovereign.

“That’s just simply not true,” Harper said. “Sovereignty is never an all-or-nothing kind of proposition.”

Nobody is arguing that Frank’s Landing and other self-governing Indian Communities have the same degree of sovereignty as federally recognized tribes, but federal courts are recognizing an increasing array of rights.

It’s well-established that Indian Communities can determine their own membership and form of government, receive federal grants, manage federal programs and create corporations.

In some cases, they also have been found to have sovereign immunity from lawsuits and the right to staff their own police forces, levy taxes, issue tax-exempt bonds, establish their own zoning and even enforce federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.

The Nisqually Tribe views these possibilities with great apprehension. Earlier this year, when the Landing struck up a business partnership with the nearby Squaxin Island Tribe, it went on the offensive.

“The Nisqually Tribe is determined to vigorously defend its sovereign rights,” said tribal chairwoman Cynthia Iyall, “for as long as it takes.”

A REMARKABLE HISTORY

Frank’s Landing is located on a peninsula formed by a hairpin turn of the Nisqually River, just before it flows under Interstate 5 bridges and disperses into the delta.

A handful of modest houses are set back from the main street, Conine Avenue, which runs through the settlement and then dead-ends at the steep and unstable gravel bank of the Nisqually River. A few mobile homes are scattered here and there. Suburban-style yards trail off into fruit trees, horse pastures and farms.

Frank’s Landing claims 60 to 100 members, but most don’t live there. Instead, they’re affiliated by family connections, employment or shared values.

The community’s main feature is Wa He Lut Indian School, a meticulously cared-for complex of metal-roofed structures fronted by totem poles.

Twice a day, yellow school buses hustle back and forth along Conine Avenue, carrying more than 100 Indian children to Wa He Lut from their homes as far as 30 miles away.

Most of the activity in the Landing, though, is traffic in and out of the smokeshop, where customers can save $20 or more on a carton of cigarettes. Aside from federal grants, the smokeshop is the community’s sole source of funds.

For all its seeming ordinariness, though, Frank’s Landing has a remarkable history.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the epicenter of the struggle over Indian fishing rights, and in Indian Country it still has a status something like a shrine.

Indian activists from around the country gathered at the Landing in the early ’70s, drawing hundreds of supporters that included political leftists, radical students, Black Panthers and movie stars. Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda both made cameo appearances.

The Landing’s residents – among them Billy Frank, the community’s charismatic “getting-arrested guy”; Al and Maiselle Bridges and their outspoken daughters, Suzette, Allison and Valerie; and the Landing’s political strategist, Hank Adams – seized the nation’s attention.

Protests at the Landing helped draw attention to a legal dispute that ended in the 1974 Boldt Decision, which turned the Northwest fishing industry upside down and gave new creditability to Indian treaty rights and the notion of tribal sovereignty.

The landmark decision, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1979, re-established Puget Sound-area tribes’ right to fish as they traditionally had, and to take up to 50 percent of the annual catch.

But the political aspirations of Frank’s Landing members didn’t stop there. Billy Frank, now 77 and who for the past 30 years has headed the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, has championed countless environmental campaigns and received national recognition for his environmental advocacy. Adams is nationally renowned for his activism in Indian affairs.

Suzette Bridges and Alison Gottfriedson both have strong résumés as principled fighters for Indian rights.

Wa He Lut Indian School, founded by Maiselle Bridges in 1974, was in itself an act of political resistance, helping establish a separate educational system for Indian children.

In the public eye, at least, Frank’s Landing has outshone the 600-member Nisqually Tribe, which, like many tribes, has struggled with poverty and disarray due to political infighting.

Lately, however, gambling has infused the tribe with new resources, and, thanks to the Red Wind casino, it’s slowly developing into an economic power.

Over the past 25 years the tribe has reacquired more than 1,000 acres of reservation land that had been privately owned. Its environmental efforts along the Nisqually River are regarded as national models.

Iyall, the tribe’s articulate chairwoman, is acknowledged as an able leader. Still, the tribal politics can be vicious and debilitating. Earlier this month, four members of the tribal council were indefinitely suspended in a political free-for-all that has yet to play itself out.

That kind of infighting, Frank’s Landing members say, is why they wanted to be separate from the tribe in the first place.

“When you’re talking about the tribe, you’re talking about politics,” said Suzette Bridges.

Billy Frank, known for his direct speaking style, put it more bluntly:

“Everything they touch turns to crap.”

THE 1994 AMENDMENT

The way American Indian law has evolved, the designation of an Indian group as a “federally recognized tribe” carries enormous advantages.

The 29 recognized tribes in Washington are essentially governments within governments. They have their own constitutions, make their own laws and levy taxes. Many have their own police forces and court systems and have a legal right to operate casinos.

Tribes that aren’t federally recognized, on the other hand, such as the Duwamish in Seattle and the Steilacooms in Pierce County, have essentially no legal rights.

But, thanks to the effective lobbying efforts of Frank’s Landing, the community has been able to parlay the administration of Wa He Lut Indian School into an odd, in-between status, somewhere between “tribe” and “not a tribe.”

In 1987, Congress confirmed Frank’s Landing’s governmental status in order to make the school eligible for federal grants. In 1994, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, cemented the Landing’s status by adding an amendment that outraged the Nisqually Tribe.

The amendment expanded Frank’s Landing’s legal description by designating it as “a self-governing Indian Community” and added the words: “not subject to the jurisdiction of any federally recognized tribe.”

Alaska has several Indian Communities, but the designation is uncommon in the Lower 48.

Frank’s Landing is the only recognized Indian Community in Washington state, and the concept is still an unfamiliar one here.

Last month at a Tacoma seminar on Indian sovereignty sponsored by the Washington state Department of Revenue and attended by experts in Indian law and tribes from around the state, a request for a definition of “self-governing Indian Community” drew blank looks.

The potential of the designation is well-known at the Landing, however, and over the years, members have done their best to maximize it.

Frank’s Landing’s five-member governing council hires lobbyists, contributes to political campaigns and has its own Community Comprehensive Plan.

The Landing’s economic development arm, the Alesek Institute, works on a number of social service programs, including mental health counseling for Indian children and a new housing project in the City of Tacoma. Like Wa He Lut Indian School, the Alesek programs are intended to serve Indians who have needs but who aren’t members of local tribes.

“There’s so much need out there,” Frank said. “If you don’t belong to the tribe you don’t get anything. We’re trying to pick the extra people up.”

The community vision for Frank’s Landing is to further that effort, he said.

“We want an educational and cultural center,” Frank said. “We need a longhouse, a museum. We want a high school, a college … housing.”

‘TELL ME WHAT IT SAYS’

Attorneys for the Nisqually Tribe argue that Congress never intended to create an independent government at Frank’s Landing and that the congressional language, specific as it seems, has nowhere near the legal significance the Landing claims.

Iyall recently dismissed Frank’s Landing’s five-member governing council as “basically a school board.”

The tribe’s argument is historically based: When Pierce County appropriated half of the Nisqually Reservation in 1917 to create what is now Fort Lewis, tribal members living on that portion of the reservation were forced to find land elsewhere.

Some Nisqually families ended up with land some distance from the existing reservation. Even though all the allotments weren’t contiguous with the reservation, the tribe claims it retains jurisdiction over all the allotments in the Nisqually basin.

The fact that Billy Frank’s father, Willie Frank, spent his $8,000 in allotment money to buy a 6-acre piece of property near the river’s mouth didn’t somehow make the Frank clan an independent community, the tribe says.

“There’s no question about it,” Iyall said. “Frank’s Landing is part of the Nisqually Reservation and it always has been.”

In federal court April 15, Nisqually attorney Malcolm Harris argued that Congress designated Frank’s Landing an Indian Community only so it could receive federal funding for Wa He Lut Indian School, and that it never intended to change the Nisquallys’ traditional claim on the property.

“I really question whether they’re a legal entity that can do anything,” Harris told U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Leighton.

Leighton didn’t seem convinced.

“Don’t tell me what the law means,” he chided Harris. “Tell me what it says.”

In the view of Harper, the attorney kept on retainer by the Landing in Washington, D.C., Congress has the final word in Indian law, and in this case, the law could not be clearer.

“It says Frank’s Landing is an independent community, ‘not subject to the jurisdiction of any federally recognized tribe,’” Harper said. “The Nisqually Tribe wishes Congress would have acted differently. But Congress didn’t.”

Rob Carson: 253-597-8693