Tribal chair honored by Portland nonprofit

Published 5:14 pm Monday, July 28, 2025

BAY CENTER — Ecotrust, a Portland nonprofit with a long-term connection to Pacific County, is honoring the Chinook Tribe’s Tony A. (naschio) Johnson with a 2025 Indigenous Leadership Award.
Johnson is chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation Tribal Council and Culture Committee. He works as a senior program officer at Seattle-based Inatai Foundation, a philanthropy “seeking to transform the balance of power to ensure equity and racial justice across Washington state and beyond.”
Johnson is being recognized as an Accomplished Leader “of the Chinook Indian Nation in its pursuit of federal recognition and his tireless work to revitalize the cultures and languages of tribes of the Lower Columbia River region,” Ecotrust said in its award announcement.
As chairman, Johnson has elevated longstanding efforts by the Chinook to regain formal legal status that was yanked at the start of the George W. Bush administration. The tribe has occupied lands and waters around the mouth of the Columbia River since time immemorial, but struggled to obtain federal treaty rights until the closing days of the Clinton presidency.
Johnson’s efforts have aimed to right his injustice in a host of ways, including by ramping up the tribe’s historic practices and traditions, and by obtaining legal access to tribal trust funds that were long kept out of reach by the federal bureaucracy.
Ecotrust has a lengthy involvement with the local area, having partnered with The Nature Conservancy of Washington in the early 1990s to envision the nonprofit now known as Craft3, along with the defunct Willapa Alliance, which aimed to encourage sustainable local natural resource policies.
This year brought the largest group of nominations since the Indigenous Leadership Awards were relaunched in 2021. Awardees were nominated by other Indigenous leaders, allies, and members of their own communities. “A selection committee composed of past awardees and trusted leaders carefully reviewed the nominations and was deeply inspired by the vision and leadership reflected in this powerful group,” Ecotrust said in a statement.
“Ecotrust’s Indigenous Leadership Award is the only such award for Indigenous leaders of the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada,” said Kara Briggs, Ecotrust’s vice president for Tribal Lands and Waters Stewardship. “The 2025 recipients represent the leading edge of Indigenous leadership, drawing deeply upon their unique cultural traditions rooted in their lands and their nations. These are leaders who we will be talking about in 100 years, ones who their Indigenous nations will write into their own history books.”
This year’s awardees will be celebrated on Wednesday, Oct. 15, in the Main Hall of the Redd on Salmon Street, Ecotrust’s regional food hub and event space, at 831 SE Salmon Street, Portland.