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The first recording that we've been able to find of this story was in a newspaper story featuring local cemeteries published in the Auburn Globe-News of August 1, But is the story credible? One thing to consider is that the reporter confidently wrote that Auburn's Angeline was, in fact, the daughter of Chief Seattle. We know this statement to be incorrect.
We also know that, today, there are five totem poles on display in Seattle's Pioneer Square area.
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Four were created by non-native artist Duane Pasco in the 's; none of these match the circumstances of the Auburn story. The fifth and most famous totem pole in Pioneer Square was indeed "spirited away," a polite euphemism, in this case, for "stolen" from an Alaskan village by a group of Seattle businessmen in Its history is well documented and has no relationship to Auburn or the Muckleshoot Tribe.
It's also interesting to note that Angeline's current Victorian-style tombstone is perhaps the most ornate marker remaining in the entire cemetery. It's puzzling that her family would invest in such an expensive monument if they also intended to mark the grave with a carved totem. And, if it were erected later to replace a missing totem, it seems likely that it would be of a more modern design.
At 67, he's considered an elder statesmen for his people, with governors and U. He's collected awards for humanitarianism. Above all, though, Billy Frank is a Nisqually Indian, which is to say, a fisherman. If you're a newcomer - one of the 2 million people who've come to Washington since the mids - you may not know this old fisherman's story. It's a fish tale, except it's all true and involves more than catching a fish.
The fate of Indian tribes and the future of a once-rich industry hung in the balance.
Race, politics and Marlon Brando came into play. In the end, a major shift in power took place, permanently changing the status of Indians in the United States. In the middle of it all was a conservative, white, bespectacled judge named George Hugo Boldt who, 25 years ago this week, handed down the mother of all fish decisions.
The ruling shocked the region, and the repercussions - and resentments - continue still. Congressman Lloyd Meeds of Everett. As in any good tale, there were good guys and bad guys, and for most of the story, Billy Frank was considered a bad guy. He was arrested more than 40 times over three decades. He was branded a renegade by then-Gov.
Dan Evans. For most of this century, white society did not look kindly upon Indians, when they looked upon them at all. They were viewed as a nuisance, a hindrance to progress. In the Northwest, tribes were widely seen as poaching communities - lawless, primitive, skulking around in the dark.
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Of course, he never saw himself as a poacher. To be an Indian in the Puget Sound was to have salmon swimming in your veins. If you let Billy Frank tell the story, he might go back a few thousand years through a hundred generations of Nisqually fishers. He's squarely built with gray hair pulled back under a scruffy wool cap.
He wears bifocals. His face is lined and leathery with the look of history about it. And the man can talk. Stories spill out easily, and those meaty hands always seem to be expressing something. He swears a lot, mostly out of exuberance. When he talks about "the mountain," he's referring to Mount Rainier. He's lived his whole life in the 78 miles between the mountain and the river's mouth, and that's where he's headed now, with two guests, in his foot aluminum boat.
The trip from his house to the mouth of the river takes 20 minutes. Harbor seals and sea lions pop their heads out of the water as the boat passes. Three-quarters of a mile upriver, just before the old Pacific Highway bridge, Billy Frank points to a gravel bar on the opposite bank. He recalled it was a cold December night, just before Christmas He was He had just emptied his net of a load of chum salmon and was working on his knees in the dark when two bright lights flashed on him.
The boy ran and stumbled. Two game wardens took him by the arms. Today he can point to dozens of spots along the river and tell like stories: of having boats and nets confiscated, of being chased and tear-gassed, tackled, punched, pushed face-first into the mud, handcuffed and dragged soaking wet to the county jail. Like his father before him, Billy Frank lived like an outlaw, fishing at night and always on the lookout for men in uniforms.
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Indians all over the Northwest lived the same way. When brought to court, their sole defense was that they had a right to fish according to century-old treaties signed with the U. The irony was that those pieces of paper were never the Indians' idea; they were imposed by a fair-skinned people too powerful to fight. Eventually, the squiggly words on those pages would be the Indians' only weapons.
Billy Frank maneuvers his boat into a muddy creek just west of the river. Carcasses of spawned-out salmon line the banks. A quarter-mile up the creek, he points to an isolated Douglas fir, now a snag, rising a hundred feet into the air. Interstate 5 roars a short distance away. Under that tree, in , the process began ending life as the 6, Indians of the region had lived it for thousands of years.
Billy Frank's grandfather, Kluck-et-suh, was a boy at the time, and played under that tree and fished this water, then called Medicine Creek. Working on behalf of the U. Isaac Stevens, a stump-sized, single-minded dynamo of a man, negotiated a rapid-fire series of treaties with the region's Indians for the sole purpose of taking their land so white settlers could move in.
Starting with the Medicine Creek treaty signed under that foot Douglas fir, Stevens pushed through six treaties in two years. The Indians lost most of Western Washington seemingly overnight. Tribal Community. Tribal Sovereignty.
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Tribal Government. ISBN November 7, Archived from the original on July 12, Retrieved July 16, The Seattle Times. Retrieved January 7, Auburn Reporter. November 4, November 27, Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. Muckleshoot Tribal Transit. Muckleshoot Tribal Schools. Retrieved November 16, Bibliography [ edit ].
Further reading [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Muckleshoot. Lushootseed -speaking peoples of Puget Sound. Lushootseed grammar. Northern Southern. Duwamish Tribe Steilacoom Tribe.
Biography common as muckleshoot and sons: The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is a federally recognized Indian tribe whose membership is composed of descendants of the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup people who inhabited Central Puget Sound for thousands of years before non-Indian settlement.
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Toggle the table of contents. Location of the Muckleshoot Reservation.