Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman's Life on Oyster Bay

4. Indian Policy during Katie Gale’s Time

18 4 Indian Policy during Katie Gale’s Time Long before the landmark fish and shellfish cases and even long before Indian religious freedoms were restored in 1978, Indian people in the Puget Sound area and beyond had been standing, or trying to stand, on the ever-shifting sands of U.S. Indian policy. Understanding the political context in which the colonized people of Indian Country were embedded allows for a much more sophisticated understanding of the history of the Oyster Bay people and the choices they made in their lives in the mid-to-late 1800s. The story of Katie Gale and her friends and neighbors who labored on native oyster beds in South Puget Sound is set largely in the time of President Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy.” This period in the federal government’s dealings with indigenous people has been called the “assimilation era.” It falls roughly between 1866 and 1900, as does the bulk of the narrative that follows. The term “assimilation era” broadly refers to policies for the governing of the many western bands and tribes of indigenous people displaced by European and European American settlers, miners, and railroad construction. During this time Indians were pressured to move to reserves set aside for them. The reserves weren’t safe from encroachment if there was good agricultural land or mineral resources within their boundaries. Various acts of the U.S. Congress, enacted just before and during this period, only made sweeter and more undeniable the hold the promise of the West had on developers, Indian Policy during Katie Gale’s Time 19 entrepreneurs, and land-hungry farmers from the East. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, the Homestead Act of 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, and the Dawes Act of 1887 all served to make the West more attainable and the idea of settlement more attractive to landless European immigrants and European Americans. Each of these acts served to further diminish the lands available to Indians. At risk were even those lands specifically set aside for indigenous people and rights to resource use on ceded lands, as written in treaties made between tribes and the U.S. government. Stories of mistreatment, neglect, and outright genocidal acts against Indians in the West are legion. Though genocide in its broadest definition was not official U.S. policy, this nicety was a detail with no significance to the hundreds of innocent, peaceful Indian men, women, and children slaughtered. Well-documented episodes of unjust acts and massacre after massacre, often retaliatory or vengeful, are innumerable. There were good people on both sides and among those good people of European American descent were some who witnessed firsthand the horror wrought upon Indian people by implacable and avaricious settlers and by U.S. policies and those whose duty it was to carry out promises written into treaties. Among these good people was John Beeson, who courageously stood up in a meeting in Jacksonville, Oregon Territory, in October 1855 to speak his contrary convictions to the people present who were determined to exterminate the Indians in the Rogue River Valley. Another was Episcopalian bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, who witnessed firsthand tragedies of misguided policy, injustice, and neglect from his frontier post in Minnesota, where he lived amid Sioux and Chippewas.1 It is written in accounts of the period that “Christian principles” moved these men to action.2 However, both Beeson and Whipple and many other European American men and women seem to have been inhabited by the more universal quality called compassion. And their compassion was what in Buddhism is called the “Great Compassion,” one that made them feel committed to bring about the well-being of Indian Policy during Katie Gale’s Time 20 others, so much so that they were willing to do whatever it took to make it happen. The beliefs, commitments, and words of Beeson and Whipple, among others, mark the beginning of a well-organized and persistent lobby for change in U.S. Indian policy and the governance of reservations. These changes, long in coming, resulted in what has been called Grant’s Peace Policy. Taken as a whole, these policies were meant to improve the wretched conditions that the reservation system and its politically appointed administrators had imposed on Indians. By 1866 Whipple and an Episcopalian named William Welsch managed to petition Congress for a board of inspection. This board...