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

6. Oyster Bay

31 6 Oyster Bay A dapper oyster barge cuts a jaunty path through the dark, choppy waters just a few waves’ width from my neighbor’s home, formerly the Oyster Bay branch of the J. J. Brenner Oyster Company. My neighbor and longtime friend bought the structure and the property it sits on and uses it as a unique home and art studio. I watch the barge from my window, looking over what the locals call the “high rise,” the second-floor structure of a working oyster plant, where a ramp and pulley system is used to offload oysters from boats. It’s a late November day. It’ll be a 16.2 tide in another hour and a half. It’ll be low again at almost 8:00, down to a 1.9. This is a usual late fall day on Puget Sound—blustery, gray, and drizzle to full-out rain through the daily diminishing hours of light. Sun will set at about 4:30, so even the little almost day we cherish this time of year will be gone. The water is moving fast around the barge as the long, aqua, crab-like arm of a gantry crane dips over port side of the craft, pinching and prodding the muddy beds for the dumping tubs that contain oysters picked and stashed by men and women who fill them during low tides. Above the engineer’s cabin, a glassed-in housing at the back end of the craft, a long pole stands, spotted here and there with twinkling lights. The barge makes grand, productive circles, then heads back down bay to its home berth. Oyster Bay 32 All this water, this many-fingered salt sea, was called Whulge or Wulch by the Indian people in pre-treaty times. Saltwater. Most of my life here it has been called Puget Sound. It got that name from Peter Puget, the twenty-seven-year-old adventuring third lieutenant on the hms Discovery. He accompanied George Vancouver to the area in 1792 and was sent with two smaller boats and a group of men out into the far reaches of the fjord-like expanses to the south of Admiralty Inlet and the Tacoma Narrows. He was charged to search the southern reaches of the sound. As he traveled he recorded impressions of people and places he passed along the way. He also commented on the delicious small oysters that were in abundance. At what might have been near the head of Mud Bay, one bay east of Oyster Bay, a place with whose people the Oyster Bay people sustained a long and close cultural affiliation , he enjoyed meeting a band of Indians: “These people I should suppose were about Sixty in Numbers of all Ages and Descriptions. They lived under a kind of Shed open at the Front and Sides. The women appeared employed in the Domestic Duties such as curing Clams & Fish, making baskets of various reeds, so neatly woven that they were perfectly water tight. The occupations of the men I believe consist chiefly in Fishing, constructing Canoes and performing all the laborious work of the Village.”1 In this, among the earliest of recorded encounters with people of the region, European men decide to test and comment on the moral character of Indian women: They appear much attached to the Women and hold Chastity as one of the Cardinal Virtues, and not like our friends at the Sandwich Islands make Prostitution a Trade. Immense Presents would not tempt these Girls, though coaxed with Rage to violate the Marriage Bed and much to their Credit be it Spokan they remained Stedfast in this Refusal. Credit is apparently due for this steady attachment and affectionate Conduct to their Husbands in such trying Situations, as the Oyster Bay 33 Articles offered were of inestimable Value in their opinions, and such as would have flattered their Vanity; not that their Beauty or Appearance created any violent Desire for the possession of their Persons. Such Questions were put merely to try, how far they conceived Good Conduct was binding in the Matrimonial State, and I may say from these Circumstances that a Contract of that high Importance to Civil Society is among these poor and uncivilized Indians preserved in its greatest Purity.2 Vancouver named waters and inlets of the area in honor of Puget’s exploration. Many of the names still hold. Meanwhile...