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

11. Katie Gale’s Early Life

88 11 Katie Gale’s Early Life I wonder if Katie looked out from her home toward the east in the evening and admired the glowing pink cone of Mount Rainier. After a clear day, the bright glaciers that circle its peak reflect the sunset in the west. I wonder if she watched for the color of autumn sunrises as the dawn broke behind that mountain. I wonder if she walked up the hill behind her house, up beyond the rough carriage road, to look toward the west at the last light of December sunsets. Did she stop her work to celebrate the plates of ice that lie, brittle, brilliant slabs, on the mudflats when it is cold enough to freeze the freshwater of the meandering Kennedy Creek and even lift clumps of oysters from their beds? Did she watch the radiant frozen floes as they drifted from the banks with the outgoing tides? I imagine sometimes that I’m looking out at heron and tern and bufflehead descendants of the birds she saw. Did the return of the dunlin sandpipers, winging their way above her, bunched shoulder to shoulder, twisting and turning in astonishing harmony, sound to her, too, like the breath of God? The dunlins are extravagantly wonderful in flight, wintering on Oyster Bay, far from the Arctic where they breed. Flocks turn instantly, in midair maneuvers that astonish me. The collective flashes, alternatively brown and white, show the tops, then underbellies, of the congregation’s individual members. They feed in the mud, in the night, wherever and whenever, on sea worms Katie Gale’s Early Life 89 and small crustaceans, plentiful on the bay. They gorge themselves on the feast provided by the tidelands to fatten up for the journey back north in the spring. Oyster Bay is home to more than five thousand shorebirds in the winter, “including black-bellied plovers, dunlins, greater yellowlegs and Western sandpipers.”1 Katie saw them all from her home, from the shore below her house, and from the oyster beds where she worked. She knew them and their habits intimately. She watched the November chum jumping from the bay water against the golden fall skies or blustery storm waves. Some say that females breach before entering Kennedy Creek to loosen their egg sacs. They’ve returned to their home stream, bent on reproduction, after three to five years at sea. From their beginning in the gravel redds dug by their mothers, they emerged as tiny alevins, and as still-small fry they swam to the estuary at the mouth of the creek around February, thence to the ocean. Now they are back in the fall to begin a new cycle. On a quiet day the slap of chum hitting the water after a skyward leap can be heard up the hill above the bank as far as my house. I wonder if Katie taught Ray and Maud and Hattie and Henry and poor, short-lived Lizzie, her five children, to slice the guts from the fish, then cut the flesh from the spinal column? Did she teach them to run these plump filleted slabs through with cedar sticks and hang them in the smokehouse? Or did their father, concerned with raising fully assimilated children, prevent any attempt by her to teach her children, especially Ray and Maud, “Indian ways,” even of preparing fish? When Katie began picking oysters she was a girl, working side by side with other family members. They picked the natural, thick and extensive beds of the native Olympia oysters, growing in the largely unpolluted waters of the bay.2 Katie was picking oysters before the introduction of Pacific oysters and predators that drill and kill the flesh of the Olympia oyster. (The Japanese oyster drill Ocenebra japonica and the flatworm Pseudostylochus ostreophagus were introduced in shipments of Pacific Katie Gale’s Early Life 90 oyster spat from Japan in the early 1900s, when Pacific oysters were first introduced to Puget Sound.) Katie and her family were there before the first non-Indian oystermen arrived on Oyster Bay with their values, dreams, and aspirations that rapidly turned a largely subsistence harvest to one based on accumulation of wealth, investment, and growth. Katie and her family were certainly on the bay before human-caused degradations to the bay and its mud and waters began. Changes began in the 1870s but were coming rapidly by the 1890s...