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

13. No Crops of Any Consequence

115 13 No Crops of Any Consequence There were good reasons not to live on the reservations and to choose, instead, to try one’s luck elsewhere. From the beginning, the appalling conditions that reigned on these hapless, cramped colonies were no secret. The Indians of Puget Sound had been through a catastrophic , culture-killing period in their history that included disease, loss of land, and war. Now they were confined on reservations and subjected to the folly of ill-advised policies and actions of administrators who were in over their heads. Reports from the various agents on the reservations catalog a litany of missteps and tragedies. Despite these circumstances, the Indians found ways to resist and carry on. In December 1857 Wesley Gosnell, the special Indian agent at the Puyallup Reservation, writes that “influenza and consumption,” among other diseases, had killed fifteen residents during the previous quarter. There had been only four births. He adds that there was a “great scarcity of Salmon.” During the previous year the doctor, B. W. Kimball, on the “Squaksin reservation” treated 153 Indians, though it is unclear if he meant this to be understood as 153 separate individuals or 153 cases brought to him. He complains that this number does not represent “the actual amount of sickness,” because many people were still consulting their own medical experts. Many people were living off the reservation , he says, and “their habits, morals, and mode of life” he apparently believed to be an obstacle to treatment. Dr. Kimball suggests in his No Crops of Any Consequence 116 reports that vice, morals, and the influence of depraved whites were the cause of many of the woes on the reservation. The accusation that women ’s morals were slack was a theme in medical reports from this period. And it is women who were to be blamed, it seems, for the low birthrates. They were, according to these reports, prostituting themselves.1 Gray H. Whaley found this characterization of Indian women in records he examined in the course of writing his 2010 book, Oregon and the Collapse of the Illahee. In response, he writes that “chastity” was a cultural value trumpeted by European and European American cultures of the period. “It was a standard that ‘the better sorts’ (wealthy or noble) embodied in their conservative dress, demeanor, and actions. Any violation might damage their reputations and make them unchaste.” This ideal “couldn’t be reached by many Western women: it was one of several ways of sorting the population into better and lower orders.” Speaking of Lower Columbia Indian women, Whaley notes that the language and ideology of purity and morality “made its way into colonial discourse to demean Native women.” Prostitution, when it did occur, was, in these desperate times, clearly a means of survival. However, what the whites labeled immoral or prostitution was often simply their Victorian shock at witnessing different standards of dress, behavior, and sensuality.2 In putting forward a moralistic explanation for disease and birth and death rates, Kimball, the doctor assigned to the Squaxin Reservation, makes no connection between the demographics of the postwar and early reservation period and the effect of the waves of disease that had visited indigenous populations since the late 1700s, several of which would have deleterious effects on fertility. He also makes no mention of the traumatic changes in people’s circumstances, including loss of traditional food supplies and the stresses that would also affect fertility . If only “intelligence and morals . . . may be improved and . . . their sanitary condition be improved,” he laments. A letter to his brother from A. M. Collins, living across Little Skookum No Crops of Any Consequence 117 from Arcadia Point and what was still the Indian settlement of sahéwabc when he and his wife arrived, provides us with one of the first written glimpses of the health issues that plagued the people of Totten Inlet and Oyster Bay before reservation life. Collins was in a position to witness sick and dying Indians during an 1853 smallpox epidemic. “This part of the country is very healthy for stout, hearty people but it is considered hard on persons afflicted with consumption or rheumatism,” he writes. Then Collins describes the local effects of rapidly spreading disease. His letter reports that “the Indians are dying daily with the smallpox. They take no care of themselves when the fever comes and they go in the water...