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3. Where You Come From
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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15 3 Where You Come From Here, today, August 2010, near Arcadia Point public boat ramp, down the Lynch Road, looking across the water to Squaxin Island, someone is wearing a T-shirt that exhorts, “Think about the Salish Sea—What it is. Where you come from.” The Salish Sea is the new “official” name for Puget Sound. Multitribal conferences are held these days to discuss the future of the Salish Sea. A new social and cultural identity and sense of mission and purpose are emerging. What is evident, wherever one travels in the region and speaks with Indian people, is a new determination to save this threatened, ailing, and all-important body of water that has been home to the people gathered here on this beach today for eons. Although Arcadia Point is a bit down Totten Inlet from Oyster Bay proper, it is a fitting place to begin this story. Arcadia attracted early donation claim seekers who apparently saw in the lush woods, favorable , mild waters, and forgiving climate a similarity to the Greek poetic domain of the same name. These early European Americans spelled the name of the area “Arkada.” It was changed to Arcadia before long. The fabled Arcadia was an almost but not quite idyllic spot where inhabitants could live out a golden life in uncorrupted wilderness. This Arcadia, located at the mouth of Big Skookum, was called QE’lbld, or “rainy place,” by the indigenous people. The “large village site” called Where You Come From 16 sahéwabc was there, presumably, when the first whites arrived. “It practically commanded the outlets of Budd Inlet, Mud Bay and Oyster Bay, as well as Shelton Inlet,” Marian Smith says in The Puyallup-Nisqually. “Its name was sometimes extended to include that entire drainage and the peoples upon it.”1 Of course, the dream of the golden life was rarely to be attained. Furthermore, what idylls the newcomers managed were at the expense of the original inhabitants. The damage was enormous and multidimensional. Those original inhabitants, the indigenous people of southern Puget Sound, had years of hardship and challenges as they sought to regain the rights they were promised and resources they retained in the 1850s treaties. Landmark legal decisions in the ensuing years were the result of herculean work by activists, some of whom trace their ancestry to people in Katie Gale’s story. For example, a precursor to the salmon-welcoming ceremony and the renewed community and sovereignty it represents was a 1964 “fish-in” at Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually River, just a few miles from the Squaxin Island tribal community and Oyster Bay. Maiselle Bridges and many of her extended family members, including Billy Frank Jr., helped lead that extended fish-in, a public protest that drew attention to the injustices visited on Indian people in the sound and one that provided the impetus for lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous of these cases, United States v. Washington, resulted in the Boldt Decision of 1974.2 The ruling, named for the presiding judge in the federal case, George Hugo Boldt of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, restored to the federally recognized tribes the legal right to fish as they had in pre-treaty times. Arguably of more direct significance to the history of Oyster Bay, however, was the next big case to come down the line. The tribes originally filed what became known as the “shellfish case” in 1989 as a subproceeding in United States v. Washington, which is the continuing umbrella case that supervises all tribal fishing claims. In December 1994 U.S. District Court judge Edward Rafeedie ruled that Puget Sound [54.210.85.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:25 GMT) Where You Come From 17 and Olympic Peninsula Indian tribes have treaty rights to take, with some limits, shellfish on certain private tidelands, and they have rights to half of all deepwater shellfish. The court’s ruling was appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the state, tribes, and several private shellfish growers and property owners. In September 1998 the Ninth Circuit issued a final order that affirmed Judge Rafeedie’s ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal from the state of Washington, the Puget Sound Shellfish Growers, and private landowners. This day, therefore, this happy time together here on this beach, is full of history: the history of a...