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

5. Sometimes I See a Canoe

26 5 Sometimes I See a Canoe Sometimes I see a canoe, or I think it is a canoe, edging up the sullen , foggy bay. It is for a moment only a sliver of dark, floating silently, just a whisper of a line, barely discernible through the mists. There are no trees to be seen or sky or water, just that dark line of intention in the hazy, overcast landscape. Maybe it is only a needle from a fir tree, waiting for a young girl to take a big drink from the water below, swallow it whole, and then give birth to coyote. But, no, I think it is a canoe and it belongs to one of the old people who lived here long ago. If I get closer to it, I think, I’ll see the adze marks, the cuts made by the man or men who hewed this craft from a giant cedar. The old whites and mixed homestead families used to watch the Indians (Squaxin Island Tribe predecessors and their kin and friends from other parts of Puget Sound) coming up bay in canoes. They were coming to the bay to visit relatives still living here, to celebrate and take the fish in season, to pick berries from the shore, or to trade for cherries or apples. When did the last flotilla paddle past Little Skookum, toward the mouth of Kennedy Creek? When did it stop, that life? Did it ever really stop? I got a fish from one of the descendants of those people, below my house on the shore just a few years ago. One of my newer neighbors was indignant. She came, her irritation written clearly on her face, partway down the stairs to the beach from her three-thousand-square-foot house. Sometimes I See a Canoe 27 “They are not supposed to fish this far in,” she called out to me from a landing, loudly enough so the fisherman could hear her too. That may be. But I thought it was a miracle to meet this man and his cargo of big chums, or dog salmon, spent from their long journey at sea on their way to their spawning ground on Kennedy Creek. Thousands of them return every November to churn the stream gravel and lay their eggs. This is not my beach, I thought as I looked from the fisherman to the neighbor. And it certainly isn’t hers. And he has the right to return as surely as do those fish, I thought. He wouldn’t let me pay for the fish. The neighbor watched as I hauled a heavy salmon back up the hill to the brine and smoker, peeved with me as much as with him. She could not imagine how it had been here in the 1870s, when neighbors got along and a European American would be happy to trade some orchard fruit for a big salmon. This is the bay where Katie Gale lived. She was an Indian woman from up the White River area, arguably from a village where some predecessors of the present-day Puyallup Tribe of Indians had lived. She moved to Oyster Bay or Mud Bay when she was still a child, sometime in the 1860s. She was likely taken in by relatives, for she was orphaned at a young age. She married a white man, ran a business, and raised children until her death in 1899 from tuberculosis. The Treaty of Medicine Creek was signed on December 26, 1854, and ratified in March 1855. This was a treaty made between the United States and the bands and villages of Indians known today as the Nisqually, Puyallup, and Squaxin Island Tribes. The first people of the region retained many rights, including the right to fish and hunt in usual and accustomed places, but ceded nearly two and a quarter million acres to the United States. Some early comers to the area had appropriated land before the treaties were signed, that is, before Indian land was legally transferred to the United States. They surveyed and claimed prime forest and prairie in Indian territory under the authority of the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. Michael T. Simmons and Wesley Gosnell, associates of Isaac Sometimes I See a Canoe 28 Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory and architect of the Washington Territory treaties, had already set up on land claims in...