The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (19 page)

F
ull moon over Puget Sound, the last one of summer. Look at the sky, all full of doubt. The light is gone from the back side of Mount Rainier, leaving a coned cutout on the horizon. No wind tonight; the heat is stuck in the valley, where the smell of chemically cooked wood pulp lingers, the scent of a city that has long since taken over Indian Country. In place of wind, the hiss of human anger travels far. Somebody’s drunk, screaming at the one he loves. A slammed door, an engine roar, screeching tires. Once again, the Puyallup Indian Nation is for sale, subject to approval by a tribal majority. In Seattle, the inhabitants voted on their future; here, they are voting on the past, perhaps the last resource they can call their own.

Frank Wright, Jr., a young leader of the Puyallups, rubs his bloodshot eyes. The stress of negotiating with the most powerful
nation on earth and defending himself against charges of selling out his people has caused his marriage to break up. Wright wishes he could ask his father for advice, but the longtime tribal leader has cancer and can’t speak from the intensive-care ward. In the hallways of the brick building which the Puyallups now call home, everybody stops young Frank Wright to ask about old Frank Wright.

“Dying,” he answers.

“Any chance he’ll pull through?”

“Nope.”

The average Puyallup will not live to see his forty-fifth birthday. Among the young, one in five will commit suicide. Seven of every ten have no job. Nine of ten get by on less than six thousand dollars a year. They fight among themselves and watch too much TV and eat too much junk food and drink too much beer which their bodies can’t tolerate. The elders try to keep the language alive, but the young ones want all-terrain vehicles from Japan and tickets to the Motley Crüe concert at the Tacoma Dome. Families crowd into skinny wood homes with exposed wires and no insulation in the walls. Too often, somebody goes to bed with a cigarette in hand, or leaves the door to the woodstove open, and then children wake up with their beds on fire. Their land is sick with pollution, and the river doesn’t work any more. Devoid of spirit and strength, the Puyallup River brings no food to the tribe that used to feast along its banks. They have no weapons but the lawsuit. The Puyallup—loosely translated, the name means “People with More Than Enough.”

And yet, as a tribe of indigenous Americans, they are still alive; that, to some members, is a miracle. Two decades ago, a court in Washington State pronounced them extinct, a nation no more. The vote today is a triumph of recognition, a climb back to the treaty table. In this century, there have been dozens of Indian land claims decided by judicial stroke of pen or Congressional vote. Usually, the land in question is barren or hidden, cold or depopulated. Never in recent times has a modern American metropolis been held up to such aboriginal scrutiny. As poor and powerless and alcoholic and tiny in numbers as the Puyallups may be—as a nation, they have about as many members as the average high school—tonight these 1,400 people, by virtue of their claim to the past, hold the destiny of a city in their hands.

At stake is the future of Tacoma, thirty miles south of Seattle, a gritty industrial port of 175,000 that sprouted on land which was given to the Puyallups for eternity. In this case, as with most of the 370 treaties signed between American aborigines and the government in Washington, D.C.,
eternity lasted only a few years. Passive people, never powerful, the Puyallups saw their landholdings shrink from more than two million acres to a thirty-five-acre cemetery. On the other side of the bargaining table is a representative of the United States of America, with 240 million members and a five-percent unemployment rate. The life expectancy of its citizens is seventy-two years.

The non-Indian property owners have houses and port facilities and skyscrapers and theaters and grocery stores and lumber mills and farms and malls—all told, property worth nearly a billion dollars—tied up on this land which the Indians won’t let go of. They are not blackhats or thieves, these citizens of the U.S.A., just descendants. A legacy of land-grabbing has left them in this quandary. The non-Indians possess pieces of paper which say they own the property now, but the title companies won’t clear the deed until they settle with the Puyallups, who have several pieces of paper, signed by several Presidents who’ve all been dead for more than a hundred years. In a suit filed in federal district court, the Puyallups assert ownership of the land on which sits some of the most valuable property in Tacoma. Rather than risk a losing verdict, the non-Indian property owners are negotiating out of court. Tonight, the final offer is on the table for a vote of the tribe. Two years ago, they rejected a smaller out-of-court offer. The whites say this is their final pitch. If the Puyallups give up all historical claims to the old riverbed, the port on Puget Sound, and the bluff on which sits downtown Tacoma, they will get cash payments of $20,000 per tribal member, a $22 million trust fund, nine hundred acres of land, job-training, and $10 million to try and bring salmon back to the ailing river—a package worth a total of $162 million.

One by one, the Puyallups drive under the freeway, up the hill, past the totem pole to the littered parking lot next to a sagging brick hospital building which is their tribal headquarters. Once, this was the site of a culture-busting government school, where young Puyallups got their ears boxed when they spoke the native language, and their feet were forced into tight shoes and they were told everything they knew was wrong. Then it became a state hospital for the young and disturbed. Finally, the Puyallups occupied it, saying the building was on their land. The state, after some resistance, gave in—a rare win for the tribe. Once, the Puyallups tried to take claim to the USS
Missouri
. They said the battleship on which Emperor Hirohito of Japan formally surrendered to the United States, long retired in Puget Sound, belonged to them under an obscure federal regulation which gave Indians first rights to surplus government property. To make their point, a young leader named Bob Satiacum paddled
his dugout canoe out to the Mighty Mo and said he was going to tow the six hundred-foot-long ship back to the reservation. The newspapers ate it up. Bob Satiacum: now there was a leader with destiny written all over him. He could have been to the Puyallups what T. E. Lawrence was to Arabia. But he is not here tonight to stir the tribe, to dazzle the national press. He is in jail, in another country.

As the full moon rises, the Puyallups try to decide, on the eve of the last decade in the twentieth century, whether they want to give up land deeded to them by President James Buchanan in 1857. I never see a full family; men arrive with other men, women come with children, old people accompany old people. In the parking lot, the debate flows in shorthand. Nothing is more vicious than tribal politics, says Frank Wright, Jr. “Gary Hart getting caught with a bimbo? That’s chickenshit compared to the rumors people throw around about us,” he says. Back and forth the arguments go, in whispers and shouts: You can’t sell land which is ours for eternity. It’s just another Indian buyout. But we need this to stay alive. Yes, but if we vote to give up claims to the land, what assurance do we have that the United States Government will make good on their promise?

The Puyallup River, born among the blue glaciers of Mount Rainier, dies when it gets to Tacoma. In color and character, it resembles nothing in nature. Swimmers can no more frolic in the river’s mouth at Commencement Bay than a goldfish can play in a bucket of battery acid. From the air, you can see how the Puyallup cuts a fine valley in its meander from Rainier to Puget Sound. At first, it winds and bends like any river, but then, approaching the city, it oddly straightens out and becomes an industrial sewer. Once the Puyallup was an unruly river, wild and free, its tidelands a maritime horn of plenty. They had a saying here, repeated up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest: When the tide is out, the table is set. After World War II, the city of Tacoma handed the Puyallup River over to the Army Corps of Engineers, and they fixed it. They took the bends and gravel and spirit from the river, then gave it back to the city of Tacoma, dead but straight, a corpse from the Corps.

When Winthrop paddled down Puget Sound and into Commencement Bay in 1853, he saw a natural setting far more dramatic than the plot of ground on which Seattle was built. Few Yankees had ever seen anything like this: a 14,410-foot volcano, wedding-day white, rising from the valley floor of a river bordered by 250-foot fir trees. At certain times of the year,
this river was so full of migrating salmon that they raised the water level. His introduction to Commencement Bay and the mouth of the Puyallup—at a time when the American East was trying on the first grubby boots of the Industrial Revolution but every inch of Puget Sound was still Indian Country—snapped Winthrop into a heightened state. He wrote:

We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallop Bay, [
sic
] a breadth of sheltered calmness, when I, lifting sleepy eyelids for a dreamy stare about, was suddenly aware of a vast shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon, could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous detail of surface? No cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a giant mountain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres as its image displaced the blue deeps of tranquil water.

He cursed the British name for the mountain. “Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the siwashes call it Tacoma.”

Rainier stuck. But Tacoma, the Salish name for the great volcano, was given to the town that would sprawl all over the bluffs and prairies and forests that rose from Puget Sound here, eventually including a neighborhood known as Winthrop Heights, named for the author of
The Canoe and the Saddle
. Boosters labeled Tacoma The City of Destiny; more than a hundred years after the birth of the nickname, there is still confusion and cynicism over what this destiny may be. Tacoma, unlike other Puget Sound ports, has yet to shed the mills in the center of town which foul the air and water for the quarter-million people living nearby.

There were no white settlers on Commencement Bay at the time of Winthrop’s visit. But one year after he left, the Puyallups made their first pact with the Boston men. In 1854 they agreed, in the Treaty of Medicine Creek, to give up 2.2 million acres of land in return for thirty thousand dollars and a small reservation on the bluff. At the time, the Puyallups were a small, docile band of salmon-eaters, most of whom were somewhat overweight. For a society that did not farm or trade for food, this was almost unheard of—living off nothing but what swam up to their village or grew in the bushes nearby. They had no concept of property ownership—except for the inverse ownership of the potlatch, in which largess was given away to excess. Their language had no pronouns in the first person—no
I
or
we
. In the late summer, they caught enough fish in a few weeks’ time to feed each family a thousand salmon a year.
They traveled up the lower slopes of Mount Rainier and filled their cedar baskets with huckleberries, blackberries, salal berries. For variety, they hunted elk, dug clams, caught crabs, boiled seaweed. The endowment from Puget Sound, where winter temperatures seldom drop below freezing, was unlimited. Without help of metal hammers, saws or nails, they built wood houses of cedar planks, some of them a hundred feet long and forty feet wide, with a stone hearth in the middle. Their universe was the river and its mouth at the sound. Each river valley was inhabited by a different nation whose members spoke a different Salish dialect.

In the elaborate potlatches, the chiefs of rival tribes tried to outdo each other in gift-giving. Trading goods, canoes, even slaves were offered as one tribe tried to show the other how well off they were. Though potlatches served as a sort of intertribal welfare system, they were repellent to the early Christian missionaries and government Indian agents, who outlawed them. Give away food? “An unsurmountable barrier to their material progress and civilization,” said one American Indian agent of the potlatches.
Here
, the government men said, handing the maritime Puyallups hoes and plots of ground,
start farming
. Turning their backs to the sea brought instant starvation. And within a few years following the arrival of Europeans, there was no food to give away.

Of all the Indians in North America, possibly no tribes other than the Aztecs were more prosperous than the natives who lived near the Pacific Coast from northern California to southeast Alaska. In the Salish-speaking area, from midway up the Oregon coast to southern Vancouver Island, there were perhaps 100,000 people at the peak, living near the mouths of salmon rivers surrounded by thick forests—the densest population of aborigines on the continent. They were never big communities bound by geography or race, but rather a series of extended families whose members intermarried with other bands, or raided other tribes for their women. They had been living here—fat and happy—for more than ten thousand years. That much has been surmised from recent archaeological finds. The conventional scholarly wisdom is that the first people of North America crossed the ice corridor of the Siberian land bridge perhaps fifty thousand years ago and then spread out down the length of the continent, following herds of oversized creatures, chased one way or the other by ice sheets. A few clues have been left behind, bits of litter that tell a slice of a story, a hint of history. A 27,000-year-old stone tool was found in the Yukon. A rock spearpoint wedged inside the bone of a
mastodon was unearthed on the Olympic Peninsula, dating back to 11,000 years ago; a Klamath Basin tool from southern Oregon dates to 13,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, camels, American lions and other creatures of the late Pleistocene roamed this country just as the ice receded.

When North America was discovered for the third time—following the Siberian land-bridge travelers and the Norse seamen—the Northwest natives had already developed a fishing industry to rival that of New England today. They used seines, herring rakes, large nets and dozens of hooks attached to fishlines fashioned from kelp. In the streams a variety of weirs and traps were used to snare migrating salmon. Whales were hunted, speared by athletes in large canoes bobbing on the mean surf of the Pacific. They wore robes of water-repellent cedar bark trimmed in fur, conical cedar hats, and elkskin shoes. As woodsmen, they cut huge, even planks from trees, using nothing more than stone wedges. Some homes had gabled roofs. They had no agriculture, but they were among the few hunter-gatherer societies to develop a sophisticated culture of art, theater and mythology. They are best known for totem poles, but Coast Indian masks, figurines and dances are just as elaborate. When, after living thousands of years off the sea, they were forced in a single generation to become farmers, they gave up almost all cultural pursuits. The grim task of subsistence agriculture on rocky glacial till took up too much time to leave any for mask-making or totem-carving.