I recently visited the museum of the Squaxin Island Tribe. These are the Indians of the South Puget Sound. In the Indian wars of the 1858-59, they were defeated along with the Puyallup and Nisqually Indians. That was the war that resulted in Chief Leschi's execution for murder. This was the war in which smallpox-infested blankets were given as presents to the Indians. All of the south Puget Sound Indians were placed in internment on the supposed "reservation" on Squaxin Island, a four-square-mile strip of land with no fresh water. The Indians could not make a living on the island. For the first few years they had to sneak off to their foraging sites under cover of darkness and fog. Eventually most of those who survived trickled back to the mainland, doing many of the same jobs white people did. I wonder what made the whites begin to accept them? Perhaps the whites took a little while to reflect on the innocent people they had killed in the Indian war. The Indians must have shown admirable patience, otherwise they could never have won tacit permission to work on the mainland. Somehow they must have melted the hearts of the white people. (How did they do it? Through intermarriage?) It would not have helped them to level righteous accusations.

A lot of the Squaxin members became lumberjacks. Many of them sold shellfish and fish at local markets. Twenty-five cents used to buy a pretty hand-woven basket full of clams in Olympia. Among themselves they kept a sense of being Indian, but they kept this to themselves. The Indian Shaker Church was a vehicle for Indian identity in this region, while at the same time passing as a profession of the conquerors' faith. There are still a few Indian Shakers, getting old in years, living the South Puget Sound and in Yakima. The Squaxin Indians kept going back to Squaxin Island for festivals and observances. It was the island of their imprisonment, but it was also where the clans of the five south most inlets began to think of themselves as a distinct people. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs told them that they were a tribe, but this was a foreign idea to them at first.) They built a Shaker Church there, and a few families built houses. I saw a picture of one of the houses on Squaxin Island, dating back to the 1930s. It is a beautiful house, looking like an architectural hybrid of a longhouse and a Scandinavian frame house. Obviously the builder had some know-how carried over from the days of building longhouses. I looked everywhere through this museum, but there is no photo of an old longhouse. I have never seen a picture of a longhouse, in any museum. I wish I could find one, just a photo! Apparently the white men got in and burned the longhouses down before daguerreotypes could be taken. [Scandalous communal living, they thought. In their eyes it looked depraved. Shame on their dirty eyes!]

The Indians used to have a potlatch house on Squaxin Island. (That's what they called it among themselves, but they would not admit that to white administrators.) The people who went to Squaxin Island for festivals in the first half of the 20th century remember seeing posts where the potlatch house had been. Potlatches were declared illegal in Washington State after the Indian wars. The anti-potlatch law is still on the books in Mason County! But the current tribes of the Puget Sound and Vancouver Island area have started them up again. Last year, seventeen tribal groups from all over the Sound sent out boats. There was a gathering on Vancouver Island of 10,000 people. The Squaxin Tribe is building a second, larger boat, and their club of oarsmen will be going up the Sound this summer, visiting other groups along the way. I was very moved when I saw the photographs of last June's potlatch. I have enjoyed driving to Steamboat Point, where Oyster Bay opens into the Sound, and looking across to Squaxin Island. Only members of the tribe are allowed on the island.

The Squaxin Island Tribe eventually bought land on the Mainland in Mason County. This land must have been bought with contributions from tribal members who worked in fishing, oyster farming, lumbering, and construction. (The B.I.A. was not investing in the mid-Twentieth Century, that's for sure.) At newly bought land was corporate tribal property. On the strength of their prior recognized status back on Squaxin Island, the B.I.A. approved their application---in 1965 their reservation legally expanded to two mainland parcels in Mason County. They built a tribal housing development. Up until five years ago, the tribe's only income stream came from the Amice Trading Post that sold cigarettes and liquor. They also had fireworks stands near Steamboat Island. Then they built a casino---a huge building with cedar-wood facing and a cedar-log entranceway. Their income stream skyrocketed. They used the money to build a new tribal center which will open next month. Except for the temples at Kyoto, I have never seen as much cedar planking and whole cedar logs in one place as in this Squaxin Tribal Center. It is a grand building, almost on a cathedral scale, with a design intended to evoke the old longhouses. It seems that the tribal council has some sharp business minds. They took some of the proceedings from the casino and bought tobacco rolling machines. Since losing the tax advantage that made tribal cigarette sales lucrative, they decided to roll their own, so they can continue making a profit on cigarettes. They sent tribal technicians to England to learn to run the machines. Now they have their own cigarette brand, and last month they started producing cigarettes to supply other reservations. This is the only Indian-run cigarette factory on the West Coast.

The only thing that makes me sad is what happened to the last old-growth tree that grew near the trading post. It came down when the contractors' trucks came in to build the casino and parking garage. I saw the fresh stump behind the Forest Service's information stand, cut off at ground level so as not to be obvious. I could lay myself down across its diameter. It didn't seem to be in the way, but once you have a lot of construction trucks barreling onto a site, they don't like big trees growing anywhere near their right-of-way.