where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

spirit of the father 25
restaurant had a lot of little booths, and when you sat down they pulled
a curtain around your table. It was really something,” Willie recalled.
The growing Nisqually even took up the big horn in the school
band. He was the spitting image of every other member. Their
identical uniforms buttoned to the neck. Their traditionally long hair
rested just above the ears. In pictures, they wore the same impassive
look. The school band of Indian children routinely played the reservations,
blaring, incredibly, America’s national anthem.
During his last stretch at school, administrators made Willie Frank
a cop. He pocketed twenty-five dollars a month carting meals to
“inmates.” “These were schoolboys and they had a jail there where
they kept the bad boys who ran away to town or something like that.
I was about twenty-two years old when I left school. I was a full grown
man. I must have been there for eleven or twelve years.”
“When they put my grandpa in that BIA school, what did it take
from us?” asked Alison Bridges. “What did that do? . . . He was
stripped of his culture. He was stripped of self-esteem. Coping skills,
social skills. . . . And that’s what happened to Indians.”
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Willie closed the doors
on life at Cushman.
Life went on while Willie was away. All of his parental figures and
grandparents died during his time at Cushman—most notably Aunt
Sally in 1895 and his father in 1896. Willie returned to Muck Creek to
live with a granduncle. He picked hops. He tended to elders, the sick,
and the homeless. On Sundays, the community held horse races.
There were two racetracks on one side of the prairie and one racetrack
on the other. The Indians played slahal, an ancient bluffing game in
which teams try to identify marked deer bones hidden in players’
hands. “Slahal went on and they had a card game they called monte,”
Willie recalled. “The men and women would play monte and slahal
and the whole gang would have horse racing.”
Mostly, Willie fished. He’d catch his salmon in the Nisqually River
and haul his fish into town in one of Henry Ford’s Model Ts that put