where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

“i live here!” 35
“My dad would put us all in the boat,” Billy recalls. “All he had
was oars, never had no motor of any kind. We poled up and down
the river. We poled clean up to the reservation. We poled all over. We
went out with the tide and come in with the tide. It was a different life
for us.
“He’d take us all down to the mouth of the river and we’d flounder
fish, all the family. We’d walk up the river, and get into the log jam,
and get logs and rafts, and come down the river, all of us. This was the
playground of all of us, this whole river. Those were long days, those
days in the summertime.”
In the heat of summer, Billy slogged it out in berry fields and tree
farms. When the leaves turned, he climbed back into a twenty-twofoot
shovel-nose cedar canoe and set a net clean across the river. Billy
took his cue from the sun or the tide and headed home to butcher
fish.
When Willie Frank chaired the Nisqually Tribe and sat on the
council, his son absorbed his gravitas and ethic. “My dad—he took
me wherever he went,” Billy says. “We’d walk to meetings, you know.
We’re packing a box. The secretary has a little box of papers that she
keeps the minutes of everything. We never had no building like
Nisqually has got up there now. We just had each other’s home that
we all just kind of went to and gathered in them homes and kept the
business going. But, see, I walked with Dad, listening to him. We’ve
got to keep the government going.”
He learned the creation story from his father. Willie rejected the
whites’ religion and entire system of values. “Dad said the Catholic
Church was full of B.S.,” Billy recalls, “that most of all the Catholic
Church was. It just comes out of him like that. They tried to make
him pray all the time [in boarding school].
“The Creator is the one who brought us here. There’s all kinds of
creation stories and how we came here. The Creator gave us
everything we have. That was his belief, and Mom and all of us. The
Creator put that salmon there for us to survive. And all the shellfish,