Snapshots of Legends

History is usually written by the winners. Their lives comprise the archival collections, and historically these have been white men enjoying political and economic privilege. So long as we rely on the materials at hand, we keep telling the same old stories." --Jean Barman (BCBW, Volume 23, No 3, Autumn 2007) interpretative strategies that are useful in understanding of Katie Gale's life with her non-Native husband Joseph. At the end of the piece, I'll introduce, also briefly, two other layers of imposed sensibilties...the tourist eye and the nostalgic eye...as they molded and distorted the presentation of Native American women in late 19 th and early 20 th century. The story of Katie Gale's late 19 th century life as an oyster farmer on Oyster Bay, Totten Inlet, southern Puget Sound is in some ways a uniquely new story. There were many women laboring in the rural west during this period. Some biographies examine these women's lives in detail. Some novels such as Willa Cather's My Antonia or Ole Edvart Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, have given these women an indelible place in literature. Bold Spirit, the memorable story of Helga Estby by Linda Lawrence Hunt, makes us wonder what other tales we have yet to learn about and makes us dig deeper. But what is perhaps exceptional about the Katie Gale story is that she was a Native American woman, one of many whose lives off reservation during the early post treaty period are seldom examined or given treatment in our texts. My representation of her life is also somewhat exceptional. 1 A straightforward biography of Katie Gale was not possible given the paucity of material about her or written by her. In fact, the only mark in the record decisively made by her hand is an X firmly inscribed on several court documents. Thus I strove to bring to what I knew of her life a perspective, and to work from what Monique Wittig 2 called an angle of approach that allows us to understand something of her in the context of her time if only from "out of the corner of the eye". I have more particularly attempted in my book and in this essay to articulate when possible the dynamic interplay of gender, race, and class as these operated in her life. That is I have tried to understand her life from the perspective of a woman marginalized by the dominant culture not just by gender but also by race. My depiction is a history from, so much as possible, "below," that is, from the perspective of the margin and told from the point of view of a subaltern experience of the 1 Research Files, Katie Gale's Tombstone: The Work of Researching a Life by Llyn De Danaan. Oregon Historical Quarterly. Winter 2005. 2 See "The Straight Mind and Other Essays" by Monique Wittig. She defines "angle of approach in the context of discussing Djuna Barne's work: "a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an ou-of-the corner-ofthe eye perception; the text bears the mark of that 'estrangement'. P. 62. period. 3 Though documents produced by either Gale are limited, I try through a study of other sources to examine her life through the examination of a particular place and time period, Oyster Bay in the mid to late 1800s. Oyster Bay is a kind of social historical laboratory...one that because it is in the developing west...offers many archival documents: homestead and donation claim papers, censuses, some diaries and journals, some letters, newspapers, and reports and letters associated with the United States Indian agencies and their officers. Thus it is not just Katie Gale's life that I represent (and in no way does the book claim to be a story of the Coast Salish people or any particular band or tribe), but a depiction of a maritime community of great diversity during the early commercialization and exploitation of its resources and statehood. The people of the bay in many ways did form a community of place and interaction in a shared historical period in a era of great change. 3 I owe much to the work of bell hooks, "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center," and Gramsci's post-colonial theories. See Kate A.F. Crehan, "Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology." Chapter five of Crehan's book discusses the power relations that maintain subordination of the subaltern and the "cracks and fissures that could potentially lead to their overcoming it." Karen Leong wrote an essay in which she rather optimistically said that biographical studies of non-white women have released a "plethora of unbound voices" that have reshaped the discourse of the western historical experience. 4 Still, most biography of western women is not analytical, 5 and the majority of these remain "fixated on white women." 6 and, as Susan Armitage has said, do not challenge much at all. 7 However critical attention to women's stories, where it occurs, allows us to understand how gender and race, interacted with structures of power in the west. In Katie Gale's case, these dynamics take on different significance due to her status in the post treaty /early statehood period of Washington. Hers is 4 Karen Leong cited by Margaret Jacobs, Pacific Historic Review, p. 592 and Susan Armitage "Wetern Women's Biographies," Western American Literature, 41, No. 1 (spring 2006), 72. Cited by Margaret Jacobs, ibid. West (2001), pp. 1-5. Vancouver, and Fort Nisqually to name a few. 21 Through these "tender ties" 22 bonds were made between and among whole groups of people. Though much of the discussion in the literature concerns the marriages between trappers, esp. French and indigenous women, a fair amount has been published that depicts Native women in alliance with men who were either in positions of leadership, for example, in Hudson Bay Company, at Fort Astoria, or in nascent European villages or towns, and or rose to those positions during the relationship. 23 In many ways, these cross-cultural marriages could be positive and could change the climate or character of a community from one exclusively Eurocentric to one decidedly 21 Forthcoming book by Candace Wellman, The Peace Weavers: 19th The Peace Weavers: 19th Century Intermarriages at the Edge of the Salish Sea Century Intermarriages at the Edge of the Salish Sea. . This is to be a group of biographies of indigenous women married to army officers group of biographies of indigenous women married to army officers and settlers on the 1850s in one geographic cluster of and settlers on the 1850s in one geographic cluster of intermarriages in the Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory. Also intermarriages in the Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory. Also see Jean Barman's new book, French Canadians, Furs and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest. Jean more cosmopolitan (given that the woman usually joined the husbands business or home). They could shift the meaning of home to one that was local rather than distant for the male. They certainly could and often did establish a reciprocating bond with the local indigenous community of the wife's family. They also provided for intimacy for both partners. For the woman, given the depredations of the era, the loss of home and home territory, and the uncertainty of the future, the marriages provided or helped her to establish a certain stability and economic as well as social space. Of course the cultural differences between the pair often continued to be obstacles to truly successful relationships as did racism and the rules and legal obstacles the surrounding community of laws and prejudice placed in the way even when husbands defended and fully embraced wives. The children of these marriages, often referred to as Metis informally, were variously accepted, assimilated, and/or faced with ambiguous or changing legal status during the last half of the 19 th century of Washington. In terms of official United States policy viz the indigenous population, this period is known as the Assimilation Era. 24 In keeping with the dominant culture's 24 Assimilation Era in Federal Indian Policy was 1887, the beginning of the allotment period, and 1943. sentiment, in some instances, a husband wanted to eradicate any relationship or identification the children of the marriage had to Indian roots. He might also wish to erase or eradicate the woman's own race and culture in any way possible. This was the case of Joseph Gale. Thus, to quote Stoler and Hurtado, The "tender ties" were also "sites of production of colonial inequities and therefore of tense ties as well." 25 Stoler writes that "matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power, that management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire are exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states." 26 During the economic panic of 1893, Katie Gale feared that Joseph, in whose name their tidelands were recorded, would lose their wealth. Also, she had, she said, been treated as a menial laborer though she was a full partner in their enterprise. Joseph paid her for her labors at the same rate he 25 ultimately ran her own oyster business, and left considerable holdings to their two children. Her modest home was on the site of what is now the still successful Olympia Oyster Company. Her story from the point of her suit against Joseph is one of many that reflect the perseverance of women during territorial and early statehood as well as the complexity of the "encounters" between and among people in the early territorial days of the Northwest. She went to court to protect her holdings and during the proceedings she defined and spoke from her subaltern status as Native woman. She is an Indian Woman Pre-colonization Native American women in the region were full participants in economic activities of their families and bands. There are many instances of leadership of women in the literature and oral histories. There were a number of paths by which women attained power, including spiritual...

Nova Religio, 1997

2015

Folkore: Saskatchewan's Yesterday Personified, 2012

Essays from students in a first year Canadian history class at the university of Saskatchewan are profiled in this special issue of Folklore Magazine. These essays reveal new perspectives by a new generation of young scholars who are eager to share what they've learned about their community's history.