1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [92]
To learn more about the dispute, I visited the delta of the Nisqually River, at the southern tip of Puget Sound. Housing the Nisqually tribe, the sliver of land that is their reservation, and the riverbank meadow on which the treaty was signed, the delta is passed through, unnoticed, every day by the thousands of commuters on the interstate highway that slices through the reservation. At the time of my visit, the Nisqually had been annoying state authorities for decades, tenaciously pursuing what they believed to be their right to fish on their ancestral fishing grounds. I met the Franks, the stubborn, charismatic father-and-son team who then more or less ran the tribe, in a cluttered office that in my recollection occupied half of a double-wide trailer. Both had been arrested many times for “protest fishing”—fishing when the state said they couldn’t—and were the guiding spirits behind the litigation. After we spoke, Billy Frank, the son, told me I should visit Medicine Creek, where the Nisqually and eight other tribes had negotiated the treaty. And he asked someone who was hanging around to give me a tour.
That someone introduced himself as Denny. He was slim and stylish with very long black hair that fell unbound over the shoulders of his Levi jacket. Sewn on the back of the jacket was a replica of the American eagle on the dollar bill. A degree in semiotics was not required to see that I was in the presence of an ironist. He was not a Nisqually, he said, but from another Northwest group—at this remove, I can’t recall which. We clambered into an old truck with scraped side panels. As we set off, Denny asked, “Are you an archaeologist?”
Journalist, I told him.
“Good,” he said, slamming the truck into gear.
Because journalists rarely meet with such enthusiasm, I guessed—correctly—that his approval referred to my non-archaeological status. In this way I learned that archaeologists have aroused the ire of some Native American activists.
We drove to a small boat packed with fishing gear that was tied down on the edge of the Nisqually. Denny got the motor running and we puttered downstream, looking for harbor seals, which he said sometimes wandered up the river. Scrubby trees stood out from gravel banks, and beneath them, here and there, were the red-flushed, spawned-out bodies of salmon, insects happy around them. Freeway traffic was clearly audible. After half an hour we turned up a tributary and made land on a muddy bank. A hundred yards away was a tall snag, the dead stalk of a Douglas fir, standing over the meadow like a sentinel. The treaty negotiations had been conducted in its shelter. From under its branches the territorial governor had triumphantly emerged with two sheets of paper which he said bore the X marks of sixty-two Indian leaders, some of whom actively opposed the treaty and apparently were not at the signing.
Throughout our little excursion Denny talked. He told me that the claw holding the arrows on the back of the one-dollar bill was copied by Benjamin Franklin from an incident in Haudenosaunee lore; that the army base next door sometimes fired shells over the reservation; that Billy Frank once had been arrested with Marlon Brando; that a story Willie Frank, Billy’s father, had told me about his grandparents picking up smallpox-infected blankets on the beach was probably not true, but instead was an example of Willie’s fondness for spoofing gullible journalists; that Denny