Browse Exhibits (7 total)

Born in 1864 to a First Nations mother and a Danish immigrant father, Nora Jewell enjoyed close ties to her immediate and extended family growing up on San Juan Island. Nora's maternal aunt lived within two miles of the Jewells and had married a German immigrant. Nora remained close to her aunt's family after her father's death in 1876. Despite having family close by, a territorial judge put Nora, then twelve, in James Smith's home, appointing him as Nora's guardian. Washington's territorial legal code by then allowed children of Native mothers and white fathers to inherit their fathers' estates, but did not acknowledge Native women's maternal or spousal rights, leaving Nora, her mother, and sisters vulnerable to the claims of white men after Peter Jewell's death. This chapter chronicles the hardships Nora endured at the hands of her court-appointed guardian, who assaulted and impregnated her before she turned 15, but also traces the strategies Nora used to maintain family ties and secure her own independence as she grew up on the island chain and then moved to the mainland in adulthood. 

Exceptional among the women chronicled in Legal Codes & Talking Trees because she is the only one who succesfully argued her claims in a colonial court, Rebecca Lena Graham was born in 1859 to a Duwamish mother named Peggy and an American-born white father named Frank Matthias. Like Juana Walker, Rebecca spent most of her life without her father, although she lived in the Seattle vicinity just as he did all of her life. When Frank Matthias died without a will in 1892, Rebecca claimed his estate against the claims of her father's out-of-state relatives. Rebecca made her case before Judge Cornelius Hanford, a man who remembered that Rebecca's Duwamish grandfather had saved his life when he was a young boy in the midst of Washington's violent dispossession of Puget Sound tribes in 1855-56. Although Rebecca had the benefit of a statute acknowledging mixed-race children of white fathers and Indigenous mothers as legitimate heirs behind her in making the estate claim, Hanford's personal ties to Duwamish people clearly made the difference in her case since the legal archive reveals few other mixed-race heirs making successful inheritance claims in the same era. This chapter not only chronicles Rebecca Graham's inheritance case, it also explores the ways in which she and other members of her generation crafted a persistent Duwamish family and community network despite removal throughout Puget Sound and emerged as a powerful political force in the 1930s that would continue to seek federal recognition into the twenty-first century.

Louisa Enick was born to Sauk-Suiattle parents in the shadows of the Cascade mountain range around 1878 as settler-colonists eager to capitalize on timber and mineral extraction worked to push the Sauk-Suiattle out of the homelands marked by the rivers that gave them their name. Like many other Sauk-Suiattle people of her generation, Louisa used diligence and stubbornness to resist dispossession and she filed a public domain allotment claim in 1903 so that she could raise her family on tribal homelands without being pressured to relocate onto the reservations established in neighboring Puget Sound tribes' names. Because federal and state agents mishandled Louisa's allotment paperwork, her land claims were diminished over the next two decades, but she used letter-writing campaigns and surveyor records to assert her land claims until she died in 1924. Her daughters continued to press the family's land claims after their mother's death, and though they did not succeed in retaining all of their privately-owned lands, the family contributed greatly to the Sauk-Suiattle effort to achieve federal recognition of lands that persisted until achieving success in 1972. Still only a tiny portion of their former territory in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the Sauk-Suiattle reservation is home to some of Enick's relatives near Darrington, Washington. This chapter chronicles Louisa Enick's remarkable persistence in documenting and asserting her land claims--a habit she passed on to daughters and relatives who continue working today on behalf of Sauk-Suiattle sovereignty.