Rebecca Lena Graham: Inheriting Race & Property in Washington, 1859-1946

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.