Billy and Hank Adams attended commission meetings and got a resolution passed that named Billy as commissioner of the Medicine Creek Treaty area, which included members of the Nisqually, Squaxin, and Puyallup tribes. “The fighting, that is, the fish-ins and demonstrations, is over now, I hope,” Billy reflected to a reporter. “My past is in the past; I’m looking forward to what will happen in the next ten years as far as the development of the resource is concerned. Now we have to sit down and be reasonable. The State is a reality we must deal with for the sake of the people and the resource. I hope that the Governor of this state will appoint a Director of Fisheries who can and will work with Indian people.”
Two months later, it was time for NWIFC commissioners to elect a chairman. The deciding vote rested with John Ides, a Makah tribal member. “John Ides just retired from the Air Force and had become involved in tribal politics and quickly became chairman of the Makah Tribe,” Adams explains. “So, he was the undecided vote and he really didn’t know. He hadn’t been involved with these other tribes. . . . [He called back to Makah to see if they had any instructions, but they told him to use his own best judgment.”
Ides knew Adams’s brother and trusted his judgment. Adams advocated for Billy and sweetened the deal with a promise to limit Billy’s chairmanship to two years. The strategy worked. Billy was named chairman of the NWIFC by a 3-to-2 vote.
Maiselle and Ramona Bennett, a Puyallup Indian, pushed hard for Billy to take the helm: “He has a great love of his Indian people,” Bennett explains. “He has lived the deprivation and humiliation that the government put on us. He has survived that with great humor and no anger toward any specific grouping of people. . . . Even when these white people were shaking their fists at us and screaming obscenities—they’d be saying you *&%$@ Indians—he’d be listening to what they were saying about what could be done about the dams, the fertilizer and the pesticides.”
It was a new beginning for Billy, as he entered a very visible leadership role in both the Indian and non-Indian worlds. “They started to know him personally in their own sphere of activity or in their boardrooms, as in the cases of banks, or in the cases of Rayonier or Weyerhaeuser, and in the government offices at the higher levels in the Congress,” Adams explains. “And knowing him on a personal, face-to-face level, they discovered they liked him.”
Before the crucial election, Billy was a party to a court case that dramatically impacted tribal politics for the Nisqually. Frank v. Morton, a case Billy won, opened enrollment at the tribe, significantly increasing participation in tribal elections.
“People became enrolled and there were more voters,” says George Walter, a longtime non-Indian employee of the Nisqually Tribe. “Tribal elections at Nisqually, and every place in Indian Country, rise and fall on multiple issues. So, anybody who tries to explain something as one issue is just wrong. There were new voters in January 1977. There was a new set of people elected to offices.”
Tired of tribal opposition to the movement for the renewal of treaty rights, Adams and Billy hoped to usher in a new era of leadership. “We did a letter in Billy’s name to all the Nisquallys and ousted the Nisqually [Chair], Zelma McCloud, and her controller,” Adams says, “the two people who had gone to the Commission and asked that I be prohibited from having anything to do with Frank’s Landing. We took over the Nisqually government in the early election of ’77. . . . They were spending all these years opposing off-reservation fishing and all this time opposing Frank’s Landing, and more or less being run by the [Washington] Fisheries Department and their policy positions.” Georgiana Kautz and Frankie Mccloud took over as chairman and vice chairman. Billy was named fifth member and Indian Fisheries manager.
of Billy’s daughter Maureen. Image-Georgiana Kautz Personal Collection
While Billy’s star rose in Indian Country, he suffered personally. The year 1977 was devastating for Billy, as his sister-in-law, Georgiana Kautz recalls. Kautz is an outspoken Nisqually Indian better known as Porgy. For years, Porgy went few places without a note tucked in her bag from Maureen Frank, Billy’s daughter: “Ha ha, Porgy! I’m out in the sunshine, and you’re in there working hard.” At the time, Kautz had just won chairmanship of the Nisqually Tribe, a job that promised endless working hours indoors.
“I went to a tribal meeting and Maureen was with me,” Porgy recalls. “But Zelma McCloud said to Maureen, ‘You can’t come in the meeting, you’re not a Nisqually.’ So, Maureen sat out in the car. Finally, I told them, ‘I have to go home; I’ve got Maureen.’ I came home. An hour later they called me and said, ‘You’re on council now; we voted you in.’ That’s when Maureen sent me the letter with Caba- qhud. That’s the one I carried forever.”
Porgy also carried a photograph. Pictured were Maureen, a young, angelic-like mother, and her daughter, Ca-ba-qhud, a striking young girl with black hair and black eyes. “Billy and Norma—they’d come over to the house and Ca-ba-qhud would be there,” Porgy remembers. “Billy would go down the road bouncing her on his arm. When it was time to go, she would just scream and want to be with Billy and Norma. They loved that kid so much.”
“She was a beautiful girl,” Billy says of Maureen, “and her baby and I talked on the telephone all the time.”
Maureen Frank studied at The Evergreen State College and played softball in tournaments in the Northwest and Canada. She developed a passion for treaty fishing rights. In her father’s shadow, Maureen learned the daily struggle for salmon and sovereignty. “All those things were instilled in her,” Porgy says. “I mean, the Trail of Tears, she was there. She loved that battle. It was inside of her. Her and Valerie, Alison, Suzette and Sugar, they loved the fight. . . . Norma and Billy would take [Ca-ba-qhud] and they would kind of want to go out and do things so I would take care of [Ca-ba-qhud] for a lot.” Maureen experienced many turning points in the Native American movement, including the occupation of Alcatraz, the encampments on the Puyallup River, and Wounded Knee.
A week before Maureen’s nineteenth birthday, Billy bought her a Dodge. He called his daughter in Canada, where she was staying with relatives, to tell her that her new vehicle was ready.
On September 14, 1977, at 8:35 p.m., Maureen, three-year-old Caba- qhud, and Yvonne Owens, a friend, were heading southbound on State Highway 97, just outside Omak in Okanogan County. Ca-baqhud slept soundly in the backseat. When an oncoming car struck their vehicle, the back seat flew forward.
“That woman was drunk, and hit her head-on,” Porgy explains. “It killed Maureen and it killed Ca-ba-qhud, instantly. And Yvonne made it out of it somehow, someway.”
“The lady was going to see her husband somewhere,” Billy says. “It was the evening time. Right at Omak, they run into her—killed my daughter and my granddaughter. The other girl was thrown out of the car.” “She lived,” Billy says of the driver. “And I don’t even know where she lives now or what. But that destroyed a big part of our family.” The driver was hospitalized with head injuries, broken ankles, cuts, and bruises, while Owens suffered a head injury, broke her arm, and fractured her ribs.
