In chapter two, Billy Franks was born and grew through his early childhood, with all the ups and downs that it brings. But, he also began learning the way of life of the Nisqually people, and lived along the river fishing in much the same ways and in the same places that his people had fished for generations.

But, changes were coming to the river as well with new laws and regulations. Franks was painfully aware of this as his nets, and other fishing gear were time and again confiscated from him and then in 1945 at the age of 14, he was arrested once again. It was then he knew that his people had to fight for what was theirs. It was then that he declared, “Hey, we live here!”

Now, the fifties come and Chapter three.

Chapter Three-The Survivor

Dubbed the fabulous fifties, a new era dawned in America. World War II had ended. The Puget Sound area boomed. Parents flooded the suburbs. But for Billy, the 1950s brought ups and downs. He fulfilled a dream and became a U.S. Marine, but picked up a drinking problem that stole twenty years. He married and became a father, but watched as more than a hundred Indian tribes in the nation were terminated in the wake of aggressive changes to federal Indian policy.

Billy’s number came up for the draft in 1952, in the middle of the Korean War. Peace had collapsed in 1950, when the North Korean Army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel that divides Korea. A military clash over communism broke out that took two million lives in three years.

Like many other Native Americans, Billy prepared to serve his country. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps and boarded the troop train for Camp Pendleton in California, one of the nation’s largest marine installations. “Not everyone succeeds in the Marine Corps,” points out friend George Walter. “It’s not like being drafted into the army. You have to volunteer. You go through a lot. Billy is a patriot. He was ready to go to Korea and put his life on the line.” After basic training, Billy was assigned to the military police where he achieved the status of an expert marksman. Billy learned police technique. He learned the kind of blind faith you place in teammates you implicitly trust. After his service, he shared an instant rapport with other men in uniform.

When he completed his training for the Marines, Billy married Norma McCloud. She took the bus to San Diego and they lived at Camp Pendleton for more than a year.

Norma was pretty, loving, and generous. “She took care of anybody and everybody,” says Sugar Frank of his late mother. “She wasn’t out for anything,” says Georgiana Kautz, Norma’s younger sister. “She just loved to be what she was, and loved to watch sports, and loved to take care of kids. They meant so much to her.”

Norma had survived a rough childhood on the Nisqually Reservation. Like all but two of her ten siblings, she was born at home. Norma’s sister, Georgiana Kautz, remembers the family hitchhiking to see the doctor. The McCloud home had no electricity or running water, and they weren’t alone. Most families on the reservation lived without electricity until 1963 or 1964. Nonetheless, the McClouds made the best of it. “You’re out there doing things: baseball games, dances, pow-wows, drinking. And Billy met Norma and they fell in love. . . . Billy was just a young man that had a lot of good things instilled in him by his father and by his mother,” says Kautz. “And a  lot of that was to fight what was happening to tribal people. It began at an early age for him, and he never walked away from that part of his life.”

The Korean War ended and the U.S. Marine Corps released Billy from duty. He and Norma drove from Camp Pendleton to the Landing, where they would start their lives together. The family compound was home to Willie and Angie. Billy’s sister Maiselle lived there with her husband, Alvin Bridges. Herman John Jr., Billy’s nephew, also called the Landing home. Reporters described the family setting as modest, with “dogs and cats and 30 pet chickens, part banty, part game cock, which fly through the air and roost in the trees at night.”

For extra money, Billy earned a living building power lines. He  joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 77 in Seattle. “Both my brothers worked for the power companies. So, in my spare time that’s what I’d do. I belonged to the union and I’d just hire out in the union when I wasn’t down here fishing.”

Known as a rags-to-riches story and an astute military leader, Dwight Eisenhower clinched the White House with the campaign slogan “I like Ike.” But his policies as president unleashed a fury in Indian Country. Under Eisenhower’s administration, the Termination Act of 1953 severed ties between the U.S. government and Indian tribes. The new policy created a storm of protest in Washington, D.C.

“They were terminating tribes throughout the nation,” Billy says. “It was a big fight. We talk about treaties in 1854 . . . and all of a sudden we’ve got abrogation of the treaties right off the bat. And so he started that abrogation in 1950,” Billy says. “[Eisenhower] turned jurisdiction over to the state of Washington and the other states throughout the country. . . . He allowed liquor on the reservation. Those were the three things he did to wipe us out, get rid of us.”

More than seven decades after Indian children were forced into America’s boarding schools came another wave of assimilation practices. The Termination Era plucked tribes from the landscape one after another. As author Garrett Epps summarizes, “Their approach was simple. Tribes who were considered ‘ready’ for assimilation were ‘terminated.’ The federal government closed their tribal rolls, sold off their tribal lands, and sent each tribal member a check for his or her share of the proceeds.” The Termination Act included provisions to abolish the tribes’ federally recognized treaty status, allot the remaining tribal land, and remove health care from the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Members of Congress backed this major policy shift as freedom for Native Americans—independence from the United States government. Many Native Americans, on the other hand, viewed termination as yet another attempt to strip them of their culture and make them white.

“People just thought these old treaties were past history,” explains John Echohawk, head of the Native American Rights Fund. “The time of Indians was over. There was no future. They forced us to assimilate.”

Although no Washington Indian tribes were terminated, Native tribes in Oregon were. In all, 109 tribes across the nation ceased to exist in the eyes of the federal government.

From 1949 until 1960, the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated an estimated thirty-five thousand Indians to urban areas for which the men and women were grossly unprepared. The number of Indians living in urban centers doubled. Their wages were less than half of their Anglo counterparts. The new legislation legalized the sale of tribal land, and Indians lost two-thirds of their reservations in private sales. The relationship between tribes as sovereign nations and the U.S. government had collapsed.

At the same time, Congress passed Public Law 280, which gave five states exclusive jurisdiction over crimes committed in Indian Country. Other states, like Washington, opted in. As leading scholar Carol Goldberg-Ambrose puts it: “Tribes had not exactly thrived under the prior regime of federal authority and responsibility. But when the states took over, with their alternating antagonism and neglect of Native peoples, tribes had to struggle even harder to sustain their governing structures, economies, and cultures.”

Henry Jackson, longtime Washington senator, originally championed termination, but later flipped his position.

It wasn’t until December 22, 1973, that Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, repealing the legislation that had authorized the termination of Indian tribes.

The 1950s were indeed bittersweet for Billy. As Indian tribes faced termination and the unknown, he and and Norma braved a new world as parents. The couple could not have children naturally and decided to adopt from Mary Miles, Billy’s niece, and Orland Paul, a Tulalip Indian. In both cases, Billy and Norma took the babies straight home from the hospital immediately after birth. They were the proud parents of Maureen and James Tobin (Sugar).

“We had a little shack that was just a frame with 2 x 6s, no insulation and one light in the middle, just a shell,” recalls Sugar. “That’s where me, Dad, Mom and my sister lived.”

“I tell you, we just took care of them babies,” Billy says. “We were always on the river. We would take them down clam digging and everything. We never had any big motors. We had little motors. . . . We’d come back in with the tide. We lived down here at tidal water.”

“Dad got a good boat one year,” Sugar remembers. “Grandma used to make him go down and take the whole family and go flounder hunting at the mouth of the river. They’d walk around. I was too young. I was scared by baby crabs and everything, but I remember it. They’d walk around waist deep, and step on the flounders.”

“I was the smallest, the youngest, and actually I was the only boy,” Sugar adds. “My toys were the river, snakes, and frogs.”

Sugar spent most days waiting for a king to strike. “I’d untie [Dad’s] little dinghy boat and I’d jump in and paddle out to the set and hang onto the cords and wait for the fish to hit. But there were very little kings.”

Or, as he walked the riverbank hunting for hooks and string, he would break off a willow stick. “And I’d go get a periwinkle in the river, and I’d hook it on the hook, and tie a rock on there and just throw a hook in the water and wait for the fish on the shallow side.” But usually, he’d catch only bullheads.

Maureen was a typical older sister, Sugar says. She didn’t like chasing snakes much and the two sometimes bickered. One summer out on the boat, the kids were sleeping on a bench Billy made when Maureen rolled over and plunged straight into the river. “Dad shut the motor off, right?” Sugar recalls. “He jumped in the river, and it was only . . . about a little over his waist. He picked her up. The boat shut off and comes right back at him. He put her in, jumped in the boat, started it up and we took off.”

As Billy raised his young family, personal demons interfered. It was illegal for him to drink, but a bootlegger around the corner gave preferential treatment to Indians in uniform. The disease lasted twenty-three years, “at least from the time in the Marines, from ’51 to ’74,” says Hank Adams. “It wasn’t lawful to serve Indians until 1953. . . . He drank and learned to drink in San Diego, Long Beach. He was addicted from that day until 1974, when he came out of Schick Shadel.”

Billy is candid about the addiction. For many Native Americans, alcohol masqueraded as a friend, boosting courage and deadening the pain of a vanishing heritage. “Like a lot of our Indian people . . . he drank,” recalls Ramona Bennett, a Puyallup Indian. “He drank. You know, we self-medicate. I was into drugs, too. We drank to ease  the pain.” Billy’s wife, Norma, also suffered. Out of all eleven children in Norma’s family, only Georgiana Kautz escaped sober. “It was what you did,” Kautz explains of alcohol’s hold on her family. “You grew up. You learned how to drink. You learned how to party. You learned how to dance.”

The late Vine Deloria, a respected Indian scholar, explained the high rate of alcoholism in Indian Country as a reaction to the expectation that Natives conform to general society. “People are not allowed to be Indians and cannot become whites,” he writes. They are, in effect, suspended between the culture they know and the culture society accepts. The consequences are steep.

“I would think a good deal of drinking is the absence of any ritualized culture for most Indian people in most areas, outside the Southwest where they weren’t pressed as fully culturally as they were elsewhere,” offers Adams. “It’s hard not to drink when you’re sort of held down and it’s poured down you.”

Time on the road for work didn’t help. “Billy as a lineman . . . you go off in a crew,” Adams says. “You travel to Southeast Alaska. You go to Montana. You go to Utah, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. You’re off in your crew and what do you do at night? You even sneak a little on the job too, if not lunch. Someone’s got a bottle. And that’s a high paying job. But there are some high costs on the road. And it’s mostly in the hard liquor area. There’s not as much beer as there is hard liquor on those kinds of activities because the hard liquor is easier to transport. Single men going off to the last frontier. . . . You think that’s expected of you, to have a hard drinking life. But you find that it’s hardly a difference for a married person.”

Financially, Billy and Norma were strapped. “They would travel to Montana to pick up cigarettes, to pick up firecrackers,” says Kautz. “We spent a lot of time together. They ran cigarettes. They ran firecrackers. They ran booze out of Nevada. The Indians couldn’t fish, sell cigarettes, booze, or firecrackers . . . so they ran them under the law to survive.”

Billy’s niece Valerie tried to convince her uncle to stop drinking. “You could do so much for the Indian people if you would just become sober,” she told him. “Valerie was very close to both Norma and Billy,” recalls Adams. “She babysat for Sugar and Maureen throughout the ‘60s because Billy and Norma both drank. Valerie was there for their kids.”

Like her daughter, Maiselle also attempted to get through to Billy. “She was always worried about us,” Billy says. “We’re on the river and we’re raising hell and all that. We’d drink beer and different liquor.”

Brutal epiphanies eventually helped Billy rise above the drinking. “You just think, ‘God damn.’ I’m looking at this tower sixty feet up in the air and I’m saying, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to climb this thing today?’ You’ve got a hangover. And your body is telling you, ‘Quit drinking.’ And it’s telling you over and over, ‘You used to be able to drink and the hangover didn’t bother you.’ I just got tired. I had a bottle of whiskey. It was the last drink I ever had. My body was telling me to straighten up. Now I look back at all the wasted time.”

It was Maiselle, says Adams, who finally got through to Billy. She convinced him to walk through the doors of Schick Shadel, a fiftybed treatment center for alcohol addiction in Burien, Washington.

Alcoholism had hit their small Frank’s Landing Indian Community hard, but as usual they found humor in tough times. Tom Keefe, a close family friend, recalls an evening Billy and Al Bridges spent in treatment together.

“Al’s great, great, great-grandfather was an Irishman who jumped ship and married a Puyallup woman,” says Keefe. “Billy remembered when they got into Schick Shadel and they were sitting for the orientation meeting. There was this big chart on the wall that showed racial groups, and it was set up like a horserace. The first two ethnic groups, far ahead of the rest, that were alcoholics were Irish and Indian. Al looked at him and said, ‘Billy, I think I’m a goner.’”

“[Billy] hasn’t drank since,” says Adams. “[Maiselle] had five people that she put in there, and he was the only one who never drank again.She put her other brother Andy in there. She put their nephew Melvin Iyall in there, Al Bridges, her husband, and the fifth person she put in there was me.”

Schick Shadel does not offer a twelve-step program for patients. It relies on aversion therapy, a technique that retrains the mind, memory and senses to be repelled by the taste and smell of the drug.

Billy winces at the memory: “What they do is they make you heave your guts out. You can’t even smell alcohol. They get you to the point where you can’t smell it. You just heave up. So, we got out of there and then I just quit. And my daughter died, and my granddaughter I just loved so dearly. And then they thought, ‘Well, Billy will start drinking again.’ Then Norma died and ‘Billy will start drinking again.’ Then [Sue] Crystal died. I’ll never touch that stuff.”

“It took that thirty days and it took that treatment,” says Adams. “And it was part of learning about himself and that he could live without that constant recourse of alcohol.”

In 1974, at the age of forty-three, Billy took his last sip of alcohol and, in turn, discovered a great confidence. “When you quit drinking you’ve got to get away from [the people who drink around you.] They’re going to say, ‘Oh god damn, take another drink.’ You go into the tavern with them or the cocktail lounge, where the hell ever you go. And so I’m watching these guys, ‘No, I don’t drink anymore.’”

“Most all of my friends now, they’ve quit drinking. Nugie [Neugen] and all of my buddies on the river here, I’m watching these guys and nobody drinks anymore.”

“We gained Billy’s full contribution at his point of sobriety,” Adams says. “At Capitol Lake [1968], when he was arrested, he wouldn’t have been there except he was drunk. And at that point, you couldn’t get him out there unless he was drinking and/or drunk. . . . He learned that he had greater courage without drink than with it.”

Billy was coming of age when he first picked up the bottle, and twenty years older when he finally set it down. “A lot of people today, they just see Billy Frank the big shot, the success story, the Billy Frank who gets his picture taken with presidents and senators and governors,” a family member once said. “That’s all real for who he is now, but that wasn’t always him. That’s not the full picture, and our young people would benefit from knowing the rest of his story.”

Billy developed a sense of humor about his addiction. Years after he quit, at a summer concert in sweltering heat, diehard Bob Dylan and Tom Petty fans baked inside rfk stadium in Washington, D.C. Billy, Suzan Harjo and their partners sat amongst the crowd.

“It was packed and 105 degrees in Washington, which is just awful. We were burning up,” Harjo says. The foursome decided water was too precious a commodity and began dousing themselves with beer. Even Billy, who’d sworn off alcohol years before, dumped one cold one after another over is head. “Even when I was drinking, I never smelled like this,” he laughed. 

Tomorrow: Surveillance

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