It was yesterday that we re-posted the beginning of the biography on Billy Franks, titled Where Salmon Run by Trova Heffernan, in memory of his life even as the aboriginal fishing activist passed away. The re-telling of the story was made possible by the Legacy Project in Washington.
With the re-telling, we hope to help in better understanding the man who saved the Nisqually River and its fish for his people and in doing so, was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.
We merely focussed on the story by posting the Preface and Introduction, today is Chapter one of the tale. In this chapter, we learn about the man inspirational to Billy Franks, his father Willie Franks Sr.
Chapter One-Spirit of the Father
Gramps found himself on the witness stand and he must have been 103 years old. He wore his trademark Native vest and no shoes. Thick socks covered his feet. Willie Frank Sr.’s hair, snow white and somewhat askew, topped a slender frame. Deep lines etched across his face revealed a lifetime on the river. His mouth curved inward. His brows furrowed. His intense eyes held stories and secrets. Any Indian worth his salt knew Gramps. Many people called him the last full-blooded Nisqually alive.
“If this Nisqually elder can’t go to the court, the court will go to him!” Stephen Grossman was insistent. The administrative law judge presided over court that day to hear Gramps’s words himself. It meant abandoning the formal courtroom and traveling south to Gramps’s home, a legendary place known as Frank’s Landing. Court came to order as the Nisqually River rushed below the foothills of Mount Rainier, cutting a jagged line for eighty-one miles before pouring into Puget Sound. The temperature crept upward. It was a warm August day in 1982. “This hearing is being held at Frank’s Landing in the home of Mr. Willie Frank Sr. to accommodate the witness, the reason for which will become obvious on the record,” Grossman announced.
The elder sat on the de facto witness stand—a favorite wooden chair—flanked by lawyers, a court reporter, and the judge. Gramps defied his years and sat straight as a rail. Discomfort may have accounted for his stiff posture. The elder never did trust the whites. He often fell silent in their presence. “He used to laugh that they carried their brains in their pockets. If they had to remember something, they took out some paper to look it up first,” recalled Susan Hvalsoe Komori, a former attorney for the Nisqually Tribe.
There aren’t many who would maintain the wherewithal to testify at 103 years of age, and even fewer with the gravitas to sway a judge. But Gramps possessed both. His opinion on the matter at hand meant something to the judge. At two city dams on the Nisqually River, salmon and steelhead were dying in the sharp turbines, steep climbs, and powerful water surges.
Facing a dwindling fishery, the Nisqually Tribe sued the city of Tacoma for past damages and changes to federal license requirements; it sued the city of Centralia in order to place the city dam under federal regulation. To convince Grossman, the Nisqually Tribe had to prove the river was historically navigable and vital to its people. Gramps, born about ten years before Washington became a state, was called to the stand. He had lived his whole life on the banks of the Nisqually. In his elder’s voice, he would joke, “Me and the river are the oldest things around here, I guess. The river was here a long time before I came, and it’ll be here a long time after I’m gone.”As the court reporter tried desperately to decipher an unfamiliar speech pattern, Gramps weighed his words deftly, sometimes drifting into Nisqually dialect. Frequently, he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, as if flashing through the years. A rush of memories came. “You could watch his face as he talked and feel as though you could almost see what he was describing, as he was obviously seeing it again himself,” Hvalsoe Komori recalled.
