One day a granduncle took Qu-lash-qud by the hand to St. George’s Industrial School for Indians, a Catholic boarding school located in Milton. Qu-lash-qud was told to take the Indian out of everything, except the color of his skin. He dressed like a white man. He cut his hair short like a white man’s. His teachers gave him a white man’s name. Willie Frank rolled right off the tongue, and it was a logical choice. His father, Kluck-et-sah, shoed horses for a white man named Frank. Then and there Qu-lash-qud ceased to exist. He was Willie Frank.
At boarding school, Willie Frank even learned about the whites’ God and their heaven. “If you die, you go to the great place that’s got everything,” his teachers told him. The religion never made much sense to Willie. He already lived in paradise. The mountain fed the river. The river and the land fed his people. Every year, the salmon returned, darting upriver to spawn. And Willie was alive. No. He didn’t need the whites’ faith. “The Indian, he don’t believe in the God, white man’s God,” Willie often said. “He believed in the Great Spirit, that’s what [Indians] called what they believed in, the Great Spirit, some kind of spirit.”
One day Willie’s trousers split from the crotch to the bottom of the pant leg. That was the end of St. George’s Industrial School for him. “I’d go to the seamstress three times and she had no time to sew my pants. So, the third time I told some of the boys I was going to run away.” “He had his family. He had the village on Muck Creek. He wanted to be home,” Adams says.
Incensed and unafraid, Willie and two classmates struck out down a trail to the Puyallup Valley, on a journey that would take them forty miles. They hopped a fence in Hillhurst and slept under the cover of trees. “This other boy and I kept going,” Willie explained. “I had an aunt that lived up this little creek. We stayed there overnight. At that time, my father had already gone up to St. George School to see me.” But by the time Kluck-et-sah arrived, Willie and his classmates were long gone.
One night, Willie woke in a sleepy haze and saw his granduncle riding by, singing. “He had other Indians with him passing by on horseback. I woke up. I just had a dream.”
As they neared home, Willie and his friend heard the roosters crow, and they took off running. “I stayed all winter. It must have been the fall of the year,” Willie recalled. “The other boy stayed with us, Mike Leschi. His folks lived in Tenino. Later his father came and got him.”
After a short-lived respite at home, Granduncle Henry took Willie to the Cushman Indian School on the Puyallup Indian Reservation. “This was not a Catholic school. This was where I used to get a licking for talking Indian. I couldn’t talk English. I must have never learned nothing at St. George. When I got into this other school, I kept talking to the other boys in Indian and they’d go and tell on me. ‘You’re not allowed to talk Indian in this school! All boys get a whipping if they talk Indian!’”
Willie quickly learned to read a white newspaper. In fact, he learned English so well he started to forget his Native tongue.
School administrators sent the boys to bed at 9:00 in the evening. A few of them sneaked out at night. Willie went once. He and his buddies crept out of their rooms and crawled through a window to sneak from school grounds. A Japanese man owned a restaurant nearby where you could get a decent meal for a quarter. “The restaurant had a lot of little booths, and when you sat down they pulled a curtain around your table. It was really something,” Willie recalled.
The growing Nisqually even took up the big horn in the school band. He was the spitting image of every other member. Their identical uniforms buttoned to the neck. Their traditionally long hair rested just above the ears. In pictures, they wore the same impassive look. The school band of Indian children routinely played the reservations, blaring, incredibly, America’s national anthem.
During his last stretch at school, administrators made Willie Frank a cop. He pocketed twenty-five dollars a month carting meals to “inmates.” “These were schoolboys and they had a jail there where they kept the bad boys who ran away to town or something like that. I was about twenty-two years old when I left school. I was a full grown man. I must have been there for eleven or twelve years.”
“When they put my grandpa in that BIA school, what did it take from us?” asked Alison Bridges. “What did that do? . . . He was stripped of his culture. He was stripped of self-esteem. Coping skills, social skills. . . . And that’s what happened to Indians.”
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Willie closed the doors on life at Cushman.
