Shoalwater Tribe's Canoe Only A Dream Boat (So Far)

A year ago, the state's smallest tribe, the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, awaited the arrival of a cedar log to be carved into a canoe. As a symbol of a seafaring past, the canoe was to be a spiritual rallying point for the tribe. We return to the reservation to see what has happened to the log, and to the tribe.

TOKELAND, Pacific County - The news around here is that the Shoalwater Bay Tribe will not be canoeing up the coast to take part in the Paddle To La Push. The tribe wanted to. It had planned on it, in fact, pinning its hopes on the 40-foot cedar brought to "the rez" by flatbed truck a year ago.

The log, being carved into an ocean-going canoe, was supposed to revive the tribe's heritage as The Canoe People of Willapa Bay. Maybe this would infuse some pride in the people, the idea went. Maybe it would give this trembling sea urchin-of-a-tribe a boost into the 21st century.

Or, maybe not. The Shoalwaters had planned to join this week's Paddle to La Push, a ceremonial gathering of several dozen West Coast canoeing tribes from Bella Bella to Santa Barbara.

But a lot happened in the year since the log arrived. The Shoalwaters, who hadn't built a canoe since the late 1800s, found they were not ready to be a canoe people again. For starters, there was the small matter of finding someone, anyone, in the tribe who actually knew how to canoe in the ocean.

"It's been a hundred years since this tribe has had a canoe. We can't just jump in and start playing Indian," said Tom Anderson, the 33-year-old artist-sage of the tribe, who has spent the past year carving out the log.

"Even if the canoe was ready, we're not ready as a people," he said. "We don't have a sense of who we are, our place in history, our ceremonies. In the past, a medicine man would bless the log, bless the tools and every aspect of making the canoe and putting it to water.

"We don't know any of that."

That the tribe wasn't ready sank in slowly, like a pebble sinking to the bottom of Willapa Bay. Other things happened during the year that used up much of the tribe's energy, things related to the more mundane matter of survival.

THE NEW DOCTOR

"Aww, I'll die waiting," said Hazel McKenney, the oldest living Shoalwater, referring to whether the tribe will ever get its act together. But even McKenney, the tribal matriarch and much-adored curmudgeon, acknowledged the long odds against her people.

The tribe's 150 or so members cling precariously to a thousand-acre patch of sand in the southwest corner of the state, ever watchful for a big wave that might knock it right out of existence.

In the past decade, a casino project folded, a fight for fishing rights ended in defeat, and a generation of Shoalwater babies died. The stunning rate of infant mortality attracted media attention and federal funding for a while, but those, like the tide, quietly receded.

With the Pacific nipping at the reservation's edge and chronic poverty eating away what's left of the tribe's morale, it was with curiosity and hope that the tribe received the cedar log.

Donated by a local timber company, the log arrived last July, dropped unceremoniously in a grassy field just off the highway, and there it sat, unworked, for a month as people from around the rez stopped to look it over as they would a beached whale.

That same month, the new doctor came to the reservation, one Richard Hirschler, an itinerant Mennonite from Indiana by way of Zambia. "The Doc," as he's known on the rez, was a major acquisition. The infant crisis of 1992 happened in part because of a lack of prenatal care. The nearest Indian clinic was 90 miles away on the Quinault reservation.

"In the sense of being abandoned, it was Third World here," Hirschler said.

Of 19 pregnancies among the Shoalwaters during that time, 10 ended in miscarriage or infant death. The medical staff considers the crisis ongoing. Of 12 pregnancies in the past year, four ended in miscarriage; one involved twins.

Even with The Doc tending patients five days a week, "there's still a lot of grief on the reservation, a lot of fear," said Dan Peterson, a tribal health official. "Women don't want to get pregnant. They don't want to take the chance."

WATCHED BY THE SPIRITS

Tom Anderson finally dug his carving tools into the log in mid-August. He peeled bark for a week, folding the moist inner bark into bundles for the tribe's basket weavers. Then, using a chain saw, he lopped off each end and split the log lengthwise, ending up with two long hemispheres. The knotty half went to the tribe's woodcarvers. The less-knotty hemisphere would become the canoe.

"Sometimes I imagined myself being watched by the spirits of the ancestors," he said. Anderson is a serious, thoughtful man, and his eyes always have something else going on behind them. "I'd catch something on my peripheral vision and imagine it was them. I'd wonder what they were thinking, if they felt like I was doing something good."

Anderson got his first hint the tribe would not be ready for the Paddle to La Push as he labored night and day - by himself. No one volunteered to help. Those who could help were busy with their own daily struggles.

The tribe was hit with two big setbacks in the fall.

In September, an appellate court upheld a ruling denying the tribe indigenous fishing rights. The Shoalwaters brooded. They brought their legal arguments to the state Supreme Court, which refused to review the case.

"It was a blow that meant more to me than gaming or anything else," said tribal chair Herb Whitish, a bearish, pony-tailed man in trademark sweat pants and T-shirt. "That's the reason we're here (on Willapa Bay) in the first place - to fish. We're being denied our livelihood."

Then, in early December, a Seattle Times investigation of the federal Indian-housing program found that Whitish benefited personally from the program. The rez buzzed with talk of scandal.

Whitish had built himself a striking two-story home with a Jacuzzi using a combination of his own money and federal grant money intended for low-income people. Whitish, who's also a business owner and the tribe's health director, is by no means low-income.

But the chairman ultimately was not investigated. The financial package was drawn up and pushed by a wheeler-dealer named Craig Dougall, a South African transplant anxious to impress tribal leaders with his "creative financing" schemes. Dougall, whose actions at the time had been approved by the feds, came under a criminal investigation.

In the wake of the mess, the tribe, using what was left of the federal grant money, managed to acquire three homes in Westport, three in Tokeland, and two mobile homes just off the reservation. Two more houses are going up nearby - nothing on the scale of the chairman's, but respectable.

Whitish came away legally unscathed but publicly embarrassed. The affair fed old resentments, and there are plenty of those on the rez.

A ONE-MAN EFFORT

In March, a 100-foot alder became the talk of the town when, during a storm, it tumbled down next to Hazel McKenney's trailer. The tree crushed a parked Chevy truck as if it were a Dixie cup.

Death seemed to be closing in on her, Hazel mused. First, her barn burned down. Then the tree fell. And then her ankle turned bad, forcing her to get a walker. She is 80 years old.

"Rotten bones," she said with a laugh.

"I will die waiting for this tribe to do something, anything."

Regarding the canoe, Hazel from the start said: What a bunch of dreamers. How could this "stinkin' little tribe" focus on a canoe when it could hardly stay afloat itself, "stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with no casino, no fishing, no nothing!"

Down the road in the grassy field, Anderson started thinking maybe Hazel was right.

He had worked through the winter, hollowing out the cedar log, turning its 15-ton heft into what looked like a shapely cedar bathtub. "Chop, chop, chop, chop, I got into the rhythm of a woodpecker," he said. By moonlight, he steamed the wood using glowing lava rocks to loosen the fiber so he could widen the hull. By early spring, it began looking like a canoe.

The tribe, which had kept a passive eye on Anderson's progress, suddenly faced practical realities: Would the canoe float? Would it list? And who would do the canoeing? It would require eight hardy men and women to paddle to La Push, a journey of a week or more over hill-sized swells. Who would brave the Pacific Ocean the way The Canoe People of Willapa Bay once did?

No one, it turned out.

By late spring, it became clear the tribe would not make it. No one knew how to canoe, and more telling, no one had the time or inclination to learn. "Hazel was right about us," Anderson said. "Maybe we are just a bunch of dreamers."

SMALL STEPS FORWARD

Things have never come easily for the state's smallest tribe. They've always been an inch-along kind of community, not quite getting what they want, but getting something.

They did not get special fishing rights, but the tribe's fledgling oyster company this year did get approval to sell oysters to Japan - one of only two Washington tribes to get it. This could mean a doubling of profits for the company, which employs a dozen tribal members.

The Shoalwaters lost their bid to open a casino in Ocean Shores, but they will open a new bingo hall just outside Tokeland. Land-clearing began in May, and the building will be up in the fall. Tokeland isn't exactly Ocean Shores, and Bingo won't make anybody rich, but it's something.

Finally, the tribe won't make it to the Paddle to La Push, but it will have a canoe. It will be the tribe's first canoe this century, and just in time for the next.

It'll be 25 feet long, carved out of lush red cedar, charred black on the outside and trimmed with red on the inside. There will be other Paddles to Somewhere, and maybe the Shoalwaters will be ready next time. Who knows, if the tribe inches far enough along, someday there might even be a Paddle to Shoalwater Bay.

"Yeah, sure," said Hazel, smiling wickedly. "I'll die waiting."