by RICH CASSIDY on MAY 29, 2012
“At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.”
– Chief Se-alth
It often takes fiction, not fact, to capture essential truth. Such a work of fiction is the shameful tale of the white man’s subjugation of the Native American lands of Puget Sound, told in Michael Schein’s historical novel, “Bones Beneath Our Feet” (Bennett & Hastings Publishing 2011).
The facts alone could never reveal the pathos of such tragedy. The basic outline of the story is familiar: Driven by manifest destiny and personal ambition, a territorial Governor sets out to claim all the best lands of the region for white settlers and to confine the first nations’ peoples to narrow, barren reservations. Some resist. Among them was Chief Leshci, leader of the Nisqually Nation, the People of the River Grass. This is his story and the story of his people. It is a tale of courage, violence, treachery, anguish, and defeat.
What we begin to understand from the novel, and what we could never appreciate from an account of the facts alone, is the human cost of such events. We gain some sense of the flesh and blood — and the love and hate — that once animated the bones that are indeed beneath our feet.
It is also about justice and injustice, for in the end Chief Leschi was tried for murder in the white man’s court, not once, but twice.
The story, and the troubling questions it raises, is not unique to the Pacific Northwest, the United States, or even North America. In one version or another, it has been repeated throughout time, as the strong have ravished the weak. Sadly, in this instance, the justice system –or at least the pretext of justice — was wielded as a weapon of the strong. Since history is normally written by the winners, it is rare that we see such events through the eyes of the vanquished.
I stand in awe of the power of the words of the writer, who is also an old friend and a former law partner. He has written a great book and one that reminds us that justice does not triumph of its own force.
Rich