Ramona Bennett Bill’s new memoir, Fighting for the Puyallup Tribe, is a work of impassioned storytelling by a working-class radical who rose to leadership during the 1970s in some of the most important Native struggles in the U.S.
Her book begins with a unique description of the price Indigenous people paid for European colonization and its specific impact on the Puyallup Tribe in western Washington State. She sums up the centuries-long relationship as “We liked to give, they liked to take.” Luckily, she liked to fight back.
Bennett was elected chair of the Puyallup Tribe in 1971. At the time, two earlier court decisions had ruled that the tribe and its reservation had ceased to exist. With these rulings, powerful interests attempted to nullify Native fishing and hunting rights guaranteed by the 1854 Medicine Creek Treaty.
Years of battle on the banks of Washington’s rivers ensued and a new kind of civil rights movement was born: the fish-in.
When local Puyallup families ignored the courts and exercised their treaty rights only to be beaten, jailed, tear-gassed and shot at, they were soon joined by tribal activists and supporters from all over, including Marlon Brando. Their persistence and bravery won the day and a subsequent court ruling known as the Boldt decision finally gave the tribes their natural born right to fish and hunt in their traditional ways. This history-making victory eventually led the state, working with the tribes, to launch an effort to save the salmon.
In 1978, Bennett led the Puyallup’s daring armed takeover of land and buildings which once were theirs but were lost to crooked federal and state governments. The occupation, known as the Cascadia takeover, lasted seven days and was covered by Freedom Socialist journalists who spent the entire stand-off inside with the occupiers. As negotiations with the state were drawing to a close, Freedom Socialist Party founder Clara Fraser crossed police lines to interview Bennett, cementing a long friendship between these two women warriors.
In the end, the occupation won the return of Cascadia for use by the Puyallup Tribe as a medical and social welfare center for its people.
Throughout her life Bennett has taken part in many of the most audacious actions of the Native movement — the Seattle Fort Lawton takeover and the Wounded Knee occupation, among others — all recounted in her memoir.
But I think writing this book may be the most important thing she’s ever done. It is a priceless history of what the fight for freedom takes in a voice that rings with righteous anger, but also wit, generosity, and pride in her matrilineal tribal roots. It is nothing short of a beautiful gift to future generations seeking to create a world based on sharing and human kindness.
