A gravestone, a mention in local archives, stories still handed down around Oyster Bay: the outline of a woman begins to emerge and with her the world she inhabited, so rich in tradition and shaken by violent change.
She contributed to the book Vashon Island Archaeology: A View from Burton Acres Shell Midden , and her articles have appeared in Women\'s Studies Quarterly , Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History , and Oregon Historical Quarterly ..
Llyn De Danaan is a writer and an anthropologist.
Steeped in sadness--with a lost home and a broken marriage, children dying in their teens, and tuberculosis claiming her at forty-three--Katie Gale\'s story is also one of remarkable pluck, a tale of hard work and ingenuity, gritty initiative and bad luck that is, ultimately, essentially American.
As Llyn De Danaan mines the historical record, we begin to see Gale, a strong-willed Native woman who cofounded a successful Oyster business, then won the legal rights from her Euro-American husband, a man with whom she had raised children but who ultimately made her Life unbearable.
In that early outpost of multiculturalism--where Native Americans and immigrants from the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia vied for economic, social, political, and legal power--a woman like Gale could make her way.
With her people forced out of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds into ill-provisioned island camps and reservations, Katie Gale sought her fortune in Oyster Bay.
Katie Kettle Gale was born into a Salish community in Puget Sound in the 1850s, just as settlers were migrating into what would become Washington State.
A gravestone, a mention in local archives, stories still handed down around Oyster Bay: the outline of a woman begins to emerge and with her the world she inhabited, so rich in tradition and shaken by violent change
