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Thursday, September 7, 2017

Clifford (Buddy) John Sanford Mowitch (1928-2003)

Clifford (Buddy) John Sanford Mowitch (1928-2003)

I don’t know why I have never run across this oral history before, but I hadn’t.  It is very interesting and explains a few things which I hadn’t know previously.  Like what in particular?  Well let’s let Buddy explain his family’s history.  The oral history jumps around a bit so I’ll try to put in more in chronological order but forgive me if I don’t.

Buddy was born on May 13, 1928 to Philip Henry Mowitch, a Yakama, and Maybelle Mabel Cultree, a Quinault, Mowitch on the Puyallup Indian Reservation.  His birth certificate recognized both parents’ tribes.  However, he also needed to be enrolled into one of the two tribes in order to have full benefits afforded to the individual tribal members.  His mother, Mabel chose to enroll Buddy into the Quinault Tribe.  The Articles of Incorporation or Tribal Ordinances in the Tribal Constitutions.  These spell out the requirements mostly based upon blood quantum, and/or lineage requirements.  Included might also be shared customs, traditions, language and tribal blood.  The requirements may vary from tribe to tribal.  

His parents had moved to the Puyallup Indian Reservation from Wollochet Bay while they did seasonal work on various hop farms in and around Puyallup and Fife.  Just like today’s migrant farm workers, Buddy’s immediate and extended family followed the crops whenever the fishing season slowed down and the fish were not active.  Hops In Washington was a very large crop similar to wheat in the state so after the harvest was finished in Fife and Puyallup, they would move on to Yakima and harvest the crops, hops, fruit, vegetables, etc. east of the mountains.  

Henry, Buddy’s father, would work wherever work was available be it the seasonal farm work or lumber mills or on the local Scandinavian farms in Little Norway.  “Swede farmers in that area where my dad … (Unfortunately the sentence ends abruptly but Buddy continues) “They intermingled real well with the Indian people, the Swede farmers, and different White people.  There was no discrimination; we mixed very well with them.”  There was a lumber mill and yard  by Uhlman’s store on Wollochet Bay.   Henry was also an excellent boat builder; his specialty was the 16-18 foot open skiffs.  We’ll revisit the fishing experiences a little later but first let’s touch on what Buddy described as his happiest childhood memories.   The memories also include some fishing stories.

“The best, what I don’t know you call it but the happiest memories was being raised on Wollochet Bay.  We had a settlement there.  It’s across on a west end of the Narrows Bridge now, at that time the Indian Settlement was about west of the point where the bridge comes ashore there called the Wollochet Bay Indian Settlement.  It was Trust Land set aside for the Wollochet Bay Indians of the Puyallup Tribe.  There were several families lived there on that settlement.  We always lived in the outlying districts, and my family, we were gone quite a bit.  But we all gathered …”  (Note:  According to access genealogy.com Puyallup Indians.  The name for the Settlement or Village at the head of Woolochet Bay was Skwlo”tsid.)  When Buddy talks about his family, he identified the members as:  his mother, Mabel; his sister, Doris; his baby brother, Dawson James; Shirley (perhaps Shirley Maria Mowitch; and Bunny ?.  His maternal grandmother, Carolyn Cooper Bruce and her second husband, John Snelling Mowitch (Henry’s brother) lived in a big house up the hill with Buddy’s aunt Blanche, Mabel’s sister; and her daughter, Helene.

The family wasn’t confined to a single settlement because as mentioned above, they worked in several different places in the state.  I was surprised however to learn that the Wollochet Bay Indian Settlement wasn’t settled entirely by Puyallup Tribal members but included other tribes such as the Yakama and the Quinault. 

“Quinault and Nisqually and Squaxin Island, Skokomish, and Wollochet Bay, they all intermingled.“  Buddy then goes on to speak about the families that lived in the Wollochet settlement and how they were instrumental in the Judge Boldt decision.  This will require an entirely different blog because it is so complicated on both sides, the Native American and the non-Native Americans who also depended on fishing for their livelihoods. The family lived wherever there was an empty house near the farms where they were working.  Buddy again mentions:  “the happiest part where I lived was right there on Point Fosdick.  We lived on the beach there, right on the beach.  My dad was a boat builder.  There was a boat house there where he could build boats.  We lived there quite a while and everything was right there in front of us.”  

“There were open skiffs.  We had powerboats.  My grandmother and step-grandfather had a powerboat and we traveled back and forth quite a bit in the Squaxin Island/Olympia area to Wollochet Bay and that area.

“The fishermen at that time, they rowed in open skiffs and that’s the way I was raised, right on the water and my dad, when I was little, tiny guy, I would go with him.  I remember real well how we just fish all day handling and wherever we were when the day was over, we would set up and camp.  Whatever fish my dad caught to sell, there were fish buyers out in the scows in the straits out on the deep water.  The would go out there and buy fish for cash.  It’s like a …you follow the tides wherever you went, wherever the fish went; everybody knew where the fish were, certain areas where the fish were biting or hitting.  My dad, through word of mouth with the other fishermen, we’d go no matter how long it took, we’d go there.”

Buddy goes on to mention that although he himself did not fish on the larger boats or as far as Alaska, his father, Henry, had.  

However the Native Americans living in and around Wollochet Bay were eventually move out of the area, and he explains it as “Not so bad because when we moved outs…we really moved away from there at nearly ten years old and gradually made our way down here.  (Note:  I understand Buddy is referring to Taholah on the Quinault Indian Reservation.)  My mom’s a Quinault and my dad’s a Puyallup.  His family is Puyallup and my mom’s people are Quinault.  It’s how come we ended up here.  She owned property here.  She had fishing locations here.  So when it came time to, we got forced out of there by the game warden and the laws picking up fisherman out there, the Indian fishermen, after doing their livelihood, they were throwing them in jail.  My dad was in jail.”  According to the Bureau of Land Management records, Accession #1063461, Serial Patent, State of Washington, Issued 4/21/1933 Buddy (Clifford Sanford Mowitch) was granted 80 acres located Willamette Meridian, Township 022N, Range 013W, Aliquots E 1/2 NE 1/4, Section 13, Grays Harbor County.

The interviewer was quite curious about the fact that Buddy’s family and other people he speaks about all had Christian names rather than Native American names.  So Buddy explains that his extended family members had been attending Catholic Church schools since the mid-1`800s.  His mother and grandmother both went to St. George’s Indian School on land just outside the northern border of the Puyallup Reservation - just north of the Pierce County/King County boundary and due east of Highway 99 in Milton.  St. George’s Indian School was started by Father Peter Hylebos in 1888.  Although, as previously mention, there were other schools for the Native Americans in the area from approximately 1860.  Students at St. George’s came from Skokomish and Squaxin Island, Tulalip, virtual from all over the Puget Sound area.  So it was natural that they were given ‘white’ names, both first and surnames.  

Buddy himself attended the local Wollochet Bay school through the third grade.  Them starting in the fourth grade his mother put him in the boarding school at the Cushman Indian School.  He had been baptized into the Roman Catholic faith at age 5, and so receiving a Catholic education was normal.  His mother felt it was more convenient (and perhaps better) for him to board while attending school.  Less time away from school fishing or traveling with the family as they earned a living.

When it came time for high school Buddy attended Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon.  The school was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and primarily served all of the tribes in the Pacific Northwest including Alaska, Montana and Idaho as well as Oregon and Washington.  

Buddy left school in his junior year when he turned 17 to enlist in the US Marine Corps to serve in WWII. although at the time Buddy says “…the tail end of WWII.”  He also said “In those days, if you didn’t go into the Service, you were nothing.”  Buddy was sent to the Pacific and tool part in the Occupation Forces of Japan and China and rebuilding government facilities.  He served 12 years, three different enlistments in the Marine Air Wing and Military Police.  He was awarded the Purple Heart.

Buddy mentioned wanting to go to college when he was in his 40s which would have been late 1960, early 1970.  But it doesn’t say if he followed up on that desire.

I have only hit upon a very few of the interesting parts of this oral history.  I definitely recommend you read it in its entirety-all 25 pages.  It is so very interesting, and reveals a lot about the Native Americans, their lives and their culture that we don’t think about.



Notes:


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