[Katie Gale]is history written by an anthropologist about a personal interest in the area where she lives. This has both good and bad points. De Danaan's personal interest in the character of Katie Gale is evident, but there is only a bit of real historical data about her, so much of the book is historical detail about other people and places who Gale "would have", or "must have" or probably knew and interacted with. For the first half of the book, this gets tedious, especially for the reader who does not know the territory or the anthropological conventions of linguistic forms of Native American names.
De Danaan wants to make the point that Katie Gale got a raw deal both as a Native American in the time of European-American settlement and establishment of reservations (mostly late 1800s) and as a woman in the same Eurocentric culture and times. She nonetheless manages to be successful in business if not in her personal life, and was a respected member of her community. De Danaan makes this point repeatedly, and with excellent documentation.
The author's teaching style extends to a need to explain almost everything, but I wonder of most readers really need to be told that kerosene lamps and wood stoves are a lot of work and sometimes dangerous, with the same detail provided for oyster farming techniques which are much less universal.
For someone interested in general history of the Southern Puget Sound area (Now known as the Salish Sea, we are told) this book is a trove of detail and sources. For many general readers, the lists of products sold at the general store with prices may be more than we need to set the stage for the personal story.
None of the detail is inappropriate, but good editing might have trimmed it to make the points without hammering them.
However the story of Katie Gale is one that deserves telling and gives a fresh perspective to our understanding of the time and place - a good addition to the historic record.
I received this book through the Library Thing Early Reviewers Program in exchange for the promise of a review. ( )

I don't think I've ever read a history book by an anthropologist before, and I have to say that I liked it. De Danaan has definitely meticulously researched her subject matter, but she also takes some well-reasoned leaps of faith as she describes the life of Katie Gale, an Indian Woman, who married a European-American settler, on Oyster Bay, not too far from Olympia in the late 1800s. As an East Coast gal, I'm not as familiar with the history of the Pacific Northwest, so this was an interesting, leisurely read for me. ( )

"Katie Gale - A Coast Salish Women's Life on Oyster Bay" by LLyn De Danaan. (Early reviewer) This book is obviously a labor of love. The author is an anthropologist and the subject of her book is a native American character from the past who lived near her own home on the Southern Puget Sound region of Washington State. It is clear Ms. De Danaan is fully engrossed in this story. The level of research that she brought to the story is impressive indeed. I am also a resident in the Puget Sound and fond of History in general and American History in particular. I should love this book and in an odd way I do love this book but not like I would have expected when I started. I enjoyed the picture that she painted of the life on Oyster Bay in the late 19th century and the tension that she exposed between the ancient residents of the region and the interlopers from the east. But I wanted to get to know Katie Gale and I felt that she was lost among the scores of colorful characters that populated the book and presumably the world that she lived in. To be fair, there isn't now much left of Katie Gale for the author to draw on and it was just long enough ago that there is really nobody left to ask but I selfishly still wanted to know more. Luckily there was so much rich detail about the people and the life they lived that I was still drawn into the world of Oyster Bay and if, as the author implied early on, the life of Katie Gale could be reflected off of the lives of those around her that we do have information about then I suppose that I did get to know her a little. The place names and locations were a little confusing at times so It helped a lot to be familiar with the area. I was a little surprised by the level of cultural mixing so soon after the European arrival in the area. This was apparently a short lived phenomena but I don't think it is well known. ( )

I am over 100 pages in and still know very little about Katie Gale, the woman for whom the book is named. I have been given so much information about the history of Puget Sound and the Indians of the area and the ways that they were taken advantage of but I still couldn't tell you much about it. This book suffers from way, WAY too much information of little interest and a real lack of organization. I have given it a noble try but I am at the point where I no longer care. I will not be finishing this book. ( )

A FAVORITE BOOK

A wonderful, innovatively conceived history of a Native American woman who lived in a community of Indians and whites on the southern edge of Puget Sound in the northwestern United States in the late nineteenth century.

Llyn De Dannon is an Emeritus Professor at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. She herself lives just down Oyster Bay from where Katie Gale once lived. She has extensively researched and documented all she can find about Gale and those who touched her life. Her findings are well documented with footnotes, bibliography, and comments about her sources, especially the oral histories she conducted, but this book is not meant for other academicians. In the innovative tradition of the college where she taught, she has written an interdisciplinary history which takes in to account economic, political, and environmental changes that affected life on Oyster Bay. Even more unconventionally, she has woven into her account her own extensive speculations about her subject and her own memoir of living on the bay as she wrote about Gale.

Katie Gale was born near Puget Sound in 1856, just as violence ended between those who had long lived in the area and the European American intruders who were entering it. Because her mother became sick and died, Katie spend much of her childhood with relatives who lived on Oyster Bay, learning the traditional craft of minding the oyster beds and collecting oysters. James Gale was an ambitious white newcomer, aware of the value of oysters and eager to make his fortune. He and Katie lived together, had children, and married, all the while working the oysters together and gaining possession of more beds. In 1893, a national economic crisis reached Oyster Bay. At the same time, Katie’s marriages become abusive. Because she was defined as a U.S. citizen and had married legally, she was able to go to court to sue for divorce. James defended himself by accusing her of being an unfit mother and only a crude and lazy Indian, claims that were easy proven to be false. Before the court ruled, he and Katie worked out an economic agreement which gave her full possession of some of their oyster beds. They remained formally married but he spent most of his time in Seattle with his white mistress and his rapidly growing oyster business. Katie and her two children remained on the bay where she established her own successful oyster business. She died of tuberculosis in 1899. Her ex-husband went on to become an important figure economically and politically in the state.

Because Katie Gale could neither read nor write, her own thoughts and emotions can seldom be known. The only words we can trace to her are from the accounts others wrote. Court documents include her description of the violent abuse that James inflicted on her. The descendants of those who were her friends add a few choice stories, such as the time she tied James, probably drunk, to a tree with his beard. De Dannon uses her broad knowledge of the region to suggest what Katie might have been doing and saying. At first De Dannon’s images of the inside of Katie’s house and the trail behind it seemed to me to be sheer fabrications, but on reading her discussions at the end of the book, I learned at she had talked with those who had lived there and known the house and trail. De Dannon is careful to indicate when she has evidence for her account and when she moves beyond it. Using her imagination allows her to make figures from the past more real and human. But she never tries to tell an intimate story that only a novelist could write.

As Thomas King observes in his fine recent Native American history, most of us tend to assume that Indians were either fighting or invisible to white people. Katie Gale’s story makes real a transitional community when people of different racial groups lived alongside each other. They were not equal, but for a time they lived together, worked and played together with an openness that would later disappear. If we are to understand the full scope of our racial histories, we need to learn more about communities like these in which Katie Gale lived.

In an unusually long acknowledgement section at the end of the book, De Dannon writes about the people from whom she learned about nineteenth-century life on Oyster Bay. Many of these were the descendants of people who had known Katie Gale. She also credits her colleagues at Evergreen College for the shape which the book took. She notes the questions which both students and teachers were regularly asked when they finished a project. “What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Why does it matter?” In writing this book, these were the underlying questions she sought to answer.

I strongly recommend this book to a wide variety of readers. It certainly should be read by anyone interested in Native American and Indigenous peoples, but also by those who simply enjoy well-researched biography or history and unconventional approaches to learning the “truth” of the past.

Thanks to Library Thing and to Bison Books at University of Nebraska Press for sending me a copy of this book to review.