The next morning I drove to the tribal office in Skokomish and laid Hanks second map on the counter, the hand-drawn one with the red line and the treaty number and the seal, and the elder behind the desk looked at it a long time and said, this cove is treaty water, and the state cannot give it to anybody, and we will stand with you.
The shellfish company manager had stood on the mudflat in his new hip boots and told me Hanks tideland lease expired when he died, that the state was giving it to his company, that one old lady cannot farm oysters, that theyd have the cove either way.
He did not know what Hanks map showed.
The beds Hank built are inside treaty-protected tribal tidelands, and for fifty years Hank farmed them under a standing agreement with the Skokomish tribe, not a state lease at all, which means the state has no lease to reassign and the company has been claiming water the state never had the power to give.
Hank knew every inch of that tideflat, and he knew whose water it truly was. He worked in agreement with the tribe from the start, respectfully, for over fifty years, and he drew the real line on a map he hid behind another map, with the treaty number and the tribal seal, so that the truth of the cove could never be erased by a company with new boots and a state application.
Treaty rights are the supreme law here, older and stronger than any state tideland lease. The company applied to the state for water the state does not control, and the tribe, seeing Hanks map and his fifty years of good faith, stood with me.
When the manager came back to see my racks cleared, I did not argue. I had the tribal representative there beside me, and I handed the manager a copy of the map with the treaty seal and I said, one way or another, you said. Heres the way. This cove is treaty water. My husband farmed it in agreement with the tribe for fifty years. The state never had a lease to give you, and the tribe stands with me. Clear your own application. The oysters stay.
He looked at the tribal seal and the elder standing beside me and did not have his one-old-lady speech anymore. The company withdrew. My granddaughter and I kept the beds.
One way or another on Hanks tideflat, he had said. It stayed ours, and the tribes, the way it always truly was. Hank shucked oysters for the whole town every Christmas, and he honored whose water it was every day of his life, and that respect, drawn in red ink and kept behind a map, is what saved the cove.