As the youngest of seven children growing up near the Black River on the Chehalis Indian Reservation, Helen Sanders often darted through their house in her father’s wake, ignoring her mother’s call to come and learn to cook.
“I knew he’d be down burning stumps in the field, so that’s where I wanted to be,” the 96-year-old woman, who later took the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs to the U.S. Supreme Court and won, told the St. Helens Club last Wednesday. “I didn’t want to be back there trying to cook something.”
Her father loved to visit with people in Oakville, Chehalis and the Nisqually area. His 1924 recounting of Native legends, Honné, is still referenced.
“When I was little I used to traipse along behind him and go into town with him, but it was a long trip for a little girl,” Helen said, noting the trek covered 2 miles.
She preferred to climb the three tall fruit trees near their home by the Black River. Helen spent most days outside rather than helping inside.
“But guess what? I did not know how to cook when I got married,” she said. But she learned. Just like she tackled any other problem she faced in her life.
When she spotted a coat in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog in elementary school, she picked strawberries and cherries at the neighbor’s next door to earn money to buy it.
“My dad used to go with us supposedly to pick cherries, too,” she said with a chuckle. “He was asleep under the tree.”
Men in her family trapped beavers and skinned them, giving the meat to the dogs, and then stretched the hides tight on a big hoop, a large round metal contraption. Helen scraped off any excess meat. They hung the pelts from a ring to dry and sold them for fur markets in Olympia and Seattle.
“The state always wanted to buy those for the fur market. It was an easy sell,” she said. “We didn’t have to run around trying to sell it. They came here looking for it.”
Her eldest brother, Jim, was a cowboy who rounded up cattle for ranchers near Toppenish, Washington. Sid, another brother, worked in the woods as a logger.
“My brother Will was kind of a hotshot basketball player for Oakville,” she said. “Of course, this little girl went to every game. My dad gave me a dime so I could ride the school bus to these games. I didn’t want to miss any of them. I wanted to see my brother playing ball.”
Life on the reservation wasn’t easy, especially in 1946.
“Our Indian Country was absolutely hit with tuberculosis,” Helen said. “It was on every corner of the reservations. My sister Pearl died early in her life.”
She was 24. Her brother Andy, who was preparing to enter college, contracted tuberculosis and also died young.
Doctors told Helen’s sister, Ruby, after inserting a metal rod in her back, that she could never bear children. She gave birth to eight babies.
Helen was born in December 1927 on the Chehalis Reservation to George and Daisy (Ford) Sanders. Helen is a descendant of Nisqually Chief Quiemuth, who was assassinated in the territorial governor’s mansion in 1856, and her great-grandparents were Sidney and Nancy Ford, pioneers who settled Centralia’s Fords Prairie. Their son, Sidney Ford Jr., married Josephine Quesa, Helen’s grandmother.
Helen was accompanied to the St. Helens Club meeting by her biographer, fellow historian Sandy Crowell, author of “The Land Called Lewis” and “Water, Woods & Prairies.” Her book recounting Helen’s remarkable life, “Journey to Justice,” is expected to be published later this year.
Sandy noted that Helen’s grandson, William Thoms, a tribal heritage official, explained his great-grandfather George began using his surname at Indian School on the reservation after the superintendent asked him his name. When he responded “George,” the superintendent wanted his last name. He had none, so he told him “Sanders,” probably after the founders of Chehalis, Schuyler and Eliza Saunders, or their descendants who traveled through the region. Helen’s mother was hidden away in the woods of Shoalwater Bay and never attended school. However, Helen described her mother as an excellent cook and housekeeper, a smart woman who sometimes sang native songs.
At the age of 7, Helen received an allotment of Quinault Reservation land, which proved pivotal to her future. Her family members received 80-acre allotments just above the Raft River.
At 17, before she graduated from high school, Helen started working as a radio operator for the U.S. Forest Service on the Quinault Reservation, sharing a room with another young lady.
“There was a real good cook, so I enjoyed life,” she quipped.
Two years later, in May 1947 at 19, Helen married Roy Secena. They had a daughter, Susan, but divorced not long afterward. She lived near where the Lucky Eagle Casino is now, not far from her parents or many friends, including Hazel Pete. One cold, frosty day, rather than trying to keep her house warm, Helen bundled up her little girl in a coat and hat, lifted her into her arms, and trudged nearly 2 miles through snow and ice to her parents’ home so they could huddle together in warmth.
“But we made it,” she said. “We always made do. When I got there my brother Will, of course, couldn’t let that little baby girl alone. Oh, he packed her around, made sure she’d go to sleep.”
As a single mother, she fished for money and worked in a salmon cannery to pay her bills. In November 1957, she married her second husband, Alston “Bud” Mitchell. They formed M&G Logging with a non-Native logger, Bean Grandorff. To finance the logging company, she once received a large check from the Small Business Administration, so large in fact that her husband posed for a photo with his mouth dropping in awe.
On the Quinault Reservation, Helen often saw what she considered haphazard and sloppy practices by logging companies who cut timber from Indian landowners, whose property was managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Loggers toppled logs down hills into salmon streams below, heedless of damage done, and left huge piles of slash, sometimes as big as 20 feet, making it impossible for newly planted trees to flourish. She didn’t like that, and the petite but vocal woman often told Bureau of Indian Affairs workers about it.
“If I showed up to the door of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they started checking what they should do next,” she said, laughing. “They grabbed their little tablet when they saw me come through the door. It was their job to see that all this worked right, and that the people that owned the allotments got a fair amount of money for what was taken off their property. I wanted them to do it right.”
As her frustration over destructive and deceptive forest practices on Indian allotments grew, Helen and Quinault Tribal Chairman Joe Jackson contacted attorneys in Washington, D.C., then formed the Quinault Allottees Association to pursue the lawsuit. They figured if the BIA was mismanaging Quinault land allotments, held primarily by Chehalis, Cowlitz, Chinook and other tribal members, she said, “it was very likely going on at other reservations, especially in Montana and South Dakota.” The lawsuit filed in her name, the United States vs. Mitchell, eventually wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court where this beautiful but feisty Quinault dazzled justices with facts — and won. It took 21 years, but the Mitchell decision of June 27, 1983, set a precedent by determining that the BIA could be held liable for Native American assets in their trust.
“So, being the mouth of the Quinault, I was involved with all those people, which was a good education for me,” Helen said. “I didn’t sit at home and try to make biscuits for my mom.”
Instead, she traveled often to Washington, D.C., and testified several times before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Native Americans. She traveled hundreds of miles throughout the state to collect allottees’ signatures on paperwork for the case or to build roads or log timber. She served two terms as secretary and treasurer for the National Congress of American Indians. She popped into the homes of her Washington, D.C., attorneys and visited the White House and Congress to lobby for Indian rights. She rubbed elbows with politicians and BIA bosses while advocating for tribal rights, fair compensation of timber harvests and protection of salmon runs.
“I never shied away from the job,” Helen said. “It was what I enjoyed. I enjoyed meeting the people that I worked with. So it was a pleasant experience all the time.”
“Helen had to educate all the allottees about all the intricacies of this huge lawsuit,” Sandy said.
“They were a good group,” Helen said. “If they wanted to know about something, they’d come and ask me, and I would give them details.”
Helen’s legacy stemming from her fight for Indian rights continues today as the Mitchell decision has been cited more than 9,000 times in legal cases, Sandy said. It was cited in the 2009 Cobell v. Salazar class-action lawsuit, filed in 1996 by Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Nation, which contended the Department of Interior and Department of Treasury mismanaged Indian trust funds. That lawsuit resulted in a $3.4 billion settlement that allocated $1.4 billion for 250,000 to 500,000 Native Americans, set aside $2 billion to repurchase divided allotment lands and return them to tribal ownership, and established a scholarship fund.
As a result of the settlement, the Helen Sanders Scholarship was established in her honor at Lewis and Clark College in 1992 to support ethnic minority students with a preference for Native Americans interested in history.
Helen still lives where she was born, but one thing has changed through the years.
“I do a pretty good job of cooking now for my family,” including three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, she said.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
