OLYMPIA, Wash. — Spat on, shot at, chased, clubbed and arrested Nisqually tribal leader Billy Frank Jr. spent decades fighting for tribal fishing rights. Not out of anger, family members say, but out of love for his people, the land and the salmon that have fed his tribe for thousands of years.
Chinese American Sculptor Haiying Wu, who may best be known for his Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Pioneer Square, has spent the past year creating a 9-foot sculpture of Frank. He's currently working at South Puget Sound Community College where visitors are welcome to watch him at work.
"I had a wonderful wonderful feeling about Billy Frank," Wu said. "But how to portray him? That's kind of the challenge."
Wu decided a man who spent so much of his life as a warrior deserved to rest, seated alongside a riverbank.
"Just by looking at pictures of him, you can tell he was a really kind person," Wu said. "The facial expression with that smile and that wisdom, I believe he's proud of what he has achieved and also he's expecting what we can do in the future."
Two identical sculptures will be made. One will be placed in the State Capitol in Olympia. The other will travel to Washington D.C. to be installed among other heroes in the National Statuary Hall in 2025.
"A lot of what you see in Statuary Hall is this stoic Indian," Frank's nephew Hanford McCloud said. "Maybe one that doesn't smile or one that doesn't cry. Here he is hunched over laughing with his hands on the bank of the river that he loves."
That would be the Nisqually River, a place where Frank was arrested 50 times for exercising rights granted a hundred years earlier by the Medicine Creek Treaty. A federal judge upheld those rights in 1974's historic Boldt Decision.
In a 2012 interview Frank watched a motorboat full of fishermen heading upriver.
"And that's what we're doing right here is seeing all of our fishermen fishing and enjoying life," he said. "This is what it's all about. That's who we are. We're Indian people. We've always regulated our natural resources."
McCloud was in the audience when a scale model of his uncle's sculpture was revealed at the state capitol. A warrior at rest. with a 2-foot podium the final version will top out at 11 feet in height.
"He worked all of his life to get to a point on that river where he can sit there and watch everybody else fish," McCloud said. "He can watch everybody else take care of the river, the water, the prairie, the trees, the birds..."
McCloud looked up at the sculpture.
"We need to continue to keep doing the work, you know? Let's stay on the path," he said.
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