Chief kanaskat
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The Story of Chief Leschi
Chief Leschi was the last chief of the Nisquallies. In 1854, tribal leaders were forced to sign the Medicine Creek Treaty, ceding ancestral lands to the federal government. The Washington Territory was just a year old, and bloody skirmishes between the United States military and natives had cost many lives.
Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens, already reprimanded by President Franklin Pierce for his handling of Indian affairs, accused Chief Leschi of the murder of a volunteer colonel. Despite the protests of Army officials and sparse circumstantial evidence, Stevens continued his prosecution.
Leschi’s first trial ended in a hung jury, and his attorneys were prevented from presenting exonerating evidence in his second trial. He was found guilty and was executed by hanging on Feb. 19, 1858. The site of his execution is in what is now Lakewood.
His hangman later said, “I felt then I was hanging an innocent man, and I believe it yet.”
Present Day
164 years later, the story of Chief Leschi is still unfolding. On Friday, Dec. 10, 2004,
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Chief Leschi Schools
Native American school in Washington (state)
Chief Leschi Schools is a Native American tribal school located in the Puyallup Valley near Mount Rainier in Washington. It is a 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) facility which is intended to be a model for Native American education. The current building opened in 1996 serving Native American students from 92 different bands which comprise the Puyallup tribe of Indians. It is the largest[citation needed]Bureau of Indian Education (BIE)-affiliated school.[1]
The school is in the Wallercensus-designated place, in unincorporatedPierce County; that county is in the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area. It has a Puyallup postal address, but is not in Puyallup proper.[2]
History
The school opened in 1976.[3] Originally the school used Tacoma School District's Hawthorne Elementary School in Tacoma for its classrooms,[4] and most of its students lived in Tacoma.[5] In 1978 the secondary classes moved to floors two and three of the tribal admini
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Outraged by the sites and sizes of the reservations imposed on South Puget Sound tribes by the Medicine Creek Treaty, Leschi, a respected Nisqually, took up arms and was recognized as the overall leader of warriors from several of the affected tribes. In the spring of 1856, outgunned and outmanned, Leschi and his remaining Nisqually followers retreated to the sanctuary of the Kittitas Valley, where his mother's powerful kin held sway. Even out of combat, the Nisqually chief remained the primary focus for the vengeance of Governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862). Upon returning west in late 1856, Leschi was betrayed by a relative, arrested, and charged with the murder of a volunteer militiaman. After a convoluted and error-filled legal odyssey and two trials, Leschi was convicted, and on a cold February 19, 1858, hanged at Steilacoom. But his fight had not been in vain -- a year before his execution, in January 1857, larger and more appropriate reservations were approved for the region's tribes. Nearly 150 years later, in 2004, a specially formed historical court exonerated Chief Leschi
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