Katie Gale

Married a white man, gave birth to four children, became a successful oyster woman, suffered greatly in a divorce settlement, and watched two of her children die of tuberculosis before succumbing to the disease herself. An extraordinary life? An exemplary life? No. But as one individual, Gale stands in for an entire population of Native American women who were ground under the boots of white expansion in the Pacific Northwest. Her life, its specific trials and achievements, still speaks to the present-day reader more than a hundred years later of women's struggles not limited to that time and place. Both women's and indigenous peoples' rights remain under siege in 2014.