Jamestown S’Kallam elder Marlin Holden passed away peacefully at home on November 11th. Marlin was a former Tribal Council member during the incredibly important work that created the Tribe’s first Tribal Constitution in 1975. His work helped the Tribe get federal recognition, a reversal of the mark of shame on our country that negotiated the Treaty with the S’Kallam peoples and other Tribes in 1855. But there was so much more to this man.
Marlin’s heritage was a Northwest mix of Jamestown and Norwegian. His mother’s side of the family traced back through her parents, David and Elizabeth (Hunter) Prince, and he was the great-great grandson of Chief Chetzemoka, the signer of the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point. Marlin was very proud of this fact and felt his life needed to honor that legacy and also the future generations of the Tribe.
While you can find a full official obituary at this link, I want to focus on my experience being a filmmaker who worked with Marlin, and the friendship he and I had starting around 2010.
I met Marlin while filming the documentary “Voices of the Strait”, funded by the Puget Sound Partnership. The goal of the film was to interview people who had been raised and lived their whole lives on the Olympic Peninsula, and have them describe the changes to the environment that they had seen. Marlin was recommended to me as someone that was worth interviewing.
Marlin was a natural storyteller. By his own words, he never was a good reader, a fact he admitted to some laughter at a lecture he gave at the Centrum Writers Workshop one year. But Marlin had many great stories, and they often reflected the tribal worldview of being in touch with nature. I chose his story of two seagulls fighting over a piece of bait as the final word in Voices. When I heard it I instantly knew that it represented exactly the way to end the film on a positive and happy note. You can hear that segment here.
Marlin’s deep voice and commanding presence conveyed an authority. He was also a very deeply religious man. He not only strongly believed in his faith but gave an enormous amount of himself to his Tribe and community.
In his “retirement” he felt the need to honor the tradition of shellfish harvesting, and was very proud of his small allotment of beach in Sequim Bay where he harvested oysters. It was hard work and even as he turned 80 he was still out there, buckets, boots and shovel in hand. He refused any help to carry the heavy full buckets back to his pickup, laughing that it was his only form of exercise.
He also was a founding member of the Tribal Canoe Journey not only training crew and skippering the canoes, but in his later years would be part of the greeting ceremony on the beaches at Fort Worden and Sequim Bay. It was a task of great pride for him. He believed it was a way to help the younger generation focus on their heritage and avoid drugs and alcohol. Marlin knew full well what lay down that road for them, as he had been a correctional officer for the State and befriended many who were behind bars. He worked very hard to reach out to kids who were at risk, and help them find their way into the tribal circle. We often talked about the pain he felt when he would hear of a youth that was arrested for drugs, or one that had died in a car accident. The tribe is small enough that every single lost life is a major tragedy. Marlin felt those losses deeply.
He was incredibly proud of his life with his wife Patty, a nurse and master quilter who ran a “long-arm”in their home outside of Sequim. He would tell me the stories of them running short 3 and 5k runs in their sixties together. His small dog was always nearby when he was at home.
As we got to become friends after the filming of “Voices” he talked to me over coffee one day of how cool he thought it would be if there were films of the Tribes’ peoples harvesting the various natural resources back at the time of the Treaty signing. We discussed making a film that would be a snapshot of the current natural resource usage by tribal members, and I said I was excited to think about doing the project. He helped shepherd the proposal through the Tribal Council, insisting that I should be the filmmaker. Obviously, it was beyond an honor as many native filmmakers existed in the region he could have chosen. We scripted and he insisted on narrating “Treaty Resources”. The film can be viewed at the Jamestown S’Kallam library but the opening sequence is here.
Over the ensuing years I would get an occasional call from Marlin for help with his computer, since he admitted he was a luddite and did his best to get by with them, and we would go out for coffee and a chat every six months or so. Once I called asking to buy a bucket of his clams for a party we were hosting but he insisted on simply giving me two buckets. He would never take my money, even though he was giving up selling it to the restaurants he contracted with in the area. During the canoe journeys I would always swing down to the beach to say hi. I called him in late July but he never returned my call. I wondered if he was ok, as it was not like him to not call back, but forgot to get back to him to try again.
Marlin was one of the generation of Tribal peoples who fought against incredible odds to take back their rightful place in America and especially the Pacific Northwest. He told me of the green cards that the State required for Tribal members to carry to prove that they could legally fish, and how people like himself would sneek around these outrages carried out by the powers in Olympia and elsewhere that wanted to keep them in poverty and shame. He told me that his grandmother insisted that he not speak the S’Klallam language, likely for fear of him being taken to one of the notorious boarding schools. It was a very real concern as we all have found out. But he told me he was sad that he was not taught the language of his ancestors.
I will miss not hearing his booming voice and his hearty laugh over coffee or out at the beach digging for clams. But he and the others of his generation have taken the Tribe to a point of leadership and strength; in its restoration of fishing and aquaculture in the area, the financial strength of their various enterprises and healthcare center that they open to the county residents and many other accomplishments.
Marlin will sorely missed by his family and tribe. It was an honor to have called him a friend.