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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

School Rekindles Spirit Of Indian Longhouse Puget Sound Children To Attend Building Built In Wake Of Floods

Associated Press

Two years after flooding on the Nisqually River washed away most of the Wa He Lut School, there is a new one in its place - an 18,000-square-foot showpiece that suggests an American Indian longhouse.

Fifty-four students from 20 south Puget Sound tribes will attend classes in the $4 million school, which has a computer room, a playground and a three-story-high commons looking out over the river.

“After the flood, we all agreed to rekindle the spirit of the Indian longhouse, which allows for no bitterness about the past,” said Tom Keefe, a former superintendent of the school.

“Now the challenge for Franks Landing is to put that longhouse spirit into the new building.”

The old Wa He Lut School was a jumble of trailers and temporary buildings on a site provided 25 years ago by neighboring Fort Lewis.

It is a small school with no formal connection to a particular tribe, and it has been run largely by fishing rights activist Billy Frank and his family.

Tax-free cigarette sales at a smoke shop up the road helped build the school.

When the rains of February 1996 came, the Nisqually River was filled to overflowing. A huge water release from the Alder Dam swept pine and cedar trees downstream to the bend at Franks Landing, flattening everything in the floodpath including a half-dozen homes and most of the Wa He Lut School.

“There was nothing left except the gym,” Frank said in an interview with The Seattle Times. “I was motoring around here in my boat. There were logs piled everywhere. It was bad, real bad.”

The Frank family wanted to rebuild and knew it would take more than cigarette money to do it. So they contacted U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.

Gorton contends that some Indian “rights” extend beyond the treaties of last century. But education is not a special right, “it’s a universal right,” he said.

As a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Gorton saw to it that the Wa He Lut School was elevated on the list of federal priorities.

In addition to Gorton’s assistance, the Clinton administration cut through the bureaucratic red tape, allowing the school to be rebuilt in less than a year - compared with a normal schedule of five years.