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the catalyst 239Three young ladies come walking from the other way. They got 20 or30 feet from us and they said, “Oh my god! That’s Billy Frank!” Andthey’re jumping up and down, screaming, running up and throwingtheir arms around him. Billy, of course, is returning the hugs. We getdone with that and walk on.“Billy, who was that?”“I don’t know.”Billy keeps close friends in high places, like Dan Inouye, an influentialU.S. senator from Hawaii. Inouye is convinced Billy helpedturn around the stereotype of Native Americans in Washington, D.C.“If he’d been born 150 years ago, he’d be a chief,” the senator says.Early on in a twenty-year friendship, Inouye climbed cautiouslyinto a boat on the Nisqually River with the elder for an excursionacross Pacific Northwest Indian Country. Plenty of differences stoodbetween them. Billy is open, Inyoue reserved. The senator is notsomeone who warms easily upon introduction, clarifies Patricia Zell,a friend of both men. But he responded immediately to Billy, afterobserving him at a private dinner party with Warren Magnuson.Because Inouye sacrificed a limb on a battlefield during the SecondWorld War, he worried that day in the boat. His one arm could havethrown him off balance. But the new chairman of the U.S. SenateCommittee on Indian Affairs gave Billy undivided attention, as theyvisited tribal reservations of the Makah, Nisqually, and Yakama. “Youneed to accept gifts. I don’t care what the ethics rules say,” Billy toldInouye. The Nisqually then related his anger over the fish wars, theincessant fighting for every scrap, and the jail time.Inouye made more than a dozen trips to Washington State in themidst of one of the century’s largest land agreements with an Indiantribe. In the sweeping Puyallup Land Claims Settlement Act brokeredin the late eighties, tribal members gave up claims to prime real estatein Tacoma in exchange for a $162 million dollar settlement.