Google Doodle honors Hank Adams, PNW hero for Native rights

If you went on Google’s homepage Thursday, you may have seen a face you recognized.

Thursday’s Google Doodle featured an illustration of Hank Adams, a nationally celebrated historian and strategist who fought for the rights of Native Americans in the Northwest and beyond.

Bellingham-based artist Natasha Donovan, who is Métis — a recognized Canadian aboriginal people with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry — drew the illustration, which depicts Adam speaking next to fishermen on a river under a sunset.

Thursday would have been Adams’ 81st birthday. He died in 2020 in Olympia.

“Adams is widely considered one of the most influential activists in U.S. history for his work forging a relationship between Native American communities and the U.S. government,” Google said on its Google Doodle webpage.

Called “the most important Indian” in the U.S. by the historian Vine Deloria, Adams helped shape many of the key historic events in Indian Country including the Fish Wars in the Pacific Northwest.

Adams was a strategist fighting for recognition of Native Americans’ fishing rights, reserved in their treaties, even as Washington state game wardens jailed, fined and beat a generation of fishing rights activists.

Adams also negotiated peaceful ends to some of the most dangerous standoffs in modern Indian history, including negotiations with the Nixon White House to resolve the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., by tribal activists in 1972, and a 10-week siege of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973.

Born in Wolf Point, Mont., Adams moved to Washington state with his family after World War II.

In a Q&A with Google, Donovan said she met virtually with some members of Adams’ family before making the illustration. She said she drew a lot of inspiration from the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

“Hank Adams played an important role in facilitating Indigenous management of natural resources and ecosystems, so I wanted to try to reflect that in the art,” Donovan said.

Seattle Times staff reporter Lynda V. Mapes contributed to this report.