Cecelia Svinth Carpenter

Hope Cecelia Svinth Carpenter (September 2, 1924 – June 25, 2010) was the first historian to write in detail about the Nisqually people. As a Tacoma, Washington schoolteacher and enrolled member of the Nisqually tribe, when Carpenter discovered that her students' history books provided an inaccurate relation of the history of native people, she began researching and writing the tribe's history to set the record straight.

Carpenter's expertise in writing and disseminating the history of the Nisqually people as a record of and supplement to their rich traditional oral history earned her the office of Nisqually tribal historian, chief consultant on Indian history for the permanent exhibit of the Washington State Historical Society, and curator of the society's Remembering Medicine Creek exhibit at the Washington State History Museum. At age 17, she married Marvin G. Carpenter and began raising a family. the Pacific Lutheran University Distinguished Alumnus Award for achievement of professional distinction through sustained dedication and service in 1994, a Murray Morgan award from the Tacoma Historical Society in 1994, and the Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History in 2003.

Selected works The Troubled Waters of Medicine Creek : An Investigation into the Nature of the Fishing Rights Arising from the Medicine Creek Indian Treaty of 1854 (Thesis, Pacific Lutheran University, 1971) They Walked Before : The Indians of Washington State (1977) How to Research American Indian Blood Lines : A Manual on Indian Genealogical Research (1984) Fort Nisqually : A Documented History of Indian and British Interaction (1986) Leschi : Last Chief of the Nisquallies (1986) Where the Waters Begin : The Traditional Nisqually Indian History of Mount Rainier (1994) The Treaties, The Councils & The Reservation (Washington State Capital Museum, 1992) The Seasonal Round of Life in Traditional Times (Washington State Capital Museum, 1992) Tears of Internment : The Indian History of Fox Island and the Puget Sound Indian War (1996) The Nisqually—My People : The Traditional and Transitional History of the Nisqually Indian People (2002) Remembering Medicine Creek: The Story of the First Treaty Signed in Washington, with Maria Pascually (2005) Stolen Lands : The Story of the Dispossessed Nisquallies (2007) Nisqually Indian Tribe (2008)