The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe signed a treaty with the US government in 1855 that ceded the vast majority of their historic territories but left them rights to access traditional food sources, especially fish. But for years the Washington state government didn’t honor those rights, leading to large-scale protests during the civil rights era by the S’Klallam (whose historical name means “the strong people”) and other tribes. Finally, thanks to a landmark 1974 decision in a federal lawsuit, the federal government compelled the state to recognize them.
“Growing up as I did in a Native American community, I was aware of the struggle that my community had gone through to have their rights vindicated,” Jones says. That history left him with a “deep sense of justice,” which is part of what pushed him toward law as an adult.
These days, he practices a unique combination of Native law and patent law, the latter of which draws from his background as a mechanical engineering student at MIT and his “tendency to tinker.” Though his two primary practice areas remain largely separate, his willingness to follow his passions as a young man set him on the path that allows him to do both.
As a teenager, when Jones wasn’t on the beach, he was learning to play electric guitar—or learning how to take one apart. While other kids his age might have focused on memorizing chords, he found himself more interested in how the instrument worked, trying to understand circuit diagrams and the role of the potentiometer, the electrical component that helps make volume knobs work. That helped him land at the Summer Science Program at New Mexico Tech, just south of Albuquerque, before his senior year of high school.
The program, which focused on astrophysics, helped set the stage for Jones’s next step. “It felt like the first time that I was around kids who had similar interests to mine,” he says. He loved the atmosphere, and the experience convinced him to apply to MIT, where he enrolled a year later.
The move from Port Gamble to Cambridge was tough at times—there was the culture shock of transitioning from the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast and from life in a rural community to one near a bustling metropolis like Boston, not to mention the relative lack of Native students and faculty on campus and the challenging academics. “It was not an easy adjustment, but I learned a lot from it,” Jones says. “It was invigorating in many ways, and challenging for many of the same reasons.”
COURTESY OF ANTHONY JONES
COURTESY OF ANTHONY JONES
As he found his footing, he also began to find outlets for his diverse skills. He remembers hands-on classes, like a robotics competition course, as highlights that let him indulge his innate curiosity. Jones was also part of the first class to complete the undergraduate business minor that the Sloan School of Management had just started offering.
“It was very different from the STEM stuff I was studying in my major program—counterbalancing the technology focus with more of a human focus. It was about understanding negotiation and how businesses operate,” he says. “I enjoyed that quite a bit.”