Dungeness

by Polinsky, Karen;

  The beat of tough feet on hard earth went on and on. A plaintiff song stirred. I stood up and shuffled my feet. Hands, many hands, reached out for me and pulled me into the circle. I danced harder. Seya reached inside. I used my belly, arms, and legs to resist her but it was no use. She lifted me up and carried me outside. The red-hot glow inside the longhouse was extinguished by the cold emptiness. It was a clear night with stars.

  You might think that I was grateful to Seya for rescuing me before the spirit took over my body. Wrong. In-tranced, I was afraid of nothing; I felt I could do anything. For example, I might have torn open the little wooly dog, scooped out his heart, and consumed the grinding organ.

  “Let me go.” I resisted her until we arrived at our place in the village longhouse and she threw me down on my cedar mat. Retrieving the crucifix from in between her panting breasts, she asked Jesus to save me.

  From that moment on I rejected her, inside and out. Wrongly; I see that now. Back then I was not old enough to grasp how complex life really is.

  To receive one’s song, or spirit power, is to discover your place in the universe. One does not achieve this—or any lesson worth knowing—without pain. Seeking a tamanowas, or spirit power, is like agreeing to exist inside your own worst nightmare until you have vanquished it. To return to this world, you must subdue it. This takes skill, courage, and determination. Have you noticed that those who have learned how to handle their spirit power rarely succumb to anxious feelings or depression? That is because the mind, the body, and the spirit have been cleansed, and revitalized. The spirit power protects you, in your journey through this world and the next.

  12

  Siwash

  (c. 1886)

  When there was no real opportunity, I begged Carl to send me to school. After a while, I stopped asking. I had learned to love my freedom more.

  In the early 1880s the only school within reach was the Jamestown School, which had opened its doors to about thirty or so Native children in April of 1874. A decade or so later, enough white settlers were “proving up” claims to justify about half a dozen new schoolhouses, establishments with names like Lost Mountain, Bear Meadow, and Happy Valley. Carl had somehow managed to save up the cash to pay the fee at the new Burrowes School, two miles through the dark woods over a footpath with mossy dims.

  Up to that point I had been homeschooled. “Home fooled,” as Carl put it. At four and five, he used whatever dime novels were on hand to teach me to read. Page turners like The Pirate of the Gulf and Buck Taylor King of the Cowboys. A week or two after my seventh birthday I received a package from Swan—although off collecting in the Queen Charlotte Islands he had managed not to forget me—a copy of Little Women.

  Who knows how many times I read and re-read the cheap volume with the peeling cracked cardboard cover? True, I had never braided the mane of my show pony, sipped tea through a sugar cube, or fainted into my bodice. I had little idea how a person who looked like me, or anyone in my family, would fit into that fine and fusty world.

  On a hot morning in late August, Carl took me by the hand. More curious than afraid, very soon I was pulling him along. After a little while, we came upon the fresh-hewn school kneeling in a knoll.

  The Burrowes School, more like a barn, was named for the farmer-logger who donated the lumber. The name captured its dank darkness. My father bowed his head slightly under the vestibule.

  Adjusting to the brown light, I faced the class shyly. A dozen or so classmates, of both genders, of all ages, giggled. My sweater, too big and too warm, made me doddle like a fat duck. They pointed at my slippers, which they called moccasins, a Canadian Cree term, one that I had never heard before.

  The mistress of the school, Miss Susan Brown, peered at me through the spectacles straddling her needle nose. With a jerk of her salt and pepper bun, she declared, “Beads and other baubles are not proper for children at school.”

  Carl knuckled my shoulder. “I’ve paid the fee.” He scratched his sparse beard. “Why not? Are you afraid that she’ll turn out vain? Aren’t little girls supposed to be cute? So why strip her of her confidence?”

  Never before had it occurred to me that Carl was someone you might call a character. A speechless Miss Brown nodded and pointed at an empty desk in the center of the schoolhouse.

  As I made my way down the center aisle, a big boy in oily overalls whispered, “Siwash.”

  In Chinook, the local trade jargon created for commerce with the Bostons, the word meant savage. Here, white kids with no shoes considered themselves one cut above Indian or mixed-race brats in leather slippers. In Jamestown, of course the reverse was true. There, if an Indian kid looked white, she had better charge up her knuckles.

  I found my place next to a girl with plaited yellow hair. She wore a red blouse with buttons on the cuffs, a lambs-wool cardigan, a pleated skirt, and real leather shoes. I stared and stared. I couldn’t stop; I was sure that I had seen her before. It hit me. Here before me, the girl from the Royal Baking Powder tin.

  Sullenly she rejoined, “You smell.”

  Congenially I answered, “You smell.”

  I bathed a lot. I mean it. At daybreak we were dropped into the icy current of the Strait. When the sun was out we bathed in the evening too. My mother claimed her cruelty would protect us from illness. It did, mostly.

  In contrast, most white settlers bathed once a week at most. To compensate, their wives used copious amounts of powders and scents. One of the most costly perfumes, from ambergris, is gleaned from the intestines of whales. Indians deplore bottled scents, and, in general, considered white people unhygienic; therefore we pinched up our noses whenever we noticed a lady approaching. How astonished was I to see a yellow-haired girl react to me in the same way.

  Like all children we believed our teacher never left the schoolhouse. Without a doubt we knew she would go on teaching the same lesson day after day until the end of time, and never stop teaching until she breathed her last breathe. But at the end of my second year at the Burrowes School, the wholly unexpected: Holmgren’s wife suddenly passed on. For the sake of his three daughters and one son, our Miss Brown married and left us.

  Without delay a handful of parents hired a teacher for the fall term. She was twenty-five and highly qualified. Better still, she accepted the meager salary without qualms. After they sealed the deal, the eager committee discovered: her sister was Miss Laura Hall, the founder of a communitarian experiment in nearby Port Angeles. As such, Miss Delia Bright was marked as a dangerous radical. Well, wasn’t it true that in their own classrooms the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony had banned the use of the Bible? Without it, what was left? Darwin, Marx, and Freud? The socialist Eugene Debs? Worse, the suffragette Abigail Scott Duniway?

  Gasp! Upstanding citizens, sound the alarm: revolutionist in the schoolhouse.

  S’Klallam School at Jamestown near Dungeness, Washington, ca. 1905.

  S’Klallam group portrait inside the Shaker Church, Jamestown, ca. 1903.

  13

  Brave New World

  (1886-1900)

  At the turn of the century, white settlers on the Pacific Northwest Coast embarked on a series of communitarian experiments. The first, the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, inspired a radical trend. The utopian experiment in Port Angeles promised a culturally rich atmosphere, founded on equality, where workers would receive their due. Though white workers were treated with respect and women were allowed to fully participate, people of color—African Americans, Asians, and Natives—were kept out.

  Peter Peyto Good, a Harvard graduate who had visited a worker’s collective in Guise, France, introduced the concept. He arrived in Seattle to discuss the notion with a family relation Laura Hall. In the fall of 1886, at a series of events sponsored by the Knights of Labor, Good began to agitate against the Chinese miners and railway workers in order to whip up support for an all-white workers utopia. In November of that year he was arrested, charged with conspiracy against the federal governmen
t, and imprisoned for ten days. The following winter, perhaps as a result of the ill effects of his time in jail, he died suddenly.

  But his grand scheme did not. Seattle city attorney George Venable Smith, enthralled by Good’s maps and models of an ideal community for working men and their families, became the new spokesman for the cause. Laura Hall became editor of a newspaper created to articulate the goals of the worker-owned collective and to fend off attacks by those who considered the members dangerous radicals.

  The Puget Sound Cooperative Colony (PSCC) selected a site in Port Angeles, a fertile river valley with a deep harbor protected by a curved sandbar called Ediz Hook. Decades before, Port Angeles’ founder, entrepreneur Victor Smith, convinced the territorial government to remove the customs from the older and more established township of Port Townsend to this pre-platted city. In 1865 Smith drowned in a shipwreck, and the Custom’s House returned to Port Townsend. Without him, Victor Smith’s dream of a thriving farming, whaling, and logging town perished.

  Three decades later, PSCC introduced five hundred new citizens from as far east as Ohio and Chicago to this remote outpost on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Right off they built essential industries that would support their new lives on the edge of the wilderness: a sawmill, a brick factory, and a dairy. Later, the colony added a store and a hotel, a lecture hall and a library, and even an opera house.

  Already, the first wave of white settlers had removed a nearby S’Klallam village from the teeming shore to the far side of Ennis Creek. When this second wave arrived, the Natives provided fish, game, and other supplies. The utopian theorists blithely accepted these supplies while trespassing on the property of the local S’Klallam, without extending to them what they claimed were the basic rights of all workers.

  The original aim of the colony: to provide working men and their families with a secure future through the efficiency of their co-owned industries; however, profitable land speculation by PSCC, which began as a means to end, compete with the Cooperative’s more lofty goals. Everyday practical problems caused the leadership to overturn their principles, which led to the charge of hypocrisy, and riled up the community. For example, though the colony was supposed to be controlled by the workers, originally all eleven board members were well-educated social theorists. Eventually, men of more practical accomplishment replaced the board. Despite these changes, however, the experiment broke apart. In November of 1900, the last assets were sold at auction.

  Nevertheless, in the decade and a half that the utopia lasted, the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony had a lasting impact on the culture of the region. Early on, the community established equal rights for women, for example, on the PSCC board. Minerva E. Troy, the daughter of the colony physician, became one of the first women to make a run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Respect for women, independent thinking by laboring men, as well as commitment to the arts, continue to define Port Angeles today. Collaborative projects, for example the steamship Angeles and the West End Opera House, instilled a can-do attitude that is the legacy of the PSCC.

  In 1889, as the newest state in the union peered ahead to the turn-of-the-century, PSCC became the model for other social experiments in Washington. For example, the Equality Colony in Skagit County aimed to provide a working model of shared wealth that would eventually convert the entire nation to socialism. Though most did not linger long, utopian experiments such as the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony encouraged newcomers to think big when they imagined the region’s future. Another word for this: Hope.

  14

  Socialist in the Schoolhouse

  c. 1887

  When Delia Bright became our teacher at the Burrowes School, more than a few families bolted. I’d never met a Socialist, but it was common knowledge that their wiry hair concealed horns as their cloven footprints scorched the earth. I couldn’t wait.

  On that first day of the fall term I arrived early. The schoolhouse was empty, except for the wood cutout of a tall woman chalking tall letters on the fresh coat of bright green paint. Bustle wagging, she added a final dash of lightning to the quote that later on in class she ritually repeated, like a mantra.

  “All life is an experiment.”

  —Ralph W. Emerson

  She turned round.

  Miss Bright might be called handsome, though her features—enormous eyes, wide mouth–were too large for anything finer. Straddling her broad nose, a pair of urgent eyeglasses. Both her aspect and her personality were robust. Her mingled curls, trimmed around her big head, fitted her like a helmet. She had an incisive way of lifting up one delicate, feathery eyebrow—her eyebrows were her only feminine feature. When she spoke, her cheeks flushed with color. When she got excited, she sweated. A lot.

  Exactly two minutes before class commenced, Miss Bright rang a brass bell. For our first lesson, she ordered us into the cold gold of autumn, the Northwest’s finest season. She led us into the forest and stopped at the hollow stump of a Doug-fir to assign us a new task, and bend us to her will: this day, to trap insects. Our pulse ticking inside our cupped palms, we would carry the specimens back to the classroom to study them.

  Miss Brown had never allowed us to step outside during class except to use the outhouse or gather kindling. I guess she thought if she flung open the door and let the copper light and green rain pour in, we would all run away. If so, she would not have been wrong. Miss Bright knew how to stimulate our curiosity. She expected us to ask questions and learn, so we did.

  I wandered into a nearby glade and crouched down to examine a moldering swamp maple leaf, bigger than my head. I examined the bark of a winnowing alder, which newcomers from the East Coast sometimes mistake for a birch. Like a magician’s spotted hanky, the bark lifted up—and then, poof! Exploded into monarch butterflies.

  I clapped my hands, and then leaned in to observe the insect’s compound eyes calculating my wherewithal. The satiny black body covered with white dots tickled my palm. Exhilarated, I stiffly walked back to the schoolhouse.

  “Oh, oh!” exclaimed the perspiring Bright.

  Miss Bright shared one or two facts as she wedged into my fist a hanky treated with ether. “The caterpillar stage of the monarch has eyes at both extremities,” she remarked. She pointed out that for a predator the marking would resemble the eyes of an angry bird. This adaptation, as she called it, protected the butterfly in its migratory journey of over two thousand miles to Mexico.

  I pinned my specimen to the plank and painstakingly penned a label:

  Danaus plexippus

  How many butterflies can one fit on the head of a pin? At first I felt happy and proud; by transforming the luminous creature with wooly feet into an artifact, I had joined the ranks of well-known Western naturalists like Lewis and Meares.

  And Swan.

  I drew back.

  I had murdered an exquisite child of nature, but it was not only that. By stapling it to the two-dimensional plank, I had trapped its spirit, thus preventing it from crossing over. This is what men of pure science do: trapped in their two-dimensional view, they pin themselves to the wall until their wriggling souls expire. Acidic tears burnt my eyes.

  This was not heaven. The dead butterfly had become as two-dimensional as paper. What had I done? I was a murderer. The dead butterfly raised its forelegs and began to sing lugubriously.

  In Miss Bright’s schoolhouse, we studied all subjects: science, mathematics, and literature. She drew us into the tales and journals of the Transcendentalist writers of New England. History became the art of storytelling. Many of us had grandparents or parents who had not been born in this country. As the cold rains began and the days darkened, Miss Bright asked, “How does your family celebrate Christmas?”

  One eve, as I sat on a mat near the fire, fashioning a doll for Charley out of scraps, I put the question to my father, who was smoking a pipe in his rocking chair. He smoked, and reminisced, sharing memories of boyhood Christmases in far, far-away Norway. He described the celebration of S
t. Nicolas, which featured a Christmas tree with lights, marzipan, butter cake with strawberries and cream, and coins and candy hidden inside tiny shoes placed outside the door the night before. In lieu of a colorful festival of plenty, from my perspective, a dream.

  Next to the fire, Seya, in the spindly chair, cradled Julia, two years old. She listened without speaking as my father recollected the fishing village of his youth. On this particular eve I didn’t ask her to describe our S’Klallam traditions—for example, the traditional potlatch. Some part of me also knew that, even in the schoolhouse of Miss Bright, there could be no mention of feasting, the bone game, tug-o’-war, barefoot dancers, and epic speeches. Native rituals were likely to be seen as savage or pagan, even inside Miss Bright’s radical classroom.

  I asked Carl, “How old were you when you left home?”

  “Eleven. ’Bout the same as you are now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I set off after my father died. He drowned fishing. I was the oldest. I decided I could do better on my own.”

  What, leave home? “How?”

  He coughed a little, and began.

  15

  Carl’s Tale: Norway, Away!

  c. 1836

  I was not quite eleven. One eve, after school—me and the young gents—had a smoke. We philosophized and rhymed until day climbed into night.

  In Norway, in wintertime, the daylight lasts less than a minute. I looked up at the sky. The night winked like quicksilver. For one instant I felt a flicker of my father in that North Sea of stars.

  When I got home that night, my mother scolded me, unremittingly and without mercy. When my father died fishing, I never shed a tear. Now, just listening to her—the defeat in her voice—made me want to cry. Instead, I laughed.