Tulalip, From My Heart
TULALIP
From My Heart
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT
OF A RESERVATION COMMUNITY
Harriette Shelton Dover
Edited and Introduced by
Darleen Fitzpatrick
Foreword by
Wayne Williams
Tulalip, From My Heart is published with the assistance of a grant from the NAOMI B. PASCAL EDITOR’S ENDOWMENT, supported through the generosity of Janet and John Creighton, Patti Knowles, Mary McLellan Williams, and other donors.
© 2013 by the University of Washington Press
First paperback edition 2015
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in Minion, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Unless otherwise noted, the illustrations in the book are from Harriette Dover’s personal collection.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dover, Harriette Shelton, 1904–1991.
Tulalip, from my heart : an autobiographical account of a reservation community / Harriette Shelton Dover ; edited and introduced by Darleen Fitzpatrick ; with a foreword by Wayne Williams.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-295-99541-0 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Dover, Harriette Shelton, 1904–1991. 2. Tulalip Indians—Kings and rulers—Biography. 3. Indian women—Washington (State)—Tulalip Indian Reservation—Biography. 4. Tulalip Indian School (Wash.)—History. 5. Tulalip Tribes of the Tulalip Reservation, Washington—History. 6. Tulalip Indian Reservation (Wash.)—History. 7. Tulalip Indian Reservation (Wash.) Social life and customs. I. Title.
E99.T87D68 2014 979.7'7100497940092—dc23 [B] 2013004569
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.∞
To My Ancestors
They always spoke about the long, long time ago—a time so
far, so far gone that we are looking at it through a mist or a
fog. It is our time when we were on this earth. We have been
here for a long, long time. We have always been here.
Contents
Foreword by Wayne Williams
Introduction by Darleen Fitzpatrick
Phonological Key
Prologue: A Sense of Place
1 / Treaty Time, 1855
2 / Settling on the Reservation
3 / Finding Work in the Early Days
4 / First Memories of White People
5 / Remember (What We Told You)
6 / The Tulalip Indian Boarding School
7 / Treaty Rights Are Like a Drumbeat
8 / Public School and Marriage, 1922 to 1926
9 / Political and Social Conditions
10 / Legacy
11 / Seeing the World
Appendix: The Tulalip Indian School Schedule
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Wayne Williams
GRANNY, my mother Harriette Dover, was fiercely proud of being Indian. She spoke of things driving her life. She always wanted to write a book about Tulalip but she was a procrastinator. Some years ago she met and became friends with Carol Harkins, who is a local social activist. One day my mother made the comment that she had always wanted to go to college and that her parents had encouraged her to do so. While attending Everett High School, after finishing Tulalip Indian Boarding School, she took all the required courses to qualify for college entrance. Carol responded, “You can go now!” My mother said she was too old (she was seventy-two years old). Carol said, “Oh no, there are older people now going to college.” Next my mother objected that she couldn’t afford to pay the costs and had no way of getting to Everett, where the local community college is located. Again Carol had the solution. She would seek funding from the tribe—which has a scholarship program for its members—and she would drive my mother to school every day. Finally, unable to find a valid excuse and after thinking about it, my mother said yes. Carol applied to the tribe for funding and in 1976 helped my mother enroll at Everett Community College.
My mother enjoyed her classes very much, especially anthropology taught by Darleen Fitzpatrick. The class dealing with the Northwest Coast Indians was most enjoyable, as it allowed my mother to offer comments about the class material, such as agreeing or disagreeing or talking about local customs, and so on. Rather than be annoyed by one of her students offering such comments, Darleen was pleased, as it added to the class.
As time went by, Darleen began to think about trying to save the information that my mother was offering. After pondering the matter, Darleen discussed it with my mother and they began a relationship that endured until my mother’s death in 1991. In a sense it is still continuing today. After discussing the book with the University of Washington Press in Seattle, Darleen submitted the manuscript for review. After much disappointment, happiness, delay, and hard work, the material was revised and resubmitted and, lo and behold, the manuscript was accepted.
I cannot say enough about the tremendous amount of work that Darleen has expended in this effort. I and the readers will be eternally grateful for her unstinting courage and determination to see the project through to its conclusion. Thank you, Darleen.
Introduction
Darleen Fitzpatrick
FRIDAY afternoon. Driving west on Marine Drive N.E., the Washington highway that intersects the Tulalip Indian reservation, I remember Harriette Shelton Dover’s comment, “Isn’t that a classy address?” Soon after passing the turn to Totem Beach, where the tribal offices and the community house are, I turn right, away from a descending sun, at the unpaved driveway to the little blue house. Mrs. Dover is hard of hearing, but she eventually hears me knocking and opens the back door to let me in. Sometimes she says, “Oh, is it Friday already?” Or she says, teasingly, that she has not thought much about what to say next. Then she sits down on the couch in her living room, facing the highway beyond, and gives another brilliant narrative.
Once a week, from 1981 to 1983, we tape-recorded her narratives about her life as a Snohomish Indian and what she knew about Tulalip Reservation history. Our relationship was unusual since it was not the classic anthropologist-Native collaboration. I did not interview her. I was not doing a study of her or of Tulalip. She had a lifelong ambition to write a history of the Tulalip Indian Reservation, with her own life as a base, and I offered to help her.
Harriette Shelton Dover was a Snohomish elder from an eminent family. She was born on the Tulalip Reservation at Mission Beach, Tulalip Bay, on November 19, 1904. The Tulalip Reservation is near Marysville, Washington. It was named for a distinctive bay located in the midst of Snohomish tribal territory. Tulalip Tribes are organized as a political confederation that includes Snohomish, Skykomish, Snoqualmie, and other tribes who are successors to the tribes that signed the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855 on the beach at Mukilteo near Everett. The other tribes include Sauk-Suiattle, Kikiallus, Skagit, Duwamish, Puyallup, and Stillaguamish—peoples who moved there as a result of marriage or because Tulalip was initially set aside as a reservation for all of the sig
natory tribes of the Treaty of Point Elliott. As a result, Mrs. Dover’s autobiographical account and history of the Tulalip Reservation includes Snohomish tribal history and culture, since those traditions and beliefs are confounded with the Tulalip Tribes’ history.
Her parents, William and Ruth Shelton, were descendants of important leaders.1 They were from different tribes, but each was considered knowledgeable about the Snohomish and Tulalip (Shelton 1914, 1923; Maryott and Shelton 1938; Hilbert 1995). William Steshail, her father’s uncle, was a signer of the treaty. Wheakadim, her paternal grandfather, was present at the signing as a teenager. Their eyewitness accounts, and those of other relatives and friends, were discussed during family dinners and gatherings through the years as both family and tribal history. Unfortunately, the accounts of Native people who witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott have not been the subject of scholarly history.
Throughout her life, Mrs. Dover talked with elders from other reservations about their life experiences after the treaties were signed. Over the years, in what amounted to a lifelong research project, she collected documents and photographs pertinent to Tulalip history and did archival research. As she points out in her Prologue, her life spanned a long and important period in the history of the Tulalip Tribes and her own people regard her as an expert.
William Shelton, Harriette Dover’s father, and Robert, her brother, were leaders who made a difference on the Tulalip Reservation. After their deaths, Mrs. Dover took their places in dealing with civic, political, and educational issues within the Tribes and with the public. She was elected to the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors, their governing body, and served from 1938 to 1942, 1944 to 1946, and 1950 to 1951. She was the chair for one year in 1945 and was the first Indian woman in the state of Washington to be elected to that position. She served as a tribal judge in 1951 and followed her father in serving as a tribal broker between the Tulalip Tribes and the local non-Indian community. She served on the Marysville School Board, was a teacher’s aide and a lecturer on American Indian cultures, and in her home hosted members of civic and church groups who met with her to discuss tribal issues. She was a member of the Seattle Historical Society, and she provided elder testimony for United States v. Washington, Phase One (1973), a salmon fishing rights case. Until 1980 she served as Democratic precinct chair in the Mission Beach area. She was well known in Democratic circles in Washington State, as well as by the public in the Marysville and Everett areas.
Mrs. Dover believed her life was typical of other tribal members and a measure of Tulalip Reservation history. Because they embody tribal or ethnic history, American Indian autobiographies have contributed to our national history for many years.2 Mrs. Dover’s story contributes to our knowledge of Northwest history because it recounts the social, political, and religious matters the tribes faced after they signed the treaties and were dispersed from their villages and confined to reservations. She pulls no punches. We have an opportunity to understand Indian people better when we know more about what happened to them from their point of view.3
In the Prologue, Mrs. Dover establishes an important link among legends, prophecy, and history, which is mentioned by other writers on American Indian cultures but which needs to be emphasized.4 She cites a legend about the adventures of a culture hero, Letskaydim, in Tulalip Bay that establishes how long the Snohomish have lived in the area, provides a sense of time that is immemorial, and demonstrates that the Snohomish have an enduring loyalty to and first possession of places that others now also occupy. Value of the homeland and its various domains is often emphasized in American Indian historical narratives (e.g., Momaday 1969; Ortiz 1977; J. Martin 2000). We learn here what it means to have a sense of place.
The Prologue also sets the tone for the role that Snohomish, her native language, played in her life, her identity, and her cultural milieu. She learned to deal with her world through her language and culture. Here, and throughout the early chapters of her narrative, she uses Snohomish linguistic terms and concepts to explain and illustrate, to make a special point, or to teach us about Native culture, since the entire area is “one great kin group” (Elmendorf 1960:49). She referred to her native language as “Snohomish” instead of using the term “Lushootseed” that is in use today; her mother, however, did refer to the Snohomish language as Lushootseed, or dxwləšucid (Hilbert 1995). Snohomish is a dialect of the Lushootseed language that is spoken by tribes in the Puget Sound area, from the Nooksak River to the Nisqually River (Bates et al. 1994).
The first several chapters of her narrative cover the 1855 signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott by tribal leaders and government officials, the settlement upon the reservation after the treaty was ratified in 1859, efforts of tribal members to find work, some of the members’ first experiences with white people, and childhood remembrances, especially of the grandmothers.
In her presentation of the treaty signing, Mrs. Dover tells us about the meetings the Snohomish held in their villages to discuss the signing, and about the speakers who supported the signing and others who opposed it. She describes the order in which the tribes sat on the beach at Mukilteo as they listened to the reading of the clauses of the treaty. Then, unlike Gibbs's account (1877), she explains that John Taylor, a Snohomish tribal member and a signer, translated the treaty from Chinook Jargon into his native language. Three other chiefs assisted him in translating the treaty for the people in their own languages (Duwamish et al. 1927; Snyder 1964; Hilbert 1995).
We learn what it was like for Snohomish and other tribal members to leave their villages on the mainland and on Hat, Camano, and Whidbey islands and settle around Tulalip Bay. Mrs. Dover develops a variety of themes pertinent to the physical and socioeconomic conditions they faced. There was not enough fresh water for such a large population to live around the bay. The wild foods available from fishing, hunting, and collecting in the smaller territory were not enough to sustain them. Their economy began to change. As a result of federal policy, they were not allowed to build the large cedar-plank dwellings that once served as their winter residences. They were not allowed to build large community or potlatch houses. As time went on, they could not practice their native religions or ceremonies because the federal government forbade them. They were expected to make a living as farmers.
Their first memories of white people provide insights into the feelings and impressions that were generated during the early days of contact and demonstrate just how vivid family stories can be. Grandfather Wheakadim, who witnessed the treaty signing as an eighteen year old, worked in Nisqually for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He made a memorable trip to San Francisco to help deliver a herd of sheep. Mrs. Dover also tells us about her first impressions of white people, especially about their light-colored eyes. She wondered if they could see with them.
Mrs. Dover was an educated woman. The story of the dual educational institutions that were the heritage of Mrs. Dover’s generation is fascinating material. She tells of grandmothers, parents, the Catholic fathers, and the government boarding school employees, and what it was like for a child to learn three religions and two languages. She spent ten months of each year and ten years of her life boarding at the Tulalip Indian School.
The Tulalip Indian School, as Mrs. Dover knew it, is the subject of her longest chapter (chapter 6). She mentions the school elsewhere in the text, too, because her experiences there had such a profound impact upon her. On a typical day, her discourse was laced with statements of regret and enmity about those years of her life. A scholarly literature on the federal boarding schools is developing.5
Her high school years occurred during the “flapper era” in America and during World War I. She wanted short hair. She wanted a silk dress and high heels. What did her parents, brother, and grandmothers want for her? She was sent to Everett High School, where she majored in science, instead of to Marysville, where her brother Robert had graduated. He wanted her to avoid the racial prejudices that he had experienced in Mary
sville. Today, Tulalip young people can choose to attend reservation elementary schools, such as Quilceda or Heritage, or the schools in Marysville, and there are meaningful youth groups, such as the Canoe Family and the Boys and Girls Club, that they can participate in.
Robert Shelton was an important influence in her life. He was for a time her eighth-grade teacher in the boarding school. She tells how he taught the students to be more aware of the world beyond the reservation and of what he and other Tulalip young men experienced when they were drafted into World War I (before federal legislation was passed in 1924 to allow American Indians to be citizens of the United States).
Robert and their father, William Shelton, founded the Tulalip Improvement Club in order to petition the federal government for rights they believed were granted in the treaty. At that time, according to Bureau of Indian Affairs regulations, Indian people were not supposed to meet for political purposes. Certainly, a meeting to discuss treaty rights would not be regarded by the BIA as a commendable or even a legitimate undertaking. Mrs. Dover said her brother remarked, “How can they quarrel with us if we say we are meeting to improve ourselves?” They met. They discussed their gardens and orchards, their lost lands, unemployment, and health conditions. They expressed concern about the changes that were occurring in the traditional culture and in their relations with one another. Later, out of their efforts came an organization known as the Northwest Federation of Indians and the landmark (but unsuccessful) federal court case known as Duwamish et al. v. United States of America (1927), which sought the return of land and the implementation of fishing rights that the tribes believed were accorded them in the treaty.
Mrs. Dover tells us about the socioeconomic conditions that were her people’s legacy as she and her contemporaries sought work. She does not say they sought jobs. Over the years, the socioeconomic conditions on the Tulalip Reservation have been desperate. They are better today because of improved services and sources of employment that the Tribes can now offer their members as a result of their own tribal health, bingo, casino, Quilceda Business Park, and other business operations. During the 1980s and 1990s, unemployment was at 43 percent and in 2010 it was in the teens, though it is still higher than non-Indian unemployment in the state of Washington, however.
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