As the narration takes us deeper into her life, Mrs. Dover reveals how her political consciousness and keen sense of injustice developed as she listened to the elders discuss the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott. Then, during World War I, her point of view widened due to her brother’s influence. Beginning early in the narrative, we are witness to a stunning presentation of race relations—from treaty times to the present—featuring the political, social, and spiritual legacies involved in finding work, fighting in the nation’s wars, fishing rights, freedom of religion, building a tribal community house, the revival of the salmon ceremony, and other spiritual issues. For example, she reveals a fact unknown in the anthropological literature: that the Coast Salish—as the tribes in Puget Sound are known to linguists and anthropologists—believe in a deity. Their traditional religions are not based solely on the guardian or spirit-power complex. Spirituality is one legacy of the Tulalip Tribes. Mrs. Dover approaches these topics through the lens of how her grandparents, parents, and she herself saw their world. As a result, the cultural milieu in which she lived comes through clearly. It was through her native language and culture that she first learned to deal with her world. As an adult, she functioned very well in non-Indian settings. She had many lifelong friends who were white—especially from her high school years—but I think they remained partly alien to her. She had a special way of referring to “the white people” in a scolding tone of voice that could have been a bit unnerving to anyone who was not aware of the historical and social contexts of her remark. She clearly realized that the keys to dealing with white people were to dress as they did and be educated in their schools, but her ethnic identity was Snohomish Indian.
As we learn about Mrs. Dover’s life, the personal dimension is pervasive. As a child she learned her tribe’s language and culture at home, but learned another language and two additional religions in the traumatic setting of the boarding school. Her first marriage was a disappointment. Her second marriage was controversial. She raised two sons who were a generation apart. The deaths of her sister (from tuberculosis) as a teenager, her brother as a young man, her father, who was her best friend, and her mother as an elderly woman, all had a profound impact upon her. She took on political and civic responsibilities and fought the ever-present battle of race relations. We learn that she was an outspoken person who could be vituperative at times. Even though her narrative is tinged with wit and humor, it is occasionally ironic and bitter. She was warm, generous, and intelligent and as proud and firm as an executive who thrived on politics. She cared very much about young people and liked to be in their presence.
Editing the Dover Narrative
In the world of Harriette Shelton Dover, I was her former instructor, project assistant, and then editor. Somewhere in that mix we became friends. We began work on her manuscript on April 6, 1981, and taped her narratives until the spring of 1983. Then, before us were the review and editorial processes.
On the first day, I looked over what she had written thus far on her own, and we discussed a title and what she wanted the manuscript to include. We also discussed who her audience would be. She was aware that her audience was diverse; it included her own family, tribal members, the Indian and non-Indian public, and scholars. She felt that her background and experiences provided people in these groups with a unique opportunity, which they otherwise would not have, to learn about Tulalip history and Snohomish culture. Lastly, I assembled a table of contents with topical chapter headings that we aspired to use as an outline as she narrated the text. Her proposed title for the book was “Marching on to Victory.”6
We decided she would narrate into a tape recorder because her health was poor at the time and because she had already successfully taped a life history narrative for Lawrence Ryggs’s 1977 master’s thesis. She was clearly comfortable working within a narrative medium. As we proceeded, she expressed at least three organizational principles: that the role of her native language was important in thought and expression, that the text should be organized by whatever topic was being discussed not by a chronological sequence of events, and that it was natural for her to speak in long, discursive sentences. As a result, we learn that the Snohomish oratorical style is to begin speaking about a topic, develop that topic wherever it carries us, and then return to the topic.
When we finished taping her material to her satisfaction, we worked on the photographs she had collected over the years. They were lying unsorted on a card table. I ran the tape recorder as we discussed them, and she added information, such as her grandmother’s Indian name. She then selected the photographs she wanted to use in the text.
My initial role was as a facilitator—someone to run the tape recorder and help to organize the material. I should mention that I was familiar with the Tulalip Reservation; my study of the Indian Shaker religion began there. Martha Lamont, the Indian Shaker minister at the time, whom I interviewed extensively, as well as other elders, taught me that an interview should be a cordial, respectful visit. She said to me at the outset that if an interview was worth doing—that is, if my asking her questions about her religion was important—then I could remember what she said to me. She meant that there would be no note-taking. It turned out she was right. I could remember, eventually, as much as three hours of discussion. At the same time, I still hurried home to type it up.
As I listened to Mrs. Dover discuss Tulalip life stories, the annual rounds to collect the foods that sustained the people, and other areas of daily life on the reservation, the context she provided was helpful to me later when I did research and gave testimony for Tulalip Fisheries for United States v. Washington, Phase Two. In addition, over the years many students from Tulalip have taken my Everett Community College course on Northwest Coast Native cultures.
My role as editor developed gradually, after the narratives were typed up as transcripts and Mrs. Dover was not well enough to work on them. She did, however, work on the first one and made a few changes in her own handwriting. She said that we had done the narratives just in time. Her health was failing. She had fallen in the kitchen and broken her hip. When the manuscript was assembled in 1984, I read it back to her in a nursing home in Marysville, where she had become a resident, before I submitted it for review and publication.
When we received the text back from the review process, I was asked to make several changes. Paramount among the suggestions was to make the narrative chronological. I had feared this would happen. Editors of American Indian autobiographical texts have almost always been asked to remove repetition and to order the material chronologically; the only Native author who was not required to do so was the novelist N. Scott Momaday (Brumble 1988:11).
The structure that Mrs. Dover and I had agreed upon for the text was chronological in its overall sense, since she started with a Snohomish legend about prehistory then moved into treaty time, and so on, but the basic organization was not chronological; it was topical. For example, in chapter 2, she discusses how their way of life changed when they moved to Tulalip Bay to live and work, from 1859 to the early 1980s. Then, in chapter 3, she discusses the arrival of the Catholic fathers in the Northwest in about 1838.
Sarris, who published a biography about Mabel McKay, a Pomo basket weaver, points out that Native people view history topically, not chronologically (1993a:99). It is necessary for them to reach back in time as they proceed from topic to topic. They use the past to comment on present events and they use repetition to help their audience remember what they are saying. In other words, a chronological order happens within each topic of the narrative but it is not an organizing scheme for the entire work. The organizing principle is of interest in covering the details in each of the topics as they are discussed. As Mrs. Dover spoke about a particular topic, it seemed necessary on occasion to refer back to a previous time period in order to make a special point. The past is a touchstone, a point of reference, or a place of embarkation. Time forms a spiral as the narrator refers to the past and proceeds
on, again refers to the past and proceeds on, as the topics under discussion are developed or elaborated upon.
After Mrs. Dover, her son Wayne Williams, and I discussed the reviewers’ reports, she directed me to arrange her material chronologically because non-Indian readers would be better able to follow it. It did no significant harm to the text. However, chapters 7, 8, and 11 do not follow an explicitly chronological sequence, since doing so would disrupt the parallel layers of those chapters. These chapters cover Harriette Dover’s last years in the boarding school, her high school years, and her brother’s World War I experiences. In chapter 11, the last chapter, she narrates a vision/dream she experienced in her twenties, in which she received a song from a deceased paternal Skykomish great-grandmother that dovetails structurally with the legend she tells in the Prologue. Thus, chapter 11 retains the authentic order in which it was narrated.
Time is important in this text. The past, after all, speaks to who you are. Mrs. Dover refers to the legends about ancient times, and she tells us about the prophecy that warned the tribes that they would be invaded and changed by newcomers to the area. She wants us to know her people’s history as they lived it, since events of the past participate in the lives of modern-day Tulalip peoples. Grandmothers are mentioned frequently because they are important sources of loving kindness and they are the perpetuators of tradition. When your life is guided by tradition, it is the elders’ voices that tell you your history.
Mrs. Dover spoke much of the time in long, discursive sentences, in keeping with the oral tradition of her tribal background. When an oral text is in written form, as in a transcript, the first task is to divide the stream of speech into sentences. Decisions have to be made about where to place periods and other punctuation marks. I experimented with her to see if she liked long or short sentences and found, not surprisingly, that she greatly disliked short sentences. I imagine that the longer sentences are, again, an oratorical style and sound explanatory and gracious, whereas shorter sentences are blunt or abrupt and might sound demanding. By the same token, she preferred the passive voice in English to the active voice, and she made the latter a cultural issue since to her the active voice sounded like someone giving orders; it was too direct.
One of my goals for this text from the beginning has been to retain the voice of Harriette Dover. In other words, the text should sound like her talking to the people who knew her. Her narrations were warm but formal, not informal, conversations, and it did not seem appropriate to shorten or change the sentences or to polish the text to make it sound more literary or academic. Harriette Dover spoke grammatically, and she did not have an accent. Oratorical and written styles are not all that different, since both the voice and the hand belong to the author. Wiget (1994) affirms that a narrative style is a prose style. What seems like right or wrong may actually be an ethnocentric reaction to a text. Greg Sarris (1993a) advises us to “let the text speak for itself.”
Krupat (1985), Brumble (1988), and others call for editors of oral histories or autobiographical texts narrated by Natives to explain how they edited the texts. I understand their concern, but since I did not interview Harriette Dover, my influence was indirect. She was not my subject. My role was more that of a copyeditor. I supplied all of the punctuation, gave titles to chapters and subject headings, added two sentences in the Prologue and chapter 1 (with Mrs. Dover’s permission), added explanatory footnotes to help the diverse audiences, and drafted the maps. I also did library research in ethnohistory because she had her heart set on the University of Washington Press, an academic publisher, publishing her book, and I wanted to be sure that we were working well within that context.
There were, however, exceptions to my hands-off rule. She did not want to discuss her role in the revival of the Salmon Ceremony. It would have been a glaring omission for her not to discuss the revival of the ceremony since it was her idea to revive it. The people who met with her to plan the event, such as Morris and Bertha Dan, Bernie Gobin, and Stan and Joann Jones, would have been stunned. The revival of the Salmon Ceremony after a 150-year hiatus was a very important event in the history and culture of the Tulalip Tribes. It turned out that she had not wanted to discuss it initially because she did not want to appear to boast.
Secondly, as we were working, I asked her if she had experienced religious conflicts when she was exposed to Christianity in the boarding school. She realized, after she thought over the question, that she had had a plethora of religious conflicts, so she discussed them in chapter 8, along with the stellar advice her father gave her for how to deal with them. As a result of her thinking over her religious conflicts—such as being frightened by the Catholic priest and a high school science teacher and going to Protestant churches in high school—she decided to include a discussion of religious activity on the Tulalip Reservation in the last chapter of the book. She said less about the Smokehouse, or Syəwən religion, one of the traditional religions, because her family was not involved in it. The Syəwən religion is very popular today, especially among young people. She also discussed the Indian Shaker religion, which is an important religion in the Pacific Northwest.
I asked Mrs. Dover if she wanted to do a chapter on her father. She expressed enthusiastic interest in the idea, but it did not happen. I thought perhaps, since her father had been such a pervasive influence in her life, that she could not “telescope” him (one of her phrases) into a single chapter.
She was clear about which materials she wanted to include in the text and which she did not. She covered certain events more in Ryggs (1978)—such as a revenge killing, assassination attempts upon her father’s life by other Indians, a story her father told about how they first learned about whiskey, her brother’s marriage, and her brother’s and father’s deaths. She mentioned, but did not discuss, a dance group of Tulalip young people that she sponsored and led for several years. I understand that they performed at fairs and for other occasions in the area. Several people mentioned the group at her funeral; it was obviously very meaningful to them. I am sorry that I did not know about it. We can only speculate as to why she omitted it. She also did not discuss the Montessori preschool that she attended before the boarding school, which is still available to Tulalip youngsters.
The manuscript closes on an ironic and poignant note about time out of time. It is shaped around how Mrs. Dover, her grandparents, and her parents saw their world. It was my idea to close it that way since irony and poignancy characterize the text. The worlds of the three generations were similar, and yet they were different. There is a lot to regret. Their lives and their history bear a continuous thread of irony.
When Mrs. Dover came into my classroom at Everett Community College in 1976, little did I realize that we would develop a unique collaborative, professional relationship and then a friendship. As she took her seat in the front row, she announced to us that she had not been to school for fifty years. Then she settled into her chair, took out a notebook, and went about the business of being a student. I recall thinking, as I watched her, that some things must be difficult to forget.
I had known her for two years prior to her enrollment at the college because I had invited her to speak to students in my class on Northwest Coast Native cultures about Snohomish culture and to show us some of her family artifacts. Having her in class as a student made our relationship less formal.
She had enrolled at the college for several reasons. She wanted to be a role model for younger tribal members, who could now enroll at the local community college and be funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This development had come about because of a change in the Relocation and Termination programs that specified that the federal government could no longer prevent local tribal members from seeking education and training at nearby colleges. She wanted to obtain more education in order to write a history of the Tulalip Reservation. She wanted to know what I was saying about Indians. As a result of those goals, she majored in anthropology and history and took three anthropolog
y courses from me. Her remarks in class were plentiful and always informative. The students and I liked her very much. She enjoyed the courses and my liberal point of view, and she liked my study of the Indian Shaker religion. She received an associate of arts degree in 1978.
When she said she “wanted to know what you are saying about Indians,” I experienced an emotion that was a mixture of curiosity and exhilaration. I accepted the challenge; it would be like having Einstein sit in on your Physics 101 course. It seemed only fair; after all, she was an elder. If I was wrong about something, it would be just as well that she tell me.
Let us preserve here her remarks to us in class about Snohomish culture and the Tulalip Reservation, as well as a remark she made to me when we were working on her manuscript. These remarks were about art, religion, traditional terms for new items or behaviors, the dignity of the high class, misgivings about people who had twins, and how her father convinced Dr. Buchanan to let the tribal members build a community house. Early in the quarter I asked her how Snohomish would say the word “art.” I had asked Abner Johnson, a Tlingit carver and artist, the same question. Tribal societies usually do not have a separate word for art. It is often embedded in some other expression or institution in their system that speaks to what art means to them. She replied that the word ala would be the best equivalent since it means “putting designs on a flat surface that mean something.” The designs she referred to were spiritual or religious designs; therefore, art to the Snohomish is a form of writing, marking or decorating a surface with designs that communicate knowledge about spiritual matters. When whites came to the area, the Native people referred to their writing on papers and documents as “making designs on paper that mean something to them.” The design on the sqwədilič boards, for example, represented intersecting paths that could resemble a cross, but it was not intended to be a cross in the Christian sense.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 2