Tulalip, From My Heart

by Dover, Harriette Shelton

  She said that when cars came into use, they were referred to as canoes, and the pistons going up and down were described as people dancing.

  She explained to us that when she was young the Snohomish disapproved when parents had twins, since too much of anything was frowned upon. One should not drink a lot of water, eat a lot of food, sleep overly long, or have multiple births. Parents who had twins could be asked to leave the area and live elsewhere. I was reminded of her comment several years later when Snohomish twins, young men, took that same class from me.

  Both boys and girls, especially the high class, or sia?b, were expected to acquire a spirit power (sqəlalitut). Boys went through an intense pursuit that included rigorous physical exercise and going out alone at night to secluded places to bathe and meditate. The girls meditated at home or in a separate dwelling where they were secluded during their menstrual periods.

  Families had certain places where they sent older children and teenagers to seek a sqəlalitut. The experience and the acquisition of a power, when a vision occurred, meant that a song, an instruction, and a gift for an occupation or some other life endeavor would be the outcome. The children ate very little during those times, drank some water, expended as much energy as they could, and were isolated. Older boys were sent out alone at night, which meant training that would accustom them to being alone in the dark. Training began when the children were three years old. As Mrs. Dover described the activity, we could see that, as imperative as this lesson was, it was also important to be kind to the youngster. After all, the Snohomish did not spank or strike children to punish them. A male relative, such as father, uncle, or grandfather, would take the child for a walk around the community house at night. For several nights the relative would walk with him and hold his hand. Then he would begin to walk behind the child, calling out to him frequently to show that he was still there and asking him to touch the community house periodically. As time went on, the relative walked farther and farther behind until the child was sent out to walk around the house alone. This process took several years.

  Then boys were sent out at night to swim in secluded places and return with a small carving that an elder had left there earlier in the day. They were often sent out in storms, as her father was on Whidbey Island, for the benefit of the cold weather, and in his case, because his parents wanted him to see a killerwhale and Thunderbird power that he could encounter during a storm at a certain point of land. Harriette Dover said that, on occasion, her father paddled his canoe over to Lake Crescent from Whidbey Island, where he built a shelter and bathed and watched for the animals to come around with their babies. So, he probably visited the area in the spring.

  She told us about when her father asked Dr. Buchanan, the agent for the reservation and the superintendent of the boarding school, for permission to build a community house where they could perform traditional dances. He said he wanted the community house so that the young people could see how terrible they used to live. Obviously, this was an effective exercise in reverse psychology because she said Buchanan was “happy over that idea” and permission was granted, since the message from the federal government had been eminently clear that they intended to change the Indian people completely. In chapter 6, Mrs. Dover discusses the building of the community house on the Tulalip Reservation, the first one since they signed the treaty, and the first Treaty Day celebration there.

  One Friday afternoon when we were working on her history, she asked me if I noticed anything “funny” about the patient in Utah who had had a mechanical heart surgically implanted in his chest. I answered that I had noticed that his facial expression was blank, but then I had forgotten about it. She said, “In our belief, you can’t do that—put a mechanical device into someone’s body—since he then wouldn’t be human. In our belief, the “mind” is the heart and the brain; it isn’t just the brain.” I am grateful to her for clarifying that, since my own cultural background suggests that mind and brain are synonymous and the heart is just a mechanical organ; although, of course, it is used to speak about feelings metaphorically. The Lushootseed Dictionary states that the “mind” is in the chest, but Mrs. Dover stressed the connection between the brain and the heart, between feelings and thoughts, to make it easy for us to see the metaphorical/symbolic ties being made among warmth or kindness, rational thought, feelings, and intuition.

  The last time I saw Harriette Dover was on her birthday in 1990. I took her a card and a red azalea plant because red was her favorite color. I had to take my mother to an appointment, so I couldn’t stay until Wayne came later before dinner. She decided to take a nap and asked me to tuck her in. I did not know I would not see her again. I did not know that she had breast cancer.

  She died on February 5, 1991, and is buried in the cemetery at Mission Beach that overlooks Tulalip Bay, near where she was born. She was eighty-six years old. Local newspaper coverage revealed that her stature in life was also evident in her death. This autobiographical history of the Tulalip Indian Reservation community is one of her legacies.

  On the afternoon that we finished taping her manuscript, she had explained to me that at her funeral a blanket would be draped over my arm and I would be given a basket that her aunt Elizabeth Shelton had woven. She pointed to the basket in her living room and said that it had a deliberate flaw, a sign of quality, on the rim. I appreciated her generous sentiment, her wish to thank me in a traditional way, even though the wish died with her.

  On both days of her funeral, Friday and Saturday, it was very foggy. I enjoyed the fog. I had been impressed with her remarks about Mist—sqwəšəb—a treaty signer who was named for the early misty days of the earth, which is a scientific fact, and so I found the fog uniquely comforting. Warm, misty rain has its own beauty, too. It felt as if the ancestors had come to get her and take her home. I wondered how I would get along without my author.

  Acknowledgments

  We appreciate the generosity of administrators and staff at Everett Community College who allowed us to use campus resources to accomplish this project. We thank anthropology students Candy Bennett and Marcella Gusman for their help; audiovisual employees Roslyn McDonald, Cheryl Cornwall, Polly Kelley, and Linda Weatherholt, who typed most of the transcripts; Lynn Mock, Ruth Torseth, and Virginia DeMouth, who did other typing; audiovisual specialist Jerry Tinker, who authorized his staff to do the transcribing for us; Jaan Smith in Word Processing and Mike Eason in the Photography Laboratory. Adminstrators and Board of Trustee members who expressed interest were Susan Carroll, Barry Curran, Robert Drewal, Dale Hensley, and Nancy Weiss.

  Wayne Williams has been very supportive and is a good and patient listener. I look forward to the day when I can hand him a copy of his mother’s book.

  We thank Grace Goedel for the phonetic transcriptions. We appreciate Vi Hilbert for her vital translations and Dr. Loran Olsen for his photographs. Simon Ottenberg, Stan Jones, James Nason, Hank Gobin, and Wayne Ude deserve special thanks.

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