Suttles, Wayne. “Post-Contact Culture Change Among the Lummi,” British Columbia Quarterly 18 (1954): 29–102.
———. “Coast Salish Art: Productivity and Constraints.” In Indian Art Traditions of the Northwest Coast, ed. Roy Carlson. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1975.
Suttles, Wayne, ed. Northwest Coast. Vol. 7 of Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1994.
Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
———. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Thompson, Thomas. The Schooling of Native America. Washington, D.C.: The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1979.
Tweddell, Colin. “A Historical and Ethnological Study of the Snohomish People. A Report Specifically Covering Their Aboriginal and Continued Existence and Their Effective Occupation of a Definable Territory.” Indian Claims Commission Docket 125. Exhibit 10. Typescript, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, 1953.
U.S. Court of Claims. Duwamish et al. v. U.S. Court of Claims. University of Washington Library, 1927.
Vizenor, Gerald. People Named Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
———. Narrative Chance. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Wiget, Andrew, ed. Dictionary of Native American Literature. Garland Reference Library for the Humanities. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.
Wike, Joyce. “Modern Spirit Dancing of Northern Puget Sound.” M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1901.
Youst, Lionel, and William Seaburg. Coquelle Thompson, Athabaskan Witness. A Cultural Biography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
1 Sehome, her mother’s father, was a Klallam leader who signed both the Klallam and the Point Elliott treaties.
2 See, for example, Winnemucca 1883; Krupat 1985, 1989, 1994; Krupat and Swann 1987, 2000; Brumble 1988; Ruoff 1990, 1994; Bataille and Sands 1994; Brumble and Krupat 1994; Miller 1990; Youst and Seaburg 2002; Schorcht 2003.
3 Mrs. Dover told me that she preferred to use the terms Indian or American Indian for the Native or indigenous people in the text.
4 See Tweddell 1953; Jacobs 1960; Spicer 1960; Stands In Timber and Liberty 1967; Momaday 1970; Hymes 1990; DeMailie 1993; and Wiget 1994.
5 See, for example, Coleman 1964; Berkhofer 1965; Thompson 1979; McBeth 1982; Pratt 1992; Dietz 1993; Lomawaima 1994; Adams 1995; Childs 1997; Dinwoodie 2002; King 2008.
6 Mrs. Dover saw her life as a march toward victory, but because no one except she, Wayne, and I understood or liked the title, including tribal members, I took the present title from the first sentence of her Prologue.
Phonological Key
Snohomish/Lushootseed terms are rendered phonetically in the text.
?
glottal stop; like a catch in the back of the throat, such as uh oh in English. “Seattle” contains a glottal stop: Sea?tle.
a
as in father, say or at
b
as in English
b?
b with a glottal stop
c
ts as in mats
glottalized ch; a popping sound
d
as in English
dz
ds as in lids
ə
sound known as a “schwa”; the vowel in cup
g
as in English; soft g
gw
as in English
h
as in happy
i
as ee or a in feet or fate
I
as i in bit or hit
ǰ
as in judge
k
as in kick
k̓
with a popping sound, or k with a glottal stop
kw
as qu as in quiz
k̓w
combines kw, with k̓ popping sound
l
as l in live not feel
l̓
as in feel
ɫ
lateral l as in lull
tl as in atlatl
m
can be an alternative to English b
m̓
sounded with throat tension, as in mussels
n
can be an alternative to English d
ṕ
as in pop
p̓
p with a glottal stop; has a popping sound
q
sounded farther back in the throat than k
q̓
glottalized q
qw
with pursed lips, as in quick
q̓w
glottalized qw; has a popping sound
s
as in English
š
s as in shut
t
similar to English
t̓
glottalized t, has a popping sound
u
sounded as the double vowel in boot or boat
w
as in work
w̓
sounded with a tense throat, as in what
xw
made with a blowing sound, as wh in what or which
a raspy h
w
a raspy h, as in hate
y
as in English
y̓
sounded with throat tension, as in the slang term yuck
Adapted from Bates, Hess, and Hilbert, Lushootseed Dictionary (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).
Tulalip, From My Heart
Prologue: A Sense of Place
MY name is Harriette Shelton Dover. I am going to talk about Tulalip: that is the name of this Indian reservation where I live. In my language, the Snohomish language, we have a word, bečali?qwaad, that means “to lay down the heart; to be at ease, at rest; not to worry.” Bečali? means “to lay [something] down”; qwaad is “to leave it alone or drop it.” That is what I am going to do here: bečali?qwaad. I am going to lay down my heart.
Tulalip is the name of the Indian reservation, and it is the name of the bay. Tulalip Bay. The name is mispronounced by so many people, but Tulalip is the nearest to the right pronunciation for the Snohomish Indian word dxwilap, which means “the long bay; the bay shaped like a purse, long with a narrow opening; a bay going far inland because of its shape.” Tulalip is a very ancient name, a prehistoric name; it is the name of a place, of a bay and, since 1855, the name of a reservation.
Tulalip was named in a legend by the Snohomish tribal ancestors in a time so long ago my grandparents referred to it as “a time of remembrance, covered by a drifting, deep fog or mist.” Much has been written about Tulalip and its Indians by white people, but I believe this is the first history by a Tulalip Indian.
My grandparents and parents used to reminisce about the days when they were growing up, and they would remember what their grandparents said about their childhoods. This is how our people kept an account of their history from one generation to the next. 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 and can’t really see. What happened to our people?
We have our legends, which the Indians kept. We have a legend that was told about Tulalip Bay during prehistoric times. It indicates how long our people have occupied this area. This legend is about a prehistoric animal that we call dzəgwə, a word that means “a fearful animal that comes from the deep water.” It does not refer to any of the animals today, and since it was seen only once, we did not develop any other word to describe it. It was a fearful, mysterious animal.
Our people used to tell us about a young man, Lətsxkanəm, who belonged to our Snohomish tribe. One day he decided to walk from our village, which is at Hibołb, at Legion Park
in Everett, a large village, to a smaller one at Spee-Bi-Dah [or Spibida]. Our people would stay at Spee-Bi-Dah in the summers, although there were some families who stayed there all year around. As the young man got to Tulalip Bay, to the south or Skayu Point, he was somewhat tired, and he did not want to walk all the way around the beach. So he thought he would swim to Totem Beach, which is just about where the Catholic church is now. So he came across, and just as he stood up, walking in the shallow water, walking up to the beach, he heard a fearful if not terrible noise behind him. He turned to look, and there was a terrible black animal, something he had never seen before. It was trying to get at him. So he started to run through the water and get on to the beach. He was terrified and running through the water—swimming and then running in shallow water—and he was so tired that he fell on the beach, but he was watching this terrible animal, dzəgwə. He said, “It was long, long like a whale, and on his back it had a lot of fins, not just one like whales have,” and from what he could see, it seemed to have a big red mouth. It was thrashing in the water and trying to get at him, but it did not take long, even though it seemed like thousands of years to him, when the animal sank back into the water out of sight. The water seemed to be boiling when the animal was thrashing about, trying to reach him, just foaming. The water got quiet; that animal had sunk out of sight. The man was so tired and so terrified; he sat there for what seemed like a long time.
Then he continued to walk along the land to Spee-Bi-Dah. By the time he got there it was late, so the Indians did not do anything. They all came the next morning, and he came with them to show them where he saw this terrible, mysterious, great big animal. The Indians went out in canoes with their spears, feeling around in the deep water. They never saw anything and they did not hear anything. No one ever saw that kind of animal again. That was the last time our people talked about a terrible animal—bigger than a whale, with several fins along its back. When our people used to talk about it, they would say it was so long, long ago. It was a monster, a scary animal, they only saw once. If they saw it several times, they would have had a name for it. It took that young man several weeks to get over his fright.
Some people, the white people, say that we came here a little before they came. According to what our people say, we were here when there were some very mysterious animals that were still appearing in the water. I remember when I was a child, they used to tell us not to stay out in the bay, not to swim way out there and stay too long. “If you are going to swim in the bay, just swim the once and come back up on the beach.” I heard about that animal only once. It did not frighten us, since we felt it was seen so long ago. Once in a while, we used to talk about it and wonder where it went.
Lətsxkanəm was the first Indian, our people (the Snohomish Tribe) said, who as a young man started the guardian spirit quest. The Indians were already doing that and fasting, but he went farther and he went out more days than anyone else up to that time. He had a vision of a longhouse, a community house like our people used to live in, that was deep in the water. Whales came to tell him that some of our forefathers are deep in the water, and that is where the tradition of the community house came from. The young man could see it in his vision: he walked way under the deep, deep water, and he saw a longhouse, a community house. The people there told him that all the house posts he saw had a simple carving on them of the mouths of whales, and they told him those were the different leaders—the sqəlalitut, or their guardian spirit. Lətsxkanəm was the man who had the vision of the longhouse, and that is when our people started to build their longhouses, and that was so long ago. The longhouse at Possession Point, where my father was born and lived, had the poles with the design of the mouths of whales carved and painted on them. The farmers tore the longhouse apart after the Indians moved away from there to the reservation. My father tells the legend about how to make a longhouse in his book Indian Totem Legends. He was the only man who saw something like a whale with fins all along its back. It was a time long ago, but it is in our traditions.
I am going to talk about what we call the Prophecy. I heard about it when I was a small child. My grandparents and their generation, their brothers and sisters, cousins, were talking about the Prophecy. They said in that time long ago, a medicine man in the Snohomish tribe who had udab, what you call the power to heal, was out meditating. He was searching for his guardian spirit. He had been out in the woods, deep in the mountains, fasting for days and days out there. He came back after a few days and he told the people what he had heard. At almost the same time, my mother used to talk about a medicine man in her tribe, the Klallam tribe on the Strait of Juan de Fuca,1 when he went out on his guardian spirit quest into the Olympic Mountains area. He had the same kind of vision as the man who belonged to the Snohomish tribe. The talk about their experiences went around to the other tribes. These men had heard that “there will come a man.” Those were exactly the words they used. In the Snohomish language this would be expressed as kluaxk̓wištobs. In our language, štobs is “a man” and kłu means “it will” in the future tense, and axk̓wi means “to come.” “There will come a man.” There will come a man from far to the east, from the way the sun walks, which is from the east, coming over our mountains. As he walks over the mountains, his footsteps will sound like thunder and that noise, the thunder, will resound all over the country, all over the Puget Sound country. And our lives will change. There will come a dark night, and that dark night will last a long, long time. That man will bring a long, long night. So that was the Prophecy that I heard about the coming of the white people.
My parents were remembering the Prophecy again during the 1930s. My parents and their cousins used to get together for Sunday dinner. They would talk and reminisce about old times, the things that had happened to our people. Sometimes they talked about the treaty, the Point Elliott Treaty that was signed in 1855. Years later, after I read the treaty, I remembered what they said, over all those years, and what they said was just exactly about what happened at Point Elliott, that’s Mukilteo, in 1855.
Treaty time, shall we say, was quite an upsetting time for the Indians, but nobody then had the time to think about it. My father said the white people were “just boiling in”; they came in waves of people across the continent. They “boiled over” into this part of western Washington. They were all over. It was quite an astonishing time, and I have often thought it was fortunate the Indians had reservations to go to even though these reservations were really too small. There was supposed to be land for all of the Indian men, but there was not enough for everyone.
I am going to talk, in this history, about the Indian people who came to live on the Tulalip Reservation. I learned about these things from our people, from my grandparents in particular, and through the events that happened in my lifetime. My life covers a long period of time. I never thought about it especially before, but it covers almost this whole century. The way things were for the Indians way back then was certainly different than it is today. Just like it is for all American people. My wish is to write down some of the things I remember from my American Indian childhood on an Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest.
Part of Snohomish Indian Territory
My memories of Tulalip, where I was born in 1904, go back to 1908 or 1909. I remember the dates, I believe, because there was a World’s Fair or Exposition in Seattle in 1909, called the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and my father was gone. He was at the Fair with the Puget Sound Indians’ exhibits. I felt terribly alone and afraid, especially at night, with just my mother and me.
One of the things I certainly remember was my home. Home was a three-room house my father called a cottage. It was situated on what had been the old Tulalip Mission School grounds. Part of the old Mission School burned down, so the newer school, an Indian boarding school, was established across the bay; it was called the Tulalip Indian Boarding School. It was operated by the United States government, whereas the first school at Mission Beach was a Catho
lic Mission School. My father went there for two years when he was quite grown up—seventeen or eighteen years old. So he had a different kind of life than I had. I went to the Indian Boarding School.
Several vacant, large, old buildings remained of the Mission School, and we used to run and play in those empty, echoing rooms. When we became too noisy, my mother would appear and order us back outside. She said, “The buildings might collapse.”
My mother was one of those people who ferociously cleaned up the house every day. And I always said that’s why I don’t bother with the house. If things fall on the floor, they can stay there; but my mother, at least twice a year, would scrub down the walls, and every week all of the floors and porches were scrubbed, and it seems like that’s all I remember—tiptoeing around wet floors or helping mop up. That doesn’t mean my mother was not a very loving person, because she was. But the people I remember as most loving were my grandmothers. I always called them the “dearest grandmothers.” There were three of them who lived over past the vacant buildings,2 where there was another building with four large rooms downstairs, a long wide veranda, and three bedrooms upstairs. It was not their home either. They were just living there. The house they lived in was once occupied by Father Chirouse, a priest who came to the area in 1857. Indians, in those days, just lived where they could. Usually they put up what were called “shacks”: one or two rooms built of cedar shakes. My dearest grandmother lived in one of the bedrooms, and the two other elderly grandmothers lived in the other two rooms. They each cooked and ate and lived in one room. The veranda was used to hang bedding, laundry, and freshly washed sheep wool to dry.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 4