The Indian tribes I know about were people who bathed in the morning in cold water—in lakes, creeks, or certain rivers. The women would go to one place and the men to another. Western Washington is full of rivers and a lot of lakes, so everybody, as soon as they get up, can walk to the place where they are going to wash their faces and their teeth and take a bath. When the Indians moved onto the reservations, we read about how dirty, filthy the white people thought the Indians were. I would like to point out that the Indians, when they were put on reservations, were a displaced people, and not only displaced but they were dispossessed.
They moved to reservations from their old villages with just what they could carry. People here had longhouses that were scattered all over where they lived, and when they got on the reservation there was no housing, no readily accessible water. It was just a wilderness. But then Indians could get along—except for not having water. I thought it was no wonder they were considered dirty. If you had to walk two, three miles to carry a bucket of water when you wanted to bathe or cook or wash clothes, you can only do that two or three times a day.
When the Indians arrived in the bay, the women found it harder to walk half a mile or a mile to carry water. They had to carry water home in buckets, but usually the children and teenage boys and girls helped them. I remember when we were little we helped carry water. We carried smaller buckets of water to the house. If three or four people are going to take a bath, you have to carry a lot of water. If they were going to do laundry, they had to carry buckets and buckets of water. It is really hard to do laundry if you have to carry buckets of water.
I remember seeing people with tin tubs filled with water on an open fire, so that there would be a lot of water. When my grandmother and anyone washed clothes, it took all day. They had to carry the water, heat it, and wash the clothes on a washboard. They used big bars of yellow soap to wash the clothes. I used to help my grandmother and my mother hang up the clothes.
When I was in the boarding school, I saw Indians come down to the waterfront and get big buckets or cans, like milk cans and coal-oil cans, that they used to wash with soapy water and rinse and then fill the cans with water and carry them back home on the wagons.
You wouldn’t think water would be a problem in western Washington because there seems to be water everywhere. The water here from Mission and Tulalip Creeks was fresh; it is running or moving water. I remember that the creek just over the hill from where we lived at Mission had clear running water. Sometimes when we had a lot of playmates, we went over there where the pipe was running for the horses and cows to drink from a trough. We used to go there in summer and play and put our faces in it. It was really cold, and we looked at each other and laughed, with water all of the way up to our heads—just soaking wet.
Here at Tulalip, you would think there was a lot of water, but not with 1,500 Indians camped out all around this bay. It was hard to keep clean and to keep children clean. Children are always into everything. They can find the nicest places to play, and they can sit right down in gravel or just dirt, even if part of it is a little bit of mud. It doesn’t matter. If part of it is grass, they will play and get dirty. I think I am always trying to explain to people why we were considered dirty, and why we were considered stupid. Of course, the Indians eventually learned how to dig wells, and many of them have wells.
Shelter
The Indians who didn’t live here at Tulalip Bay, near there or on the islands, moved down from their villages. Our Snohomish Tribe had their biggest longhouse at Possession Point on Whidbey Island. Several hundred Indians lived there together. We didn’t live in tepees. The roof was open during the day. Some of the large, wide boards were lifted so the sun could shine in; or even if there was no sun and it was not raining, then they could open it anyway, so there was constant fresh air in a big longhouse. When they moved to the reservations, these Indians built their own homes, and it was easy for them because they already knew how. But they didn’t have the ventilation of the big houses, and this contributed to the poor living conditions and the high incidence of deaths due to tuberculosis, as well as a poor diet later. Indian people were forbidden to build the traditional longhouses. They were supposed to drop all of their Indian ways.
Of course, the Indians took care of one another. They made speeches about staying together and helping one another. They had their own organizations, their own leaders. They lived together in extended families, living and sharing. The grandparents were the babysitters and took care of the children while the mothers and fathers cleared land. The Indians were such good workers. It took a while for the Indians to make enough money to buy the axes and saws to cut down the trees. You would need thousands of dollars to clear the land, let alone build a house. So they helped each other to build their little one-room shacks. They made their own shakes. Today, cedar shakes are very expensive. Way back then, Indians made them by the thousands. They cut down a cedar tree, sawed it, and then split the shakes, because they were, after all, natural woodsmen.
I have a picture of a man and his wife in front of one of those shacks. The Indian is an old man, and all of his children and grandchildren are gone. There are just these people left, and somebody helped them put the shack together. Somehow he was able to have money, and they bought a window. When I was growing up, those were the kind of houses I saw. They were either one or two rooms, and they were made of shakes.
Some of the women I saw were elderly, like I am now, and their family had died years before. They were all alone. In some of those pictures, you see elderly people sitting in front of their cabins made out of shakes. One of Edson’s pictures shows an elderly lady or two in front of their mat house. The pictures are entitled “Indian Summer Camp.” It is not a summer camp. It is their permanent home—although, a mat house can be warm because the mats are woven double and made of tall cattails that grow in wet places.
I have a cattail mat. You can see the way it is woven with a big wooden needle and sewn together with material from the cattail itself. An Indian woman would peel a thread off the very edge of each cattail. When it is dry, then they spin the thread on a spindle whorl. My mother also used to spin her wool yarn that way. They spun the cattail edging and made a strong twirled rope, like twine, and that is what they used to sew the matting together. Cattail mats were woven double in opposite directions: each cattail was laid over the other, like shingles are on a roof to make it watertight. They were windproof and almost, but not quite, watertight.
My parents had several large ones that were six feet wide and probably ten to fifteen feet long. They made them double and piled them high, and when you lay down on them, they were very soft.
Way of Life
Indians settled on reservations all over the United States. Indian reservations were much smaller than the areas the Indians had lived on. The Indians’ way of life in the Northwest was a hunting and a food-gathering culture. It was not like the pioneers. They stayed in one place and planted their food, and the ones that planted, who were the farmers, raised enough food for many people. We didn’t plant anything. We just harvested. Indians knew where to go for certain roots, berries, and all of the native foods. But when they moved to the reservations, then their hunting grounds were within the boundaries of the reservation and so starvation was a very great problem. Of course, to white people it didn’t make any difference. They could see an Indian dying of starvation and they wouldn’t know the difference.
I like the way Alvin Josephy put it. He tells what was happening to the Indians from 1860 to the new century in 1900.1 In his book is a picture of a very old, old lady. Her hair looks about like mine, uncombed, and she is sitting on the ground, resting on one hand, on a little rug. I told some people, as we were looking at it, “This woman is dying of tuberculosis. I can tell. She is very, very weak.” When the photographer got there, he probably said to bring her out here. “Tell her I will take her picture.” She was inside a tent. So they brought her out. The other Indians who we
re there were not going to argue with a white man. He might have a revolver. So this poor lady was brought out and her picture was taken. You look at it and you will know one thing: Indians are dirty and stupid. They never combed their hair, because this woman’s hair was tangled. She must have been lying for days and weeks, too weak to get up. The Indians in that period, from the late 1850s, were starving there, and, as a matter fact, the Indians were starving on this reservation.
It was not complete starvation: hunger might be a better word, because our Puget Sound bays were rich, and the resources—salmon, trout, flounders, clams, mussels, and oysters—were all around us. We were certainly the richest people in the world, as far as food was concerned. In the woods there were deer and elk and, of course, smaller animals like rabbits. (If Indians ever ate rabbits, I never saw them. My folks never ate rabbit. There was so much food to eat; I don’t think they would bother with such a small animal.) Deer and elk were plentiful here too, and they didn’t have to go far to hunt. So that is part of our history.
But the Indians here were moved onto small reservations where there were no rivers. Each of the tribes in western Washington had a river. The Lummi fished the Nooksak River near the Canadian border. The Skagit River was south of there, where the Skagit Indians and some other tribes lived and fished. We had the Snohomish River, and the tribe affiliated with us—the Skykomish Tribe—they had the Skykomish River. The Snoqualmie Tribe had the Snoqualmie River.
Large areas were available for hunting, from the Cascade Mountains all of the way to Puget Sound—millions of acres of hunting and fishing lands. It was a shock for the Indians to move to a smaller area, even though this was part of their land too. We moved to a reservation where there were huge trees, and that was the richness of western Washington that was noted by Captain Vancouver of England who came here in 1792. He made a voyage around the Puget Sound, and he talked about the forests as a vast resource in western Washington.
We had the native food, but the timber has just about disappeared. They had to go from a way of life of abundance to a reservation where they had to start from scratch—just like the pioneers did. But there was a difference, a vast difference, between the Indians moving onto the reservation and the white pioneers. The area for hunting and gathering along this reservation is not enough to sustain 1,200 or 1,500 people. Our people went to the Cascade Mountains in late August for a certain kind of mountain berries and a certain kind of roots on the prairies. There weren’t enough vegetables for several hundred people. Anyway, for the camas roots these Indians sometimes would go to Puyallup or Fort Lewis and dig baskets of camas roots. They would stay for a week and dig those. They didn’t have money to buy food such as potatoes or rice. Just about every Indian woman made socks to sell, and that was how they made their money to buy food. They were not what you would call an agricultural people who stayed in one place and raised garden produce and hogs or chickens. Our hunting areas were on Whidbey Island and Camano Island. There were no clams to gather around here at Tulalip to supplement our diet as we would ordinarily. It was a bad time.
The Indians way back then couldn’t go wherever they wanted. They were ordered to go back to their reservation and stay there. If the agent didn’t tell them to stay there, they could go to other places to get native foods, such as the roots and bulbs the Indians used to eat for vegetables. Our people went out in their canoes to the islands, such as Whidbey Island and Camano Island, to hunt, and in the summer for fishing, drying of salmon, and digging clams. There were no clams here at Tulalip. If they couldn’t go to those places, they would have no winter food. You could have pretty good food even if you didn’t have a job. Besides fishing for fresh salmon or fresh trout, you could have roast duck, geese, or maybe pheasant. When my mother was living, she used to smoke-dry five hundred salmon every year. Then you work for several days filleting salmon. But, as I say, the reservation was too small to support 1,500 people in a hunting-and-gathering way of life. Indian reservations were never set aside as a good hunting ground or a good fishing ground.
The Indians used to smoke-dry salmon by the basketsful. I think a lot of pioneer families smoked bacon or hams, but for us, they were all dried salmon and they were all prepared the same way: filleted open and kept open by little sticks of cedar and then hung up in the smokehouses and dried and smoked evenly all around. They lasted us through the winter and spring, but they were also given to a number of elderly people. My mother would have baskets for them because the old people can’t do that anymore, dry or fillet a lot of fish.
We used to dry the salmon eggs too. I remember eating salmon eggs. They stick to your teeth, so you have to chew very hard. My father used to tell me, “Just chew it good.” Today white people use salmon eggs for fish bait. I’m not sure, but I don’t think anybody eats it anymore. I was saying once, “Oh, you don’t know what you are missing. If you want to feel better, just eat salmon eggs that have been baked in an oven.” I remember some white people were talking about salmon eggs, and they wondered how we could eat fish heads and salmon eggs. I said, “You ought to try it if you want to look young when you are seventy-five years old. Just look at me. I ate a lot of it when I was growing up. I haven’t had salmon eggs for a long, long time.”
When the Indians moved onto the reservations, they lost their hunting and fishing grounds. Indian reservations were set aside so that Indians were pretty much out of the way. They were not farmers. Most of the land out here was too gravelly, anyway, to be suited for gardening—and so much of it was without water—but that is what the government wanted the Indians to do. So when the Indians moved here they were supposed to clear the land, which they did. In the 1914 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, these Indians were ordered to farm. I remember when I was growing up, wherever we happened to go in the summertime, seeing Indians clearing land. They did nearly all of it by hand. They cleared the land not with dynamite or tractors; they didn’t have those. They used fire. Some of them had teams of horses, so the big trees were cut down and they burned the stumps. Those stumps would burn for days and days; it seemed to me then that they were burning forever.
It takes a while to clear this kind of land, with its wilderness shrubs, wild roses, salmonberry bushes, and so many trees. Even if you planted apple trees, plums, or pears, they would take several years to grow and produce. Although Indians did learn the new ways. Many had orchards. Up to about ten to fifteen years ago, if you walked through the woods—back through this reservation—where there were a lot of alders, it was like a wilderness. There were apple trees in bloom. My mother and father knew whose allotment that was. There in the woods would be an apple tree with the prettiest apple blossoms. Or, once in a while, there would be pear trees blooming.
Indians left their allotments to go to the Puyallup Valley to pick hops in September or October. They talked to my father and asked him to come and look after their orchard, because all through the summer the bears would come and climb up the apple and pear trees and the branches would be torn and broken down from the trees. Bears killed a lot of the trees. They climb it, or they use it for their claws.
When I was little nearly all the Indians had chickens, so that they had a few eggs. However, if you moved to a place anywhere out here, you would have to go out and find work to buy food and that was usually in a mill or picking hops. The hop fields were owned by the pioneers; it was their way of having an income too.
I don’t know why I should remember this, but my mother and all of them used to get together and go picking blackberries. My mother and her cousins, different friends, were way out there where there was a big patch of wild blackberries. My mother was busy picking, and she started to talk because she could hear, she was sure it was Mary Ann, her cousin, just on the other side of a big patch that went up several feet. So my mother was talking to her and she was moving along, and she wondered why Mary Ann didn’t answer her because it sounded like a grunt. Well, she finally got around the bush and there was a blac
k bear and it was picking berries off the same vines where my mother was picking, only on the other side. The bear was sitting up and reaching with its paws and the berries would fall in its lap and it would eat them. My mother said it was just as if somebody poured a bucket of cold water over her. Here was this bear and it was only four feet away and she had been talking to it for probably twenty minutes. She finally saw that she could move, so she turned around and started to run toward the road. Well, you really can’t run through the brush. Her cousin said she wondered what happened to my mother. She had lost her old hat and her hair had got caught in all kinds of vines and small trees, and instead of her hair being braided it was all torn apart. She said, “What’s the matter?” My mother could hardly speak. She said, “I thought I was talking to you.” So, they had to come home because, you might say, my mother was really shook up. Talking to a bear. She said it finally dawned on her that Mary Ann doesn’t grunt like that; Mary Ann always talks. She only took one step and looked. Oh, she was being pals with a bear!
Hunger and Starvation
Thousands of dollars were appropriated for this reservation. The Indians never found out what the money was used for. The Indians were hungry, and they were sick because of the scourge that went over the whole continent—sicknesses the white people brought, such as measles and tuberculosis. The Indians caught colds and other illnesses they never had before. Indians died by the hundreds of thousands from pneumonia. They never saw or had that before. Measles and a cold could turn into tuberculosis, and the Indians could not stand up to it. Nobody could. If you don’t have much to eat, you won’t have the strength to stand up to it. Indian health was broken. Hunger was an additional traumatic shock.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 8