Now and then, some of us older Indians who can remember way back to 1909 talk about when there were outstanding Indian athletes of the world. American Indian athletes of our time made quite a big name for themselves. People saw their pictures in the newspapers and magazines, with articles about the various reservations they came from. They used to compete in the Olympics in Europe. They were good runners—in distance and in everything the Olympics had to offer. The Indians were winners. Of course, everybody thinks of Jim Thorpe, but there were a lot of other Indian athletes who were as good as he was, and maybe better.2 Jim Thorpe was a full-blooded Indian. He was at the Olympic games as a long-distance runner, and, of course, he could run the 220 or half mile. A faster runner came from the Navajo desert country. His last name was Tewanima. Tewanima competed during the same period of time as Jim Thorpe.
Another Indian came from northern Wisconsin. His father and mother died when he was young. He didn’t remember them, and he grew up with his grandmother. They were so poor. When he was around nine years old, the agent took him away from his grandmother and sent him to Haskell Institute to get an education. I forgot his name, but I will always remember he grew up with his grandmother, and he talked about going out to pick wild rice with her. He said they ate it a lot. It was ground or pounded into flour and made into all kinds of food. It was maybe ten years before he got back home again. He had to stay in the Indian school.
All over the United States, in all of those years, Indians were good athletes. You never hear much about Indian athletes. The Indians that have been available, in the last fifty years, are boys who grew up in Indian boarding schools. If they are in the Olympics, they don’t make much of an impression. Or if they are on any football team, the famous ones, you never hear about them.
Starvation was occurring all over on the reservations all of those years. Indian children were kept in the boarding schools on a starvation diet that became apparent when Indian children were growing up. Today if you go to an Indian gathering, it is very noticeable that many of them are overweight. They are the ones who survived on macaroni, no cheese, just macaroni and rice or bread. They don’t have the strength, or the staying power, to be football players or any kind of an athlete. Public schools, like Marysville, exhibit racial prejudice against the Indian boys. Some of them would turn out for football or basketball if they were allowed to play.
However, I am sure someone will remember Sonny Sixkiller. Sonny was an outstanding quarterback at the University of Washington. I would like to remind people that Sonny Sixkiller did not grow up on an Indian reservation. His father moved off of the reservation, and they lived in a town in Oregon. So Sonny Sixkiller grew up where his father could work. The majority of Indians had to stay on reservations.
All of the years since the white man has been here have been terrible years. Even the Indian agent talked about how tragically poor the Indians were. You would have to live that kind of life—to be hungry day after day—to understand. You can be hungry. The white man can be hungry today, and he can go out tomorrow and maybe find a job. Maybe he could find a job today. He could change things.
Now, the white people who came here chose where they wanted to go. They took up a homestead and built a small house. They could farm. They had the choice. My parents and we Indian children—we had no choice, none whatever. We didn’t have freedom of choice for one hundred years or more. We had to stay on this reservation. No place to go. We were really prisoners of war.
My earliest memories are the funerals and deaths of our people. I have seen Indian people die from the time I could remember. I must have been four or five years old when I watched one of my playmates die. The Indian women would get together when a child was dying or someone was dying. There was no doctor or medication, so the Indians did the best they could. I remember going with my mother. I was told to sit still and I did. I could sit still by the hours and watch my playmates die. I didn’t sit or stand there and stare at them. The Indian ladies knelt down and they said the whole rosary. Prayers went on and on. I sort of learned them when I was small, but I could sit still for a long, long time. Dying and death were all around when I was little and growing up. The death rate among the Indians was very, very high.
The summer my sister died, there were three or four teenagers who died. Some of them were our schoolmates. There was seldom a week that went by without at least two funerals—that is eight Indian deaths a month. The young women who survived grew up and got married—then they would have their first baby. Sometimes the mother died after her first baby was born, so that left behind a little orphan—a little girl or a little boy. Sometimes the husband and the child also died. So there was nobody left from the families. Whole families died—just disappeared from the face of the earth.
My father had one sister younger than he. My aunt had four children, and all of them died before they were four years old. She was married to a man from British Columbia. I don’t think it made much difference where they lived, because part of the time she lived up on Vancouver Island. The deaths were caused by poor diet and poor living conditions.
Alvin Josephy speaks of the death rate of the American Indians. It was really a stunning, staggering death rate. There were no doctors, no medication, no care, nothing. All of the young Indian people that I saw die were at home, and, of course, way back then there was not much medication for the pain of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is not a disease that people worry about today, but for years it was. Now we worry about cancer and diabetes—not only for Indians but for the entire population of the United States. Those two diseases seem to be incurable, unless the people discover it early enough for treatment. But the American Indian death rate continued to be high until well into the 1930s.
Tribal Lands: Allotment
In 1887, as a result of the Dawes Act, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior of the federal government began to allot land to individual Indians.3 All of the reservations in the United States were divided up into allotments of 80 or 160 acres each. Married men, heads of households, received an allotment—that was their land and it was in their name, but it was held in trust by the United States government. When they allotted this reservation, it was divided into ninety-five allotments; that meant there were ninety-five men who were heads of families, and a few women who were widows who had families, and so the allotments were in their names.
If there were only ninety-five allotments, that meant several hundred Indian families were left without any land. Indian leaders went to the agent and told him that some Indians didn’t have any land and, furthermore, that he had wanted them moved away from the bay. The agent had said in 1902 that no Indians were to be living around the bay. They had to move to their allotments, clear the land, and start farming. Quite a bit of this land is too rocky, as I said, to try and start farming it. Most of it wouldn’t be farmland, but that policy went on for many years.
We were no longer allowed to live together around the bay. We had to move out to nowhere, where there was hardly any water or roads or houses until the Indians built them, and the result of that was to separate us from one another.
The parade of canoes for guests arriving for Treaty Day. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
Girls in their uniforms attend Treaty Day. Juleen Studio.
The grandmothers. Photograph by J. A. Juleen Studio.
Boys in their uniforms attend Treaty Day. Juleen Studio.
The newly constructed community house, c. 1920. Photograph by J. A. Juleen Studio.
The interior of the community house. Note the design of whales’ mouths on the posts at the far end of the room. Photograph by J. A. Juleen Studio.
William Steshail and his wife, Lucy. Photograph by Edmond Meany. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, no. NA 1216.
The Shelton home, after 1923. From left: Ruth, William, Coy grandchildren, Harriette.
William Shelton working in the sawmill. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
&n
bsp; The little canoes race. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
1 Alvin Josephy, Indian Heritage of America (New York: Knopf, 1968).
2 See Peter Nabokov, Indian Running (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1988).
3 Also Article 7 of the Point Elliott treaty provided for the reservation lands to be surveyed into lots that would be assigned to individuals or families.
3 / Finding Work in the Early Days
WHEN I was small most Indians had little or no income. White people feel that Indians received money every month from the government. They did not. Many Indians were migratory field workers. They could get work picking hops. In the Puyallup Valley there were hundreds of acres of land owned by the pioneers who raised hops. Apparently, hops was one of the early crops when western Washington was first settled in the 1840s and 1850s, so that was one of the few things that Indians had to do. There were no commercial berry fields, no bean fields, no fruit orchards—just hop fields. In later summer the Indians went to the Puyallup Valley, and they stayed there until the end of August and September, or maybe they would come home in October or November at the end of the harvest. Even children worked picking hops.
My parents and the older Indians I knew said picking hops was hard work. I have a picture of my father and mother and grandmothers working in the hop fields. Hops grow on tall posts in rows, like berries. When they are being picked, the foreman cuts down each tall post of hops, and then you pick off the little blossoms. They are soft. You have to pick very fast because if you are slow, the whole thing sinks down when you fill up your container and it packs down. They put the blossoms in boxes and baskets. They used to tell me, “You are pulling the blossoms off of the vines.” They used to wrap their fingers in an old sheet or an old bandage to protect them.
Maybe I can describe it. It is not a clear picture. You would have to sort of get an idea of the long rows. Hops have a very pungent odor if you get close to them. Even within a few yards you can smell them. It is not a bad smell. It just smells like some kind of plant, but some people got sick when they picked hops. Then, for working all day long, perhaps, all you got was fifty cents. Of course, way back then, you knew you could buy fifty cents worth of flour, and it would last you a week and buy five or ten cents worth of salt and a little baking powder. Then you have flour, salt, baking powder, and if you already had some lard you could have some fried bread.1 The amount of money they made was not enough. They probably made $100 a year. If you catch salmon or trout, or have roast ducks or roast geese or native pheasant, then you have something to eat.
There was little work anywhere. Nobody would hire an Indian. Why should they? The white people would not in the first place, so Indians went around living without a penny of income. That is how they started: no jobs, no income. We had a reservation. But it would take money to clear the land, to dynamite the stumps. You need thousands of dollars to buy fencing—which the Indians didn’t have—let alone build a house. But if you read the life stories of the pioneer farmers who came to Washington Territory in the 1840s or 1850s, you'll know that one of those was Ezra Meeker, who wrote Pioneer Reminiscences of Puget Sound. He became well known and he was wealthy. I think you can still see Ezra Meeker’s home in Puyallup.
Nobody could actually starve way back then, but hunger was a very real problem. Nearly all of the pioneers that landed here didn’t have any money. By and large, they were misfits. They left the Midwest or the East Coast and probably had no jobs. They came across the country in wagon trains. Anyway, hops fields were initiated by the pioneers, and that is where the Indians made their money.
Hops were used to make beer; and breweries (and liquor) were one of the things that the white man brought. They were all over. There was one in Mukilteo. The first thing that was in Seattle—that became Seattle—was Yesler’s Mill. Henry Yesler had a brewery, and right next door or near it, as part of the same building, was a hotel. In the hotel were a lot of prostitutes. So there was big business: a mill, prostitution, and a hotel.
Maybe a dozen Indian men in the whole of western Washington could find work in a mill. The first mill was in Port Gamble. In later years, at least up to the 1930s, logging and the mills were the big thing out here. Mills were how they made a living. You look around Marysville and Everett, there are still one or two mills, but before, Everett was ringed with mills. Now there is only Weyerhaeuser and Scott Paper, when before, there was Simpson and several others.
Some of the Indian men were able to find work in the logging camps, but the camps could take only so many. Some logging camps were initiated and operated by the Indians themselves. Of course, they were slower than the bigger companies, but it was one of the ways that Indian families had some income. But the prices would fluctuate. Sometimes cedar was three dollars a thousand feet. I think now cedar must be a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars for a thousand feet. Way back then, three dollars a thousand feet was high, too.
By 1900 and 1910, these Indians were logging by hand. Living here at home then, the only work was hand logging. You could work with your family if you had two or three teams of horses. By that time, one or two Indian families had trucks, but they couldn’t carry big logs on them or anything larger than fifteen feet. They were not working with the big logging companies. I used to see a lot of hand logging, producing what are called cedar shingle bolts, which are four feet long and any diameter. They are made into shingles. Many Indian men cut shingle bolts and sold them to a shingle mill. You could be flat broke one day, and if you worked hard for two, three days, by Friday or Saturday you could get a wagonload of shingle bolts to a mill in Marysville. Then you could have three or four dollars to buy supplies. But the living was really not that much, even for the pioneers.
However, the white people could change things. A man coming from back east with thirty-five cents in his pocket, and that is all he owned, could rent or even make a rowboat, and he could go anywhere along Puget Sound and cut down huge cedar or fir trees. Some cedar trees were on the average over 140 feet tall and 8 or 9 feet in diameter. Some were 14 or 15 feet in diameter. They cut down a cedar tree, cut off the limbs, and tied it to their rowboat and took it to a mill. They could make money just by helping themselves. It might take him a week to get to the mill, but he could get the money. But for the Indians, it was another situation. They couldn’t just go out and develop logging operations on the reservation. They had to get permission from the Indian agent.
As I said, Yesler built the first mill here. The Dennys and Dr. Maynard gave him land in the middle of what became Seattle. He also built a hotel, or what passed then for a hotel. The upper floor was full of prostitutes, who were Indian girls. The pioneers talked about Yesler’s Hotel, which was full of Indian women and girls. I’ll bet I know how they got there. I’ll tell about the experiences of my mother and father.
They grew up in the 1870s and 1880s. They were married in 1890. In the late 1860s they saw this kind of thing: My mother used to tell about when she and her family (an extended family since they were six or eight canoe loads of Indians) were traveling from Guemes Island, which is near Anacortes. Guemes is one of the beautiful islands where my mother’s people had their longhouses, and that is where they lived.2 It took several days of traveling by canoes to get from there to the Puyallup Valley. They would come along the Sound, and they camped at night and ate at noon. They stopped and ate lunch. Then they would go up the Puyallup River to where Ezra Meeker’s hop fields were. Now, they didn’t talk about this incident I am going to tell all of the time, week after week, month after month, but every once in a while, different Indians would remember an event of this kind.
On one of these trips my mother had a cousin traveling with them who was the same age, fifteen. They stopped for a noon lunch after they left Anacortes, built a fire near Port Ludlow, and made tea. They noticed a rowboat following them and her uncles. My mother’s uncles said, “There are two white men and a woman following us, it seems.” The rowboat stopped about a block down the beac
h from them, and the two men and the woman got out. They started walking down the beach toward the Indians, and my mother’s uncles put my mother and her cousin in a tent. They had some Indian bread they were going to fry. They put my mother and her cousin under some blankets. They knew they were looking for Indian girls, because they had heard about it. My mother heard them approach. They said “Hello” or “How do you do?” And they talked about where they were going. The Indians didn’t speak English. The white and Indian people talked to one another in Chinook Jargon, which is a trade language. One of the men had a bottle of whiskey. He poured it into a tin cup and handed it to the Indian men. They shook their heads and said no. The woman said, “Just taste it.” They had learned to speak those words: “Taste it.” The men said it wouldn’t hurt. The white woman took the cup from the white man and handed it to an Indian man, and she said, “Just taste it. It won’t hurt. It won’t hurt you. Just taste it.” The Indian men said no. They shook their heads no. So she took a drink, and the men, they took a drink and said, “See? It’s good.” Well, the Indians talked about it. They noticed every time the woman and the men drank they took a big breath, took a swallow, and said, “Aah.” The Indians noticed and wondered why they had to breathe like that after they swallowed all of it. Anyway, they tried to give them the whiskey, and the Indians wouldn’t take it. They kept drinking to show the Indians that it didn’t hurt. They weren’t drunk and they could handle it. But they kept looking around, and the woman walked around the camp. The Indian women were making bread. She was looking for girls, of course. The whites finally left, but they kept following them.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 9