The woman must have known there were several girls with them. Many Indians were orphan children because families had died off, and there were thousands of Indians dying. First of all was the smallpox epidemic, and after that the measles went around and around. Whole families died. So there were girls, sometimes eleven or twelve years old, who lived with their aunts and uncles. They were very lonely. They were heartbroken young people because they had lost their mother, lost their father, lost sisters and brothers. When these white men with white women said, “Now come with me and I’ll take you to Seattle. Tell the other Indians you’ll find her in Seattle. I’ll buy her some dresses and shoes. She can work for me.” The Indian girls can’t speak English, and, besides, they know what a dress is. Well, she has a dress but maybe just one, and it has patches. She washed it and put it back on while it was still damp. She is still crying and will go with a stranger. She will think, “This might be better.” The uncles would say to her, “No, no wait.” Those kind of people—white men and women—would take the girls, load them up on the rowboats, and leave. The Indian men and their families could paddle on down to Seattle and walk up and down the streets, trying to find the girls. They asked white people—white men, because the white women in town wouldn’t talk to the Indians and crossed to the opposite side of the muddy street, away from the saloons. The Indians walked along there, and they asked people; they tried to tell them they were looking for two or three Indian girls. After a while, they found out they could go to a priest or a preacher and talk about the girls who had disappeared. So the houses of prostitution were filled with Indian girls.
When the history books are written by white pioneers of Seattle or their descendants, they speak of the prostitutes in Yesler’s Hotel. There were prostitutes in Port Townsend, too. They were Indian girls, and they landed there not knowing what kind of life it was. If the Indian uncle tried to get in to get his niece back, they wouldn’t let him. What house of prostitution wants an Indian man? He was told to go to the back door where the kitchen is. They would say, “You can’t come in here,” give him a big cussing and slam the door. So they never found the girls again. Of course, my father and mother said it’s highly unlikely those girls lived very long. They had lived an outdoor life and were then locked in places like that, where they could probably go out once or twice a week with the madam of the house. So I have no doubt that there were lots and lots of Indian girls that were prostitutes. They were all very young, and they got into it not knowing what it was. Once they were there, they couldn’t get out and go home. There were white women, white girls, who were prostitutes too. Very likely they got into it not knowing what it was either, when they were first picked up.
In our old customs, the old tradition, prostitution was unknown. A young woman going out was always told she had to be good, and I mean good. They tell you when you are going out, “Now, you be good.” Nobody told you what “good” meant. You had an idea, but not quite. Just to be good. Those Indian girls didn’t have a choice. Any woman or girl at home years ago, in the old tribal organization, who stepped from the narrow pathway where she was supposed to walk—if she stepped to one side, then it meant a man somewhere else out in the woods got a penalty, and that was death.
My father talked about the last family that did that here. The girl was young and married to a Klallam man from across the peninsula. She very deliberately came back and met the young man she loved. He came from her tribe. She kept coming home to visit, and finally her husband and her in-laws followed her here. They found out she was living with this young man she loved. Her aunts and mother told her, “You’re doing wrong. You know you are. You shouldn’t be coming home to visit.” She said, “What am I doing?”
Her in-laws came and her husband came there. They knew they were in a place toward what is now Warm Beach where the girl and the young man she loved stayed in a camp away from the longhouse. The longhouse was at Spibida. There were several smaller longhouses there at Warm Beach, but she and the young man were in a camp away from there, farther north. Her people came too—her father and mother and her relatives—and tried to talk, but there was no use.
The husband killed his wife’s lover. The lover was lying down with his head on the girl’s lap. Before he could even get up, her husband’s people had landed. She was madly in love, and here the canoes landed so quietly, and her husband and his people were already there. They took the young man and cut off his head. She was standing right there, and she was crying. I guess she was saying, “I’m sorry,” but nobody was listening to her.
Her father and mother tried to talk. They killed them both. They cut out her father’s heart and this young man’s she was living with. They put her father’s heart inside of her mouth, and, of course, that heart was large. They told us the heart of her father and of her lover were still warm, and there was a lot of blood. They tied up her hands and threw her into the canoe. They gave her her lover’s heart to hold and took her. Nobody ever knew what happened to her. No one among the tribal members who were still alive was going to say, “Tell me what you are going to do with her.” Nobody said anything.
I think it was told to us as a lesson. If I had a daughter, I would have told her. When we were young, that was a law. I think it is in one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It was strictly enforced with the Snohomish Tribe and other tribes here.
I often wondered if those skeletons they found in Warm Beach could have been them.
There were problems, and in all of this, the Indians were trying to find their way. Most of the Indians did not speak English. As I said, they had a jargon or a trade language called Chinook Jargon,3 which the Indians from different tribes developed so that they could speak to one another if they didn’t know each other’s language, and some of the white people learned to speak it when they came here. It was what linguists would call a pidgin language. Some of the pioneers in Seattle used to talk to me in Chinook. I was just out of high school, and they were always quite sarcastic that I didn’t understand the Indian language because I didn’t understand Chinook [Jargon]. In Chinook, tillicum is friend. Klahowya is a greeting, “hello,” and so sometimes they would say to me, “Isn’t it funny you’re an Indian and you don’t know your own language.” I said, “That’s not an Indian language. It is pidgin English.” “What do you think tumtum means? Several of them thought that it meant “stomach,” or if you are hungry. I said, “No, it means ‘your heart’ or ‘your thoughts. Mikə tumtum is ‘my thoughts,’ or how I feel. But we, the women, did not learn Chinook Jargon, although I understood some of the words. We went to school. I speak the Snohomish Indian language, and my parents spoke several other Indian languages.
As the pioneers came along, they shot their guns at anything they saw, whether it was rabbits or any kind of bird. They shot them. If they saw Indians, they shot them, too. It was common when they saw one to shoot him. By the time they got out here to the coast, it was almost as though waves and waves of pioneers had to stop to take a breath, and they knew, vaguely, that they probably had reached the end. By the time they got out here, all they did was kill some Indians. They started to kind of slow their killing. Of course, they killed each other in fighting brawls, because as the pioneers moved along, the first thing established in every settlement was a saloon. Liquor was the first thing they brought in and that would cause trouble, too. A lot of men can go in and drink and nothing happens; they are just relaxing. There is still another type who will go in and want to fight all of the way through.
The American Rifle Association doesn’t want gun control. They say it is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—I forget which amendment; it guarantees the right to bear arms. I am always saying that’s not exactly what it means. It means a militia, and that means a group of men like an army. They bear arms to guard the village, the town, the people. I heard some of those men from the American Rifle Association. They were on the Dick Cavett Show some years ago. I always liked him.
; There is a tragedy happening to the people in Lebanon—and we see pictures of mothers running with their babies; they are just clutching them. They are being bombarded by great big guns. Well, white people didn’t have big terrific guns like that, but they had guns when they came over the United States, and there were Indian women running to escape just like in Lebanon. Sometimes it wasn’t an army or a cavalry attack or anything like that; sometimes it would be just three or four drunken white men who came brawling into some Indian camp. Indian women and girls would have to go into the deep woods. They had shelters in the woods where they could stay and where there was usually some food put away. So the American Indians, quite a lot of them, have lived through that sort of terror. Certainly, the destruction isn’t like what is going on in Lebanon, in Beirut, where that big city is, but it is being leveled by those big guns. And there are still men and women, and a lot of children, and they look so tired. Well, that kind of thing happened to a great many tribes all the way across this continent. It happens in many places.
Right now on the television news they have been talking about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan. There was a man from Japan who was talking; I guess he was a young man then, and he happened to be way out in the outskirts when the bombs were dropped, but he was talking about the awful destruction. Quite a lot of the Japanese have leukemia now. The Secretary of Health, years ago, said you can’t prove it; nobody can prove such a thing. Sometimes government officials just go ahead, and to heck with the people.
Wayne, my older son, said that when he was in the army in the fifties, they came out of the desert after experiencing the deployment of an atomic weapon at ground zero in Nevada, and they marched back to their buses; he said that the first bomb was dropped from an airplane. The following week, it was in Newsweek, I remember; he called me long distance because he wouldn’t be able to write for a couple of weeks, since they were going somewhere south of Desert Rock. I think they were something like ninety miles from Desert Rock in Nevada; it is an army base. They went on buses to wherever ground zero was. They were four or five miles from ground zero. He said they worried about the trenches that they were told to dig. The sergeants were running Geiger counters on them: they went up one side and down the other and around their heads. It was clicking pretty good. Wayne was going to say how is it, but the boy ahead of him said that, and the “sarge” said “Shut up and get on board.” He said when they were in the trenches the hot sand blew over them; it seemed hot anyway. Well, sand wouldn’t blow over everybody. I imagine that bomb . . . well, I don’t know how it was. I don’t think power is equal all of the way. There is always something that stops it; or if there are buildings or whatever. I wonder if that is why he has white hair and if that made it difficult for him to get a job since they always want younger people.
On the news they showed the people who were protesting the nuclear submarine as it came through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There were all kinds of boats and rowboats strung all over the straits. I was saying, “What’s the matter with them anyway?” That’s fine. Everybody can get together and say we don’t want a nuclear war, but to get that far out and endanger their lives and the lives of other people, skittering out there in the Strait in front of that big submarine—and all around were Coast Guard cutters. They have the right to do that, but not that kind of crazy protest. Like I said, they endangered their own lives and the lives of other people. The time for them to protest was when the submarine was first being built. If you saw the newsreel, that submarine came in almost like a bullet. It was really making knots, moving along. The protesters, with their launches and boats, could run circles around that submarine. I was wondering how that submarine was going to get through that mob, and just coming through at full speed that’s the only way to come. I was thinking of my grandmother; she died in 1921. I was thinking about those protestors, and I was thinking what’s the matter with those people anyway. There is a time and a place to protest. It should be done with a little more dignity, shall we say. A little more thought for the safety of themselves and others.
Then, I don’t know why, but I remembered my grandmother, way back then I was running down the white people, and she said—she never ever spoke English, always in our language, so when I was talking with her, I always talked our language—“You must have pity on the white people.” You know, I was just going to say something, but we never answered our elders, not ever. We just sat and listened, and we thanked them for what they said. I remember she said, “You must have pity on the white people. They really don’t know, most of the time, what they are doing. Wherever they came from, they were a lost people.” So, what they do here around this country, she was just speaking of our Puget Sound country, “for what they do that seems, you might say, crazy, you must forgive them. They don’t know any better. Whatever manners they might have had have just been dropped or forgotten. You have to have pity on them. I was just thinking of her, and I was saying there is no answer to that. I could have hollered to high heaven. “Have pity on them? Grandmother, are you in your right mind?” I think that is why all of those little grandmothers seemed so placid. You’d think that nothing ever got through to them. Maybe. I used to think grandmother doesn’t know what it is like to be a teenager. Well, she did. She said that times are different. Clothes are different. But nothing changes good manners. Kindness, courtesy never changes.
1 Also known as fry bread; it is a yeast bread, deep fried in oil, invented by American Indians.
2 Her father was Sehome, a Klallam leader, who had moved to the Samish area to be with his wife’s family.
3 See dictionaries on Chinook Jargon by F. Long, J. Gill, and G. Gibbs. Recall that the treaties were negotiated and read in Chinook Jargon to the tribal members at the time of signing.
4 / First Memories of White People
ONE of the problems Indian men face is that the Indians have continuous unemployment. In the old days, an Indian man was a man. He was a hunter, a fisherman, a provider of food, and a protector. When white people came here, then Indians in various places had Indian wars. But eventually the Indians gave up. They moved onto reservations, where there was no work and nothing to do; a situation like that is very demoralizing for a man. He no longer feels as if he can do anything. He feels helpless. He feels as though he is not really a man. Nobody can change something like that; it is a big turnover of a people—the end of thousands of years of Indian culture and traditions. When any group of people is overrun by a greater number of people, they have no way of surviving. Then they lose much of what sustained them before in their culture. All of the tribes had their own ways, their own customs.
When the white people came, the Indians had to earn their own money to buy material—calico, usually—to make the women’s dresses and men’s shirts. They sewed their own dresses, men’s shirts, and children’s trousers.
In some instances they were able to go to Port Townsend, because Puget Sound Indians traveled in canoes. Port Townsend was the biggest town around here in the Puget Sound. The only other place they went was Victoria, British Columbia, and also Olympia, where there were a couple of saloons and a general store. As I said before, one of the few ways they could find work, where they could earn the white man’s money so that they could buy material for clothes, was picking hops in the Puyallup Valley.
The Indians suffered because they had pressures from all sides. One of the biggest pressures was from the missionaries. Then there was the Indian agent. Another pressure was having white people live all around them. Hundreds of thousands of white people moved in in the 1830s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.
When the pioneers were moving across the United States, they had their own problems. If it wasn’t wagons breaking down, or horses or mules dying, or Indian attacks, then, of course, they would have terrible sickness. They brought with them diseases the Indians never had before. I think that was the most amazing movement of people: the movement of white people from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean and then sp
illing all across the continent. You have to face the fact that a great number of them were misfits; they were uneducated. They left home when they were very young. Some of them claimed to be aristocrats where they came from, but they were not. Of course, that is my point of view. I used to meet some of them at the Seattle Historical Society meetings years ago. They were the men and women who were descendants of the first settlers in Seattle and in high society.
Once in a while, I used to talk at the Seattle Historical Society meetings about Angeline. In one of the photographs of her, she is shown sitting down, and she has a kerchief tied around her head. She was an elderly lady with a shawl on, and she held a cane. Her father was Chief Seattle. Chief Seattle was a friend of the Dennys, who were Seattle pioneers. Seattle told them, “I will move my tribe, the Duwamish, who own the river and all of Seattle, across the Sound to Suquamish—also part of our territory.” But Angeline stayed behind. She got old—a very elderly lady, and poor—and those women at the Seattle Historical Society talked about how dirty she was.
She lived in a one-room shack down on the waterfront in Seattle. I usually didn’t say anything, but one time I said, “You have to remember when you get old. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but probably it won’t. Why? You have money. What did Angeline have? Nothing.” She probably was dirty. Elderly people are very frail, and they don’t have much strength. She would have to carry water in buckets and have a big fire and a big tub to hold a lot of water in order to bathe. Maybe she didn’t have the strength to carry several buckets of water. She might have one bucket that she could fill and carry. There was no one to help her.
For several years now, Washington State and many other states have had programs where they have funding to take care of elderly people. Maybe they have poor health, so that they can’t really take care of themselves—wash clothes, scrub floors, and wash windows. Maybe they can make a fire and make tea or have bread and tea to eat.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 10