My father went to the Mission School; he was already baptized, by a priest, with the name of William. He was about eighteen or nineteen years old when he arrived at the Mission School. He didn’t tell his folks, who lived at Possession Point on Whidbey Island, that he was going. His parents and all of his uncles did not want him to go to school. They said, “If you go there, you are going to get sick and you are going to die.” So many Indian children were dying. They died of measles, and if they caught a cold, it turned into pneumonia and that turned to tuberculosis. When the pioneers came, it seemed as though the Indians caught colds and other illnesses they never had before. They never had measles or pneumonia and so on.
He just left home one early morning and arrived there in a canoe. He met a cousin, brother, there who took him to the priest’s office. The priest talked, and my father listened to him, but he didn’t understand any of it. He said it seemed as if the priest was asking him something, so the cousin told him his name is William. The priest wrote something on a book and talked some more. His cousin told him the priest said, “You have to have another name. You can’t have just one name.” My father told my cousin, “You know, just William.” The priest seemed to be listening and talking. My father had some older cousins who were there, and their name was Shelton, and so his cousin said something to the priest. The priest said, “Oh, that’s his name: William Shelton.” He wrote it down. So, standing in the priest’s office, my father became William Shelton. If it had gone according to how the white people name their children—you take your father’s last name—my father’s last name should have been Wheakadim.
It was unusual that my father was named Wheakadim after his father. His name should have been William Wheakadim. But my father didn’t want the priest to know what his name was. He stayed at the Mission School for two years until he got out in 1890. Then he met my mother and they got married.
In 1902 the Girls Building burned down, along with almost the entire school. I don’t remember if they had an investigation about why and how it started. I think they discussed it. But some people saw one of the clerks who had been dismissed from the agency office walking around there about one or two o’clock in the morning. The fire started on one of the porches, a veranda, with a pile of burning oil-soaked rags as if somebody had rolled up the rags and poured a lot of coal oil on them and lit the pile. The fire just raged all through there. They got the girls and boys and all the employees out.
My father and mother lived where the agency used to be, across the bay from the Mission School, where a lot of Indians lived at that time. My father and the others got to the fire. They said they woke up because they heard a man shouting. They got up and went to the front porch and opened the door and stepped outside and listened. A man was riding on horseback, and he was going from here to the school and around the road and north and shouting that the school was burning, and they wanted everybody to come and help.
They had a bucket brigade. They got there just when the Girls Building was in flames. Some Indian men came, and they said, “All the children are out.” The Sisters took care of even the little ones. They woke them up, but for some it was hard to wake them up and get them lined up. Then there are the little boys in their nightshirts, and they can hang on to each other and say, “All right, this is the way out.” So they did get them all out, but they had no clothes to wear.
The word spread. Indian men brought in messengers and canoes, and they went to Everett. Everett was already a small town, and they asked at the Catholic Church for any kind of clothes for children. Some Indians even went to Seattle and Olympia, and so the word spread. Of course, pioneers were not that wealthy either. Clothes were hard to come by. A lot of them did their own spinning and weaving and made their own woolen cloth to make trousers or dresses and coats. They even spun yarn and knitted stockings and socks. They had to go all around to get clothing for the children.
My father said he and David Snapps, one of his cousins, got to the steeple of the church just as it was starting to burn. A couple of younger Indian men climbed up with a bucket of water. It is pretty hard to climb that far, and they couldn’t climb up the steeple. By that time, the water in the bucket was half full, and to try and throw it up like that just didn’t work. My father and they started removing the statuary—a large one of St. Sebastian and another smaller one of St. Joseph. By that time, the church was full of smoke and it burned down.
The Girls Building, the church, and some other buildings burned down, but the Boys Building was there when I was little, as I said, because we used to run in there and “clump up” the stairs. It would sway. We would be upstairs running around, and we would stop and look at it and it was swaying just a little bit. We would hear my mother’s voice. She heard us and came running to tell us to come down from there. She said, “You can go on the first floor, but don’t run around.” But we went upstairs anyway and ran around and around together and watched it and listened to it creak.
When I was born in 1904, there was no school. Students who were big enough were taken to Chemawa Boarding School in Oregon. When I came along at school age, the school had been built again. The Indians cleared the land and burned the stumps. There was a Girls Building and a Boys Building, a classroom building, and a number of other buildings for the homes of the employees. They had a club building. It was a two-story building, with about six or eight rooms where the single employees stayed. Then there was a kitchen and a dining room where they ate.
Dearest Grandmothers: Manners and Religious Training
If the white people ever think about it, they probably think we arrived at the boarding school like a bunch of wild animals. White people think we are absolutely savage. We were savages or, shall we say, barbarians, but we still emphasized what we believed to be good manners. I remember one of them was how I should eat. How I should chew my food. You never chew your food with your mouth open. Never, never. You take small bites of food. We were taught how to sit and how to walk and how to enter and leave a room. As a matter of fact, all of us were taught before we were of school age how to say “please,” how to eat at the table, and, in the old days, the really old-time Indians never allowed children to eat at the table with the older people. All of the children ate separately. They gave them a piece of smoked salmon, a slice of bread, and then they ate around their mother. They were not allowed to talk. They were not allowed to stand up and run around. They must sit there. They could talk to each other or to their mother, but there was no loud talking. The Indian children were already quiet. When we played, then, we were noisy, shall we say, but when we went into a room, any room, classroom, dining room, then we were supposed to sit down and keep still.
The Indian children always played together. Usually wherever they went, they could go around the beaches or they would go along trails, and some grandparents always went with them or aunts and uncles went walking along with them. I remember my grandmothers and all of their cousins used to go to Mission Beach when I was little and we would run up and down that beautiful beach, and that was acres and acres of nice clean beach. And we could run up and down and make tracks, you know; we could make all kinds of designs. We could be two, three, four blocks ahead of our grandparents, and I would always turn around and look and see where my grandmother and them were. They’d be walking along and talking. I guess they were reminiscing about the times when they used to run up and down the beaches. Walking with their canes, talking.
I remember I have talked before, so many times, about when I used to run down to my grandmothers all the time. She lived about a block away. In that big house there were two other elderly ladies that lived there. In the next room was Sədulitsə, Mrs. Mary Jake, and she was about the same age as my grandmother. In the other room was a much older woman, and she came from Suquamish. The agency called her Sally. I can’t remember her Indian name. But I remember when I learned how to read; every morning I would run down to see my grandma. My mother would be calling me, but I would go flying out
the door, and maybe my mother would just want to start unbraiding my hair. All of us had long braided hair. All I would do is slap some water on my face and just run my wet hands over my hair. I’d give my face a big slap with a towel and then I would run out the door. One time I told my mother, “I’m going to eat breakfast with my grandmother.” Well, my mother would keep calling me, you know, “Come back, come back.” She didn’t want me running down there starving to death and eating. My grandmother would probably feel nobody fed me.
My paternal grandmother was the one who tried so hard to make me into a fine Indian lady. My mother’s mother I don’t remember. I don’t remember one thing about her and she lived with us too, or near us. I often wondered what they would think if they heard me getting mad and swearing. I will always remember going to my grandmother’s house every morning. My paternal grandmother was the only grandmother I remember. I was very close to her, I spent a lot of time with her. I think that was the way of life with our Indian people way back then, for generations, for hundreds of years, the grandmothers had a lot to do, in fact almost everything, with raising their grandchildren. They always seemed to have a big interest in us young children, because I used to meet other older women about the same age as my grandmother and sometimes they would tell me the same things that would help me in my lifetime that my grandmother told me.
As soon as I ate breakfast, I went hopping down there. I knocked at the door and opened the door and walked in. My grandmother would be knitting socks, and I used to help her. That caused a lot of tears. I mean, my mother always got upset because I never learned that fast about heels and toes on knitted socks. But my grandmother said to just do it over and over.
Then one day I knocked at my grandmother’s door that special time. I guess I was about five years old because it was before I went to Tulalip Indian School. I knocked at the door and I opened the door and I went “clumping in.” There was a hallway there and I got to the open doorway and she was sitting in her little home there, and she was always knitting socks. The heavy woolen socks that the Indian women made, and they sold them to the stores in Seattle, Port Townsend, Olympia—all of the first towns. Of course, Seattle way back then was probably just a saloon and Yesler’s Mill and probably Yesler’s Saloon, too. Then, Olympia was mostly saloons and a store. Port Townsend was a bigger place. But I went hopping down to my grandma’s, knocked at the door and went “clumping in,” as I said. When I sat down there was always a little box, with a big cushion on it, beside her. So I flopped down and I was yakking away, telling her something, and she said, “It is time that you learned how to walk into a room, and into any place, like a real fine Indian lady. You know how you go, “oh, oh, what did I do now.” My mind is going around, and I know I am not supposed to go “clumping” into a room like that. So, she told me—she never ever raised her voice—in a quiet speaking voice, she said. “You will go back out the door and you will knock, and when you hear my voice telling you to come in, you will come in, and you will not slam the door, and when you walk into a room you will take shorter steps and don’t have your feet and your shoes fighting with the floor. Lift your feet, take shorter steps, and when you sit down here by me, sit with your knees together, and you will remember that as long as you live. Go back outside. Knock at the door, and when you hear my voice, come in. Please walk with short steps, and please don’t lift your knees too high. When you sit down, you will sit here with your knees together, and you will remember that as long as you live. You will always sit with your knees together.”
I walked back out and shut the door. I remember I looked at the doorknob for a while, and I thought maybe I had better go back home. As soon as I thought that, I knew my father and mother would hear about what my grandmother tried to teach me. Everybody would be disappointed that I ran away from something I was supposed to do. So I knocked at the door. I could hear my grandmother’s voice. I walked in, in short steps. I never had the nerve, until about five years later, to ask her how was I going to walk without lifting my knees. I never, ever asked. If they told you to do something, you did it. I will always remember that business of sitting like a lady with my knees together. Now that I am much older, I always notice how every woman sits.
The other thing I learned that same summer was also from my grandmother, my real grandmother’s sister, Sədulistə. Two sisters came from La Conner to visit my grandmother at her house. They came with their husbands. Whenever they, my grandmothers, came in the summer, they would stay for perhaps two weeks and then go back home, and then they never saw each other again for the year. Those grandmothers came in canoes, paddling. They were all older people like my grandmother. I used to sit and listen to them talk for two or three hours at a time. If I fell asleep, they would put me on their laps and wake me up again.
When I talk about my parents, my grandmothers, they all talked in our Indian language, the Snohomish Indian language, and I also talked in the Indian language like them. As I was growing up, I spoke two languages. I talked in Indian—Snohomish—more than in English. My father worked at the agency, where he had to talk English. When he came home, he talked English to my mother, and that is how I learned to talk English to some extent. Otherwise, we talked in our Snohomish Indian language. So when I was talking with my grandmothers, that is the language we spoke.
Another lesson I learned, that I never forgot, was with my grandmother’s sister, Sədulitsə, but she was also my grandmother. My other grandmother and her husband and some cousins who came from La Conner were visiting my grandmother. My other grandmother was married to a man from La Conner, he was Swinomish. Some parts of their language were different from ours, but I understood them perfectly. I heard it so many times. They came from La Conner, and they came in canoes, naturally. When the other grandmothers would come, I was always down at the beach waiting for them, and I would call out to them, “Where are you folks going?” I was talking in Indian you know, and they would always tell me they were going to see my grandmother. Some people wouldn’t bother to answer a child, you know, or maybe you don’t even listen to them babbling.
There were other men and women who came with my other grandmother, Sədulistə, so there would be a room full of my grandmothers’ relatives and they would be talking. They would talk for hours and hours, remembering when they were children, or they would talk about what they heard or knew about the time of the treaty in 1855. The treaty was something that was important to us. I never realized it then, but I heard those words so many times—the treaty. But that was what my grandmothers and their husbands would talk about. Some of them were small children at the signing of the treaty, and they didn’t really know what it was, but they knew that it was treaty time. My grandmother didn’t go to the council meeting.
Anyway, that time when Sədulistə came from La Conner, we were all visiting and talking. They would talk hour after hour where my grandmother lived. They had been talking, reminiscing, for two or three hours. There would be quite a number of them. I turned my head to look at every one of them who spoke and as they moved about the room, because we were going to have tea or coffee or lunch. I was sitting on a little box on a big cushion and when someone spoke, I turned my head. Sədulistə put me on her lap and said to me, “You must never turn your head like that if people are talking in a room. You must not turn your head at any place where there are groups of people, where there is a council meeting. Do not turn your head that rapidly. If you are going to look at people or different persons, you turn your head slowly. You must not be turning your face so fast and in so many directions. People are going to talk about you. Different women from different tribes will talk about how you throw your face around, so you remember, don’t ever turn your head like that just so rapidly from person to person. You can turn your head more slowly without throwing your face around. A fine Indian lady turns her head very slowly and looks. If you turn your head like that your earrings are swinging all over, and a lot of strangers—there will be hundreds of people in a longhous
e—will watch how you walk and how you turn your head. They will talk about how low class you are, how stupid you are. We have to be careful. You don’t want people to think that you are low class, or that you are stupid, or that you are silly, crazy.” At that age, four or five years old, I already had earrings. They pierced my ears. I barely remember anything about having my earlobes pierced.
Believe me, I remembered what she said. I tried. I tried to follow what she said. I was about five or six years old, since it seemed to be quite a while before I went to the boarding school. It seemed as though all of the grandparents, different relatives, all had an interest in us younger people. By the time I was fourteen, I wondered when they were going to stop picking on me. I felt that they were picking on me all the time. However, after I got older, I certainly appreciated them. By that time, most of them were gone. The grandmothers were always anxious to tell us how to be.
I remember thinking years afterwards, “Who cares? Nobody is going to notice how I turn my head.” But way back then, all through our travel life—hundreds, thousands of years ago—grandparents, and grandmothers in particular, had a lot to do with how children were raised. They are the ones who emphasized manners, the manners the Indians believed in.
Another thing that happened to me had to do with one of our legends. We have legends that tell of the baby who was born. He was called the Sky or Star Child. His name was Dukwibəł our Spirit Creator.3 Our legends are a little different for the different tribes. In our legends, he became a good hunter. He had a little vest, a little coat, that was made of many colors of feathers. In my father’s booklet, “Legends of the Totem Pole,” the legend is called “The Little Man with the Coat of Many Colors.” These legends are old, old, old. They come from a time my parents said was in our history hundreds of years ago. A time that is like in the morning: if you look over toward the mountains or over the water toward Whidbey and Hat islands, there is a mist that drifts and takes maybe an hour or so before the sun shines through. That is what those Indians used to say. It is like a time that was behind a curtain, a fog, a mist. It is our time when we were on this earth. We have been here a long, long time. We have always been here.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 13