I was just thinking of her, and I was thinking, there is no way to answer her. I could have hollered to high heaven. “Have pity on them? Grandmother, are you in your right mind?” I think that’s why all of those little grandmothers seemed so placid. You’d think that nothing ever really got through to them. I used to think, oh, grandmother, she doesn’t know what it is like to be a teenager. Well, she did. She said times are different. Clothes are different, perhaps, but nothing changes—good manners, kindness, courtesy never changes.
She was saying, ?’ošəbdxw, meaning “have pity.” Have pity on the white people. They don’t know any better. They run around—saxwsaxwəbid, which means “running and jumping all over the country.” “You find them all over. They seem like they don’t know where they are going, or what they want. But they are going fast.” They used to come around in rowboats, walking on the beaches and looking at the timber, rivers, lands, and everything. She said, “It is as though they were a lost people—wherever they come from.” She didn’t know where they came from. They just came from far, far away across a big body of water. She told me, “You must forgive them. They don’t know any better. It seems like wherever they were born, they don’t stay there. It just seems as though they are a lost people, and they are not too certain what they are looking for, or where they are going; they are going fast. You have to forgive them. They don’t know any better.”
I thought it was kind of funny years after she was dead and gone. I thought, “Grandmother, what do you mean: ‘be good to them’? They are a bunch of brawling, drunken people. People who call me names. Tell me to get out of there. And you want me to be kind to them?”
Of course, my mother was like that, and my father was too. He said, “You have to overlook a lot of things. Your best friends are going to be white, you remember. A few will be your friends and will stick by you through thick and thin. Maybe some of your relatives have helped so far, but not as it gets to be too much for them.”
I forgot all about that until about two or three years ago, and that is when I thought: Oh, grandmother, you don’t know what you are saying.” She didn’t run into many white people in her later years when she came here to live. She didn’t go into town. Everything she had my mother and other relatives bought for her. The pitiful poverty of those elderly ladies like my grandmother is another thing. My father worked at the Agency, and he bought all of her groceries. Every month he went to see what she wanted: flour, salt, lard, baking powder, and meat. My mother baked bread for her and cooked roast beef. When I think of them, I think how brave they were. If I was in a situation like that, where my husband had died, most of my children had died, my grandchildren had died, and I was all alone, and the roof over my head was a poor one because it was just one room, I don’t think I could take it.
My mother bought the calico for her dresses when they became worn. The calico material was usually blue and had a design made up of tiny flowers. The dresses had wide skirts and a fitted blouse my mother called a “basque”: it buttoned all the way up to the neck. The sleeves were two or three inches above the wrist and showed their bracelets. Almost all of the older Indian ladies had Indian jewelry made from hammered silver coins. My grandmother wore the black velvet blouses and skirts for Sunday. The velvet blouses and skirts were somewhat discouraged because we were supposed to be getting civilized.
I remember my grandmother would have her sisters and brothers-in-law come from La Conner. They came in their canoes and brought their friends and slept all over or in some of the vacant buildings around Mission Beach. They cooked and ate in grandmother’s little place. They came to visit, and they stayed for maybe two or three weeks. In a way, that was interesting. I knew Indians who went visiting and stayed a week, two weeks, or maybe two years, or all of the rest of their lives. They are welcome in a place where their brother, sister, or cousin is living, or even cousins-in-law. There was plenty of food: deer, native pheasant, clams, different kinds of fish. Food was not a problem; although, it would be now.
Elderly little women knitted heavy woolen socks. Somehow, somebody got them to town or to Everett or all of the way to Port Townsend. Western Washington logging, timber, and mill workers wore those woolen socks that the Indians made. So there was usually a place to sell hand-knitted Indian socks. Those women worked almost day and night. They drank coffee and ate a piece of bread in the morning, and then they started knitting. They fixed something to eat for lunch and kept on knitting and knitting. No matter where they went, if they were walking along, they knitted.
Some of the Indian women had spinning wheels that were made by Indian men. You would think Indian men way back then wouldn’t know how to make one. But they saw the spinning wheels someplace and noticed how they were made; then they carved the wheels and put them together. I have seen the handmade ones. My aunt, my father’s sister, had a homemade spinning wheel.
I used to help my grandmother, too, in preparing the wool. Teasing the wool, doing like this, is called cədzəlqid; this is the beginning in the preparation of the wool. The wool has already been washed, so you fluff it up. Then after it is washed, it is dried, and the thorns or dried leaves will fall out of it. Then the pile of fluffy wool is carded. It is made into pieces one and one-half to two inches in diameter and fourteen inches long in a skein. The pieces are then put onto the spinning wheel to be spun into yarn.
My aunt spun wool that way. She put the small piece on the end, and she had her foot going, and that spinning wheel was turning, and she turned her fingers and spun the wool on it. I thought it looked easy. I asked if I could try it. She said, “Oh, of course.” She talked Indian, “Just go ahead.” She told me something about how to do it. “Be sure to turn it as it goes and feed it in.” I couldn’t do that and move my foot and turn the treadle and do as she said with my hands. The thing spun around and broke right off. So I stopped it, and the wheel was flopping around. She said, “You didn’t turn your fingers. Turn your fingers so that it spins through your fingers. Don’t hold it that tight. Let it turn in your fingers.” So she patched it up and let me try it again. I broke the yarn again, and she said, “You will have to do it a little more often.”
My grandmother used an Indian spindle and so did my mother. I thought, “That looks easy: you spin it on your knee with one hand and with the other turn your fingers with the wool that is spinning.” My mother and grandmother said, “Move your fingers. Don’t hold it so tight.” Anyway, I broke the wool again.
I have one of those spindle whorls that my mother spun white wool on. She said she got it too tight. She couldn’t see very well then. She must have been 100 years old. I have tried that too, and I flopped it onto the floor. I thought at first, “Oh, that’s easy.” I was showing some white people who wanted to know how in the world you use it. It went spinning off of my lap and went around in a big circle. I said, “Oh dear. Oh, well, now you know.” My father used to say, “Don’t go rushing into something you really don’t know about. You think it looks easy. Don’t go rushing. You are liable to end up looking like you didn’t know anything to begin with.”
So, that was how I ended up. I had a hard time with that Indian spindle.6 I don’t think I could do that now—not anymore.
Childhood Pastimes
Every Indian girl had to know how to sew. By the time I was six years old, I could sew. I also knew how to knit. I went to a Montessori school then. When I was seven years old, I went to the Tulalip Indian School. I have a dress my sister made for her doll. You should see how fine the stitching is. We sat on the floor, on a couple of cushions, or sometimes we sat on small toy chairs when we sewed. The chairs were made for little ones to sit on. We had to sew.
I knew how to cut out a dress with a yoke. My sister cut it out so that it would fit, and she made the little pants. My mother let us have scraps of cloth to sew on. Sometimes we made little quilts for our dolls—not very fancy ones. Every Indian girl knew how to sew and could also do straight knitting. (I still have my doll with t
he kidskin body. It had dark brown hair that I used to comb.) We sat and sewed almost every day, and my mother looked at our stitches and would usually ask us to “make them smaller.”
My paternal grandmother looked at what we were sewing when she came to visit. When Indian women came to visit, even those who were my mother’s age looked at what we were sewing. My mother and her mother learned how to sew with the white man’s needles. Before that, they didn’t have little needles like the white man’s steel needles. So when they got the white man’s steel needles, they said you have to make small stitches and make them even. Don’t have big sloppy stitches. People will look at your clothes or your moccasins and if they have big sloppy stitches, nobody will marry you. They will know you are lazy and good for nothing. I don’t know how many times I heard that during all of the years I was growing up: “You had better learn how to do this.”
The only thing I never learned was how to cook. I mean, anybody can peel potatoes and boil them. One of my cousins asked me one time why I didn’t know anything about cooking. I really wasn’t home that much. My mother didn’t want us fussing around in the kitchen. I would be in the kitchen with my mother when it was time to prepare food for some meal. I was the one wringing my fingers and saying, “What shall I do? What to do?” My mother would say, “You can do this or that.” One time my father said, “Don’t stand around and say ‘what shall I do now?’ Watch your mother and the other women as they prepare food and then you will know what to do.” Well, I didn’t learn. After I went to the boarding school, I was home only two months during the year. You would think I would learn, but I didn’t. I wasn’t interested in cooking. After my sister died, my mother never insisted that I cook or that I do anything.
My sister and I cooked peeled potatoes. We put lard in a frying pan and poured peeled potatoes for fried potatoes. My sister knew how to cook, but when we were home my mother didn’t want us to disturb her kitchen. When she had bread rising we stayed out of there. When my mother made donuts, once in a while we asked to help. Indians didn’t have that much, to be wasting grease or oil for donuts, but they were good. She let us cut our initials in the grease, and it kind of changed shape. Then when I got in school, there weren’t any donuts or cake or sugar.
As I said before, my mother spent her childhood at a longhouse on Guemes Island, where the Samish Tribe had their main village. She had a pet cat. I guess they got it for her when it was a kitten. When I was little, I remember seeing quite a number of Indian women carrying their pet cats in their arms. They carried it along in the canoe. If they were living on Whidbey Island, they took their cats, and after a year the men would say, “Are you taking that cat along or something?” The Indian women didn’t especially listen to those men. They were just talking. I had a pet cat. I remember my father said, “Don’t hold it too close to your face.” I was running all over, carrying my “child.” He was wrapped up in a shawl.
My mother and her cousin were about the same age. When they were children together on Guemes Island, they both had kittens the family got from Victoria. My mother called her cat her grandson. We used to laugh when I was growing up that my mother, when she was a little girl, played that she was a little old grandmother and that she had a grandson. Her uncles built little mat houses exactly like the grown-up mat houses that were used when they went out to the islands for fishing, clamming, and drying salmon and clams. Their mat house was just big enough for them, so that they could put a blanket and a cushion in it and they could sleep there. I think they used to have hard tack to eat in there too. They didn’t have anything then like cookies. Their mother let them take an old frying pan and maybe a pot to carry water in.
My mother remembered one time her cat disappeared. She had picked up what she thought was her grandson in an empty roll of cloth. The cat was gone. So she and her cousin came out of their little mat house, looking around. A couple of her uncles were walking by. They said to my mother, “If you are looking for your grandson, he is running way down the beach that way.” My mother and her cousin felt kind of embarrassed. They didn’t know that any of the grown-ups knew—that they had a grandson. So they ran all over the beach, trying to catch the grandson. Her uncles came and helped catch her grandson. Her mother said, “Let the cat run around. You can’t hold him wrapped up like that all day.”
When my father was little, his uncles made him a little canoe just big enough for him. He said he didn’t know what happened to it, but it was an absolutely beautiful tiny canoe that he played in. Somebody helped him build a rowboat too. He said in the early days when the white people first started coming here, the Indians wondered what kind of people would travel backwards in a boat? Why would they travel in the direction they couldn’t see? He remembered rowing around in his rowboat, making his own oars, and trying to figure out why the oars didn’t slip when the white people rowed their boats. So he used to paddle around in a small rowboat and a small canoe. Sometimes his cousin got on, and they all sank.
My father talked about how he and his cousins dove when they were swimming around and walked along the bottom. Way back then, the water was clear blue. They carried big rocks with them in order to stay down. Then they met each other under the water and talked to each other, but they didn’t stay down long. They had to drop the rocks. They had to come to the top, and then they laughed and laughed. They talked to each other under the water. He said they looked different to each other. Their eyes looked funny. When they talked, big bubbles came out. Paddling to the top, they laughed and laughed and told each other how funny they looked.
My father and his cousins played hunters chasing deer. My father said he was always the deer. He used to complain and say, “I don’t want to be the deer this time. I want to be the hunter.” His cousins looked at him and said, “No, you be the deer. We will let you be the hunter next time.” So he had to run through the woods, and they were chasing him. They were all bigger than him, and they could catch him when he got back on the beach. He tried to run through the water. They caught him and rolled him over and tickled him and made him laugh. But he said he got scared of them when he was running through the woods. He yelled and yelled in the circle when they were talking about what they were going to play. Somebody said, “Let us be hunters. William can be the deer.” He protested, and they said, “You can be the hunter next time,” but next time never came.
We weren’t supposed to play Indian games. My mother and her cousins played with wooden dolls that their uncles carved. They weren’t very big. My mother said they were less than a foot long. They were just wonderful. Years later they saw china dolls that came from the white stores in the cities and towns. I still have my kidskin doll. It was one of the last dolls my parents got me for Christmas. My sister cut out the pants and the little dress. We both had the same kind of dolls; my mother would buy two so nobody would get into an argument. My mother would let us have scraps of cloth to sew the outfits. The doll had real, dark brown hair that I used to comb, although I didn’t comb it much because it wasn’t meant to be combed. But we would sit and sew almost every day, and my mother would come and look at the stitches, and she would say, “You can make them look smaller.” My paternal grandmother, and every Indian woman who came, would want to look at our sewing. Sometimes we were trying to make little quilts for our dolls, but they were not very fancy quilts; every Indian woman knew how to sew.
Once in a while, I look at dolls at the stores at Christmastime, and a great number of them are blond, blue-eyed dolls. You see black dolls, too. But Indian dolls are always the same. They make them wrapped up in blankets. Years and years ago, I first saw them. I don’t think those type of dolls have changed very much.
When we were little, there were times when we didn’t have the china dolls. I accidentally dropped mine when I was running to my grandmother’s house and it landed on a rock, all broken up. I cried and cried. But my mother and grandmother made dolls for me out of rags. They just rolled up a piece of sheet—something that was sor
t of tan or a yellow color. All they did was tie part of his head, then another tie or another small roll and put it between, and that is the two arms. Then it is tied at the waist, so the arms won’t fall off. I thought they were just grand. I carried those rag dolls around. My mother would go over to my grandmother’s house—I called her aunt then7—she lived about two blocks away. I showed her my doll. Sometimes it seems like little children can be very happy with something very simple. Who would be satisfied with a rag doll made like that? I thought they were just grand. Sometimes my mother crocheted or knitted little bonnets or a sweater for the doll—for the little rag doll.
The Indian boys had a bigger area to play in than the Indian girls. We had to stay very close to our mother or our grandmother. We were not allowed to go walking way out somewhere into the woods to look for wild roses or whatever. We had to stay close by.
One of the pleasures we had when spring came was to walk with some of our friends around the lilac bushes. We’d put our arms around one another’s shoulders and go walking around the playground at the boarding school. The lilacs filled an area more than a block long, but they were planted close together, and there were places where you could squeeze through. They had been there for years.
My mother had lilacs just like the ones that were at the school, and their fragrance was very pronounced. You could smell them a long way off. If my mother had any spare dollars, she bought a plant. She bought some Persian lilacs one time. They were a darker purple. But those beautiful things didn’t have the fragrance that the old-fashioned ones had. They had double blossoms in big clusters.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 15