In later years, it was actually written in government reports that the food given to the Indian children in the boarding schools was, as I said, inadequate.
One year we didn’t have any towels. Everyone had their own towels hanging in the lavatory by number. I remember my number; it was thirty-three. My towel, my dresses, my stockings, my shoes, my uniforms all had my number on them. They were sewn inside.
It seems to me I ought to go to paradise for all of that suffering. The discipline and the schedule were the killing thing.1 There wasn’t even enough time to go to the bathroom. It never varied from one year to the next. All of those years I was there, I knew exactly what I was going to do one year or two years later, and where I would be at a certain time. I would be either in the kitchen, the sewing room, or the laundry.
It was quite a traumatic shock for the little Indian children to be brought to an Indian boarding school and no one, outside of our parents, worrying about us. Nobody seemed to worry that we did have a big shock to go from home, where it is warm and where you hear your mother’s voice all the time. You go to a boarding school like that and you never see your mother anymore.
I saw my father, really, more often than I saw my mother. He worked at the Indian Agency.2 He operated the mill where they made lumber. I guess you might say it was rough lumber, but it seemed it was always needed for the barns, the dairy barn, or repairing fences all over where they had the school cows.
They had a school herd of cows, about sixteen cows, that the schoolboys milked every morning and every afternoon too, I think. But, really, they gave so little milk because the milk was never enough for two hundred children. I would get maybe a fourth of a cup of milk or sometimes none at all. It all depended upon how hungry someone else was.
Work Details
When I first got there, I was seven years old, and we went to school for half a day, from 1 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. We worked in the morning from 7 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. We worked in different areas that were called “details.” The details were assigned by age and grade. They had a kitchen detail where the bigger girls worked, a laundry where some of the others worked, and then a sewing room.
When I first arrived at the school, I worked in the dining room. We cleared the tables. Somebody washed the dishes. We wiped the dishes and we set the table. Then, along about that time, we sat there for two hours or more and peeled potatoes. Every day we peeled about five or six buckets of potatoes—that is the way they came. They brought in a bucket, and we peeled and peeled potatoes.
Mrs. Andrews tried to make a good worker out of me. The doctor and my father wanted me to be outdoors. I used to have to mop the porches: the porch at the dining hall, the porch at the Girls Building, the porch at the agency office. That used to just irk me because I would have to walk down there with a bucket of soapy water—not real hot. Then I’d have a broom and a mop. I’m going down there, and I always met a lot of people, and I’ve got brooms, and they’re hitting my head. I used to feel real embarrassed. You know, I felt very low class.3 I’d mop very hard. Mop it with soapy water. Then I’d go over it again with plain water, and that made her—Mrs. Andrews—just howl and howl. She said, “You tell that Harriette Shelton to get back here and mop this porch; this is terrible. Look at this.” They’d look at it. And they didn’t know what was the matter with it. It looked clean and okay. She was always saying that. “You tell that Harriette Shelton to get back here. Harriette Shelton, you just get down to the office and you mop that again. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Doctor is very mad over that porch.” So I would go down there. I don’t see how I lived through that, you know. I think the only reason I lived was because I was so mad at her all the time. She was bound and determined to show me she was going to make a good girl out of me, and I was a good girl. I wasn’t bad. She just wanted all of us to jump as soon as she said something. We moved, and I mean fast. She said if the bell rang, then you line up and I mean right now. If you were in the bathroom and you had to go, you let that go and you lined up. I thought that was like torture when you were in the bathroom and you wanted to go and you couldn’t go. If you look at the schedule [see Appendix], you would see there was no time for recreation and no time to go to the bathroom. It was half hour by half hour by half hour from five o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night when everybody was in bed. Some girls just folded up and died.
When I was twelve or fourteen years old, I worked in the laundry, and that was a killer. I worked in the front building, the club building. Those washers were big, like five to six feet wide and five feet high, and they turned back and forth, and they swished the clothes in a big barrel. They had a mangle that ironed the clothes. It rolled continually when they turned it on. That used to scare me when I first worked there. They told us to be careful.
We had to shake the wet sheets and fold them just so. When you ironed them, you put the wide edge first and it goes through, and you have to hold it so that it goes in reasonably straight. Then the pillowcases—you put the other end in first, not the edge. It was hot. You have to be careful. If your hand got caught, you couldn’t pull it out again. It just goes on. Those things were hot. One of the girls, she was the same age as my sister—Violet Firgrade—her hand got caught in that mangle, and oh, lands! It was terrible. Violet’s hand was mashed, and it looked just awful because her fingers were turned. You would think Dr. Buchanan would try to fix it. Her hand was scarred up. She didn’t seem to mind it. She tried to use it, but she couldn’t hold anything. That used to scare me. I’d be just terrified. That was hard work.
We would get there at seven in the morning. It was bitterly cold in December, January. The laundress would build up the fire where we ironed. There were three of us; we ironed all of the boys’ shirts, the girls’ dresses, and the girls’ aprons. The sheets and the pillowcases were put through the mangle.
I put some pillowcases in the mangle. I found that awful hard, to stand there all day. After the first day, I could hardly lift my arms. It was hot and steamy in there. No wonder the children died of tuberculosis; that place was dusty. If you opened the doors, it was bitterly cold, and then the wind would blow on you and you were sweating. That was really something. We worked like grown people.
Working in the laundry was a killer. It was the hardest of the work in school. We ironed from 7 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. with heavy, old-fashioned irons, set irons, for the whole school—130 girls’ dresses and the blue shirts for the boys. It took us several days to iron them. We stood there for four hours, ironing. In spring and summer it is pretty hot to be ironing that long, but by July it is hot and suffocating. There was a special woodstove that was about five feet high, especially made, so that the irons can stand right on it, and the fire had to be very hot so that the irons are hot enough. There were several rows around the stove where you can set your irons so that they would get hot. You just take another iron and go on. You go back and put it there and take another one. I didn’t think I was going to survive standing there, ironing. That’s a job.
We worked by age and by grade. When I was twelve years old, I worked in the laundry for five months, and then the next five months I worked in the sewing room again. Then the next year I did what they called “housework” in the Girls Building.
I worked in the sewing room, too, when I was small. We sat there and darned stockings and socks by the millions. Those stockings and socks had such big holes. I already knew how to sew because my mother taught us, and I liked it. We also sewed patches, rips, and tears in the dresses and shirts of the girls and boys. But we could sit down and relax too. They had chairs for us little girls. The chairs had the legs cut off so that they were low to the floor, so it was comfortable.
But I never especially learned how to cook. My sister and I used to make things like cake or something, and we peeled potatoes to help my mother, but cooking—that just upsets me. Some women wondered how I could grow up like that and never really cook. So I always have to tell a big long story that I wasn’t at
home. I was in that Indian boarding school from the time I was seven years old.
When I had the housework detail, we started upstairs in the dormitory. We had certain brooms—they were wide and long—and then we went over the whole dormitory with dust mops. We ran over all of the 130 beds with dust cloths and dusted everything—even the windowsills. That is why I don’t do anything. The dust can pile up in my house and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t dust. But when we were at home, even our mother had us dust the house.
When I was fourteen years old, I was on the dining room detail again. I was the bigger girl, so I washed all of the dishes for 200 to 230 boys and girls. Today I always say I am not washing dishes. Those dishes can stand there and pile up, and if I really need them then I will wash one. I washed dishes for 230 boys and girls, twice a day. I washed them in the morning and at noon. If I went to school in the afternoon, then I didn’t do them at noon but I washed them at supper, and I had to sweep the big dining room. There were little girls to help. They set and cleared the tables, but you have to watch what they are doing. I used to get so tired of washing those dishes. We washed them in a big washtub. They didn’t have dishwashers. I think in later years they got automatic dishwashers, but way back then we washed the dishes by hand. I used to get so tired—that is an awful lot of dishes—of leaning over that hot tub of water. It would go on and on. We had to change the water several times, because with that many dishes the water gets cold. Working in the dining room wasn’t really hard; it just went on and on and on. I washed dishes twice a day, but at noon I didn’t wash dishes because I had to go to school in the afternoon. As soon as the meal was finished, we all went downstairs and got dressed in our school clothes. Then we spent four hours in a classroom.
We used yellow bars of soap; that is a strong soap and it burns your skin. Knives, forks, spoons were all poured into one washtub where I was washing them. We learned to take two enamel plates and just stir them around. Otherwise, it took several hours. But it took longer to wash the forks because we had to scrub them. But with that many children to help, we had ways of shortening the work. When I got the dishes done, then I helped the smaller girls set the tables for the next meal and swept the floors.
I don’t know how I lived through that, now that I think about it. When I got through, about four o’clock, I went downstairs so that I could wash my hands and face and comb my hair again—braid it and tie it up with ribbons. They were long, long days. Many of my cousins and my sister just folded up and died from lack of food, the continual cold, and the long days, long hours.
Religious Training
You would think that Sundays were something nice, but I always found Sunday in that school was a big worry for me, and if it was a big worry for me, then it must have been for others. We went to church, and the priest came, shall we say, from the old school. He was strict. I remember when I was first in school, when I was little, I often fell asleep in church. I used to be terrified because if the priest saw me he might slap me around. He used to slap the boys, but he didn’t slap any of the girls.
The whole day of Sunday was never a day of rest. It was as bad as or worse than the week days. I remember we were always so tired and so hungry. We got up early at 5 or 5:30 A.M. We were all Catholics, so on one Sunday of each month we fasted; we didn’t have breakfast or supper the night before if we were going to confession and communion. They were such poor meals we never really had enough, so we were really starving. We went to church. The priest came on the mail boat at 11:30. So then we had mass from 11:30 to 12:30. So then we had our first meal at one o’clock, and that wasn’t much food. We had to go through the morning and afternoon, from the night before, on the evening meal and that wasn’t much. We had to go all of that time with nothing to eat. I used to get so hungry I could hardly walk.
Father O’Donnell slapped the small boys around when he asked them questions about catechism. They were too frightened to talk, and he would slap them hard. It just about knocked them down, and then they would cry. Then he would slap them on the other side and tell them to stop crying. Here the poor, tiny things were trying to choke off their crying, their sobbing, and the rest of us were so terrified we could hardly breathe.
He was always mad and always shouting. We saw him all day on Sunday. He actually yelled at us and talked to us about being sinners, and how we were going to hell. When I was small, I was afraid to fall asleep because I thought if I went to sleep I would go to hell, and I could see the burning flames—great big flames and nothing but fire.
After Mass in the morning, we marched back to the Girls Building. We changed from our uniforms of blue serge into our everyday clothes—denim overalls and blue shirts for the boys and calico dresses for us girls—and had our noon dinner. We called it dinner. Then right after that, at one o’clock, we changed back into our school clothes—and our school clothes were different from our Sunday clothes. Sunday had navy blue serge for the girls and that is so scratchy and so hot. Our dresses had long sleeves and high collars. In church, the livelong day, those things just itched and burned. Our school clothes had long sleeves and high collars too, but they weren’t as bad as the wool serge.
We marched down to the school assembly hall. We would be from one o’clock to four o’clock sitting down in the assembly hall of our school building. And that is all of the boys and all of the girls, all 230 of us or more. The Girls Building and the Boys Building and then the classroom building were all about five blocks away. It was an attractive campus. It had green lawns, sidewalks, and no flowers, really, but they did have lilac bushes that bloomed in the late spring.
Then from 1 to 4 in the afternoon, we studied the catechism of the Catholic Church, and that was terrifying. The teacher was the priest, and he was just meaner than mean. He was always mad. He slapped the small boys around and asked them questions. We had catechism in our school clothes. And then that mean, just really cruel, priest—if the little boys didn’t know the answer to some of the questions in the catechism, some of them were too terrified to talk. But, oh, lands, he would slap them so hard and just about knock them down and then they would cry and then he would slap them on the other side to stop them crying.
Father O’Donnell was the priest the livelong ten years I spent there. I was in that school for ten months of every year and then home for two months and back again. So ten months every year for ten years, and every Sunday I had to put up with him.
I want to emphasize I did not enjoy Sunday except for one thing: my mother came to visit every Sunday afternoon. When she came, she visited in the playroom with some of the other parents who were waiting for us to come back from the school where we were in catechism. Her visits saved my life. She used to bring cornbread. She made it in big pans and wrapped it in a clean dishcloth. Then she brought Hershey’s chocolates and apples. If she brought two dozen apples, then we gave all of them away. I gave two apples to my friends, and then sometimes some of our relatives came. They hated me, and I hated them, but they got the apples and some of the candy too. I used to get so mad, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted my mother to know I was kindhearted; at the same time, I was wishing they were dead.
I always said I think if I had a choice of feeding somebody I would give them cornbread; that is a really nourishing thing. I am always saying to my boys, “You know, if you look at all of the black athletes, they have the most beautiful teeth.” And, of course, they came from across the sea and apparently they were already tall people. It’s incredible, their strength, they play football—tall and they are strong. They grew up on cornbread and corn porridge, corn meal mush. In England they always say they feed the cornmeal to the horses. Oh, it was some Englishman, an aristocrat, who said, we feed that cornmeal to our horses, but in America they eat cornmeal porridge. An American had a response to that; he said, “Where in the world can you find better horses and better men.” Best horses in England, and they feed them corn. Best men in the world in America; they feed them cornmeal. That Englishman di
dn’t have much to say to that. But, anyway, cornmeal bread—I just loved it.
After catechism, we marched back up to the Boys Building and the Girls Building, and then there was a skimpy Sunday supper. We had a half a cup of cocoa and a small piece of coffee cake. It must have had one cup of sugar in it for more than 200 boys and girls, because you couldn’t taste the sugar. But I am quite sure somebody would say, “Well, it isn’t good for you to have sugar.” We rarely had sugar through the whole ten months. The coffee cake was a treat, but it was small. It was probably about two inches square, but it was really good. It had brown sugar on the loaves when it was baked. It was a treat because we never, ever had sugar on the table. Sugar was put in the oat meal mush, but you couldn’t really taste it. They probably put a cup of sugar for the 230 children, so you couldn’t really taste the sugar. The cook was a good cook, given what she had to work with.
On Sunday evening, small girls could play from six to eight o’clock, when we went to bed. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I was in Company B. I was a big girl, and on Sunday evening we put on our blue serge uniforms that we wore to church. We marched down to the assembly hall again, and we sat in chairs from 7 to 9:30 P.M. We sat in chairs all Sunday afternoon and evening. Two hours in the evening may not seem very long, but it gets pretty paralyzing. Believe me, those chairs got harder and harder until it was hard for us to stand up and walk. We were kind of paralyzed because we had to sit so still.
All of the bigger boys and bigger girls in A and B Company attended Sunday evening chapel, which was totally different from the Catholic Mass on Sunday morning. Chapel was nothing like the Catholic Mass or the afternoon catechism lessons. Chapel was Protestant. At the evening chapel, two girls and two of the boys read verses from the Bible—not the Catholic Bible, the King James Protestant Bible. The girls’ matron (I think she was Episcopalian) and the boys’ disciplinarian picked out the two boys and two girls who read the Bible verses. So the evening chapel was all Protestant. I did enjoy the Bible verses because the agent talked for an hour about what the verses meant, and he insisted that we sit absolutely still. The prayer we said was the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, which was a beautiful prayer. I have never seen it anyplace else. It probably belonged to the Catholic Church. It went: “I would be true, for there are those who trust me. I would be brave, for there is much to dare.” That is all I remember. But it was a really nice prayer.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 17