Dr. Charles M. Buchanan, our superintendent of the school, was also the Indian agent.4 The employees were Protestant, so they went down to Sunday evening chapel. The superintendent-agent wanted everybody there except the little girls and boys. Sometimes I enjoyed Sunday evening chapel because the Indian agent was the most interesting man. He was a strict disciplinarian. Actually, the man could be cruel. He could beat up the boys, give them the biggest strapping—actually, a flogging. He used to walk by the Girls Building and throw handfuls of nickels over the playground, where there was a basketball court. He would throw those nickels, and we scrambled all over. Some of us got five or six nickels and some didn’t get any.
Dr. Buchanan was also a physician. He was a very well educated man, which was kind of rare, because we very seldom got educated people in the Indian Service. They worked in the Indian schools, most of them just two years through high school, teaching us. He was born in Alexandria, Virginia. He came from a wealthy family. He graduated from the University of Virginia. While in college, he also studied music and languages; he knew Latin and he was an accomplished musician.
He also talked to us in chapel and played the piano and the organ for us on Sunday evenings. He played compositions for us by famous composers like Mendelssohn, Mozart, Beethoven, and several other famous composers. When he would play compositions from those marvelous people, he showed us each composer’s picture and told us where he was born and about his childhood and the kind of life he led. Then he played pieces by each of them and told us the differences between Beethoven and Mozart. For example, some of the music seems like falling water—really delicate running notes. Beethoven was a heavy, more dramatic-sounding music. I truly enjoyed all of it; it was something worth living for the livelong week. You could just sit there. But, then, you had to sit so still and our clothes were always so stiff. But that was Sunday evening chapel, and we had to sit there from 7 to 9 P.M., and for the livelong day we had been going since 5:30 in the morning. So by ten minutes to 9, we were marching back to the Girls Building and the Boys Building.
I think we lived for and enjoyed the music. We also used to sing hymns on Sunday evening that he liked. We sang things like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” “Come Thou Almighty King.” In the Catholic Church, we sang something totally different. We sang through the whole Mass, the elevation of the Communion and the Processional. It is a wonder I can remember it—that’s a long time ago.
Back at home, now that was totally different, too. Now and then there were some drumbeats on the Indian drum, but not very loudly. My father was very careful. It was against the regulations for Indians to sing their songs or to talk the Indian language. I mean, it was also against the regulations for the Indian children at the school to talk in their Indian languages.
Then at Dr. Buchanan’s Sunday evening prayer, we said the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Prayer of St. Chrysostom. Now, I enjoyed that and it was interesting. We listened and read out of the Protestant Bible, and in the morning we had been suffering through catechism. You would think that I would be very knowledgeable and deeply religious. When I was at the boarding school, I said, “Believe me, when I get out of school I am never, never going to church again. I am never going to look at any Bible—never.” But, of course, after I left school, I forgot what I said.
Then we marched up to bed—upstairs to the dormitory. We could take off our uniforms and wash our teeth. They had some kind of a gargle we gargled with. So we’d say all of our prayers again: the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Prayer of Saint Chrysostom. The beds were so cold. There were radiators there and there was supposed to be heating, but there was never enough when you needed it, the ten years I was there. They had huge furnaces in the basement, in the furnace room, of every building. The watchman was supposed to keep the fires going. He threw in four-foot pieces of wood, but he would fall asleep somewhere and the fires would go out. When we got up in the morning, it would be so bitterly cold. I remember my teeth chattering and everybody’s teeth chattering. Get up and run, run, run. Afterwards we washed our teeth, washed our faces and combed our hair, and all of us had long hair. We combed it and braided it and tied it with ribbon.
But that routine never changed, from one miserable year to another, the ten years I spent in the Tulalip Indian School. On the Sunday closest to Thanksgiving, we had to go to communion. One Sunday of every month was for confession and communion in the Catholic Church. That was quite a punishment because when Christmas Day came, we still had to get up at 5:30 A.M. We couldn’t eat because we were fasting before going to communion; we were not supposed to eat or drink water, and so we didn’t have any breakfast. During all of those hours we had nothing to eat. I used to get so hungry I could hardly walk. Of course, we didn’t sit around and moan about it. We played and ran around. By 1 P.M. we came back from the Catholic Mass, changed into our everyday clothes, and then, finally, had something to eat.
Discipline
When we first went to school, nobody cared that we only talked our own Indian languages. They didn’t have bilingual programs or ESL [English as a Second Language] like they do now. Recently, on the television news and in the Seattle papers, they were talking about people from Vietnam and Thailand who came here. Several thousand dollars are budgeted to teach them English. Well, no money was appropriated for the language programs, and some of the teachers were saying, “That is terrible. There has to be more money to teach them.” They said to us, “All right, you speak English,” and we did. If you are around people who speak one language, you will sort of learn it. When we got to school, we were surrounded by over a hundred girls who were all speaking English. Then you learn. If they say, “Come here,” you know what they mean.
I was given a whipping for speaking our own language in school when I was nine years old. It sounded worse than if I had killed forty people. Every time I think about it, it makes me mad: to have other people babied around and me beat up. I wasn’t very big when I was nine years old.
Two or three of us were talking “Indian” [Snohomish] downstairs in the playroom in the Girls Building. Somebody probably told on us. It was against the regulations for any of the students to speak their Indian languages. Agnes, one of the girls I was with, didn’t speak our language. The other girl was Sarah. Agnes was just listening to us. But the matron strapped all three of us. The girls’ matron came downstairs from her office. You could hear her voice two miles away. She was screaming, and she had the strap.
Everybody was terrified of that strap. It was made out of a horse and buggy harness. It was used on the children. In later years, we read that that kind of strap was used on convicts in penitentiaries, and it was made illegal because it cut the skin and made it bleed; it was really thick. It was made of three layers of pliant leather, about two inches wide, and put together with little rivets. So it had holes in it and a long handle, so that when she hit you with it you really felt it. It could make your skin bleed after several hits. It jarred your teeth and your head and your whole body. Some of the boys got a flogging with the strap and almost died.
The matron strapped us from the back of our necks all of the way to our ankles for talking in our own language, and I mean she laid it on. The strap wrapped around my whole body. She was a tall woman, big and strong. She swung her arms way out, and she made that strap sing around my neck, and she nearly knocked me out. She could hardly breathe she was so mad. I went sailing across the hall and my head crashed into the wall. I am surprised I didn’t faint. I wasn’t expecting something like that. She said to me, “You get back here.” I did, but I couldn’t see very well, since the blow had had an awful jarring effect on the back of my neck. It made my head flip back. She laid the strap down on us—all of the way, close together—from the back of our necks to our ankles. I remember I thought to myself, “I hope I live to see the day when you burn in hell.”
I had a dream about Mrs. Andrews last week.
Beli
eve me, we never talked “Indian” at the school again. Some of our people, such as those who were my sons Wayne’s or William’s age and some of the girls, were kind of shocked and disturbed over the fact that they never heard our language. They said their mother never spoke the language or their father or their grandmothers, and so they said they didn’t know a single word of their Indian language. I gave a talk somewhere to a group, and I explained the reason why we seldom spoke Indian: it was beaten out of us. We were severely punished, and some of the boys and girls got worse punishment than I did.
I should mention, first of all, that we Indian children were not slapped or pushed or spanked at home. I was never ever slapped or pushed or spanked by my mother or my father or my grandmother. All I ever heard were soft speaking voices. My grandmother had a soft voice, and my mother did, too. But once in a while, my mother could shout if she had to call out loud and clear when we were playing outside away from the house—then she would call out. Otherwise, my mother didn’t raise her voice. As I say, we were never slapped, never pushed, never spanked, never whipped.
My mother punished me for laughing out loud. Let’s talk a little bit about punishment. American Indians are a loving people, and they put up with a lot of little mistakes by children. I like to stress that the American Indians are not as mean as you might think. But I was going to speak of the punishment given out to children when they made a mistake.
I was told a number of times not to laugh out loud, not to open my mouth and shout. Shouting and loud laughter by Indian women and girls were absolutely unacceptable. When I think back about my mother, my grandmother, and mothers of those generations, I never ever heard them laugh out loud. They smiled a lot. When they laughed, they chuckled very softly. But I am speaking of the time when I was about nine years old; I laughed out loud. It was summer, and I was playing with my sister and some of the neighbor children. It must have been really loud, because my mother came to the door and called to my sister and we went right home.
Their rule was, if your parents or grandparents or someone older is speaking to you, you are to stand on both feet and face that person who is giving instructions or reprimanding you. You don’t stand on one foot or stand way out there and say something like, “What, I can’t hear you.” You must go right back to your mother or whoever is calling you. You face them, hold your arms down, and tell them you are sorry. I was told when I was four or five years old not to laugh out loud, but at that time, when I was eight or nine years old, I forgot. I laughed out loud.
I think somebody was chasing me, or we were playing a game. My mother called us and we went right in, and she told me and my sister, “You know you are not to laugh like that—not ever. You never throw your head back or open your mouth and laugh like a horse. Never. You can laugh, but it has to be a soft laughter.”
I had to stay inside that day, and I had to learn how to sew on my mother’s Singer sewing machine. I had not sewn on it before. My mother cut out an apron for me to sew. It was different from the aprons you think of today. It was the kind of apron that is made like a dress: it buttoned in the back, and it had long sleeves and cuffs and a high neck with a collar. And so I had to work on it.
It seemed as if I cried gallons and gallons of tears and that the day lasted a million years. It was such a nice sunshiny day outside. My sister was not allowed to sit in there with me. She had to go outside and stay outside. So there I was sewing on that machine, and it kept going backwards. I started it, and then the thread would break. So I would try and fix the thread. I usually did it wrong, and it seemed as if it took me ten million years to learn which way to put the thread on the machine. My mother would come in and fix the thread, and I sewed some more. After I was sewing for a few hours, I began to enjoy it. The machine didn’t go backwards as many times, and I sewed the apron together.
It was blue-and-white-checked gingham. My mother saved the miserable-looking thing, and I found it again about fifteen or twenty years ago. I thought I saved it but I can’t find it anymore. The sewing is crooked on the seams. I was supposed to make French seams. I will always remember the sleeves. They had a lot of gathers, and I put the wrong sleeve on the wrong side, and so the sleeves were hanging backwards. I had to rip it all out. Then I sewed it again, and I had the wrong sleeve on the wrong side or the right sleeve on the wrong side, but I worked and worked on it. Believe me, I never laughed out loud again. I used to really laugh and play, but not that much.
When I saw them punishing the boys and girls in the school, I am not surprised I have heart trouble. I know a lot of people have heart trouble who didn’t go to Tulalip School. The punishment that the boys and girls received was too severe. When some boys couldn’t take the strict regimentation anymore, and the hunger that we lived through, they ran away from the school and tried to go home. Usually they were caught around Mount Vernon because they were walking, and they were brought back to the school.
Dr. Buchanan shaved their heads, caned them, and made them wear girls’ dresses. They weren’t locked up. They had to go to work and go to school just like the rest of us, and so we saw them hour after hour. It used to jar me, and I am quite sure it did the rest. Those were our classmates, and they were in big trouble. When they got out of school or got back to the building from work at 5 o’clock, they were fed bread and water for two weeks, in an isolation room. I saw the bread and water that was taken in to them.
The children who ran away from school got more punishment than anyone else. They had to march at seven o’clock to sick call. Actually, anyone who either got hurt or sick told the matron or the disciplinarian, and they wrote your name down on the sick call list and you lined up. The girls came first, and then the boys came in about half an hour later. But the matron would push at their shoulders and say, “You’re not sick; you’re just lazy.”
At the end of sick call, Dr. Buchanan took the runaways to another room. They took off all of their clothes and were made to lie over a stool, and then he would strap them. He was a big strong man. You could hear them calling and crying because they would roll off of the stool. The strap burns—it hurts. He strapped them all over their bodies, and he followed them all over the floor because they rolled over, and he hit them on their heads or wherever he could hit them.
I used to see the boys in their dresses coming from the hospital at recess time. We were in the classrooms by eight o’clock, and by ten o’clock they would be walking back from the hospital to the Boys Building. Believe me, they could hardly walk. They took little short steps. It broke me up—and the other boys and girls too—because it took those boys two or three hours to get back up to the building. They could hardly walk. They were almost dead, really. That’s a long, long road to being civilized.
It was a shock to see our classmates with their heads shaved. They looked so different. Of course, all of them had a lot of beautiful black hair. The nature of the punishment was out of this world. Other times, the teacher took a stick and beat them, or had them hold out their hands and rapped their knuckles. I enjoyed the classrooms, and I imagine the other students did too, but the memory of the whole thing is nothing but worry and sheer terror. I was terror-stricken every time I went back there the first of September. Then I could go home in July.
Joe Hillaire from Lummi told about when he first came to the Tulalip Indian School. When he arrived at the boarding school, he noticed a pond and waterfalls nearby. At home he got up early, dressed, and bathed somewhere. On the first morning at the boarding school, he went running down to the pond to bathe. He had a bar of soap, and he was having a great time in the cold water when Dr. Buchanan came upon him. Dr. Buchanan got up early in the morning and walked all over, very quietly, through the whole school grounds—just looking at everything. Well, he was walking around early in the morning before everyone was up, and here was Joe Hillaire bathing down at the waterfalls. I don’t know how, but my father got there too. The pond was near where the totem pole used to be, but that was long before the totem pol
e was put there. Joe said his teeth were chattering and he was getting cold standing there. Dr. Buchanan jerked him around by the hair, and that was the first morning he had been away from his home. His father and grandfather told him, “You remember to bathe every day. Don’t forget. Get up early in the morning and bathe.” So he did. He was only ten years old.
My father came along. He was on horseback. He said he asked, “What is the matter?” He didn’t expect to see anybody around there, and here was Joe Hillaire shivering and his teeth were chattering. Dr. Buchanan said, “He is taking a bath down here in the waterfall. He is not supposed to be around here. He is supposed to be on the playground or in the Boys Building. He isn’t supposed to leave there.” He was going to take Joe down to the hospital and beat him with a switch. My father said he talked to the doctor and explained this is what Joe was taught at home. “He wants to be clean and take a bath. He didn’t know where to go in the Boys Building. He saw this place the day before when he came, and so he came down here. His father and his grandfather told him, ‘You remember, you bathe every day.’ So that’s what he did.” Joe said, “Mr. Shelton saved my life. I would’ve gotten a big, big switching.”
Every time I think about it, it makes me mad: being severely punished for something that you were taught to do at home, such as taking a bath early in the morning. Joe Hillaire told us how much he appreciated my father. When he came to the school, they cut his hair short, so he was already upset, and then after that evening, he was going to be punished the next morning for taking a bath. He always felt my father had saved his life.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 18