Tulalip, From My Heart

by Dover, Harriette Shelton

  I didn’t see my sister for a month. I finally saw her at the hospital, but I was up at the Girls Building, so I just waved at her. If it was a sunshiny day, she was out on the hospital veranda in her bathrobe and wrapped up in a blanket. I was too terrified to ask if I could go and see her. By March or April, the doctor at the agency told my father she should go home. So my sister went home. I felt real lonely and deserted. Then I found out that I could go home. I came home the first part of April. When the agent let me go home, then I knew my sister was very sick. But when I got home, she was still able to walk around. My father and mother told me that my sister was dying. My father had taken her to a doctor in Everett. In fact, the agency doctor had told him he had better take her to a certain doctor in Everett, and that doctor specialized in lung diseases. He was the one who told my father that she had tuberculosis. And so I was allowed to go home because my sister was becoming steadily weaker, and so I finally got home in the first part of April. So I used to spend a lot of time with my sister all day and part of the evening, and she just got weaker and thinner.

  We had a three-room house. Our living room was a big room, but in the kitchen the windows were only about a foot from the floor. My father made the window into a doorway, and he built a room big enough for a bed and a heating stove, a wood stove, a table, and two or three chairs. Way back then, we didn’t have overstuffed furniture. We had a Morris chair. It had a velvet cushion and cushions on the bottom and the back. The velvet had big flowers on it. It was a pretty chair, wrapped in blankets—that is where my sister used to sit.

  When I got home before the end of March or the first of April, she could still get up and walk, so we walked slowly down the trail and we would almost get to our grandmother’s house. But she would get tired, and we had to start walking back. The room where she had her bed was all open. My father put a wire screen around it, and outside they had canvas, and he fixed it so they could roll it up with ropes so that she could see all around. Apple trees and plum trees were close to the house, so we could smell the blossoms in my sister’s room. When the canvas was rolled up in the morning, the entire place was surrounded with blossoms. The birds came back, and we listened to them. My sister identified a lot of them. Of course, my grandmother came and visited, and she had names for the different birds.

  I spent a lot of time with my sister—all day and part of the evening, and she got weaker and thinner. My mother tried to do everything that the doctor said: give her meat broth, give her eggnog. My mother made eggnog every morning or halfway between breakfast and one o’clock and gave us eggnog. I stayed well, but my sister got weaker and weaker. That was one of the tragedies we lived through. I watched my sister get weaker. By the end of May, she couldn’t get up out of bed anymore. She just lay in bed, so I sat with her all day and read something to her from the fourth-grade reader or the sixth-grade reader.

  Her dying went on for three weeks. The last two weeks were a dreadful nightmare. It took me thirty years to get over it. I cried in the night. I cried throughout the day. I had bad dreams where I screamed at night, and my father and mother got up and sat on my bed and held my hand, and my mother slept with me.

  My sister suffered terrible pain for days. I can only say to die of tuberculosis is a dreadful, painful death. I don’t think many people see that kind of death anymore. I think there is medication to help the pain, and there are things the doctors can do now. There was no doctor then for my sister. I used to kneel down by her bed and hold her hand when she was suffering such pain, and she always had such a high fever. She would pull at my hand. The suffering she went through came at every hour or two hours. It lasted, maybe, an hour. It seemed the pain wracked her whole body, not only her chest, but also her stomach. She cried out. She just screamed.

  My father was home all of the time then. The last week or two my father and mother held her. They tried different ways of holding her. My father took her in his arms and tried to change her position a little bit and see if it would help. She was so weak she couldn’t sit up anymore. I put cold compresses on her forehead and little things she wanted to have done. Her dying was a big cross for us to bear. She died on May 24. It is a little better now; after all, this was 1917, but that stayed with me for years.

  It was the same evening my brother graduated from Marysville High School. He went to the Indian schools out here, and then he went to Marysville High School for three years. My parents didn’t attend his graduation. When my brother Robert left early that evening, he went on horseback all of the six miles to Marysville and went through the exercises. He said he would hurry home.

  As I said before, I saw other deaths when I was smaller. One of our cousins, Marguerite Jules, died two weeks after my sister. My sister was fifteen years old, and I think Marguerite was sixteen or almost seventeen. After my sister’s funeral, we used to walk up this road to the Jules’s house around ten o’clock in the morning and stay with the father and mother and their daughter. Marguerite was in bed, of course, but when we got there we piled pillows around her, and she could talk. It seemed to make her feel better when people came to visit. In between the pain, she talked with us. She was just like my sister.

  My sister crocheted lace edging for her pillowcase and bureau runners. When I was seven or eight years old, my sister taught me to crochet, so I fiddled around with crocheting when I was sitting with her. But Marguerite Jules did the same thing; she crocheted in between the awful pains. Every time she had the spasms of pain, then, one of the mothers took the crochet hook and the ball of thread and put them on the table.

  Another Indian girl and two Indian boys died that same summer my sister and Marguerite died, and they all died within about two months of each other. All of them were teenagers. In just two months, five young people died: my sister, Marguerite Jules, Cecelia Weeks and her cousin Edwin Weeks, and Edwin Hillaire. Edwin Weeks was seventeen or eighteen years old.

  Some of the boys and girls who were brought to the boarding school were already not well. You could see they were not well. They were very pale and thin and they kept getting thinner. After a while, they couldn’t get out of bed, and then they were sent home. Their parents were notified, and the parents would come by boat—by mail boat or train—and take their child home. The following September when we got back to school, we would meet every group that came in by boat or launch from the reservations. The Swinomish would come in one day or one evening and the Lummis would come in a couple of days later. We would get up in the morning and go all around to see who came. We were all happy to see each other, but I used to ask about someone, did so-and-so come? No. She died. Or after school started, I would remember some of the boys and I would ask, and they would say, no, he died. The death rate among the Indians way back then was very high.

  Babies died of other diseases, such as spinal meningitis.5 Sometimes there would be Indians living in tents down by the beach, in some of the fields or meadows, and we would go to visit, or go every afternoon. I would hold those babies. Mostly they were dying of spinal meningitis, you know, where their eyes move back and forth. They were sort of unconscious and they moaned with the awful pain. I held so many babies who died of that disease. It is a lingering, horrible death. The babies are practically in a coma the last two weeks or so, but they seem to come out of it, and then they cry and cry and cry. They are just gasping because they are so weak, and the pain must be so terrible. They can’t eat. The mothers try and nurse them, since they were still being breast-fed. They were hungry and so they tried to nurse, but they were gasping and crying.

  Sometimes it was measles; quite a lot it was measles. There was no doctor for all of those deaths. Of course, you might say no doctor would be able to cure tuberculosis anyway.

  As I say, my sister’s death lived with me for years and years. I have said I hated the white people with an undying hatred. The white people brought diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, and trachoma. Tuberculosis was rampant on every Indian reservation across the
entire continent. Indians died by the thousands. All over, on every reservation, Indians had eye infections. It was called trachoma. Nearly all of them advanced to almost total blindness. For the ones that survived all of that, diseases and things, I wonder what they ever had to eat. If they were elderly like me, even though they had canoes and things, they wouldn’t be able to paddle across to the islands to dig clams and certainly not go to other places for camas roots and things like that, and then they didn’t have any money to buy food and there was no medical aid, no doctor, no nothing.

  My sister’s dying was a big cross for us to bear. Speaking of watching someone dying, or holding their hand while they are dying, I saw other deaths when I was smaller than that. I remember some of my playmates died when we were four or five years old. I barely remember. But I remember sitting . . . the Indian women would always get together when there was a child dying or someone dying, there was never any doctor, never any medication, so Indians did the best they could. I remember going with my mother, and I was always told to sit still and I always did. I could sit, it seemed like, by the hour; just sit absolutely still and watch my playmates die. I mean I didn’t sit there or stand there and stare at them. The Indian women used to kneel down, and they would say the rosary; the prayers would go on and on. I sort of learned them when I was real small. But I could sit real still for a long time. So dying and death were all around when I was little and growing up. The death rate among Indians was very, very high.

  I stayed home all of the time my sister was sick and dying. The superintendent-agent didn’t make me go back to Tulalip Indian School after my sister died. My father took me to a doctor in Everett. I was all they had then. I was the youngest, and my brother was gone in the army. I was thirteen years old and thin because I came out of Tulalip School. The only reason I lived was my sister dying, because then I got to come home.

  I had swollen glands in my neck and under my left arm. We went to the doctor in Everett. He gave me iron drops—five to ten drops in a glass of water. It tasted bad and made my teeth turn black. They wouldn’t give you iron drops like that anymore. But way back then, that is what the doctor said I should take to build up my blood and help my swollen glands. I talked to one of the doctors in Marysville about it recently, and he said he never saw anyone with swollen glands. I said we all had them. There must have been forty or fifty boys and girls with swollen glands. It was a miracle if they lived. I had another doctor who said they must have been tubercular glands. I said I wouldn’t know, but just about every Indian child I knew had swollen glands. The doctor I talked to said people get tubercular glands in some of the backward places where there is an inadequate diet.

  It took me almost two years to get well. My mother had cows, so there was always fresh milk and cream. She made eggnog. She had chickens so that the eggs were fresh. I always said, “Put a lot of sugar in the eggnog.” I never got enough sugar in Tulalip School. I had an eggnog every day. After a while, I didn’t appreciate it as much. It gets tiresome every day, but I did get better. My glands stayed swollen, because about a year later the doctor in Everett said, “You should have them lanced.”

  I went to Providence Hospital in Everett. I was in surgery from 9 A.M. to almost 1 P.M. because the doctor said the gland on the right side of my neck was grown around my vocal cords, and then I had a big one under my left arm. Another Indian girl had a gland on her neck down to her chin, and she and I both went through surgery.

  The agent’s wife came to see me. My neck was bandaged up, but I guess my ears were showing. She brought me a novel. It was one of the first ones I ever had that was a hardback, called The Strawberry Handkerchief. Of course, it had a lot of love and stuff, which was just great, but they had put iodine all over my neck where the surgery was and it must have gone along my right ear. She came in and said, “What’s the matter with your ear?” Well, I couldn’t see my ear. I was sitting in bed and just getting over the surgery. I hadn’t started to walk yet. I said, “I don’t know.” Anyway, I was afraid of her. She leaned over. She had gloves on and a small hat. No woman ever walked on the street without a hat and a veil in those days. It was tight on her face, so when she talked the veil went over her lips. She took my ear and she was looking at it. I am remembering a particular thing, because that is what we were always living through—with some white people saying, “What is the matter with this?” or “What is that?” or “Isn’t that funny?” She said, “Your ear is almost black.” I said, “Maybe it’s because I am an Indian. She said, “Oh!” I guess it finally dawned on her she had this Indian by the ear, because she let go of my ear and said, “Well, I hope you get better and I hope you enjoy the book,” and she left. I said, “Thank you.” I appreciated the book, so I got into it, but now I don’t remember who wrote it.

  I read those kinds of stories in Redbook way back then. The girls’ matron and the other women employees got Redbook magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies’ Home Journal and put them in the girls’ reading room. When I wasn’t old enough to go in the girls’ reading room, somebody brought me a magazine, and there I was all “humped up” down in the dining room or in the dark playroom, reading it. Later, I used to sneak in there and steal them. I would hear her voice—the matron. She would be calling me from upstairs, and I would run. I would tiptoe and put my magazine in the clothing room. The matron was always, shall we say, calling for me. She knew I was reading somewhere in the basement playroom. I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I enjoyed it. I read Little Men, too. I discovered Kathleen Morris’s romantic novels. Anyway, I was far away from scrubbing porches or sweeping the room. I was way off in my imagination while the matron was bawling me out. One of my good friends, a cousin from La Conner, said, “Harriette, why don’t you do the work and get it done?” I did. It’s all done. I guess the matron didn’t believe it, and then I had to do it all over again. It seems like that’s all I did for a long time: scrub the porches, scrub along the stairways.

  Classes Continued

  When I was in the sixth grade, something happened. I skipped the seventh grade and went into the eighth grade, so then I had to work hard again. I had to pick up things that I missed in the seventh grade in spelling and arithmetic. But by the time I got into the seventh grade, I was doing well in classes. The teachers had talked about it. Classes were getting easier. I could do everything, so they thought I could skip the seventh grade. Anyway, I had spent three years going through the fourth grade.

  Then, our eighth grade teacher resigned during the first week we went to school. We were wondering what was going to happen when we got to the schoolroom. We looked, and somebody said there’s a new teacher. We got into the room. We all came in staring. Who is the new teacher? It was my brother Robert!

  As you know, he finished high school, and I thought he did pretty well too. A number of students who go to high school have a father or mother or older brother or sister who can help them with algebra, geometry, and so on. He didn’t have anybody to help him. We only had oil lamps then, and I remember seeing him sit at the small living room table. I had my elbows on the table, and I watched for a long time when he was doing algebra. The following year it was geometry, and he had taken up studying German.

  At first when he returned from being drafted into World War I, he worked in an office as a typist and a clerk. Robert was fourteen years older than me. There were four brothers and sisters in between, but most of them I didn’t see because they died when they were babies from the epidemics that swept the Indian reservations: measles and complications, pneumonia, tuberculosis. He went to the Tulalip Indian School, but at the time they had different employees such as cooks and teachers who were friendly with the boys and girls. There was an employee who could play band instruments. He taught a lot of the Indian boys how to play.

  My brother studied trombone and cornet and the French horn. He could play all of those instruments, but the one he liked the best was the trombone. When I was home for a vacation—if he happened to be home, no
t working or in between like the weekend—he practiced and practiced the trombone. I sat and listened to him play “Tromeroy.” I forget who wrote it, but it was beautiful. Another one is in the German language: “Forsaken” or “Verlassen.” I heard my brother playing all of those beautiful things. He was very musical, but it didn’t seem like I was.

  When Dr. Buchanan first heard my brother play, he wrote a letter to John Philip Sousa. He had a band in Washington, D.C., and it was very prestigious. Dr. Buchanan wrote to him that there was an Indian boy here who could play extremely well, and would he listen to him? John Philip Sousa wrote back, eventually, and he said we do not allow Indians or Blacks into our organization; this is all “American.” So I had already heard about things like that by the time I got to high school.

  The agent wanted my brother to go to the Hampton Institute in Virginia. My father said he is not going any place away from here. So he went to Marysville High School.

  If I ever thought it would be easy to have my brother for a teacher—it wasn’t. I used to get so frightened. As he called on each one of us, we had to stand up in the aisle and answer the question. Usually it went on and on. Sometimes I didn’t answer and made believe I wasn’t there because I was too scared to stand up. He “blasted me” right up to the sky. He said, “All right now, stand up and speak up.” He shouted, “Speak up! Don’t mumble to yourself. The whole class is interested. They want to hear.” I almost dropped dead, but I got over it. I guess I got used to standing up and speaking. It was a neat way. My father did that to me when I learned how to read. He made me stand up. I was in the second grade. He borrowed a reader from school, and I had to read to him every evening. Of course, he didn’t say, “Don’t mumble. Speak up.”