I think the students who had Robert for a teacher thought he brought to us what the outside world was like. All we knew was a very limited life on the reservation. It was just us—just Indians. I learned a lot from my brother, my grandmother, my father. My mother was all for the Catholic religion. I had to learn a lot of the prayers and how to say the rosary. And I was learning two languages.
My brother had a nice personality, and he was a good public speaker. He married a white girl; that upset the whole family and created quite a turmoil, but she was a wonderful person. All along the way, I met people who taught me things. She taught us how to drink tea from a teacup and how to make sandwiches so they were small and looked appetizing. She worked in the boarding school too.
I remember some years ago, several white women said to me, no wonder I had nice manners—I grew up in an Indian boarding school. I didn’t have time to say, “Oh my god, what are you saying?” All I remember is line up, right face, left face, squad right, squad left, company halt, forward march—march to the dining room, march to the classroom, march out of the classroom. March, march all of the time.
The boarding school didn’t have anything to do with Indians who became leaders, such as Sub Williams, myself, and others—Indian leaders like Carol Wilbur, Tandy Wilbur from La Conner, and Cyrus James from here. Clara James and her husband were both in Tulalip Indian School, but they were quite a bit older than me. James Norbert. Clara married his brother, but now that I think about it, Norbert stayed in Lummi. His daughter Florence McKinley is very prominent in the Lummi Tribe. She is one of my cousins. La Conner is the only reservation where we didn’t have a lot of cousins, but that seemed to be because of the rivalry. I am related to Morris Dan and Robert Joe. Isadore Tom is from Lummi. The boarding school had nothing to do with the development of any of these people as leaders. They taught us how to say “please” and “thank you,” but anything else that I might have learned came from my grandmother, and that was the same with the Indian leaders.
There is one good thing I will say about that school and that is they had good classroom teachers. We really must have had good teachers for them to come and teach children who knew two languages, and we were just learning English, but some could speak the English language very well. They did really well. When I went back to school, things came back to me, in English, that I had had in the Tulalip school. I must have had it in high school, too.
When I went to Everett Community College, things came back to me that I had learned in Tulalip Indian School, just general things that they teach you in English classes. The classroom teachers in the boarding schools made my life and the lives of the other children bearable because the classroom was enjoyable. Those teachers were absolutely wonderful. They were the ones that made my life worth living. Oh, they truly did. It was nice to go into their classrooms because they were never upset or worried about anything. It was a nice experience to walk into a classroom and have the teacher speak to us in a nice speaking voice, not giving a lot of loud orders. Those teachers never seemed to be upset or worried. They just seemed to repeat, but I don’t think they had to repeat that much.
I never had a teacher who beat up the children. Some of the older grades had teachers who were always beating up the children, and they usually were the boys. Usually, the boys answered back, and the teachers ran after them or grabbed them by the hair and jerked them out of their desks where they were sitting and slapped them hard. In some of the grades, we had two grades, so I saw that done. All of them refused to cry out, but they did there because then the teacher would take a stick and really beat them. She would have them hold out their hands and beat the tops of their knuckles.
Even though I enjoyed the classroom, and I imagine the other students did, too, the memory of the school is nothing but worry and fear—terror. I was always terror-stricken. I’d get back there the first of September; then I could go home July the second, and in all of those years I didn’t tell my father or my mother what it was really like at the boarding school.
Treaty Day
In this period from 1908 to 1910, 1912, my father was trying to get permission to build a hall or a longhouse for the Indians so that they could gather. First, he asked the agent if he could have a building where the Indians could gather and have Indian dancing and singing so that the young Indians could hear things they had never heard. It was quite a radical thing for my father to be asking because it was absolutely forbidden for drums to be beaten, and Indian singing was against the agent’s rules. However, there were places on Whidbey Island, Hat Island, and Camano Island where Indians could gather, where they could have their own drums beating and remember the old times.
My father and a lot of the older Indians said they felt lost. I think the people who came from across the Atlantic Ocean or even the Pacific—even today or twenty years ago or sixty years ago—no matter where they came from: Germany, Norway, France, Spain—they still remember their own language. If you are alone with people who are speaking one language, you will learn it faster than if you are sitting in a classroom learning it out of a book and not speaking it. Many Indians no longer speak their own language, because those of us who were in school had to speak English. I mentioned before what an awful thrashing I got for speaking Indian.
I used to hear my father saying, “It’s too bad, because the Indian songs and the drumbeats are going to be forgotten.” Once in a while, my father would beat the drum in the evening and sing some of the chants, but not very often because if someone heard us they would report it.
He talked to a lot of the Indians first, then he went to the agent. There is a picture of a number of the Indians and my father; they were the group my father talked with; they were men from here. Of course, their wives were always there at their little meetings, and the women talked too. Men listened politely because there were some tribes where women were not allowed to even be in council meeting, but out here I always thought maybe it was because the weather was milder; it doesn’t get that hot in the summer or that cold in the winter. In the Middle West and other places like it, the weather is bitterly cold. They have deep, deep snow and blistering hot summers.
My father went to the agent and said, “We would like to begin again. We would like to have a day where we could all gather together—the older Indians—and have them sing the old songs and beat the drum. Could we do that?” Dr. Buchanan, who was the superintendent of the agency and also the boarding school, told my father, “No, you can’t. That is against the Department of Interior regulations, which say no drum beating and no Indian dancing.” Indians on other reservations were sent to jail for doing any of the Indian ceremonies. They were tried in the tribal court and charged with disturbing the peace and beating their drums and singing the old chants. They often served thirty days in jail, with bread and water three times a day. Dr. Buchanan liked my father. He and my father were nearly the same age. He told my father to write to the commissioner of Indian Affairs and ask for permission.
My father also asked to build a longhouse. He called it a potlatch house: a place where the Indians could gather and have a dinner. The agent said, “I want you to write the commissioner of Indian Affairs. Write the letter yourself. Don’t ask someone to write it for you. Tell him what you just told me. You want the younger Indians in school to see and hear the old chants and see some of the old ceremonial Indian dancing.” My father said, “I will do that if you give me the address.” So the agent wrote down the name of the commissioner, Cato Sells. “If you write to him, you had better write to the secretary of the Interior and ask him too.” So my father got the name of the secretary of the Interior and his address.
My father’s command of English was poor, shall we say, but I remember him writing in the evening, because I happened to be home. My mother told me to keep still. “Don’t be jumping around.” Sometimes I played with my kitten. I sat still too. My father sat at the round table in the middle of the living room. He had a big frown on his face while he was w
riting. He wrote the letter with an indelible pencil.
I found a copy of his letter in some of his old papers about twenty-five years ago. It was a very long letter, a very touching one. He misspelled some words, and didn’t really know how to use periods or commas, and so the periods are scattered over every sentence, about three or four, and it may not be the end of the sentence but there is a period. Some of the younger people here, young men who were on the board of directors, said, “It’s too bad you can’t find the letters because we think they are important. We would like to see them. What did he say, and how did he say it?”
I used to hear my father talking to my mother about having a Treaty Day and building a longhouse. He went to La Conner to talk to the Indians there about it. In those days, you had to go on horseback from here to Marysville to get to the train. He must have written to somebody on the reservation because he got off of the train in Mount Vernon, and a number of his relatives were there. They had horses, so they went on horseback from Mount Vernon to La Conner. He talked with them and told them what he had in mind. Of course, they all made short speeches that they would help and be glad to, too. He went to Lummi and talked to them and, of course, they were happy over it.
I remember my father’s table piled up with all of the papers and letters from the superintendent, the commissioner, and the Interior Department when he was trying to get permission to build a longhouse. He told us the agent said a letter came from the secretary of the Interior and for him to tell the Indians they can have a Treaty Day for one day and one evening. They are not to dance all night or until daylight. They will have to go home and take care of their livestock. They did have horses, sheep, and cows.
We read about it ten or fifteen years ago, and it sounded like such an unusual order. For instance, that it would not be tolerated for them to neglect their livestock. The Treaty Day “business” got off all right. Dr. Buchanan selected January 22 as the day for us to gather to commemorate the signing of the treaty at Mukilteo in 1855. That is why they called it Treaty Day.
Treaty days were held in 1911, 1912, and 1913 in the Tulalip Indian School. I was in the school then, and so we got to go into the dining hall and see the singing and dancing. For the first time in my life and in the lives of all of us school children, we heard so many drums and so many Indians singing and various kinds of dances that these Indians had—spirit dances. I was deeply touched. I think all of us children were. It seemed as if we recognized the drumbeats and the singing even though we had not heard them before. It just seemed to answer a need for me. It was rather satisfying and, of course, the dancing and the singing went on almost all day.
On the first day of Treaty Day, the dances were held through the day. In later years, in the longhouse, they were usually done at night. I remember several hundred Indians singing. Each one stood up. We couldn’t see some of them because the dining room was so filled with people, but we could hear their voices. They cried when they got up to speak. They told that they were very, very small when they were at the treaty. Some of them said they had been there, but they really just heard about it because they were too little to remember. Of course, they spoke the Indian language, and they told where they were when they got their sqəlalitut. We call the guardian spirit sqəlalitut. They were only boys, anywhere from twelve to fourteen years old, when they were sent out to seek their spirit power, and they did the same thing that my father did—fasting and going out to the forest, the Sound, Deception Pass, and staying there overnight, and in the day sitting quietly in meditation. Each one of these Indians told where they found the sqəlalitut. They didn’t just walk out into the wilderness or the forest and stay overnight a day or so. There had to be preparation. They fasted. They were allowed to drink water and sit in little shelters in different parts of the forest in quiet meditation. Eventually, after five, six, seven, or ten days of fasting, they had a vision, which we call sqwədilič. It means that they heard the vision: usually some kind of an animal spoke to an Indian in our own language and sang its own guardian spirit song. So all of the Indians sang and danced that day all that long time ago. All of them had different songs and different dances from one another, as they still do today.
By 1914 we had the longhouse down here at Mission Beach. I was still in the boarding school. We saw the canoes come in to Tulalip Bay because most of the Indians came by canoe. They were real Indian canoes, and they were just loaded with Indians. The women had on bright colored shawls and bright kerchiefs on their heads. There must have been seven or eight canoes that came in from La Conner in one day. We were let out of class at 11:30, and we were lined up to go marching back to the building, boys and girls, and here came the canoes around the point. We said, “What is that?” We heard the drumbeats, and then here they came. I remember saying, “I will remember that forever.” They had about eight canoes tied together, so that all of them were standing up. They were beating their drums and keeping time as those canoes came in very slowly. The teachers let us stand out there and watch them come in. The drumbeats were coming in over the water, and the canoes were coming around the point, coming in very slowly, and as if all the canoes were dancing. The heads of our canoes look like some kind of mysterious animal. The canoes went past our school, and they came in down there where they were camping. There were hundreds of people there who hadn’t seen each other for a long, long time.
We dressed up in our Sunday uniforms. They were blue, wool serge dresses, and they were scratchy. It was January, and it was cold, so we wore rubbers when we marched to the longhouse from the school. I think it was about three-quarters of a mile. The seamstresses and the group in the sewing room used to make our clothes. We had gray wool capes that year; they had hoods sewed on. The hoods were lined with red plaid and came to a point on the top. I thought they were pretty. We appreciated the warmth, but it was funny to have a hood with a peak. I heard the seamstresses talking about how nice we looked—all fifty or sixty of us, marching with those little peaks bouncing up and down.
They brought our lunch from the school to the longhouse in a horse-drawn wagon in big clothes baskets. Lunch was thick slices of homemade bread, made right at the school with thick slices of roast beef on each sandwich. They were almost scary, the slices were so thick. Now that I think about it, the bread was real good. Then, wrapped up separately in newspapers, was a slice of peach pie for each of us. They were made of dried peaches soaked overnight and were very delicious. I was working in the kitchen one time when we had to do down into the basement to get buckets of dried peaches for pies. Then we brought them upstairs into the pantry and put them in pans of water so that they soaked through the night, and the pies were baked the next day. Oh, that pie! Sometimes now I wish I had some. I don’t know why, but it seemed to be really sweet. The school never ever had sugar—not on the tables.
When we went to the longhouse, it was the first time for all of us to see one and see how big it was, with the fires burning in the center. It was the first time I ever saw the sqəlalitut. I remember somewhere along the side they had their sqwədilič boards and their poles that move. Each one was held by a young man. I saw a woman sing that kind of a sqəlalitut. The poles are long; they almost reach to the big logs that cross the longhouse roof. These had red Indian paint and shredded cedar bark that was tied on like a scarf or a red ribbon.
My mother went down to the longhouse. She usually didn’t go to meetings because she wasn’t from this tribe. She worked with several of the women for two, three days, cooking and baking. They baked cakes and pies at night. Many of them peeled apples for apple pies. They donated whatever quarters they had to buy sugar. I don’t think they had to buy apples because the school had apple trees. The dishwashing went on all day and much of the night.
My father saved the 1914 program of Treaty Day. The first speaker was Dr. Buchanan. Then my father and quite a number of Indians from Lummi, La Conner, and Tulalip spoke. They traced some of the history of what Treaty Day is. I remember my father saying
that it is not exactly a celebration; it is a commemoration, because the Indians were not having a good time when they met to discuss and sign the treaty.
The longhouse was the first and only building that these Indians had during the reservation times where they could meet together. Before that was built, it was forbidden for the Indians to meet, that is, to get together. All over Puget Sound, it seems, the Indian agency told the Indians, “You cannot have meetings.” A lot of these Indians at Treaty Day were quite along in years when I saw them in 1911, 1912, 1913. They cried when they got up to speak. They said that they were very, very small when they were at the treaty grounds. Some of them said that they had been there, but later they heard what went on because they were too little to remember. That really was something. I know my father talked about it. I heard him talking to my mother.
It is interesting that the chiefs who signed the treaties were so interested in having the young Indians learn to read and write. I remember hearing them when I was small. They said, “Pay attention to words. We will never be able to catch up. We don’t know anything about what the white man thinks or plans unless we know his language—unless we can read it. All of those marks—designs they called them—they make on paper mean something to them.”
When they started the celebration at night, somebody started to sing and others beat the drums. When I was there in 1914, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, but not that familiar. I had not heard it that often. Three or four dancers went around the longhouse like a flash. They had red paint on their faces and scarves tied over their heads. They ran around very fast and then went out the door. The drums started again; then almost immediately the dancers went around a third time to a rapid drumbeat. They came a fourth time. The drums were beating slower, and here they jumped right over the fire. The fires were six feet across. We were keeping time and watching. It was my brother and his friends who were jumping across the fire! My father was so astounded. He wondered who they were. Their faces were painted. I guess they saw it when they were children, because things had changed by the time I came along. My father and some of the other Indians said they were really full of the spirit. That’s quite a bit of a jump over a six-foot fire. They went clear over to the other side and landed on their feet with the drumbeat and just kept on going.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 21