That was in January. I wasn’t in the longhouse again until summertime. My mother went to the meetings on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, because the Indians were getting together and talking about putting on a fair. They were also clearing a big wooded area to put in an athletic field. They played baseball there. It was a racetrack too. When the tribe had their Indian Fair, a number of Indians came from Lummi, La Conner, and Nisqually, with their racehorses. Indians just loved betting on horse racing.
We revived Treaty Day here in 1960. They rebuilt the longhouse we have now. Wayne, my son, was involved in it. Several Indians got up to speak. Some of them came from British Columbia. They still remembered my father when they were just children. They spoke of Chief William Shelton. They remembered it was my father who got permission to build the first longhouse because he talked to them, and they put in the money. They collected the money to buy nails. My father cut the lumber at the mill where he worked.
Treaty Day on January 22 is usually observed in Tulalip or La Conner and sometimes on the Lummi Reservation. It is a commemoration—not a celebration—as my father and the others said, for a time of worry and a time of great change. When white people first arrived here, they came rapidly and in great numbers. They spread around here in western Washington, and it upset the Indians. They didn’t get upset like you think a neighborhood would. They got together and talked about the changes that were taking place all around, and how they would stay together and give each other courage. They made speeches about staying together and taking care of each other.
Dr. Buchanan Dies
Dr. Buchanan died in 1920, when I was still in the boarding school. His death was a stunning experience for us. He was mean; in some ways, he was too mean. But, in other ways, he was a nice man to know. I mean, we didn’t know him; we just saw him. But he would stop and talk with us around the playgrounds. Then, I heard him on Sunday evenings when we were at evening chapel.
He was cremated, and I think his remains were sent back to Virginia where he was born. The Indians collected money, and they had a bronze plaque put on a large rock about five feet in diameter near the superintendent’s house. Some of them gave twenty-five cents, fifty cents, or a dollar. The plaque gives his name, where he was born, where he died, and his birthday.
When we learned he died, we were all lined up and waiting in the hallway to march into the dining room at school. A telephone call came, and the matron came out and told us that Dr. Buchanan had died. He was somebody who was important in our lives, and I was terrified of him. My father was quite broken up. He was the same age as Dr. Buchanan. When they first met in 1894, when Dr. Buchanan first arrived here, they were both young. My father was already working at the agency then. Once in a while, they got into a quarrel. Dr. Buchanan didn’t apologize always, but he told my father, “Well, William, let’s forget it.” My father worked for Walter F. Dickens, too.
Graduation
When I finished school at Tulalip, they had a graduation exercise for us that lasted several days. One day they had a “field day”: this was where they have a hundred-yard dash, relay races, obstacle races—things like that. We saw the boys go around or through barrels, swings, and things in an obstacle race. Then, another day they had a water festival. We went down to the waterfront. We were allowed to stand on the wharf and watch the small canoe races, with just one paddler, the larger canoes with two paddlers, and the big war canoe races that had eleven paddlers in each one. The races lasted all day. We had a picnic lunch outside. We had to stay together, but that was fun. We sat on the grass, and they passed out our lunch from a big laundry basket. I always thought that was the grandest lunch. The Indian girls who cooked in the kitchen were good cooks. We’d have big thick slabs of roast beef and thick slices of their homemade bread. We never ever had butter, but, gee, that was good. We would always have a pie. They made the pies there. I remember those pies would always be flattened out because they were piled up in the basket for a hundred and fifteen girls, so those on the bottom would be pretty well mashed up. They usually had peach pies that were made out of dried peaches. We scraped the mashed up pie off of the newspapers with our spoon and saved every little lick. The third day in the evening we had the last assembly down in the school assembly hall.
The entire school marched in and sat there: 230 boys and girls, and probably 20 or more employees. The farmer and his wife came, the carpenter and his wife and family, the superintendent and his family, the assistant, the chief clerk, and two or three clerks, plus all the teachers and their families.
I think I said before that I had surprisingly good teachers during those years, and for them to come out to a small place like this—an agency and a boarding school—when there were places like Chemawa, where instead of 230 students like us they would have 600 or 800 who came from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. I think they had a school down at Riverside, California. It was big, too, and those were still different tribes. They had those Indian schools scattered all over the United States.
My mother bought white organdy because they said we should have white dresses for graduation. My mother bought a white petticoat. I told her, “I want a lot of lace on it.” I don’t know what there was about my mother, but she was bound and determined that I should wear plain cotton. Even if I crocheted narrow lace and put it on my petticoat, she said I shouldn’t have it.
I don’t know why; I thought about it this morning, when I was getting dressed. I used to ask my mother if I could have lace on my petticoats. Usually, the lace on my petticoats at home was white. When I was small, petticoats were white. They were made out of flour sacks with crocheting on them and an inch or an inch and a half of lace on the bottom and around the neck and armholes. I asked for real lace from town. I don’t know how old I was. It was after my sister died. I must have been about thirteen or fourteen. My mother said, “Why is it that you are always asking for something you can’t have?” But I wanted a petticoat with lace. At Tulalip Indian School we wore petticoats that must have been part wool. They were a hideous gray, and they had gray and black stripes. The stripes were an inch wide. They made bloomers for the little girls because they are warm in winter and another thing that was good about them was that they had elastic in the waist. They were nice, but in May or June they are hot.
My mother bought me a tatting shuttle. It was white ivory and about two inches long. You can tat with it. I used to make yards and yards of lace with it, but there was nothing to put it on. If I heard the matron’s voice, I used to stick the tatting shuttle in my bloomers. Then I am real innocent standing around when she would say, “What are you doing? Get out of here.” Sometimes she would let me tell her, I just came from the dining room. I just got through wiping dishes for 230 kids. Well, we didn’t use the word kids. My mother always said, “Don’t say ‘kids’.” I think they said that in school too. They told us “Don’t call children kids. Kids are goat’s children.”
The church said you shouldn’t wear such things as lace on your clothes just to feel good about it. It is a sin. I was always in sin; wishing for lace on my clothes. The few times I had narrow lace, crocheted lace on my petticoat, it would last for two or three years, and then you would have to take it off a worn petticoat and put it on the next one.
Some students who lived in Lummi and other areas and their parents were too poor to provide organdy; then the school sewing room furnished them with white crossbar muslin dresses.
In the graduation program, they had kindergarteners on the stage sing, and then the first graders, second and third, and then there was us. I couldn’t believe we were getting out of there. It was a really happy time. My mother allowed me to have a petticoat with some lace on it, but not much. I had white slippers—my mother thought that was a sin—and white stockings. I don’t think my mother would have broken down and bought me all of those things except my father said I should have them.
High School Plans
It was a nice summer, but in August I was worried. My broth
er said I should not go to Marysville High School. My farther didn’t want me to go there either. I would have to go six miles on horseback or by horse and buggy from way out here. They certainly couldn’t let me go alone. Somebody had to go with me every morning and come back in the dark in winter. We didn’t have a car. The mail came at noon all of the way from Everett. There were a few cars, but in certain places this road was almost impassable. It took two and half to three hours to go to town and the road meandered all over. The Indians were always working on the road. They hauled gravel with a horse and a wagon, but it seemed to disappear in some places, and there would be water all along the muddy road. Anyway, my brother said I should not go to Marysville. It was too . . . “hidebound.” They don’t like Indians.
Some of my classmates didn’t go to school. They just went back home. We were quite along in years. I wasted so much time in the boarding school. I was seventeen years old when I graduated from there in 1921. When I started high school, I was eighteen years old. Some classmates got married within a year or so. They had their children. Two or three girls went to Haskell Institute, a big, big boarding school in Kansas. They were able to finish high school there and then went to work at other Indian schools and agencies. They worked in the laundry or the sewing rooms of different schools.
Some of my classmates started high school in Marysville, such as Abraham Fryberg and Noble, as we called him, or Cyrus James. Cy was just remembering that a couple of years ago. Cy said they went to the Marysville school in the morning and found out which classroom to go to, but nobody told them what to do at the end of the hour. They were supposed to move on to the next class. So they sat in the first classroom all day long. The teacher never spoke to them, not one word, nor anybody else. They just walked by them. They listened and tried to write down what the teacher in the first class said. The next day they were back there, and after that they never went back. Nobody talked to them, not a single teacher, and not a single student told them what they should do. So those three or four students who tried to go to Marysville High School just dropped out after the third day.
One of our Indian young men, George Jones, went from here to Hampton Institute in Virginia. He said it was all Negro with a few Indians and they were all Indian young men. There were no girls. All George did was fight—they didn’t get along. George just walked out of there one day. He was walking around New York City having a great time. His folks used to send him money so he saved it, and he was going to come home. He went to Detroit where he met another young Indian. His name was Joseph Dunbar. Well, they took Joseph from here the same time they took George Jones to Virginia, and they put him to work in a carriage factory. Nobody helped Joseph or any of those Indians. They just traveled to big cities, and they had to make their own way. Apparently, Joseph had a hard time finding a place to stay, and because of the high room rent, he didn’t have much to eat. George and Joseph had written to each other so they were able to locate one another, so George went to Detroit, and he said, “Let’s go home.” Joseph was already sick, he was already thin. I remember seeing him. He would be walking home from Marysville. My father would stop and pick him up and talk to him. He was just so thin and so pale. He lived two or three months after he came home. He died of tuberculosis. But George made out all right. He was in a different place. It didn’t work because young Indians got to places where they needed counseling, or needed somebody to see to it that they received their treatment.
I was the only one who went to Everett High School.
I went to Everett High School because my brother said that is where I should go. Some friends told my father to put an advertisement in the Everett Herald and ask for a family who would take an Indian girl who was going to go to high school. An attorney friend of my father’s helped him to look at the answers. They chose a woman who lived just two blocks from the high school. She lived all alone in a duplex. She was a widow. Her five-room apartment was upstairs. So I moved there.
Her name was Mrs. Zanga. She and I got along fine. A nice couple lived downstairs. The husband was a policeman in Everett. I heard later that some women told Mrs. Zanga they thought she would have a terrible time with an Indian girl who probably did not speak English and was probably the dirtiest or the biggest drunk ever, and they said, “Oh, my lands, you are asking for big trouble!”
Mrs. Zanga’s husband had died years before. He was born in Italy. She was born in North Dakota. She was Scandinavian. I asked her once how they got along, because once in a while she said her husband was “flighty.” He would get mad over things, and she had to put him in his place. Anyway, that part was interesting.
I thought she would help me with my classes because going from an Indian boarding school to a high school in Everett was quite a jolt for me. Mrs. Zanga was Baptist—not a Catholic. All of the churches are the same to me. They are different in the way they have their rituals or services, but they all believe in the Christian religion. It was quite a jolt for me because during the years I was growing up all of us Indians were Catholics. As I say, I thought the lady I was boarding with would be able to help me. She only went to the fourth grade! Way out there in North Dakota, there is not that much schooling. But she was a wonderful person. She went to church, and she believed in Christianity, all the best of it, and she was a most marvelous cook. I think I weighed something like eighty-six pounds when I started living there, and by the time I was in school and eating her food, her cooking, I had gone up to something like eighty-eight pounds.
Students at the Indian boarding school. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
Mary Jane (Lummi) and Harriette Dover (Snohomish), when they entered the boarding school in 1910.
Dr. Buchanan and his family.
The barn where the boarding school boys worked. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
The laundry where the children worked. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady.
Harriette Shelton in her graduation dress, 1922.
William Shelton, with the children in the boarding school, c. 1912. Photograph by Ferdinand Brady; courtesy Museum of History and Industry.
William and son Robert on the Tulalip Indian School baseball team. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry.
Robert Shelton and his wife, Arvella.
William Shelton carving the Everett totem pole. Juleen Studio.
1 See Dr. Buchanan’s boarding school schedule in the Appendix.
2 He was also responsible for the grounds and transporting the superintendent and visitors to and from Everett in the agency launch.
3 Mrs. Dover is referring to the Snohomish (Coast Salish) class system; see Suttles 1951.
4 He came to Tulalip as a physician in 1894 and served as physician and agent from 1901 to 1920.
5 Buchanan stated in his archival record that the Indians of Puget Sound and the Yuman tribe in Arizona had the highest infant mortality in the United States among Native peoples.
7 / Treaty Rights Are Like a Drumbeat
THE war in Europe had been going on since, I think, 1914. The United States declared war in April 1917. Then World War I finally hit the whole United States. My brother had to register for the U.S. Army in April. All of the Indian boys of that age group, from twenty-one to twenty-eight years old, had to sign up. We were all worried, really sick with worry, over my sister because she was dying. When she died at the end of May, as I said before, she died the same night my brother graduated from high school in Marysville. Then he was called up by the draft board and he left home.
The first World War was something we read about in the newspaper. Incidentally, newspapers came here one or two days late. Today you can get your paper the same day it is printed, but way back then, the mail for Tulalip came from Seattle and Everett on the mail boat. People came on the mail boat, too—anybody who had business to do at the Indian agency. The mail boat arrived here at 11 o’clock, 11:15, or 11:30 A.M. Every time the mail boat came, you heard a whistle. Today mail is delivered by the mail carrier from Marysville.
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Robert and his cousin Clarence Shelton were called up together, and they both left on the same day to report to Fort Lewis. That was another big worry. There could not have been very many Indians to call up because the death rate had been so high. If I remember correctly, we had eight of the Indian boys from this reservation who served in the U.S. Army. They were in Fort Lewis for three months or ninety days. They had rifle and bayonet practice.
When my brother got several days’ leave to come home, then we sat around and listened to him telling how to use or swing a gun with a bayonet on it. I felt as if I knew how, because he was telling us. Way back then, the Indian described everything he saw. We had a different language, since my brother talked in English, but he saw everything too.
They had the bayonet practice over and over. They had a Frenchman, a soldier, who taught them. He had been severely wounded, and we could guess that he had an artificial leg. I remember Robert said, “You certainly have to see to it that the enemy doesn’t get to you first. The first thing you try to hit is just below the ribs, because if you do like that, but turn it, you are liable to have that bayonet in a rib; so that is why you jab and turn and pull. Try for here; try and jerk it down, because if you just try and cut a big vein—and then you also have your breathing tubes on each side.” So, hour after hour, the grandparents, cousins—everybody—are listening to him. Then, of course, there was the awful worry that American soldiers were going to be sent to France.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 22