We appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, so Mr. Griffin went before that court. They gave him and a couple of attorneys for several other tribes fifteen minutes to present the case. We lost that one. The Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court’s judgment. The attorney sent me the decision; I think it is in my son Wayne’s house, but it is twenty-five years since I looked at it. The way it ended up we owed the government money—thousands of dollars—because they had provided meals and room and board for the Indian children in the boarding schools here. They counted up every penny they had spent on every child for, whatever it was, thirty years. So they charged us room and board for the Indian boys and girls in the Indian boarding school here. Nobody brought up about the worms in the oatmeal. We used to have corn meal mush, too. I used to like that, but that had a different kind of worm in it. The attorneys wrote letters to the agent and the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. They never even answered.
Then, in 1927, they held the last Indian fair—like the ones before World War I.
Fishing Rights
When I was little, these Indians used to fish all over, not just on the reservation. They could fish around Whidbey Island and fish on the beach with a net. But, gradually, as the years went by, Washington State Fisheries began to order the Indians all over the Sound, in western Washington, and also up the Columbia River to stay on the reservation to fish.
I talked with one of the girls, Eileen Williams, who attended Everett Community College when I did. She came from the Colville Reservation. She said her father fished on the Columbia River close to the Canadian border, where the river is still rather small. But then the river gets around and makes the big turn and it touches Oregon and then it is a big, big river. When she was little, her grandfather had his net beside the river where they fished for hundreds and thousands of years. The Washington State Fisheries people would come along and tell them to get out of there. “Get out. Get out. You’re not supposed to be here.” If they didn’t move, if they tried to say, “We’ve always been fishing here,” well, then, those men would just move in and grab that net and just cut it up with a big knife—just shredding it. Of course, those Indians were as poor as any Indians around here. You have to buy twine to patch the net. Twine that will last in salt water or in fresh water is more costly. Time and time again, for her grandfather and her father, too, and all the Indians she knew, the Washington State Fisheries people would cut up their nets. So then some of them did give up, but some of them would keep trying.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, secretary of the Interior, has charge of the Indian Bureau, but nobody cared what was happening to the Indians’ fishing rights, which were guaranteed by the U.S. government representatives when the Indians signed the treaty. The representatives said those things that are written in the treaty will stand as long as the sun shines, rises in the east, and as long as the rivers run from the mountains to the sea, as long as the grass grows green. These words and promises hold true; they will be carried out. Of course, that is a whole lot of words. The Indians were being arrested.
In 1912, 1913, and 1914 the Indians were arrested by the Washington State Fisheries or game wardens, and they were tried in court and sentenced to thirty, sixty, or ninety days in jail. Long ago most of them couldn’t speak English very well. Certainly, most of them couldn’t afford an attorney. So when they appeared in court, the game warden or the fisheries man read where he found him, what he was doing, where he was fishing. The judge talked and sentenced the Indian to jail. Indians were in jail in Bellingham, Mount Vernon, Seattle, Olympia. The rights of the Indians were practically extinguished by Washington State until the Indian tribes got together again.
They had meetings with their leaders—meeting after meeting. They decided before the time of the Boldt Decision something should be done. We had the Tulalip tribal meeting minutes, which my brother and I started taking from 1924 to 1926. When I testified in Judge Boldt’s court, one of the things the tribal attorney asked me was if I could remember the years 1924, 1925, and 1926. The attorney has the book of the minutes of some of our tribal meetings. A lot of it is my typing and my brother’s, so I guess it was in his office after the Boldt case. I was telling Wayne we ought to ask for that again since it used to be in our house. He showed it to the attorney and he said, “Oh, gosh, this is just what we need.” Well, Louis Bell died; I don’t know how long ago, several months ago. His son or his two sons, the Bells, now have the attorney’s office. I should remind Wayne again to try and get that back. It belongs to our tribe, the Snohomish Tribe; it is probably lost for good. We worked on that project for more than thirty years.
In 1927, I was with my brother and father. Several tribes here in western Washington brought a suit against Washington State that went on for months and months.3 When the case was heard in the Supreme Court of the United States, they upheld the Supreme Court of Washington State. The Washington State court said the Indians had no rights. They had no business fishing off of reservations. The Indians started over again. There were no attorneys the Indians were able to hire. We collected money. Some Indians, again, were only able to give fifty cents or twenty-five cents. Some attorneys worked for something like five, ten, fifteen years on fishing cases and ended up with a decision that wasn’t quite yes and wasn’t quite no. Our fishing case should never have been tried in a superior court. It should have been tried in a federal court as in the United States v. Washington [1973].
Freedom of Religion
My father helped with the churches that were established on this reservation. Of course, the first one was Catholic. But along about this same time period, I heard Indian people in our house speaking with my father in the Indian language about an Indian man whose name was John Slocum. He had started a group of people known as the Indian Shakers. They told him, “Our people are in big trouble.” They have been tried by the Indian court, and they were locked up in a couple of cells in a jail in the old mill or sentenced to work because they had joined the Indian Shaker Church. My father never saw them because he was working there on the campus at the boarding school, and he didn’t hear about the trial or the arrests until after they were in and locked up. Some Indians came and told him, “Some of your cousins are locked up down there.” My father went down there, and he was talking to them and they were telling him what they were doing.
They said my father ought to go there and see those Indians working on the road. They have women working—not only the men. My father was at work. He left the sawmill and went and got on his horse. Several miles toward Marysville, he found Indians working on the road, and there were women, and, of course, they had their children with them who were helping too. He stopped to talk to them and said, “What happened?” They said, “We were in court, and we were sentenced to thirty days of hard labor for joining and ‘working’ in the Indian Shaker Church.”
My father thought he’d better go and attend a Shaker meeting. They were held at Ambrose Bagley’s home. It was big enough, so that lots of Indians could meet there. They told my father, “This is where we have been meeting and this is what we believe in. We take care of our own people.” They had just had a funeral. The Shakers got together and paid for the casket and the whole funeral. These Indians used to do that anyway. When I was growing up, they took care of everything: the caskets and the over box. Of course, they always had big dinners.
Anyway, my father talked to them. He had women cousins there. One of them was Mrs. Bagley, Mary English. They told my father they were joining this new church. They told him about John Slocum and some of the other Indians who had established this new religion. They met every week on Saturday and Sunday. They all wore long white robes on Sunday, and they had white scarves in their hands. They all shook hands with everybody who was in the church group. They extend their brotherly love, what Christ taught, we are brothers and sisters, all together. My father went to one of their meetings, and he saw what they were doing.
My father talked to Dr. Buchanan, and he told him that it is not right to arrest people or to punish them for something they believe in. My father was an intelligent Indian. He only went to the second grade, and he didn’t remember the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He didn’t know about it. But somebody told my father that everybody is supposed to have their choice of religion. Dr. Buchanan told him, “William, you don’t know what you are talking about.” He used to be able to talk to Dr. Buchanan. My father told him, “You are making a big mistake to punish them and try to break it up, because you will not be able to break up that church. It is already very firmly established, and, furthermore, I think it answers the need of the Indians like no other church has ever done.”
Dr. Buchanan saw my father a day or so later, and he said, “Well, William, you win. We better leave them alone.” But the Shakers took a lot of punishment.4
Lots of other Indians belonged to the Catholic Church and many of them did not talk to the Shakers, either. The Catholic priests said that what the Shakers do is of the devil. It somewhat divided the Indians again. But, of course, for my father and mother, nothing divided us. The Shaker Church members endured months and years of punishment. It was almost like being ostracized by some, but not all, Indians.
My father helped them to collect money when they built the first Shaker church on this reservation, and, of course, the money collected later was donated. Indians were actually good carpenters. They had already worked with wood or timber or lumber. They were, in their own way, master craftsmen with their Indian tools. They had lived in longhouses so they knew how to put a building together.
By the time I was in high school, I went with my father to the Shaker church, but he was not a Shaker member. We stayed there from 7 or 8 P.M. until 1 o’clock in the morning. It really appealed to Indians who didn’t go to the Catholic Church.5 The Catholic Church was the dominant church in western Washington among Indian people. There were Protestant missionaries by Hood Canal and Olympia, my father said. The Shakers met regularly, and they all extended friendship and brotherhood to each other, which was something that had been pretty well lost. The Indians lived so far apart that they didn’t see one another for a month or two or three months at a time. You would think they would see each other every week.
My father talked to a number of the Shakers because he wanted to know how they got involved in the Shaker religion. Of course, he heard about John Slocum, and then I heard the Shakers tell my father about John Slocum.6 He was an Indian who started the Shaker faith. He came from Squaxin Island and Nisqually. It seemed to me he was under a lot of pressure. I used to hear the Indians who came to our house, who were coming to the agency to see about their land or something, and then they would stay at our house because there was no way for them to get back to Marysville or Everett because they would have to go on the mail boat. There were no cars, and the road from here to Marysville wasn’t much of a road. So everybody went by the mail boat or they went by canoe.
I listened to them talking in the evening after supper, telling my father and mother things that they know (if they came from around Shelton or Olympia, it’s the same language but it has different words). So they would tell about John Slocum. I heard that name so many times, but I never ever saw him. As I remember, they said he got sick and was dying. He said he would come back again. The Indians said he did die. They had him in a coffin, and they had a big funeral. Indians always have so many speeches at their funerals. Speakers from families of many tribes came. At the funerals, they all speak and express their sympathy. Sometimes they trace the history of the bereaved family: where they came from; who the grandfolks or great-grandfolks were; what tribe they came from. They give a kind of family history—anyway, speeches and speeches. Some women said John Slocum was breathing. They helped him out of the coffin, and he was able, as the Indians call it, to be himself again. He told what he had seen and what he had heard. God talked to him and explained to him how he was to talk to the people and teach them what they would do to build their own churches. I was just coming out of Tulalip Indian School, in about 1920, when I used to see them. I was about nineteen or twenty years old.
I remember going to the Catholic church on Christmas, right here with my mother, and there would be a lot of Indians. They would come by horse and wagon and quite a lot of them just walked. I remember going to midnight Mass when I was real small. I don’t know how we got there. We must have come on a buggy. I remember it was kind of dark in the church, but it seemed as though there were hundreds and thousands of candles that we lit in that church. It was just beautiful. Up on that high, high ceiling was a structure in the shape of a cross that was just covered with candles, and all around the walls, and there were candles all over the altar. We lined up during a certain part of the Mass because I remember my mother gave me a candle and they lit it, and all these Indians are lined up with the priest standing there and the choir singing. The woman ahead of me had a shawl on and she was holding a candle. I was holding a candle. My mother had me by the wrist and she was saying, “Now hold it up. Don’t let it shake.” Well, they were quite tall candles. They were special candles that were allowed on the altar. I remember going up in the procession, holding the candle, and, oh, my, they have a lot of candles. There is genuflection you have to do in front of the altar and then you go to the side where there is a statue of the Virgin Mary.
So there I was on Christmas in a procession, holding a candle, and yet back home every day there was my grandmother, and she didn’t speak English. I think I said that before. She had been baptized with the name Magdalene, but she never went to church, and I guess my grandfather didn’t go to church either. He said, “It’s wonderful, but it’s not for me.”
My father was not born on the reservation. He was born on Whidbey Island. That is where my grandfolks stayed. They had a chance to work in a logging camp, so they were able to earn money. That was the only thing the Indians could do and that was logging. There were heavy stands of timber all around. That was almost second nature to them to chop and saw down trees. By that time, they were sawing down dozens of cedar trees. In the old days, the Indians didn’t cut down like that; they just cut down one tree for a canoe or enough trees to make a longhouse.
1 He wanted the Indians to do the logging themselves and thus earn a living from the sales, instead of letting companies come in and profit from reservation properties.
2 She was also known as Sherry Guydelkon.
3 The case is known as Duwamish et al. 1927. The judges would not accept Native testimony or hand-drawn maps of tribal territories. The issues in the case were not resolved until the Indian Claims Commission cases in the 1950s and United States v. Washington, 1973, also known as the Boldt Decision.
4 According to Buchanan’s correspondence in the Federal Archives in Seattle, he continued to prosecute the Shakers even above the objections of Cato Sells the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Congressman James Wickersham.
5 Many new “joiners” in the early days of Indian Shakerism were former Catholics.
6 See Erna Gunther 1949 and Homer Barnett 1954.
8 / Public School and Marriage, 1922 to 1926
I WAS terrified when I started high school. My brother picked out my classes. He wanted me to take the science curriculum—the hardest course in the school. I had to have a foreign language and English. I said, “I don’t want to take those courses. Just let me have the general studies program, and I can take cooking and sewing.” But my brother picked out my program. He and my father wanted me to go to the University of Washington when I graduated. You might think I learned to cook when I stayed with Mrs. Zanga, but all I did was study.
My brother said, “You move fast going from class to class. Don’t dabble along, because there isn’t much time between classes. As soon as you hear the bell, gather up your papers and pencils and books and move out of the classroom and go on to the next one.
If you have time, then you can go to your locker and get your next class book. If you don’t have time, then you better carry two or three books and have them ready so that you don’t have to be running. You can’t run in the hallways.”
My first classes were Algebra I, English I, Spanish I, and General Science I. When I looked at the algebra book, I wondered, what in the world are they talking about? Furthermore, what am I doing here? The teacher explained, and I listened with all of my being. My brother and my father said, “You listen to every word the teacher says. Everything she says is important, especially when she first starts talking at the beginning of class. All of the way through, be sure you hear what the teacher says.” Of course, my father, my grandmother, everyone said the same thing: the teacher is not talking just for fun. My brother Robert was the one who prepared me. He was fourteen years older than me, and there were four brothers and sisters in between. Most of them I never saw; they died when they were babies because of the epidemics that swept the Indian reservations, such as measles and the common cold and pneumonia and tuberculosis. The teacher explained, and I listened with all of my being. What is she saying? It wasn’t too clear, but, vaguely, I got it.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 25