When I got home that evening, I brought my algebra book. I looked at it because my brother said, “Now read it. If you don’t understand what your teacher said, then read it again. If you don’t understand what your teacher said, then read what it says at the beginning of the lesson. Read and read it again. Read again, sentence by sentence; and as you read each sentence, look over the book and think what it says. Know in your own mind what it says.” So, that is what I did. I suffered with algebra until I got it. About the second evening, a terrible bright light broke, and I could see what they were doing—X and Y and everything.
All mathematics just “breaks me up.” I counted on my fingers in school. I never really learned the time tables. The teachers emphasized how very important it is and how much easier it is to learn them. I looked at those numbers and I thought, “Oh, dear, do I have to learn that?” So instead, I walked around and talked with my friends. I remember now that seven times seven is forty-nine; that is easy. The algebra came easily.
Halfway through the semester we had to identify fifty songbirds and other birds in western Washington in order to get a grade. I spent every weekend with my father. He knew a lot about birds, but he knew the names in the Snohomish language. I had a book from the library. You couldn’t say “barn swallow,” for instance. We had to tell the color of its back and wings, color of the throat, and other things. It was kind of nice, in a way, sitting out there by the trees—listening. When you hear a different song, you walk around very slowly and ask, “Who is that?”
I don’t see how I made it through Everett High School. I still have my report cards. My father and my brother said listen to every word the teacher says. Everything she says is important, especially when she or he first starts talking in the beginning of the class and all of the way through. See what they say. On my report card I got an A in Algebra, a B in Spanish, and an A in English. I thought, oh, this is going to be easy. Well, not easy, but I could work with it.
I got on the honor roll. Spanish was easy. I could talk Spanish as well as the teacher. Then, by the end of the semester, I was almost flunking algebra because of fractions. I got all mixed up. I could add up piles of fractions on both sides of the line, and for a while I could do it and get an A or a B, and then for a while I got nothing but an F. I used to tell my children, “You know things get like that—just don’t give up. Sometimes you are going to wonder if you are ever going to come out of that deep, black mud you are in.” My teachers were just wonderful all of the way through high school. They made us study. It seems to me in the last few years, in some high schools, students are just “dawdling.” They don’t especially learn. They aren’t doing any book study.
I was the only Indian in Everett High School. Nobody, not one single student, boy or girl, through those four years ever said anything to me about being an Indian. In the beginning of the school year, there was an article in The Kodiak, the high school newspaper. I mentioned that my father carved the totem pole downtown. But I wasn’t singled out for friendships. Friendships came about, and I was part of a very nice group.
There was an English teacher in the school who first taught in an Indian school somewhere but not in Washington State. She said she enjoyed the Indian children so much. It was a landmark in her life because the Indian children were all so courteous and they had such good manners. When they played, they were more active. When they spoke in classes, they used good English and it was a joy to teach them.
We had a reunion about two years ago. My son William took me. It was our fifty-fifth or fifty-sixth. I said to them, “Let’s not count them anymore.” I recognized a lot of my former classmates and, of course, they recognized me with my white hair. They called to me from across the room. We had a dinner at the Holiday Inn south of Everett. Nobody was going to throw me out this time.
Now and then I think of my brother and how bound and determined he was for me to take English, algebra, geometry, and history. He said, “You don’t have to take cooking. You learn that here at home.” But in my junior year, I took a sewing class because I thought, why can’t I have a little restful time? I struggled through geometry, struggled through Spanish III and IV and all of that English, all the way through four years of English.
I remember telling some students that I already knew how to speak English, and I wondered why I had to take this class. We had to parse sentences. I used to pull my hair. I said, “Who cares whether they are adverbial clauses or whatever.” The second or third year, we spent a semester on English poets and another semester on American poets. We had to learn three or four lines of certain poems. The teacher would say, “This is the part that is important. You will hear it again.” In Longfellow (the teacher ought to hear me), I think it is the one called “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock.” The teacher would stop reading and talk. You could hear, and you could see, the murmuring of the pines and hemlock. An English poet wrote “Sunset and Evening Star”: “And one clear call for me, and may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to sea.” I think it is called “Crossing the Bar.” And then there was the one that Whittier wrote about the barefoot boy: “Blessings on thee, little man. / Barefoot boy with cheek of tan, / and thy merry whistled tunes, / and thy ragged pantaloons.”
Believe me, we learned them. I used to know several of them. I could stand up and recite. I remember my brother saying, “It won’t hurt you. It will help to improve your mind, expand your mind so that you should be able to have a wider point of view. It is going to be vitally necessary. Things are going to change for the American Indian, and we are not going to be isolated on the reservations anymore.”
I struggled through the entire thing. My brother moved to Everett, so I didn’t see him on weekends. There wasn’t anybody for me to talk to about what I was going through, but I got through two years of Spanish, algebra, and geometry. When I was a junior, I took physics and chemistry. I wasn’t any good in physics. I got a C all the way through. I used to “howl around” and say, “Why in the world do we have to listen to my brother? He said for me to take chemistry. Why? Here I am measuring water, acids. Some of them smoke.”
At the end of the year, the class was talking about the “unknowns.” We had ten or twelve unknown compounds or chemicals to analyze and identify. You put the unknowns in a test tube with a little bit of water and shake it up, and see if it is soluble in water. Then you go through a hydrochloric acid test. I used to wonder, what insane maniac dreamed up all of this? I thought about the unknowns. I bet I won’t find any of them. I went through all except one, all twelve. It was kind of a blue-green crystal that looks like salt. It was cobalt. I got that just once, and I got the others in the book that look like salt. The teacher said, “Do not taste it.” I thought it looked like salt. I tasted it and it was salty. It was potassium chloride. Most of them we had never seen before.
The teacher was gone for a while. We had a young lady substitute. She was a senior, an A student. The teacher had a little black notebook that he kept in his desk, filed away somewhere, so that he could tell what unknowns each one of us had. When we got our unknowns, I went to tell her that I had potassium chloride, or maybe it was sodium chloride. It was something simple. She looked in the book and said, “No, it wasn’t.” I said, “It wasn’t?” and she turned and walked away. I went through the whole miserable thing about three times, and I came out with the same thing. Each time you do it over, you go from A to B, and if you miss B, you get a grade of C. She said it was wrong. The next day or so she was gone and the teacher was back, so I went up to talk to him. I said, “I can’t get anything else but potassium chloride.” He looked in the book and said, “That is what it is.” I said, “That is what I told her.” He said, “You told who?” I said, “I told your substitute.” He said, “Oh, I’ll talk to her.” Well, I got a C or a B on that one anyway. I got worked up over that, too, way back then.
Haircut
I wanted my hair cut, but my mother said
no. My mother said, “Absolutely not. Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.” The style then was short hair. It was called “Marcel.” I thought about it for two weeks, and I thought I know what I am going to do. I asked her one time, summertime, if I could have my hair cut in the Marcel style. She said, “What do I have to tell you? Now, don’t ask. Indian women and girls don’t have short hair.” I walked out and went to the garage and talked to my father. I said, “Could I have my hair cut?” He stopped whatever he was doing and he looked at me. “What does your mother say?” “She said it would be all right.” He said, “All right. You get ready and I’ll take you into town. Where would they do that?” I said, “In the beauty parlor.” He said, “All right. Get ready. We’ll go.” I ran in the house and I got my coat and purse, and I told my mother that my father said I could have my hair cut. “We’re going into town.” He came into the kitchen to get his other hat and my mother was standing there. She got real mad, and she said in English, “My goodness!” She was swearing like anything.
I imagine what happened to me, in having my hair cut short, was probably what happened to many girls, even white girls. It seemed as though many people of the older generation were shook up over short hair and short skirts. The music changed, too, to something like jazz. It seemed as though the younger generation was not really going to heaven.
I will always remember the reaction of my aunts and uncles to my hair being cut. The one I remember so well, and it bothered me somewhat, was Uncle Joe. He was my father’s uncle. He was older than my father, and, furthermore, I could not really explain anything to him. When he came through the door, I was usually in the kitchen helping my mother. He would stop and look at my hair from side to side. The whole family was coming in with him, and everybody stopped and looked to see what he was looking at. He was looking at my short hair, and he would always say the same thing. “Oh, dudah,” and the longer that “oh” goes, the worse it is. “Ohh, dudah. Her husband must have died.” Then he would go on into the other room, and his wife or somebody would laugh. His wife said the same thing, “Oh, leave her alone. It looks nice.” So there I am with short hair. It’s Marcelled, and I thought it looked super. But he always said the same thing. I didn’t even have a steady boyfriend. So there I am—a homely little person out there, and that is all he said loudly every week. “Oh, dudah. She must have lost her husband.” It seemed like he did that for months and months until he got used to it.
The older people were upset. Indian girls were cutting their hair. The only time Indian women cut their hair then was if their husband, son, or daughter—or somebody in their family—died. It was a sign of deep mourning. I don’t know why, but there always have to be trials and tribulations for people growing up, and that was one of them. Nobody said (it should have been my father who said), “You should follow the Indian way and keep your long hair.” If anybody had said anything, it would have been Uncle Joe. But he didn’t say, “It’s too bad to accept the white man’s short hair.” Now that I think about it, that is one of the things that jarred him, too. I was following the white man’s fashions and that was not our way—to have short hair for girls and women. As my mother said, “Indian women don’t wear short hair. They never cut their hair. The only time it is cut is when they are in deep mourning.” If my father had said no, I would not have had my hair cut short, except he was usually in favor of anything that I wanted. I never used him like I could have—now that I think about it.
I asked him for high heels along about that time too. My grandmother and several of them came to the house. He told me to walk across the room. I did. Of course, I had been taught to take small steps. You don’t take long steps as if you are plowing a field. I hadn’t thought of that for so long. I had to walk across the room several times for my brother and the others to see how I walked with high heels. They rocked a little. Maybe they were exaggerating a little. Anybody could walk in high heels.
My father was such a marvelous person, and he had a fantastic life. He had a real Indian life—as real as it could be at that time. They wouldn’t be able to live that way now. There are just too many people around. Way back then, his uncles were right on him like a bunch of bees. They were always giving him advice, and all of it was important. One of the things I think of now that my father found so helpful was one of the last things his uncle told him: “It’s all very fine to have a temper, but you have to learn how to handle it. You can get into big, big trouble if you don’t control your temper.” Some people can get really violent. Today you read about people who shoot other people because they get so mad and frustrated. My father told me several times that his uncle said, “You have to control your temper, or it is going to control you, and it can damage your life, and it can almost ruin it.” It is all very fine to have a temper, but there is a time and place to use it, and one of the times to use it is to learn how to live your life. There is usually so much frustration and disappointment to live through.
My father and I were good friends—real good friends. Whatever I did might have seemed kind of crazy to my mother. She never used the word “crazy,” but it would almost sound like it. My father was more understanding of boys and girls. He said, “It is natural to do things that seem outlandish or crazy. It seems like it to our people or to your relatives. The young people learn. You could tell them things, but sometimes they have to learn it themselves.”
He used to play the fiddle for dances, especially square dances for Indians, and even white people who happened to be around would go to dances. They had square dances and waltzes and schottisches that began in the evening and would last until six or seven o’clock the following morning. My mother let me go a few times with my father and my brother. My father played the fiddle all night. They stopped about midnight to have an entire dinner: roast beef, chicken, boiled potatoes and carrots, homemade bread and butter. People brought their children, even little children, and they fell asleep, but everybody took care of them.
I didn’t go to dances when I was a teenager because my mother wouldn’t let me go—but my brother did. My father told me one day why he didn’t go to church much. He used to play for the dances. The priest, who had this parish at the time, was very mad at my father. He said he was the leader of the devil. He said, “Don’t you know you are the leader of the devil when you play all night like that, and that is why people don’t come to church the next day?” My father never forgot that remark. He used to say the same thing that my grandmother said in our own language:
Whatever you do that is good and kind will come back to you. Somebody will do you a kindness, and you will be a bigger and better person. Whatever you do that is wrong or mean, it will come back to you. It will be bigger and worse than what you did. If it doesn’t return today or tomorrow, or the next year, it will return as surely as the night follows the day. If you don’t pay for it, for whatever you’ve done, your children will pay, and whatever happens to them will be bigger and worse.
I always thought that part was more frightening than anything I ever heard at church. I don’t want anything to happen to my children or grandchildren. My father was an outstanding Indian leader. He had been taught all of the things, the qualities, the Indians required of their leaders, and that was certainly the business of being honest.
When I was growing up, I used to wonder, why do they get into such a ruckus, because they were always emphasizing honesty. But I didn’t say anything. You were not supposed to say anything. If your father or parent or grandparent is talking to you and telling you something or giving you advice, you take it kindly and courteously. I have heard some young people—Indian and white—get so mad over their parents and grandparents giving them advice or telling them what to do. I have heard them say, “My parents raised their own children, and all I want them to do is leave me alone and let me raise my own children.” But that is not the way I was taught. I listened to my parents and grandparents.
For example, I remember when I got through high school and I was engaged to
be married. It seems as though that news spread around, because in June or July some woman and her husband came to our house. I didn’t remember ever seeing her, but they were the same age as my parents. But I will always remember her giving me advice and saying, “Remember one thing. Don’t ever feed your husband warmed-over food. You cook a good, warm, and entire meal. He is working every day, and it is especially necessary that he have warm food that is just freshly cooked and you lay it on the table when he gets home.” Of course, she talked about not allowing your husband to go around with messy shirts. “See to it that the laundry is done regularly, every week.”
I didn’t say anything. Mother thanked her, and I said thank you too for talking to me. Afterwards, I was asking my mother, “It seems like Indian people keep reminding me to take good care of my husband and everything. What about me? Who is going to take care of me?” My mother said, “Oh, just never mind. You just do what you are supposed to be doing.”
Several of us who were about the same age would get together and once in a while we talked about how our people, our parents and grandparents, preached. It seemed like they never ever stopped what we thought was preaching. Now that I think about it, all of it might not seem important, but it does make a difference in your life, your daily life. The young Indians of today feel as though they were terribly picked on if somebody tells them, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I guess young people have thought that ever since the beginning of time, that older people talk and give advice and preach. I think it was important. When I think of my grandmothers, my mother, and all of them, I am always impressed with one thing and that is their courage way back then. Actually, the Indians would be hungry. The reservations were never really set aside as a good hunting ground or a good fishing ground. Indian reservations were just set aside so that the Indians were pretty much out of the way.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 26