My mother took me into town. She didn’t do any preaching that time. She let me pick out the material. In Tulalip Indian School, remember, I had plain, stiff white petticoats, plain gingham dresses, stiff navy blue uniforms. When I asked for a lace petticoat or lace around the neck of my dress, she would get mad and tell me that is a sin. It didn’t bother me when I was ten years old. When I was fourteen years old, I kept asking. By the time I was fifteen, I asked for a silk dress. It was 1919 and the end of World War I, and the women’s fashions were changing. By the time I got into high school, it was called part of the Roaring Twenties, but we didn’t know about it.
When I was a junior, my mother allowed me to buy a navy blue silk taffeta dress, and I was in seventh heaven. During the Roaring Twenties, the blossom skirt came out and fit like a basque, kind of tight. The sleeves came just below the elbow. My mother wouldn’t put in short sleeves. It was a sin to wear short, short sleeves. It was interesting that she would get so worked up—and it was not all of the time, just when I wanted lace on my clothes. But it was a sin. My father was always in favor of everything. “If she wants lace, get her some lace.”
Marriage
People should know too that I had trouble like other people. My first marriage didn’t turn out too great. All I remember about it is crying and being unhappy. He was always asking me, “What have you been doing?” “Where have you been?” I was alone. I didn’t have anybody in Seattle. I never even went to church. He said he loved me. He was twenty-six or twenty-eight years old. His folks thought he would never get married.
I met him at a dance at the Knights of Columbus in Seattle. There were a group of Indians who got together and put on a real American dance. It was mostly Indians who came. He had not been there before either. He was always working and never had time to go. I was almost out of high school. I don’t know why I thought I had to get married. It seemed like everybody was getting married. Why in the world is it, you grow up and you think about getting married? So I met him in a dance hall. In a way, that always sounded funny to me—not “funny,” really—a girl in a dance hall, but what kind of a girl would be in a dance hall? My father and mother took me that one time. A lot of Indians came from all over western Washington to those dances.
I’ll call him Frank. His name was Francis.2 I remember my mother saying, “You don’t know him. You don’t know what kind of person he is.” I thought she was being just like she always was: you better not do this, don’t do that. So when she said I didn’t know him, I said, “Oh, yes. I was introduced to him by somebody who knew me and so I figured I knew him too.”
I got married in the First Presbyterian church in Seattle. When I came back home, Francis and his parents invited me to come and visit them. They were living in Sequim. So I went to visit them on the ferry he worked on. He said, “We are going to get married tomorrow.” He was afraid if I went home, I might meet someone else. I was already wearing his ring. I said, “How can I change my mind?” I listened to him. The ferry landed about four or five o’clock in the morning. By nine or ten A.M. we were married.
There was just his cousin for a witness, and the other witness was a white girl who worked in the church. I was honest, but I can say here I don’t know how I could have been so dumb. Nobody else would go ahead and get married like that, because I wanted my folks and my brother and sister-in-law there. He said it would be too hard to stand up in a church with a big wedding. I listened. As I said, I don’t know how I could have been so dumb. But that is the way I grew up in the Indian boarding school—somebody told me to do something and I did it. I felt like I had to do it.
When I came back home, my mother and father came to pick me up at the ferry. I was already married. I told them, of course. She told me, “Don’t you ever change your mind. You are always changing your mind. You are married and you are going to stay married.” My father chuckled, and he said, “Your mother still thinks she is the boss. You have another boss now.” If my mother hadn’t ordered me to stay there, I would have come home.
My sister-in-law had a shower for me, and I got a tablecloth, pots and pans, and a lot of things. I listened. If anybody asked me, I would have come home after a month of marriage because I was all alone in an apartment. He was gone all day, or he would go back to work. He worked with the Washington ferry system in Seattle. He left at 7 P.M., and I didn’t see him again until 6 P.M. the next evening.
I went to the public library on Fourth Avenue in Seattle. I spent a lot of time there, and that is when I read Bancroft. It was a big book. I read a lot. When I was in Tulalip Indian School, I was always getting into trouble for reading.
I got so homesick I went home. The time he worked changed. If he worked from midnight to 6 A.M., the following two weeks or so he worked from 6 P.M. to midnight, and it rotated. Some of the time he stayed aboard the boat, and then I went down and met the boat. There were several women who met those boats when their husbands got off their watches. I went down on the dock every evening. Some of those women had been meeting the boats there for fifteen years or so. It was an old thing for them. But, anyway, it got to the point where he would shake me up and wonder what I was doing all day.
Later on I said, “What could I be doing? I don’t have any money!” That was really interesting. I was starving hungry much of the time. Money was something he thought I didn’t need. He paid for a nice apartment on Queen Anne Hill. I used to get on the streetcar to see where he was, and after a while I just walked. I walked those long, long blocks because I didn’t have any money. He was making good money, too, for that time—from 1920 to early 1930. Most of his money went to his mother. He bought a new car, so I could drive from home to go down and meet his ferry. One of the things he said to me was, “I bought you a car.” It was in his name, but I drove it when he wasn’t home.
Now that I am along in years, I understand he was under pressure—working long hours on a ferry, with constant noise and vibrations above the engine room. When you lie down in your bunk, it vibrates—and you wonder how they took it. One of my nieces is a very attractive girl, and I know her husband kept her up at night wondering what she was doing. She wasn’t doing anything. He was just jealous.
I found out he had a very bad temper. He didn’t trust me. I met someone I went to the boarding school with. She was living in Seattle too, but it seemed as though she was what my husband called a “streetwalker.” I didn’t know about it at the time because she had an apartment in town and she worked as a waitress in a small café. Francis thought she was somebody bad. I met her now and then when I was walking down to the dock. I talked to her, and he got mad. “You know, if you are going to talk to people, streetwalkers, then that is what you are.” I never saw them before. I didn’t know what they were. They didn’t have them out here in Marysville or on the reservation. It was all new for me to live in a big city.
1 aa. See Ruth Shelton in Hilbert (1995); Snyder, appendix (1964); Bates, Hess, Hilbert (1996).
2 His full name was Francis Williams. He was a member of the Klallam Tribe, and his mother was Tsimshian, one of the coastal tribes in Canada. Mrs. Dover’s mother was also Klallam and Samish.
9 / Political and Social Conditions
WHEN the decision came down from the Supreme Court in 1928, that was when my older boy was born, so the decision was kind of secondary to my new baby.1 I listened to my brother discuss the case because then some of the other Indian tribes started to be aware of and talk about the promises that were in the treaties that were never kept. Through the years things just got worse.
About this time my brother Robert had a radio show. The city of Snohomish, Washington State, and the Snohomish Pioneers helped him. He was a member of the Snohomish Pioneers. They put on an hour radio program on KFBL in Everett. Wayne was just a baby then, so I never got to go. I went once. They did a drama about a tugboat that exploded and sank around here. All of the pioneers were screaming. I listened to them, and that is all I remember.
My brothe
r wrote the dialogue for another radio play about the first courthouse trial. He took it from the history of Snohomish County. It was on every week for several months, and it was a big thing for the county people, since so many of the early settlers from Everett, Stanwood, and Seattle were still living. My father played the fiddle on the program. You could hear people dancing. It was recreation for the settlers.
Robert had a program on the Treaty of Point Elliott. Some of the employees from the boarding school and some of the chiefs had speaking parts. They talked about how much the Indians discussed the treaty before they met with Governor Stevens. I used to hear about the treaty so much when I was little. The Indians were not together on the treaty. It always seemed as though the Indians were clapping their hands and so happy over the whole thing. Actually, they talked about it for several days and nights.
My brother was the secretary of the Snohomish Tribe, and all the Tulalip soldiers were in that group—something like six or eight. They were all anxious to see if they could get land. So, as I said, the Snohomish organization grew. My brother died suddenly in April 1930.2 When he died, the group that was together at that time included reservation and nonreservation Indians. After two meetings, they voted me into my brother’s place. My father was the president. Later, when they were more established, the bigger group voted to make Thomas G. Bishop their president, and the name of the organization was changed to the Northwest Federation of American Indians.
Thomas Bishop never lived on the Tulalip Reservation. He lived near Port Townsend, on a farm he inherited from his father. He was quite well known, and that is why the Tribe elected him. He was half-Indian. His father was white, which is why he had farmland. He was a senator in the Washington State legislature for a while.
The older Indians had more patience with many of the issues they discussed, but some of them were troubled and they talked about how very blonde and blue-eyed some of the members of the Tribe were. They had very little Snohomish Tribe Indian blood, and there was no requirement on the amount of Snohomish tribal blood they had to have to be a member. The Northwest Federation of Indians became a large organization. Supposedly, there were Indians in the organization from the reservation, but they couldn’t tell if they were Indians. None of the off-reservation people were enrolled in the agency here or are on the census roll. They didn’t live here. Dozens of people were saying they were Indians. My father usually knew them, but he didn’t know all of them personally.
I heard my father and the older ones, such as Ty Stockton, who was my brother, talking about this problem. We had people coming to meetings who were very little Indian. My brother Robert said, “I don’t think if it comes to that, the U.S. government Indian office will decide on their roll, and they will only accept the names that are on the agency roll.” Then my brother had died and my father was grieving. They felt that they should have what was promised in the treaty, and that was that each Indian would have land. My father talked to the agent about the doctor’s refusal to attend the Indians from the reservation.
Tulalip Tribal Council
They had a council of five members. My father was the president. They did the same things as the Improvement Club: talk about the church, fix the foundation of the church, and fix the roads. It seemed like the roads always had to be fixed. There were some places along this road to Marysville where it seemed no matter how many loads of gravel were piled in there, after a year or less it all disappeared and there was just mud. So gravel in some places along there was being hauled in. They met down at the longhouse, since that was all there was. Sometimes if they had to get together rather fast on something, they sat on the beach in front of the Catholic church. Sebastian Williams and Wilfred Steve were the youngest members, with my father.
They said they sat on the beach to have their meetings because it was simpler and more fun. Otherwise, they had to go all of the way over to the agency. So they called the meeting to order right on the beach. They sat on the logs and talked. My father used to talk about when they organized. There was no money so they put together themselves maybe a dollar, and when they bought envelopes and some typing paper or a notebook they could keep the minutes. Sometimes they met back east of here, where the boarding school was and where the land was being cleared. It is fields and houses now. They sat around. It was all stump land, and sometimes fires were burning in the stumps, but they found places to sit on a rock or log or something. They didn’t have money for anything better.
I don’t know if there were any minutes from that time. Whatever was written, I think, was maybe lost. I think Wayne found some minutes that Sebastian Williams wrote.
They had several meetings to talk about the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. I read it. It sounded like a big, terrific change. Indians around here were always a little worried about any big change like that. I think they had several meetings to talk about the Indian Reorganization Act, until they had a meeting and they voted for it. There were more young people who voted. They had a meeting of the tribes and voted for it. There was more voice then, and many more young people were there. I was home in 1934. I came home before Wayne was born in 1928. By 1930 he was two years old, and six years old in 1934 and starting to go to school.
When the Indian Reorganization Act came, my father was older, and he had heart trouble and emphysema. He didn’t want to be on the new Board of Directors that was established according to the Indian Reorganization Act. The Tulalip Board of Directors has seven members, and they are elected by the whole reservation. The council of five members was elected by the Tulalip Indians.
We found some of the minutes that Sebastian Williams wrote when they talked about what they would call their new organization in 1934. They knew that in La Conner, the Swinomish Tribe called their new organization the Swinomish Senate. They thought about it and said, “we always had just a five-member council and maybe we could call it something else.” The younger people came up with the Tulalip Board of Directors, since if we are going to handle or take care of tribal land, then we are in business; so let’s call it a board of directors to take care of the business of the tribes. I never liked the name, but it was reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Board of Directors
My father was on the Board of Directors at first. He told the people on the Board, “I can stay maybe for one year.” He wasn’t feeling well. If they met someplace where somebody was smoking, he had a hard time breathing, and so it was a constant worry for us, where he might be. He stayed on a year or two. Then, later, he went to some of the meetings because they asked him to come. They said, “We’d like you to listen and just tell us what you think.” They had elected a group of seven members; they were younger. They were all my brother’s age. By that time, they were speaking nothing but English at their meetings, and minutes were kept of every meeting. My father just couldn’t take it. There was always somebody smoking cigarettes. While he liked the smell, it still used to start him coughing.
Some people said my father was not a chief; he was just a police officer, a police chief. He was the chief of police for five reservations—Tulalip, La Conner, Mukilteo, Suquamish, and Lummi—from 1921 to 1928. Once in a while he would be up at Nooksack. Pressure was on the Indians against drinking liquor, and that was strictly enforced. I never saw any Indians drunk all of the time I was growing up. It certainly became very common by the time I was thirty or forty years old.
In 1934 or 1935, I don’t think there were any Indian police any longer; that is when the Indians accepted the Reorganization Act. Some reservations had to enforce their own system of law and order. We had a part-time police force, but they didn’t patrol the reservation like the Indian police did when I was little.3
The first Board of Directors chairman was Bill Steve, then Ezra “Art” Hatch, Carl Jones, Hubert Coy, and my father. They met the first time down at Mission Beach. Coy had a small store where he sold candy, pop, cigarettes, and cigars. They also sat on the beach. It must have been a nice evenin
g, or later afternoon, because they sat on the logs and had their meetings.
Bill Steve used to talk about it. “When we started, we didn’t have a penny to our name.” They collected the money among the directors. They had a notebook, so they could write down the minutes and keep track of when they met and when they collected money. The second time they met in front of the Catholic church, inside of Tulalip Bay, and they sat on the beach again. Then the third time, about two or four weeks later, they met on the baseball field. Now it is a residential area. But they met there—sitting on the bench for people who are watching the baseball game. They met in different places because they still had no official place to meet. Later, they were allowed to meet in the agency office. The agent stayed until they were all there, and then he left and they started their meeting.
Life Changes
My father never said anything when I got married. When he was sick and dying in the hospital, I went to see him and that was when he told me, “You get a divorce, do you hear me, and stay at our home. Your son is going to grow up and be a good man, and he should be a leader.” He said, “Don’t forget our Indian ways. Don’t ever put it away from you—not our language and not our ways. You have to dress like the white people. You have to speak their language.”
I think my father would have welcomed me home because I was the youngest in the family, and I was the only one they had by then. My older brother was married and then gone, so I was the only one left in the family.
One of the things my father told me on one of his last days was, “Don’t leave your mother. Don’t leave our people. Don’t move to big cities and live a different kind of life. You stay with our people.” My mother talked to him about seeing a priest. I was there. I didn’t say anything. I was going to tell my mother, “Just leave him alone.” He didn’t answer. He never saw the priest, but he always lived up to what his parents and grandparents taught him
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 28