They allowed one letter from the prisoners of war about once a month or once every two months. The letters used to come. They were special letters. They were folded over so that they could be opened and read. But long after the peace was signed in 1945, and he came home, Jack said, “I can hardly wait to get home so I can see my mother.” Nobody had the nerve to tell him she was dead. When he got home, he went running up to where the house was. They lived back here, and their house had burned down. Mind you, he got there and it was just ashes. He looked around. It was late in the afternoon. He saw the chicken house, and there was smoke from a stove fire in there. His father came out. He asked, “Where’s Mom?” So they told him. “Well, where’s sister?” She is dead, too. He never sobered up after that. Never. I think he had quite a time getting a pension from the army. He was wounded, but not badly—just a flesh wound through his upper arm—but when he tried to get his pension, they bluffed him down. They got after him and said, “What are you doing? Are you looking for work? Why not? Where have you been looking?” You know, just put him over. Anyway, he never sobered up. I don’t know how long he lived. For two, three, four, five years he was dead drunk and stumbled around in Marysville.
The other one you saw around there was another young man. He was in the army in the Korean War. He and his brother volunteered. They were poor, and I guess he thought that way they could get regular meals. Way back then, I don’t know what the rules are now, but they almost never allowed brothers to be together. They landed in Korea when the Chinese joined the North Koreans, and they spilled over that whole countryside and chased the Americans back. They stopped to dig trenches—to try and stop the thousands that spilled into that small area.
They were in a reservoir north of Korea, in trenches, and they were trying to hold the area. They were holding the North Koreans and the Chinese back, and there was an exchange of gunfire. His brother was shot through the head. He was right beside him.
When he came home, he talked about it. He got very drunk and he was drunk every day. I saw him in town. He cried and cried in the tavern. He said he called to his brother. He saw him when he hit the dirt wall of the trench. He fell right down and then he looked at him. Most of his face was gone and the entire top of his head. He said he dropped his gun. He called his brother’s name, put his arms around him and hugged him and called him. He said, “You will be all right. Don’t leave me. I’m not leaving you. I’ll take you home.” He was right there, and he saw his brother killed. The top of his head and his face were gone. He was still warm, and he was hugging and holding him. Well, he never was sober either. I notice he is pretty good now. I mean he will drink, but he is not that bad. But then he could hardly walk. Every day, every day, every day.8
All of them that you see around there have very bad problems and they drink. Somehow, you feel that if you drink that much it will numb your brain. There are others, girls, who were married to soldiers who were killed in France or Korea. They’re drunk too. Eventually, after two, three years they will get married again and finally sober up a little bit.
The Indians had problems, insurmountable problems, for years. White people had a psychiatrist who can talk to people with problems, but then people like that have to be paid. A lot of people, perhaps, have problems. There is nobody to talk to except their own family, and they are all wrapped up in grief, too. Well, so much for alcoholism.
Why do we drink? I remember telling a white woman. I said, “There is only one thing that will make us better. It’s not that much.” She said, “Well, there ought to be something.” I said, “That is for the white man to go back where he came from. All of you go back to Europe where you came from.” She said, “That can’t be done.” I said, “Yes, but that is the only thing that will help the Indians. Everywhere we go there you are, white man, and you are nothing but trouble to us.” I did enjoy her. She always had something to say about us, and I tried to answer her. But you can’t answer about things that concern people. You can’t send white people back to Europe. They would be strangers there, too. Indians here said to one another years ago, “If there was an old country for me to go back to, I would go back to it.” Of course, for the Indians there is no old country.
Alcoholism is still our problem. Now we have very young people still in school, and they are drinking. But you would have to be an Indian to understand.
Hospitalization
After World War II, one of our Indian veterans had a drinking problem, and he had a heart attack. The local hospital would not take him. They brought him into the hallway, and a nurse came in and said, “You can’t bring him in here. There isn’t any room.” Some of the Indians tried to tell her that he needed immediate emergency care, but they had to carry him back out and put him in their old car. They brought him home, where he died. I don’t think he regained consciousness. We talked about it. As I said, health care and hospitalization on this reservation have been nonexistent. I think we should have complete medical care.
In 1951 I was in the Cushman Indian Hospital in Tacoma for eight or nine weeks. I was surprised I got in. I had something wrong with my liver and kidneys. I had been working then as a tribal judge. An Indian from the agency took me to Cushman. I got there in the evening about ten or eleven o’clock. A doctor came to the emergency room. He said, “You can’t expect to come down here at this time of the night and be taken care of. There isn’t any room here.” I got mad. I started talking loudly. I sat up—even though I had a hard time sitting up. I was really sick, and I sat up on the examining table and put my feet over, and I said—I swore—“Now, you listen to me. I am going to crawl out those front steps and call up the reporters from the Seattle P.I., the Seattle Times, and the Tacoma Times, Tacoma Ledger, or whatever. I want them to come here and take a picture of where you threw me out of this hospital.” He was astounded. He went out the door, where he told me I had a lot of nerve to come there. He came back and said, “Don’t stand up,” trying to take my shoulder, and he got really shook up. I was surprised. He was almost nonchalant when he said, “One can’t expect to come down here in the middle of the night.” It was impossible to go somewhere else. I got immediate care. The nurse from the upper floor came down. They treated me as if I was almost human.
I shrieked at the nurses on that floor in the hall again three or four weeks later. They said, “You have to go without supper and breakfast before surgery.” Well, I went through all of that, but that time I had to go without supper and take some kind of medication and not have breakfast and then have an X-ray. I was hungry. The doctors who came from Seattle and Tacoma said I could have anything I wanted to eat. I said, “Could I have bacon and eggs?” They said, “Sure.” So when I went back to my room, I told the nurses I wanted to have bacon and eggs and coffee with cream, please.” The nurse went out. I was in bed waiting for my coffee, and after a while, I heard some loud talking in the hall. I was in the surgical ward, and very sick people were getting out of bed. I got mad. I guess I waited about forty minutes. I got up out of bed and, hanging onto the beds, got outside of the door to the hall, and I shrieked at them. The nurses were down the hall, talking. I called out in a loud voice. I said, “If you don’t bring me my food, I am going to throw this!” It was a cart. It had cotton, thermometers, and medications on it. “I am going to tip this thing over, and you get it here.” They stopped and looked. I was pushing the cart, and I said, “I am going to smash everything that is on here. Now, you move!” I went back to bed. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they came with the grandest breakfast.
During the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, they had an Indian exhibit. I had our Indian artifacts on display there. They had Indians from all over. I hurt my foot; it was painful, and I thought maybe I hurt my ankle. The car that belonged to the Fair Association was a big car, and someone drove me to Harborview Hospital. They put me in a wheelchair. I couldn’t stand up anymore. I could just hop on one foot. One of the Indian women stayed with me. I got there about 5 P.M., and I was still ther
e at about 7 or 8 P.M. and didn’t see anybody. I could see an entrance to the hospital, a circular rotunda, and stretchers coming in. They were mostly black people, and it looked like we were the only Indians there. There were some white people.
I especially remember a very drunk white man. He was one of those people who was dressed as if he came from somewhere important. He had on a suit and a white shirt, and his tie was hanging loosely. He was awful drunk. The nurses asked him his name. I was close to where people were being admitted. He would say his name, and the nurse would say, “Spell it.” It was a simple name like William, for instance. He would spell W-i and then ask her what comes after that. “All right, W-i . . .” He would say “i,” stop, think about it, and finally say, “Yeah, that sounds like it.” He started over again. “W-i,” stop and almost fall down. He was hanging onto the counter, and he said, “What comes after that?” She stayed with him for about an hour and a half to get his name. I thought, why can’t she get him to drag out a wallet and see what he had in there? But she was laughing and talking with him, and my foot was swelling up.
I had on moccasins, and they got so tight it hurt worse. By about 8 or 8:30 P.M. the head nurse finally got to me. She had a clipboard and got my name, and then she said, “Oh, you are in the wrong place. You should go down to the Public Health Hospital. That is where the Indians go.” I said, “Why didn’t someone tell me three or four hours ago? I have been here ever since.” “Well, I’m sorry.” I said, “Call me a taxi, please.” She called a taxi. I asked them to please have a wheelchair out there for me. She said, “I already did that.” In just a little while the taxi came, and I got into it. The lady who went with me was able to go down to the Public Health Hospital and stay a few minutes, and then she had to leave. She had family somewhere in town.
So there I was in another big hallway, sitting in a wheelchair, and some doctors in white coats and nurses were going up and down the hall. About eleven o’clock I got mad. I was shrieking as the doctor was leaving the counter and going down the hall. I hollered at him, and I said, “You get back here.” I guess he was sort of astounded, too. I told him how long I had been there. He said, “All right. Our emergency room has been full.” Right then, he had a sailor who had been stabbed fighting downtown somewhere. So I was brought into the same room, a very big room, where they were working on the sailor. There was a big doorway, and another sailor was with him. They looked so young. They said he was very badly hurt.
So after all of my yelping and getting mad, they x-rayed my foot. Then they wrapped it up with an elastic bandage, and I drove myself home. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t think we had a phone, or otherwise I would have called George. Here I drove all of the way home at one o’clock in the morning with my foot swollen. I don’t think I had any money, or otherwise I would have stayed somewhere.
It seemed like everywhere Indians go, they are kicked out. I don’t know if it is any better now. Maybe it is. They talk about the new people—the Vietnamese—and their problems. They don’t have any income, and some of them are on welfare. I was thinking about when I couldn’t get a job way back in 1940, 1941. The people at the welfare office just blasted me for not getting a job. Anything I could get was housework and that only paid seventy-five cents a day.
Income
When I lived in Seattle, I worked at Boeing and the Twin Teepees restaurant. There were many times when all I had was a dime to eat on all day. So then I drank coffee. I brought my slice of toast to work. I ate that all day. I ate part of it in the morning and part of it in the afternoon. By afternoon, if you haven’t eaten anything, then your knees begin to shake, and it is hard for you to walk and stand up and talk because you get so hungry and tired.
When my father died, he didn’t have any insurance because Indians couldn’t buy insurance. He left my mother with about sixty dollars. We sent my mother’s name in to the county welfare department. The caseworker who came to see my mother was a man. I didn’t say much of anything because my mother answered his questions. They wouldn’t put her on. He said, “You have a lot of resources. You have to sell all of your land that you own—that you are not living on. You will have to sell all of these baskets you have. The canoes out there will bring you enough money to live on.” I said, “I own half of those things. I am half-owner of these baskets and canoes, and I am not willing to sell. I think it is important to keep them and to save them.”
It was hungry, hungry times for us because I was home. My marriage had broken up, and I didn’t have any income either. I walked over to Mission Beach, to white people’s houses, to do housework for seventy-five cents a day, which was a lot of money then.
Later, another caseworker came. I wasn’t there. I was doing housework. When I came home in the evening, my mother was very upset. She said the caseworker told her my son and I had to move. We couldn’t live with her. My mother spoke up. She said, “My daughter is not leaving this house. Half of this house is hers. My grandson, Wayne, is not going to be wandering around with no roof over his head.” He was about ten years old and going to school in Marysville. My mother finally got on welfare. Mrs. Martha Mukey came and put my mother right on, but the supervisor said, “Well, she has resources, and she will have to sell those.” So they gave us fourteen dollars a month. We lived “high on the hog” on that. But we didn’t sell anything. We just went hungry.
Looking for Work
One time a woman was visiting here from one of the churches in Marysville or Everett. She didn’t see why the Indians didn’t go out and look for work like she did. She said, “I work!” I am quite sure people would say, “Well, why don’t you go off the reservation? Why don’t you find work?” We tried. Believe me, I know all about trying to find work.
I worked in Seattle. I worked at Boeing, and I was a hostess at the Twin Teepees restaurant on Aurora Avenue. When I came home, as I said; I found housework with people who lived at Mission Beach. They were some of the earliest families who lived there. I was paid seventy-five cents a day to one dollar a day, and that was considered really working. I had to stand up on stepladders and wash the ceilings. I had to wash windows. It was constant hard work. The houses were not clean. I had to clean things that hadn’t been done in years. Women like that want you to scrub the kitchen ceiling, and all of the cupboards, inside and out, and then crawl around on your hands and knees and scrub the kitchen floor. Then, scrape along the corners and along the splashboard with a knife, where the carpet or linoleum meets the wall. They would stand there and say, “Now, you clean that up good!” Working there always reminded me of Tulalip Indian School: orders, commands, commands.
Then you had to contend with someone in her family. Some man wants to push you in somewhere. I think nearly every girl who went to work ran into what they call sexual harassment in the newspaper today. When I was young, it depended upon who the personnel director was. If it was a man, he usually had a proposition. He wanted you to go to bed with him somewhere. “Your place or my place?” Some of these men had a hotel—not a really good hotel—where they would tell you to come and meet them. I think that happens to some of the girls even if they work in an office, but not all of them. I don’t know; it all depends on what kind of a job it is. In a way, I thought it was only because I was an Indian, and they thought I was stupid and didn’t know anything—so much for income and so much for being hungry. But I do think it is worse for Indian girls. Even if we walked along the street in Seattle, some man would make a remark when we stopped for traffic lights or to cross the street, and tell us how much he will give us. I said once, “I know how to swear.”
I knew better than to look for work in Marysville, although I did look for work there, such as dishwashing in a restaurant. The supervisors I talked to in Marysville were quite astounded when I appeared and asked for work twenty years ago. They would say, “We have a long list of people who have applied, and there is no vacancy. It is already filled.” Employers in Everett were the same. So even if they talked to you,
there were no vacancies. I couldn’t even get a dishwashing job. When people say, “Why don’t they go out and work?” They wouldn’t give Indians any work. The only work that was available, to some extent, was seasonal farm work and working in a lumber mill. But the mills take just so many Indian workers, and they would not take any more.
When Wayne, my son, came back here to work as business manager, he had a conference on employment. One of the counselors in Marysville High School said he used to go and talk to employers in the mills and places where they thought they could hire Indians, but they all said the same thing to him: “They’re good workers. They are the best; they are reliable—but when it comes to fishing season, they tell us they have to go fishing, so then they lose their jobs.” When they come back some months later, there is no job. He couldn’t understand why the Indians would give up a job and go fishing. For people anywhere to drop a job and go fishing sounds like they are doing that for recreation. Well, it isn’t recreation with the Indians; it is making a living. They are trying to make money.
In the early 1950s, I looked for work in Everett. I went to every store in Everett and to the hospital. Some of the girls who graduated with me from Everett High School were working in dime stores. One of the big department stores was called Rumbaugh’s—where the Bon Marché is now. I tried to find work in the mall. When I got to the first dime store (I don’t know whether it was Krafts or Woolworths), I tried to talk to the personnel director, who was a woman. She looked as if she was in her early thirties—a young woman. The girl I knew told me the personnel director’s office was way, way back in the store. It was not very big, glassed in, but apparently she saw me coming. She got up and left her desk and walked out. So I met her in the hallway. I called her name and told her my name. I said I was just going to tell her I have come there to apply for work. I told her that I talked with Twila, who worked there. I don’t remember her married name. You know, that woman walked right past me. She never said one word.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 30