I looked for work as a dishwasher. I met a woman I knew. She worked as one of the dishwashers at the Everett Yacht Club. Way back then, they didn’t have automatic dishwashers. They had to do it all by hand. She told me the other dishwasher had quit, so they were going to hire another lady. I hurried down there. There is a new Everett Yacht Club now; this is the old one. I was just starting up the steps; it was a nice sunny day, and the commodore of the Yacht Club was there. The screen door was open. As soon as he saw me—I had just put my foot on the bottom step of the porch—he came out and said, “What do you want?” I said, “Mrs. So-and-so, who works in the kitchen, said you are going to hire a dishwasher.” He said, “You go around to the back.” He gestured—like that—with his hands. “Don’t come in here.” I said thank you, and I started to walk around the building. I just got around to the back, and he came out the back door. He told me, “There are no openings here. Just go away and don’t come back. We don’t have any openings here.” Well, that cut me quite a bit because I knew there was an opening, and I knew the woman they hired. She was also from Everett.
It was pretty hard for Indians to get a job. I have been to every store in Everett. We have been to hospitals. Of course, that was in the 1950s. Now there are some Indians working in the housework division at Everett General. I went to their office, too. As I stood in the doorway, I told the personnel officer, “I’ve come to apply for work in the house division. I’ll mop floors. I’ll do everything or anything.” She said, “Come in. Are you an Indian?” I said, “Yes, I am.” She said, “We come from Texas.” She did talk with an accent. But I didn’t get the job. She said, “Oh, my lands. Do you see this? She had a big pile of papers. I guess they were applications. She said, “I’ve got hundreds of applications. I’m going to take the whole thing and throw it in the wastebasket. Oh, you can go ahead and apply, but I’m just throwing them away.” So, I don’t know. That was rough. Real rough. Just tell you, “Don’t come back. Just get away from here. Don’t come back.” So much for me trying to find work.
Some of the Indian women did housework cleaning cabins north of Marysville. One of our Indian women worked there every day. The beds had to be made, sheets changed and the floors and bathrooms mopped.
I tried to get work at Scott Paper Company after I married George Dover. Sometimes I like to think that maybe they thought I could not do it. There were some women working there. One personnel man said, “Oh, no, there are no openings” and shut the door. When I walked in, a man said, “How tall are you, Mrs. Dover?” When I said five feet two inches, he said, “Without your shoes?” I said five feet. He said, “I am sorry Mrs. Dover. We never take any women who are shorter than five feet three inches without their shoes, and I will tell you why. The machinery in the mill here is geared up and made for people who are five feet three inches or more. In fact, they ought to be five feet five inches or more.” Anyway, I stayed there and talked with him. He was nice. He was the only one in the whole wide world, it seemed, who ever turned me down for work and made me feel better that he turned me down for something else besides being an Indian. I couldn’t tell him much different—that I was five feet five inches tall.
I belonged to the Everett Business and Professional Women’s Organization. I got into it because I was the postmaster of our small post office. I was also asked to join the Zonta Club. It is an affiliate of the Kiwanis Club. I was on the panel for the Washington State Federation of Women’s Clubs. It was held at the Monte Cristo Hotel in the Mirror Room. There were huge mirrors all around.
I had quite a time, because the women there were beautifully educated. I talked about Indian problems. There was a beautiful Japanese lady there. She was a living doll. Then a young black lady, and she was a doll also. I will always remember she was very much like Lena Horne. She wore a small flowered hat with a big rose on it. Afterwards, I was talking with the president of the Zonta Club, and I said, “That is really something to put me with all of those accomplished women.” Of course, she said, “Oh my, Harriette. You are just as good as they are. You were just perfect.”
I was the only Indian there. I remember I thought, I haven’t got a penny to my name, so I worried like heck about what I was going to wear. I had a two-piece black dress. It had a jabot, a high lace collar with pleats in the front. But I had the collar for several years, and I thought it didn’t look white anymore. So I dyed it rose pink with Tintex. Surprisingly, it came out pretty good. Sometimes Tintex in that color can be pretty poisonous, but it turned out nice. I had a veil from the dime store. I put it around my head and put some dark rose pink flowers on top, and I thought, now that looks like a hat. Anyway, I was a “killer” in that old black dress. I remember thinking how the old skirt that went with it looked like a sad rag because I wore it for several years. Women notice what you are wearing.
The Japanese woman talked about the problems of the Japanese Americans—that was before Pearl Harbor. The beautiful black lady talked about black problems. She came from Seattle. There was a white teacher. She taught in Seattle in the poorer sections. She talked about the poor and the blacks. We could only talk about the problems. There isn’t much you can do, but people think, you know. We had ten or fifteen minutes for people in the audience to contribute something to what each one said. Of course, the audience was all interested women, and they were courteous to the beautiful black lady and the Japanese girl who had on a nice sea green suit. It looked beautiful on her.
I talked about welfare. I outlined how hard it was for a lot of Indians to get on welfare. Indians would come into the post office and ask me if I’d take them to Everett. They didn’t have a car, so I took them into town. Sometimes I didn’t get time to eat. I carried half a sandwich with me, but I would get hungry because I had to wait and wait. I would get them over there by 2:30 P.M. for their appointment, and often we were still there at 4:30. Finally, I went in with one young Indian man. He was married and had a baby, but he was trying to get on welfare. I went in with him because it seemed to me he was too quiet. I didn’t intend to help him. I just went along to listen. The woman who interviewed him said, “Have you been looking for work?” He said, “Yes.” She asked, “Where have you been? What kind of work? Where? What dates?” She had a pencil, and she was writing down everything he said. I said, “He can’t answer that fast.” She asked him again, “Have you been looking for work during the last week?” He said, “No. I have to walk several miles from the reservation to Marysville, and then hitchhike to Everett.” Then she said, “Well, why not?” So I interrupted her, and I said, “He already told you that he has looked for work for two or three months, and he can’t find work. There are a lot of people out of work.” She turned to me and said, “I wasn’t talking to you.” I thought if we stayed there for another hour or two, we were not going to get anyplace. I said, “He has told you already two or three times. He has to walk miles and miles to look for work. It is a waste of time. If he is lucky to get work in a saw mill, he would have to leave at three o’clock in the morning in order to get to work at 8 A.M. or earlier, and perhaps walk through rain and cold.” She didn’t say anything. Just slammed down her pencil.
I brought him back home. I saw him later. They came in and asked me to take them to town. I asked him, “Did you ever hear from welfare?” “Oh, yes. We get a check every month.” I said, “Oh, that’s really nice.” But it seems like they just chewed up the Indians.
So much for income. There was no chance to find work, to go to work, and to have regular work. Most people would not hire an Indian. But in the 1970s my younger boy worked at Safeway. He went in there one day and asked for work. He had one year at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Then he decided to quit college and join the Air Force.
When I worked in Seattle, a lot of people happened to ask me if I was Chinese. I asked, “Do I look Chinese?” This woman said, “Well, I don’t know. I am asking you.” I said, “No, I am an American Indian.” She said, “Oh.” I said, “Tell me who you
are.” “Well, I’m an American. I came from Texas. And let me tell you, Texas is the greatest place in the world.” She walked away. She said she just wanted to know. She said she is an American. I said, “Well, so am I—a real American.” She was walking away. I said, “Do you know how Texas was settled?” She turned around and stopped because there was a break in the work hour. She said, “It was settled by all kinds of people.” I said, “I’ll tell you how Texas was settled. It was settled by murderers and horse thieves from every state in the Union. They escaped to Texas.” Some of the women who were standing around were astonished. She said, “Well, as far as that goes, you can say that about any state in the Union,” and she started to go away. I said, “I’m glad you said that because that is exactly what the Indians say.” In the Carolinas and in New England there were wealthy people, but they were landless people who came from Europe. Of course, my mother would say, “You can’t make a mixed-up statement like that one.” However, that woman wasn’t the only person who thought I was Chinese. I wonder what the Chinese would think.
My niece and her husband had an experience like that, about who is an American, just before World War II, when we were looking for apartments to live in. They were in Seattle, up on First Hill on Bellevue or Belmont Place where there were a lot of smaller apartment houses. They would have a for rent sign in the window. We would knock at the door, and they would look at us and say, ““That apartment has been taken.” One woman opened the door and she looked at us. We said, “Your sign in the window says you have an apartment for rent.” She said, “Oh, I am sorry. We rent only to Americans.” I started to say, “We are Americans,” but she slammed the door. I was thinking how that hurts. That used to cut me up: “We rent only to Americans.”
Indian women look so astounded when things like that happen, such as signs that say “Americans Only.” I hope the people in Seattle who at that time said “We take Americans only” are satisfied with all of the people who have come in recently. I think six thousand Vietnamese people have moved into Seattle. They will have to be assimilated or helped along. I think they are helping them. I think some of them were cut off, because I saw an article in the newspaper saying they had planted opium poppies in their gardens. I hope you are satisfied, White Man. At least the Indians didn’t have opium poppies out here way back then.
Some people said I sounded like a racist. Oh, not really. Some of those people got better care and a more courteous response than I ever did, and I feel that I am an American. People in Everett, Marysville, or Seattle, where I went to look for work, they’d have a sign in the window and they’d take one look and sometimes they would ask, “Are you an Indian?” When I would say yes, they would say, “We have already filled that position. We don’t have any vacancies.”
I understand some of the Vietnamese can’t speak English, but their children are going to school. They must be using two languages, and that is what I did. When you are six or seven years old, you are also learning your own language. I spoke Indian all together because my grandma never understood English. Quite a lot of her generation didn’t speak English. So I was talking Indian two-thirds of the time. In high school in the English classes we had to parse sentences. I felt like pulling out my hair. I was saying, “Who cares whether the clauses are adverbial clauses? Who cares!” I remember my father told me the white man has a language, that’s English. “You learn it. You learn it good. Use their good words because they have some bad words. Learn all of their good words.” Well, dear father and grandmother, I have struggled and struggled trying to learn good words.
Second Marriage
George Dover, my second husband, was not an Indian. He was white, and he worked in the logging operations out here. I never saw him before. He lived with his mother and stepfather. They were buying some land, and George worked somewhere else for a while. He came home in between. He came into the little post office where I worked. He and I used to talk about it after we were married. He asked for his stepfather’s mail by the name of Campbell. I gave it to him. His mother always got a lot of magazines. I had their mail ready, and I gave it to him.
I said, “Do you know anyone by the name of George Dover?”
Nothing. Just quiet. He had picked up his mail. He looked at me and he said, “You are talking to him.”
I said, “Oh! There are three or four letters here for George Dover.”
I will always remember how I met him. His mother and I talked about George before. She said, “You ought to meet George.” I didn’t know who George was. When he came into my little post office, I didn’t know him. All I thought was that he was nice looking—large blue-gray eyes and long eyelashes. Of course, he had light hair—almost blonde.
When I was engaged to George and he asked me to marry him, I thought about it for several months. My grandmother told me, toward the end of her life, never to marry a white man. Of course, my father said that, too. When I was fourteen years old, he said, “Remember one thing—never, never marry a white man. Never.” My father had died years before, but my mother was still living, and she was very shook up. She reminded me again.
George came several times to take me to dinner, and I thought about it. It bothered me to think that one of the last things my father said was to take care of your mother and go home with your boy if you want a home for Wayne. I think my father felt, somehow, that my marriage was a shaky one for a long time.
I did come home, and for years I was all alone when Wayne was growing up and we were home with my mother. I had William. He was about four years old, and he was missing his own father. I thought William should have a father and a mother. If they are living with their grandparents, then it should be the two of them, just as long as they have a balanced home life.
One of my cousins came to visit from Quileute. She once went to school with me, and I hadn’t seen her for several years. She married out there, but she came all of that way to our house. She said, “Harriette, we heard you are going to marry a white man. I am telling you—don’t. Don’t marry him, because, you know, your father always said all of us must never, never marry a white man.” We thanked her for coming. That was a long way to come to tell me what to do.
Levi Lamont was one of my father’s cousins, too. He came in the post office. He was one of those people who talked loud and clear. He said, “Sister, if you are thinking of marrying a white man—don’t. Do you understand? You are not to marry a white man. Do you understand?” He went out of the post office and he was mad.
Somebody else came in and said they heard I was going to marry a white man. He said, “Don’t. You are supposed to keep our blood pure Indian.” By that time, I thought, why should I listen to people? I’ve heard “don’t” all of my life. So, I married George.
In the last twenty-five years, the young people on this reservation haven’t had any conflicts like that one. Quite a lot of our Indian girls have married white men. We older people talk about it now and then. We say, “This tribe is changing—the girls are marrying white men.”
The Indian Shaker Church around the mid 1900s.
Harriette and her son Wayne.
Harriette married George Dover in 1950. From left: Tommy Gobin, Adam Williams, Charlie Sneatlum, (name unknown), George Dover, Harriette Shelton Dover, Ruth Coy, Wayne Williams, Blanche James, Margie James.
Celebration of Marysville Tyee Days, Summer 1947.
Planning Committee of Tulalip Tribes. Front row, from left: Harriette Shelton Dover, Supt. Raymond Bitney, Bill Steve (chair), Charles James. Back row: Arthur Hatch (water superintendent), Sebastian Williams, Lawrence Williams. Everett Herald photograph.
Representatives to a Bureau of Indian Affairs conference in Chemawa, Oregon. Harriette is in the first row, far left.
Harriette playing her drum, c. 1982. Photograph by Loran Olsen.
1 The case is known as Duwamish et al. v. United States. F275. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Court of Claims, 1927.
2 He died of a ruptured peritoneal ulcer. S
ee Ryggs (1978) for a detailed description of Robert’s death.
3 There is more to this issue that happened in later years because of local police having jurisdiction on the reservation. See Public Law 280. Today, the Tulalip Tribes employs their own police force.
4 The boarding school was closed in 1938, and the Indian children attended public school in Marysville.
5 It is trust land and is therefore owned by the federal government.
6 This is especially egregious since there was no Tulalip Tribes organization then or a tribal organization of any kind.
7 She was postmaster at the post office in Tulalip Bay from 1938 to 1953.
8 When asked how he stopped drinking, he replied that his mother and grandmother took him to the Shakers because drinking was a waste of his time. As a Shaker patient, he was “worked on”—with a set of ritual and counseling procedures that divested him of the desire to drink—and then he was told to help the Səywən, or Smokehouse religion, members. Tribal elders had conferred spititual and historical knowledge upon him, so the Shakers and his family wanted him to be devoted to sharing those gifts with others. He is revered by Tulalip tribal members.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 31