10 / Legacy
IN 1959, after Wayne came back here to be business manager, this tribe sponsored a meeting of the Northwest Intertribal Organization. They met in Everett. Indians came from Spokane, Colville, Okanogan, Yakama, Wenatchee, Fort Collins, and Cowlitz. There were delegates from all over the United States.
I was on a panel that met in the morning from 9 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. I wasn’t supposed to be on—Sebastian Williams was. I thought, seven o’clock in the morning at my house is midnight for me. He asked me if I would be the chairman. The conference was being held at the Monte Cristo Hotel, when it was new. When he asked me if I would be the chairman for this panel, of course, I said, “Are you crazy? I don’t know anything!” He said, “We have to have somebody on there, and I want you to do it.”
I was the only woman on a panel of seven Indians. I had three men on one side and three men on the other, in front of about five hundred or six hundred Indians, in a room that was just standing room only. It took me a long time to get over it, because sitting right next to me was a handsome young Indian man—well, not that young—who came from Yakama. His name was Tony Skahan, and he knew one thing: he was the answer to every woman’s prayer. He was very good looking.
Each person on the panel had a subject they were going to talk about. There were two or three of them. There would be an Indian person speak and then a white person, and the white person, I think, came from Washington, D.C. The subject that morning was fractionated Indian lands. I thought I was a “super good chairman.” I talked loudly and clearly. I thought nobody is going to back me off of the map. I wore a blue suit and a white blouse. (The suit was a real pretty shade of blue. It wasn’t navy blue. It was a bright Belgian blue. Well, it was lighter than that. And anyway I thought I looked like a “killer.”) After each one spoke for half and hour, then we opened it up to questions from the people in the audience. One person stood up and said, “Miss Chairman.” I said, “I recognize you,” and when they asked a question, I looked to the man I hoped would answer it, and then I said, “Do you have an answer?” The young man sitting next to me, Tony Skahan, said, “You are supposed to repeat the question. You are supposed to repeat it out loud. The audience way in back didn’t hear the question.” It took me a while, and I think I did pretty well, even with the criticism, and he said several things all through the three hours.
When I came down from the podium, which was a stage clear across the room, a lot of people came up to me, people I knew from the reservations. Of course, I didn’t know many of the people. I will always remember a young attractive lady from Cowlitz in a big crowd. She grabbed my arm and said, “Oh, I want to thank you. You did so wonderfully well! You just showed the men what women can do, and they are always trying to keep the women back. I’m so proud of you.” I’m always sorry I didn’t get her name. Others said I did pretty well, even wonderfully well, even with the “crumb bum” sitting there giving me “Hail Columbia” every time!
The man whose place I took had gotten sick with an upset stomach, and of course some people said he just had too much to drink. They were having parties the night before. I said, “Well, good.” So I had a chance to go on, but I will always remember him. I thought maybe he would come and speak to me afterwards. Three hours is a long time for me to appear before a group. He was in the audience. He did look upset or sick. I would have thanked somebody who took my place, but I guess I was just a crumb to them.
I saw Sub later, and I grabbed his arm and said, “I want to kill you, Sub, and the man sitting next to me. I want to kill him, too!” Sub said, “What’s the matter? You did fine! I am helping to build you up.” I lost him in the crowd, but I was able to eat. We had lunch in one of those rooms in the hotel.
Indian Education
When Wayne was going to school in Marysville, the Indian children were supposed to be getting lunches. We learned they were given a sandwich of dark bread with lettuce and some kind of dressing on it. Most of the Indian children hated it. Lettuce and bread is fine for people who are on a reducing diet, but Indian children are already thin. They were half hungry for years. I didn’t have the nerve then to say anything about it.
Years later I did go to the superintendent of schools about the children’s school lunches. I found out the Marysville School District receives a sum of money—I think it was 12,000 dollars a year—to pay for lunches for the Indian children and white children living out here on the reservation who qualify. Money like that kept coming in bigger amounts, because I had another upset with the Marysville School Board sometime later.
I thought I would never forget it. I was talking about school lunches, and I said, “Those children are entitled to hot lunches, such as soup and a sandwich.” They were still getting lettuce sandwiches. I wrote to Warren Magnuson. He said the year before he and Henry Jackson had seen to it that Marysville received $225,000 to help pay for a school building that was built three miles north of Marysville and is called Cascade. Along about that time, my youngest boy was going to the second grade. They took children six miles to Marysville, then another three miles to Cascade, north of Marysville, to that school—when there was an elementary school right in town. I went to see the school board.
In Seattle, about ten years ago, quite a number of Indian parents from Lummi and La Conner, and I from Tulalip, called a conference. The parents from Nisqually were talking about the lunches provided by the federal government. Hot meals were supposed to be provided. Nobody told them their children were supposed to receive free hot lunches. Most of them could not afford the twenty-five cents a day for the children’s lunch. Some of the Indian children went all day long without anything to eat. The mothers and fathers were just talking. We were seated at a table. They said they did not know that lunches were provided. Their children didn’t go to eat lunch, and here the lunches went for all of the white children. Quite a number of the Indian children didn’t even have breakfast, and no lunch. The Indian children were supposed to receive free lunches, those who had incomes at a certain level or below. So then the children all went to lunch and had hot lunches.
Two or three of the mothers told us their children, who were first, second, third graders, came home so pleased and excited about their hot lunches. You know how children will come running into a house; they are already talking out loud, telling you what happened. So some of the children came home and said, “Momma, I didn’t know I had a rich uncle!” Their moms were preparing evening meals and would say, “What do you mean?” We would say, “Well, we got lunch at school—a nice lunch.” They were all lined up. As they went through the door into the cafeteria, the teacher pushed on their shoulders or back, pushed them hard, and said, “You ought to be thankful you have a rich uncle who is giving you free food, free lunches.” We said, “I didn’t know I had a rich uncle! Teacher said I was lucky; I had a rich uncle who could give me free food.” The mothers said, “Now, what did they say? What did the teachers really say?” “That’s what they said. You are lucky you have a rich uncle—Uncle Sam, and he is giving you all this nice food.” Several children said, “Well, where is Uncle Sam? Why doesn’t he come and see us?” So then the mothers had to stop what they were doing and try and explain who Uncle Sam is!
When I was a teacher’s aide in Marysville schools, with the third and fourth graders, two other ladies made them go around the room, and we tried to teach them how to do a double step like the Plains Indians do. I noticed some of the teachers couldn’t do it; they had a hard time. They had to think about it. You go sideways, straight ahead, like a War Dance. A Grass Dance is one, two, double-step, two. We had a lot of fun teaching them how to dance. First of all, you tell them to make two taps with each foot—and don’t take long steps, just tap afterwards. You can learn the toe and heel things. We went around in a big circle in the gym. We beat the drum. Those children loved it. They would ask, “Are we going to dance today? Why don’t we dance?”
One of the girls who was in one of those third-grade classes
just graduated from high school. She is a waitress in Marysville. She came over and said hello to me. I wondered who she was. She was little in the third grade when I came there. She said, “I learned how to dance, Mrs. Dover.” I used to tell them, “All you have to do is just keep time with the music, and you can use this same step to band music or an orchestra, and you can dance.”
A young man came here to look at my car two or three years ago for the mechanic I go to in Marysville. Carol Harkins went out to talk with him. The young man said, “Is this the Mrs. Dover who used to teach at the school?” Carol told him, yes, it was. He said, “Those were just the grandest school days of my life. I will remember that as long as I live. Those were so enjoyable.” You are astounded to hear somebody liked something! The waitress said, “Mrs. Dover, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed having you come to our classroom. I learned so much about the Indians.”
One of the teachers in the fourth or fifth grade in Marysville was angry when I came there to talk and teach about Indian culture, especially the Northwest. She said, “We teach Indian history in the third grade, and that is absolutely enough.” When we went to her class, she would flounce out of the room. Maybe someone talked to her, because later she stayed, but I used to get so scared. All of the other teachers appreciated us. They enjoyed it too. Once in a while, the teachers said, “I’m going to go for coffee, if you don’t mind.” I said, “Oh, no, just go ahead. You can leave the room when I come.” But they stayed unless they were dying for coffee.
One of the mothers said, “Mrs. Dover, you made a big difference in my son.” He was from Marysville and I guess already getting into trouble. He had already been picked up and was in juvenile court. We picked him out; I don’t know why. I guess one of the teachers said, “I wish you would take him.” Anyway, he was the tallest one in the classroom. We were going to take him anyway. We would name chiefs. We would say to them, “All right now, classroom, you elect a chief.” Then we just picked them out and said, “We’ll have him and him,” or maybe four chiefs or so in a class. Girls were the princesses. They were so pleased, because they were little. His mother came to tell me that we made a big difference in the boy. He did change. He had a stepfather, and sometimes he went to school and sometimes he played hooky.
If you read something in a book, it goes in one eye and out the other. For example, you can read that the Indians wore covering on their feet, not shoes. They wore moccasins. If you bring moccasins into the classroom, they are really surprised, and they want to look at them and touch them. Even boys. They ask, “How do you get the beads on?” Show them almost anything about Indians’ clothing or what they did. Then if you explain it a little more, it makes it more like a living thing to them.
In the Tulalip tribal paper, the Syacəb, recently there were two or three references to trouble our young people are having in schools, and some of them are dropping out. They are just not finishing. I think that is what Moira Moses was talking about a little while ago. Is there something I can say to the young people? Why is education important? I don’t know whether they will listen to me, or remember what I said.
When our Indian people experience racism, I have had white people say to me that you don’t have to pay attention to what people say—just don’t pay attention. I said, “Well, it is easy for you to say.” But when you are walking into a classroom, just going to your desk, and somebody says, “Indian, Indian, dirty Indian,” if you hear that every day, it is pretty hard for you to study. Some of our young people get to the eighth, ninth grade and say, “I don’t have to put up with it, the white children calling me names. I’m not going to school anymore. They can’t make me.”
Two grandparents I know were talking to me one day about their grandson. I think he is fourteen years old, and he quit school. He said, “I’m not going back. You can beat me up; you can kill me, or put me in jail. I’m not going back—not to Marysville.” And so he quit. I guess somebody said, “What are you going to do to make a living?” He said, “I’m going to go fishing.” Fishing is a big gamble. But he doesn’t know that it is a big gamble. Some of our young people do graduate from high school.
The pressure to be civilized was not that bad until the late 1920s and 1930s. It seemed to me when I was going to the boarding school, and later, that being Christianized and being civilized were a terrific jolt. The pressure was on the Indians, especially on the children.
I remember when I had a meeting of all of the Indian workers. They were teachers’ aides in Mount Vernon in the early 1970s. My very best friend, Hazel, Mrs. Gaudet, and I were walking through the hall where the meeting was scheduled. I was saying, “I don’t want to be Christianized. I don’t want to be civilized. I don’t want anybody to tell me that I have to be this way or that way.” Hazel had a frown on her face, and she was looking at the numbers on the rooms, and suddenly she said—she was kind of talking to herself—“Now, let’s see. . . .” Then she said, “Oh, I am sorry, Harriette. What did you say?” “Oh, Hazel, here I was so inspired and thought about all of those big words, and you never even heard me.”
If anybody is confused, it is the American Indian children. It is just as hard for American Indian young people to learn—perhaps harder, because they go from a different community, shall we say American community, where people are in homes, and they go to public schools and their adjustment to that kind of community is just as hard, just as confusing.
When I went to school, we had arithmetic—or today it is referred to as mathematics. The Indian boarding school was terrifying for me. Right now I can recall our third- or fourth-grade class; we had to do long division. It took me almost a month to try and understand what was happening in that process, in long division. I went up to the teacher’s desk and told her I didn’t quite understand long division. Teachers usually say, “What is it you don’t understand?” That kind of question always used to leave me flat. I didn’t understand any part of it! Anyway, I was frightened. I couldn’t tell the teacher what I didn’t understand. The teacher went to the blackboard after school or during recess, took one of the problems out of the book, and she did it.
I kept saying, “Where did this number come from?” She explained that this is the dividend and that is the divisor. In my little mind, I really didn’t know yet which is the dividend and which is the divisor. It always did frighten me. I took one of those numbers, to see how many times it would go into the bigger number. Maybe it was a smaller number. It took me almost a month. Night times I cried over it. I was so frightened I used to wonder what they were going to do with me, since I couldn’t get it through my head. It was as terrifying as when we sang the song “Marching to Victory,” and I thought we were going to Victoria and I would never see my mother again! It terrified me, and I guess it terrified the other children, too.
William, my young son, was in school in the sixties. He graduated in 1967 from high school in Marysville. He started first grade at Liberty School in Marysville. I took him to school the first day, and I told him, “Now you are going to stay there, and I’ll come back and pick you up.” When we got there—it was a noisy place—we found out where his room was. I walked in the room and stopped at the door. I had his hand. He said, “I don’t want to stay here.” The teacher was at her desk, and I came in the door. I said, “Good morning.” I had found out her name at the office. I told her my name. I started to walk toward her, but she didn’t look up. She picked up some papers and was looking at them and shuffling them. So I stopped. Then two young women came in. They were attractive white ladies, and they had the cutest little girls. Both were blonde little girls with wavy hair and little red dresses, red socks, and black patent-leather slippers, and little red bows in their hair. They were dolls. The teacher walked toward them and said, “Oh, good morning” with a big smile, and she said, “And who is this?” She was talking to the little girl, and here I am standing there with my boy. My boy looks like an Indian. He’s dark, darker than me. He is a beautiful young person.
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br /> She said, “Just find a desk to fit him,” and she stayed talking to them. So I took him over and tried some desks. He was winding up to cry. He said, “I don’t want to stay here.” I told him, “I’ll come back. I’ll take you home.” I saw the tears coming down. Well, it broke me up. It bothered me that she ignored me. She didn’t want to talk to me, and she smiled beautifully and talked to those other white young women, and so I went back about a week later.
I came in the door before class in the morning. She was at her desk again looking at some papers, and I said, “Good morning.” I told her who I was. She never looked up—again. I said, “I came to see and talk about my little boy.” She kept looking at those papers. So I walked up to that desk, and I hit it and made the loudest noise I could make. I said, “What is the matter with you? You don’t like Indians?” She said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was reading.” I took those papers out of her hands and threw them on the floor, and I said, “Don’t you ever treat me like that again. Do you understand? Is that because I am an Indian?” Of course, I was yelling. I pounded the desk again, and I turned around and walked out. My little boy had already walked out to play.
William came home one day with a note. She said she was sorry if she had hurt my feelings. But even so, she treated William terribly, and I didn’t know it. I would ask him, “How is school?” Well, he didn’t know how school was. I finally met a couple of the white women who live out here. Their boys were in the same grade as William, and they said, “The teacher is mean to William.” The two mothers of William’s classmates told me that the teacher would call the class up to the front of the room, row by row. They were learning how to write from one to ten and part of the alphabet. William knew the alphabet and he could write. He was left-handed, but he could also write with his right hand. When he went up to the blackboard, he wrote his 2 and 3 backwards. She left him standing there for two hours while the rest of the class sat down. William stood there. He stood there all day. He never even went to eat.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 32