I think I mentioned that I can’t imagine a more selfish group than the white commercial fishermen and the steelheaders—the way they are complaining about their steelhead, their salmon, their heritage, “my money,” “my heritage.” Your heritage, white man, is in Europe. You never ever heard an Indian who appeared on any of the panels or the news who ever said, “My steelhead,” “my salmon,” “my heritage.” Never. If anybody should have been able to say “my heritage,” it should have been the Indians, but none of them did. I remember we were saying we still behaved as though we were high class; as though we came from Indian royalty. It is low class in our Indian culture to yap around: “That’s my money. I did this. I did that.” If you did something, do it and let it go.
On the television news the other evening, they were talking about the Indians again. A high school in Kirkland cleared out a salmon stream around Lake Washington. One of the young high school boys was saying the Indians are taking all of the sockeye spawn. I was just thinking, it will go on and on. Wayne said the other day, “The Boldt Decision wasn’t the final thing. It will go on and on.”
Mission Beach
After my son Wayne was working here as business manager for several months, the Board decided to raise the leases for the lots along Mission Beach and Tulalip Bay. Wayne had been working at Boeing in Seattle as a draftsman in the engineering department. Usually, no matter where Indians live, they eventually want to come home to the reservation. Sebastian Williams retired, so then Wayne became business manager. They raised the leases for the lots along Mission Beach and Tulalip Bay, from twenty-five dollars a year for people with homes right on the beach to fifty dollars and then to about one hundred and twenty-five dollars, which was an increase of several times over.
I remember an article in the Seattle P.-I. I couldn’t afford to buy a paper then, but that one time there was a picture of some of the lessees. They were going to sue the Tribes since that is totally uncalled for to more than quadruple—quintuple, really—their leases. They had several meetings and were just raving. I saw Wayne on television at 6 P.M. They asked him what the Tribes were doing. He said, “Well, it is our land, and we make the plans for how much we will lease it.” I remember he emphasized that it is our land. He went on to say that the Tribes have written to people who operated beach resorts all over Puget Sound, and the rates the Tribes were charging were too low, and that the increases are more comparable to the surrounding rates for leasing beach property. Afterward, I met people who told me how awful the Indians were behaving. Poor people. Some of them had beautiful homes in Everett or Seattle and other places, and they had very nice homes on the beaches, too.
Our Tribe is having meetings—this is 1982—and Wayne goes to them. One of the attorneys for one of the lessee groups is Lloyd Meeds. I like Lloyd. I met him a long time ago, when he was a prosecuting attorney, and I helped put him in Congress. He was a good man. Wayne said he met Lloyd in Washington, D.C., and now he is on the opposite side from us. I’m not sure how the meetings about the lease increases are going.
Before the recent Board meeting, two or three white lessees were there in the meeting room. One man was almost speechless, he was so “rowing mad” at these Indians. He was trying to tell them, “You can’t do such a thing!” The leases have an escalating clause in five-year installments. So if it goes up, they figured that in fifty years they would be paying an amount that was out of this world. It isn’t settled yet. They might go to court. At least, the lessees are threatening to take the Tribe to court.
Wayne was in court from the start when he returned here. Scott Paper Company had bought two allotments in the middle of this reservation and was going to log it. They cut off part of a stream. They had a lake on their allotment, which they bought, and the stream flows into the Tribe’s water works that goes for several miles. Wayne wrote them a letter and said they can’t change the watercourse. Scott Paper thought nobody could tell them what to do. The tribal attorney took the case to the Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and the Tribes won that one. Other reservations have had problems like that, too.
Being business manager is a big responsibility. I would see Wayne once in a while and say, “How is business, or how is the Tribe?” I remember the first time I saw him there. He said, “Well, I am father, mother, and football for Indians and for white people—mad Indians and mad white people.” He said, “I have to roll over and make them think I am dead.”
I knew the people who lived at Mission Beach. For example, in one area there were two adjoining lots. One man—a white man—put in a waterline to the Tribes’ waterline. The Tribe had a waterline that went all along the Marysville road and then around to the end of the Point. The lessees had put in their own waterlines from the roadway, and then from the Tribes’ line to their houses. Then his neighbor tapped into his line, but he didn’t go all of the way to the road. He dug a ditch while this man was gone and put a hole in his line, and that way he didn’t have many feet to go to his house. They had quite a quarrel because the man who installed the long line got mad at the other man and got mad at the Tribe for allowing it, and, of course, the Tribe didn’t know which man tapped into the waterline. Things like that came up—misunderstandings here and there. Indians, and a few white people, came in to talk or visit. Many of them have lived here for quite a while.
Mission Beach is nothing but houses now, and a lot of white people live there, but it is tribal land. The Tribes lease all of that land, lot by lot. Years ago, fifty or more years ago, that is where the Tribe’s money came from, mainly, the leasing of those lots. The land can’t be sold, since it is tribal land, but the houses are owned by the people who built them. If, some day, they want to leave, they would have to demolish the house or remove it. They are supposed to leave the land the way they found it.
Last year one of the young people on our reservation, Leslie Parks, asked me if there had always been white people living out here on our reservation. I said no. When I was little—that was a long time ago—the only white people were those who worked at the agency. All of the rest was the entire Indian reservation. The eastern boundary line is on the freeway or I-5, right on the outskirts of Marysville, and then north it is the Fire Trail Road. He just wondered. But it intrigued me that some of the young Indians are wondering why we have white people living here. Now there is hardly any Indian land where only Indians live.
About fifteen years ago, I was talking to some people. They always had such interesting ideas about Indian people. They never saw Indians, just heard about or studied them in high school or college. When I tell them things, they come and look at our Indian artifacts. I remember several women said, “You know, Mrs. Dover, we didn’t know the Indians had beliefs or religion. We were told the Indians were ignorant, half-naked savages.” Nobody has the time to find out what Indians are.
Thinking of the Bible. We have some legends that tell about the baby who was born; sometimes it was called the Sky or Star Child, but our legends are a little different for the different tribes. In our legend, he became a good hunter, and he had a little fur vest, a little coat made of many colors of feathers. When I was talking to these white people, about fifteen or twenty of them, I said this is a story that is similar to Joseph in the Bible and his coat of many colors. Those white people said, “Well, Mrs. Dover, you can’t compare an Indian legend to the Bible. The Bible is an inspired book, inspired by the word of God.” I said, “How do you know it is inspired by God?” It was written by several men, and I think the Bible is certainly a marvelous, wonderful book. I haven’t read it; I have just read parts of it. But sometimes when I read parts of it, I think, that’s what the Indians used to say—what’s in the Bible—sometimes. Not all of it. But that legend is in my father’s booklet, “Legends of the Totem Pole”; he calls it “The Little Man with the Coat of Many Colors.” But when that party of white people said I couldn’t compare a legend to the Bible, I said I could compare it, I do compare it, and I said the Bible isn’t an
y more inspired than this is. These legends are old, old. They come from what my parents said, my father used to say, was a time in our history of hundreds of years ago, a time that is like a curtain of fog or mist that covers our past. It is just like in the morning if you look over toward the mountains or over the water, there is a mist that drifts. It takes maybe an hour or so before the sun can shine through. The Indians used to say that is the way of time, our time, when we were on this earth, when we were here. It is like a time that was behind a curtain, a fog, a mist. But we have been here for a long, long time. We have always been here.
When I went to Everett Community College, I had an excellent history teacher—David McCourt. We studied the colonization of America and also South and Central America. All of my life I have hated white people, but now I have seen and read about the things that have happened to them that were never in my high school books: about the treatment of people who came from Europe. They were supposed to be new citizens entitled to rights that were spelled out in the Constitution and the amendments of the Constitution.
I don’t think Mr. McCourt understood that what I learned in school before was somewhat distorted. When I was little, in school, they said the people found in this world were naked savages. I told my class at Everett Community College, talking about naked savages, “naked” is a bikini bathing suit. The history books say Indians were naked savages. I think everybody who sees that is thinking “naked” means they had nothing on; whereas they had on a breechcloth, but the white people had never seen anyone with a breechcloth before so the Indians were considered naked.
I heard a fisherman and a reporter talking at a dock in Seattle, and the white man said, “The Indians are nothing but an ignorant bunch of people. They shouldn’t have all of the salmon they are getting. They are getting everything. They don’t know anything. They don’t even have a language.” I was sitting here, and I said, “Oh dear, there it all goes again.” Nobody thinks we had a language of our own. They feel we are a bunch of loafers and drunks on the reservation.
1 The Relocation Program required that Indians be dispersed from their reservations to distant cities for job training and later employment. The program lasted from 1952 to 1972 when it was cancelled by Richard Nixon.
2 Washington State Fisheries gives the same figure for the pre-1974 tribal catches of salmon.
3 Octopus.
4 The Native culture and the science of biology classify steelhead as salmon, not trout.
5 The tribes reached 50 percent in 1981.
11 / Seeing the World
MY father and his parents and their group used to talk about the Salmon Ceremony. I talked about it to Wayne fifteen or twenty years ago. He said we ought to do it. He said, “Think about it. Present it to the Board.” Then I would forget about it. I sort of thought I might not be well enough to do any of it.
We had our first gathering to talk about the Salmon Ceremony at Bernie Gobin’s house in 1970. Morris Dan and Bertha Dan came from La Conner. Others who helped plan the ceremony were Stan and Joann Jones, Gloria St. Germaine, Molly Hatch, Mariah Moses, Fillmore (Big Shot) Amos, and Bob and Celia Jones. I said what I remembered my parents and grandparents said about it. Morris said what he remembered, what he saw when he was very small. We talked until midnight. Some of them had to work, so we all went home, and we decided to meet again a week later.
We talked for several hours, and little by little Morris remembered, or I usually remembered first, and so it began to come back to me what my father said or what he saw and what he participated in. We met again the following week. By the third time, we were putting details on what we remembered, and I was writing it down, jotting things down. We met the fourth week, and by that time I had written down pretty much the way we talked about it.
When our people used to do the ceremony, it took hours and hours, and days and days. We felt we couldn’t do it that way; we had to sort of telescope it together. So I wrote what I thought, and we made a good outline: the introduction or the first opening song, the blessing of the longhouse. Then we met again to beat the drums, and Morris sang and we sang what we remembered.
A week later I went to a Board of Directors meeting. They said they would appropriate the money—several hundred dollars—for the dinner. When the Board said they would appropriate the money, then we were really committed to it. We met again and decided it would have to be sometime in June, when it was high tide, that we could hold the ceremony, because we were going to use the canoes and come in with the sun. That is when we had our Salmon Ceremony when we were living in the longhouse. We went down a week before and sort of stood in there and said, “Where do we start?”
When we presented it the first time, we sat on the right-hand side of the longhouse. We were all sitting there and someone said, “Is this where we are supposed to be?” I said, “This is where we sat down.”
When we first had the Salmon Ceremony, we were wondering if we were going to be able to get some salmon. Celia Jones said, “I don’t think you folks live right.” Molly Hatch was standing there. I think our fishermen just came in with some nice silvers or Chinooks. It wasn’t enough salmon to serve several hundred people. Then this Tribe had to go to La Conner, and La Conner said they didn’t want to sell them; they would donate the fish. Quite a lot of people came from La Conner. Several people said, “Don’t put it in the paper, or we’ll have a lot of people we don’t want coming around—you know, looking around.”
Our Salmon Ceremony this year, 1982, had a very small attendance because Lummi had their Stommish Celebration and Marysville had the Strawberry Festival, and some other cities had festivals at the same time.
Two or three months before my mother died she said, “Don’t forget to go into the longhouse. Be sure and be there for June or for Treaty Time, and do that every year. Don’t let the longhouse stand empty and forlorn or forgotten.”
We enjoyed working on the Salmon Ceremony. Some of us the same age, the elderly people, put the ceremony together. We decided we would have an opening song, which was the blessing of the longhouse, because that is what our people used to do. They had certain songs, of certain people, who were what we call sqəlalitut, the guardian spirit, and so we put them together. I go around and sing my song. Then we do the opening song. We have the whole tribe go around the longhouse, to every corner, as we remembered my father and mother, and some of the others who remembered their parents and grandparents, said, “This is what we did.” It seems as though we remembered how to do it; it didn’t come all at once.1 Our grandparents and parents didn’t remember the entire thing from the beginning to the end. They just remember. They would say, “I remember the time when I was in such a place and we sang the opening song—the blessing of the longhouse.” That’s my song; it’s mine. So when we sang the opening song, our tribe went round the longhouse and stopped at every corner, and the drumbeats stopped at every corner and we began again.
Nobody would know, but the melody in the song is the same, only with different words, all of the way through the entire hour. The first opening is when we are standing in the longhouse. It is sung as sqələbčəxw. “Hear us; we are Indians.” əlabutčixw ?ačiłtalbixw. Those words are repeated, time after time, and we sing it aloud four times. That is what our folks said—all of them. You have to sing it more than that, because we don’t get around all of the way through the longhouse, but that is the first opening. “Hear us, sqələbčəxw. kwt is almost like saying “Hear us!” We are appealing to an almighty creature, but we don’t name him. We just say, “Hear us. We are your people. Hear the people, and there were no other people but us. We are the people.” That is where the first opening says sqələbčəxw ?ačiłtalbixw. After we get around the longhouse, and the verse is repeated several times, then we continue on. We sing the other songs. Actually, we sing the same song through, except the words change. It is the same melody, but the words are different.
The next song refers to a visitor who is coming, because in our songs
we mention yủbəčtiya, which means the King Salmon. yủbəčtiya. This is the King Salmon, and we sing that as we go out of the longhouse and down to the beach.2
Then when we get back to the longhouse we have speeches. Our people always had speeches. We had Morris Dan from La Conner and Stan Jones, our tribal board chairman. They explain what the ceremony would be. It is a thanksgiving or the giving of thanks of a tribe. Thanksgiving dinner is an American Indian tradition. So these Indians also have what we call giving thanks.
I used to hear my parents and grandparents talking every year about the salmon coming back. Indians used to do ceremonies every year with the first salmon runs. They had their big gatherings. It is more like a tribal thing. The song is for everybody: small children, older people, the whole tribe—everybody. Now that I think about it, I was the one who brought the Salmon Ceremony back to our people. The ceremony was something for the Indians to look forward to and to go to, because the salmon runs came back every year in the spring and summer runs: Chinook, silver, dog salmon. Indians were thankful for all of the runs of salmon. I remember my father saying, “Just supposing some day they never come back? There wouldn’t be much to eat.”
The Indians used to smoke-dry the salmon by the basketsful. My mother had a smoke house to smoke-dry salmon by the great big basketsful. They were prepared the same way. They were filleted open and kept open by little sticks of cedar and hung up. I remember my mother, she would be working. We would have something like 500 or 600 salmon all dried and that would last us all through the winter and spring. My mother would have baskets of them to give to a number of elderly people because they can’t do that anymore. They can’t fillet a whole lot of salmon anymore. We used to dry the salmon eggs too. I remember eating salmon eggs and they stick to your teeth. I remember my father saying, “Just chew it real good.”
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 35