Levi and Martha came and helped me, just us alone, of course, at our home. They say the obvious things, such as, “Your mother would have liked to take you along with her.” You have to have something like a sweeping motion to wipe away the feeling, the remembrance of my mother, whatever you are mourning for. I thought that is nice. I remember my father said there is a time for mourning, for weeping for the people who have died, but you must not allow yourself to be absolutely broken down. Once in a while, if people have other children or a close relative die, they almost abandon their children or their family just thinking about their own grief. Of course, my father said, “Don’t do that. Don’t. There is a time for grief.”
Way back in our old days, there were several days in our tribe where it was time for mourning. Of course, it includes taking the cold baths and long walks along the beaches. The cold baths in the morning are the time to weep and cry, because if you cry and cry through the day, then the members of your family will be affected, and their grief is worse. What if somebody else gets sick? I think this is a very nice psychology. One person can upset a whole household with their grief. My father said that was part of their teachings—the Indians—part of my father and mother’s teachings. There is a time for grief. There were several things they used to say, and they would repeat them again another time: you shouldn’t eat too much; you shouldn’t drink too much; you shouldn’t sleep too much; and you shouldn’t grieve too much. Of course, if you eat too much you will be in trouble because you will put on too much weight!
I had the same kind of feeling as the Shakers when we called an Indian doctor. When they sing, they concentrate and sing their guardian spirit song. The drums beat, and they lay their hands on the head or shoulders or arms of the person they came to see. After my mother died, I had my cousin Morris come to this house.14 I remember the evening after they did their healing ceremony, Isadore Tom walked in.15 He was walking slowly, and he stopped here and there and looked at the baskets. Morris just happened to be talking, and Isadore said, “It seems like this lady has lost something.” He went around very slowly and stopped. I don’t think I ever told him that I had turned things: see how all of these papers and things piled on the table are filed away scientifically?
I had been looking for a small tintype picture of my father’s uncle. He was a very important uncle to my father. His English name was Tyee William. His Indian name was Stišaył. He was also called Steshail or Stishayl. I have never been able to find that picture. I start out looking on that table and I get so far, then I’m all tired out. I’ve moved piles of papers and things, and then I would forget what I was looking for and find something else, and I’d get too tired. But I’ve never ever located that tintype again. He came to see me in 1904 on the day I was supposed to be born, but I came the next day. He was at the treaty signing in Mukilteo in January 1855. My father and his generation said that is the only picture that was taken of that generation of Indians when they were at the treaty signing.
My father talked to Stišaył about what he thought about the photo. Nearly all of the Indians refused to have their picture taken. They weren’t sure what the camera was. A camera always looks black, and the camera man was covered up when he took the pictures. A cameraman like that always goes through so many motions; he will tell the subject how to stay or stand or sit. “Please stay there and be very still.” The Indians had never seen things like that. But Stišaył must have gone into a studio in Everett or maybe Seattle. I can’t remember. It couldn’t have been Everett. Oh, I guess it could have been. I think Everett was incorporated as a township or a city in 1890 or 1891, and our uncle was still living then. He was still living when I was born in 1904, but I don’t remember him. Sometime I will look around again. I think it would be something if we had a picture of even just one person who was there.
I went up on the hill of the Tulalip cemetery, where my great-uncle Stišaył was buried. All he had was a big wooden cross with his name carved on it. Sometime after that, the cross decayed and fell apart, because now I am not too sure where my great-uncle is buried. As I said, we had a tintype, a picture of him. He was a very devout Catholic, and he had a black velvet ribbon around his neck, with a large cross that hung on his chest. The cross was given to him by Father Chirouse. My father had a picture enlarged of his uncle, from the tintype.
Just before my father died in 1938, Mrs. Hardwick did a painting of him, and when she finished it, she said she would make another one and give it to us. She did that long after my father died. She took the picture of my father’s uncle. I thought about the picture, and when my father died I said something to her. She wrote and said she had it, and I knew she did. But she got sick and died suddenly, and her husband didn’t know where my great-uncle’s picture was. He said a lot of her paintings and things were put into a warehouse with her other furniture. He said he would go through them, but he couldn’t tell what kind of a picture it was. I tried to tell him.
I think Stišaył was a very disappointed man when he saw how the reservation was and how the Indian people were living, and how the laws and regulations had become more strict. I remember my mother and father talking about how for years and years the Indian agents used to be very strict about Indians leaving the reservation. They had to go to the agency and tell the agent where they were going and how long they would be gone. During the Chief Joseph War in 1876, 1877, my folks said they had to stay on the reservation. Nobody was to go off because some of these Indians would go off on their canoes to Whidbey Island to hunt or to dig clams. The reservation here was too small for their hunting and fishing. There wasn’t much to eat and definitely no fish. A revenue cutter, a U.S. launch (by that time they had steel engines), would stop the Indians and the captain would say you have to go back. You can’t go any place. My mother remembered that, she was older than my father; they were ordered to go back to Guemes Island. So that was another time of great worry for the Indians. My father was growing up on Whidbey Island. He was born there.
So, these Indians used to leave the reservation at night. I heard my father and his generation talk about how well suited our canoes are. They could go right up in the shallow water and move along with people paddling them. Those canoes moved with paddle power. A canoe could move along for miles without making a sound because the paddlers didn’t take their paddles out of the water. You could just turn your paddle and move your canoe ahead and keep moving without taking the paddles out of the water. I was thirteen or fourteen years old when I said, “Let’s do that. I want to hear it.” Well, you can’t hear anything. They move along very quietly.
Two of my father’s canoes are in our yard at home. We used the smaller one when I was growing up. Now that I think about it, every weekend, spring, summer, and fall, there were several canoe loads of us who went to the islands. It must have been a very nice feeling for my parents and grandparents to go someplace in the canoes again.
We dug clams at certain times of the year—in later summer. My mother and the women dried the big horse clams. They must have another name than horse clams. They were real delicious to eat. I asked some white people from Whidbey Island if there were still those large horse clams around Langley, but not right at Langley. We used to have so much fun, my sister and some of us children. We located some of those clams, and you have to be real fast because they are in the sand. They can move fast and go straight down into three feet of sand. We used to have so much fun. We would try to grab them as we were tiptoeing around, and we thought they couldn’t hear or feel anything. Those things can go down so fast, and they are very strong. My father would come (he had a shovel) and shovel them out. How about that? I thought that was real fun. That was one time we could laugh out loud. We would be calling for my father to come and help us. The people near Langley said the horse clams had pretty much disappeared, because of water pollution, I guess.
I have never seen those things they call geoducks, great big clams. It was the white man who started calling them “gooey du
cks.” These Indians used to go to Hood Canal, where the Skokomish live, for them. “Gooey duck” in our language is almost the same; the same as the white man has spelled “gooey,” but in our language it is gwidəq. It must have had that name long ago, gwidəq. In our language, gwidəq means “to call out to somebody, to many people.” In our language, we would just say gwidəq and maybe they would say, səqtiya gwidəq, “call your grandmother.” The dəq refers to many people, not to just one person. I never had an opportunity to see where those things come from. I guess I was in school when they went. If I were years younger, I would get in a car and run around there and talk to people and see where they are.
Pressure of Religion
Once in a while, my son and us Indians talk about not having a choice in our religion. The priest was here, and so we became Catholic. I think the Catholic religion is beautiful. Their Mass was a beautiful thing, because we had to learn the Mass. The priest talked in Latin, but we had prayer books that told on the opposite page what he was saying. In some ways, we could guess what he said. Several times through the Mass he faced the people. He put his hands together and he said “Dominus Vobiscum.” Finally, after I could read, we learned what he was saying. I remember I was in the fourth grade, and then it dawned on me that it said, “Peace be with you.” “God be with you.” “Dominus” is God. “Dominus Vobiscum.” It was like all foreign languages: This is “God” and “in you,” and then at the end is “with God,” or “God is with you.”
I think the Catholic religion has changed in the last ten years. When I got out of Tulalip Indian School in 1922, I vowed and swore I was never going to go to a church again. I was in church all the time. Pray, pray, pray for my miserable soul. I stayed away. I told my mother, “Please don’t ask me. I will go on Christmas and Easter.” She never said anything. She was kind of broken up, because she went every Sunday. But it wasn’t only the Catholics; it was the Protestants also. If you read about the Puritans, about the Mennonites, some groups, or all of them, were just like that one hundred and fifty and two hundred years ago. In all Christian religions you went to church on Sunday, and you pretty much stayed there all day. You sat on hard benches, and you listened to a preacher for a couple of hours telling you how you should live. My mother and I went round and round about it and got no place.
When I think about the pressure of religion on us, it makes me mad. The pressure of religion on us was bad enough, because when you are little, like we were, you were terrified of hell. You know you are going to die, and you are going to go to hell, and you are going to burn forever. I used to be afraid to fall asleep when I was eight or ten years old. All Christian religions were like that: the pressure was really on the Indians. Those poor misguided people. They were bound and determined to save all of our miserable souls.
Thinking of the Bible. We have some legends that tell of the baby who was born. Sometimes it was called the Sky or Star Child. Our legends are a little different for the different tribes. In our legend he became a good hunter. He had a little fur vest, a little coat, and the vest was made of many colors of feathers. I was talking to some white people and I said that is a story that is similar to Joseph and his coat of many colors. But all of those white people said, “Well Mrs. Dover, you can’t compare an Indian legend to the Bible. The Bible is an inspired book; it was inspired by the word of God.” About fifteen years ago I said to a group of them, “How do you know it was inspired by God. It was written by several men. I think the Bible is certainly a marvelous book. I haven’t read it. I have just read parts of it. But sometimes when I read it, I think that is what the Indians used to say but not all of it. In the legend in my father’s booklet Legends of the Totem Pole he calls it the Legend of the Little Man with the Coat of Many Colors. When that party of white people said I couldn’t compare it to the Bible, I said I could compare it, I do compare it. The Bible isn’t any more inspired than this is. These legends are old, 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, of 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 out 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, and that is what those Indians used to say is the way of the time, our time, when we were on this earth, when we were here; it is like a time that is behind a curtain, a fog, a mist. We have been here a long, long time. We have always been here.
People who proselytize used to come here. There were some here last summer. They knock at the door, and they give you little pamphlets. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. One time, twelve to fifteen years ago, I was still living across the road at my parent’s home. Somebody knocked at the door, and there stood a young man and a young lady. They were attractive looking young people. The young man said, “Madam, is your soul saved? Are you a Christian?” I don’t know who I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting them. I said to my mother, “There is a young, quiet couple here, and they want to save our souls.” She said, “Why don’t you ask them to come in?” Of course, she was talking in Indian, in our Snohomish language. I told them, “I don’t give a damn about my soul. I want something to eat.” I slammed the door. I told my mother. Sometimes I didn’t tell her what I said, but I made a mistake and told her that time. She was speechless. She went back to the kitchen, and I went in, too, because I was drinking coffee with her. She never said anything for several minutes. I knew I had made a miserable mistake. I shouldn’t have told her. For several years—I think three or four years—nobody came to our house. I guess they gave up. But you can’t save people that way. Of course, it jars them up if you don’t believe it.
Some Jehovah’s Witnesses came up and knocked on my door recently. I just happened to be in the kitchen. I saw them coming. I thought, who could that be? When they knocked, I opened the door. They had their pamphlets with them. I said, “Oh, thank you. You can’t do anything with me. I don’t believe in it.” Everybody knows there is a God, and you do have to confess your sins. Of course, my father always said, “I don’t have to confess my sins to anybody. God is my friend.” But that isn’t what we call him. Dukwibəł is our Creator, and he is a friend, although he can get mad, too.
Treaty Day
I didn’t go to Treaty Day last year. I can’t drive anymore. I couldn’t think of anybody to ride with, so I just stayed home. Francey or Herman came to see me.16 They wanted to know if I would come down and sing my song. I didn’t feel equal to anything. A day or so before my mother died she told me, “Don’t ever let a year go by without singing your song. Sing it at least once in the longhouse or at a celebration at La Conner or somewhere.”
My song is the song of the Mountain Woman. It is a vision, as I said, of a woman coming from the mountains that first appeared to one of my great grandmothers. She is the woman my father named me after. Of course, I never saw her. I never ever heard the song until I heard it when I was sick.
On January 22, 1855, the Indians signed the treaty in Mukilteo. I remember some younger Indians, years ago, saying, “What are we celebrating that for?” I was saying, “It is a celebration,” but my father emphasized that it is a commemoration of a time that was very troubled for the Indians. A very troubled time. There were troubles for individual white people and individual Indians, trouble for the Indian agent and listening to all his rules and regulations. Listening to all of the rules and regulations of the Church. There was just a lot of pressure all around. We were talking about it just the other day, Wayne and I, about troubles such as fishing and the commercial fishing—the Indians and the commercial fishermen, the steelhead fishermen. They call their organization the Steelheaders Association.
I haven’t heard, not one thing, about Treaty Day this year. I don’t think Tulalip is going to have a Treaty Day gathering this year. La Conner and some of the Lummis were talking about how far it is for them to drive down here. The event goes on all day and all night, and t
hey have to go home in the night. They would like to have the gathering of the Indians on their reservation. We always had Treaty Day. Usually, there is a committee that is already planning a dinner and a supper or a lunch for hundreds of people at Treaty Day time. William, my younger boy, was here, I think it was Sunday evening, and he was saying to me, “If you hear anything about a Treaty Day celebration, let me know and we’ll all go.” Well, I can’t hear very well and I can’t see that well either, but I was just thinking, yes, I’d go.
In the spring some of the Indians would come from Seattle. Seattle has a lot of Indians from all over the Middle West, and they have ceremonies. I used to go down there to hear about it. They had one last spring, but I didn’t go. I guess I didn’t feel well enough to go. William’s wife, Marlys, likes those things. Several hundred Indians come from the Middle West, and they do their kind of dancing. I equally enjoy them with these Indians on the coast.
They also have Smokehouse in the longhouse here during the winter.17 Tulalip didn’t have spirit dancers until 1960. They still wear the same outfit. The first, beginning dancer wears a wool or cedar bark headdress, or some of them are made of dyed alder bark. They colored the cedar bark differently. Every year there have been several new dancers. Often they are sixteen years old—quite young. They are kept in a bedroom with some of the older medicine men and women who stay with them to teach them their song. They don’t eat, but they are allowed to drink water.
Church of God
We have several different kinds of churches—religions—on this reservation. As a matter of fact, I helped the Church of God get established. I was on the board of directors then. The first preacher was Reverend Shaw. He came from Everett, and he used to come over here every Thursday evening and have prayer meetings. They didn’t have any place to meet, and then Adam Williams came. I didn’t know he was a preacher. They had barbecued salmon down here at the county Chamber of Commerce. I was one of the speakers.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 38