Tulalip, From My Heart

by Dover, Harriette Shelton

  The Roland Walsby family are wealthy people in Everett. They had money in one of the paper mills, and they owned the casket company. He never worked at all. I think he went up to the University of Washington, and he went back east. He had a beautiful singing voice. He studied music and voice. He was kind. He used to come to our house once in a while. He came with Miss Johnston from a Baptist church in Everett: a nice young lady who was a buyer for one of the first paper mills here. She was a very knowledgeable woman. She was born in Canada. She came over when she was young, but she was big in the paper mill business, and she was also gentle, pretty, and kind. She was very religious. They didn’t have anyplace to meet. My mother told Mrs. Walsby they could come to our house, and they came every week because there was a piano at our house. She played the piano. Some people came from Everett, too, from that church, and we sang for a couple of hours. We talked and read the Bible. I never, ever really understood the Bible, even though I could read it and it does have very interesting language.

  Anyway, the preacher came from that church. He came out here, and he got all worked up. He thought we needed saving, you know. So he established the beginning of a church. They met in the old potlatch hall, the longhouse, and every Sunday they had a service. On Thursday they had a prayer meeting. As I said, they met at our house because we had a piano. So they got started and then they bought land where the church is now and started building a small church. My mother said I should go because Adam had come here with his wife.

  We had a big dinner down here, and I was an important speaker, shall we say. Walsby was there and some of the people from the church. Walsby came to me—here were a lot of people in the longhouse. It was in the evening, then or later. He said, “Introduce Adam.” I was just through speaking and I was feeling big and important. I said, “Adam who?” He said, “Adam Williams.” And so I looked around. A lot of people were around, and I saw him with his beautiful black hair. He came over to shake hands. He was always kind and friendly. His wife was talking with someone. In fact, I didn’t know he was married. So I said, “This is Adam Williams from the Swinomish Reservation”—and here he had just graduated from a Bible college in Portland. He was a reverend, but nobody told me. I hadn’t seen him in years! I said, “This is Adam Williams.” So he spoke a few words, and people clapped, and then Walsby came up to me and said, “Introduce his wife, too.” I said, “Oh, where is she?” And so I said, “Oh, dear people. This is Mrs. Adam Williams.” She raised her hand and people clapped. You know, I could have killed that Walsby! That was a lame-brain introduction for the pastor who just arrived here!

  My mother said I should go every Sunday and help Adam. She was related to Adam’s father; they were cousins. She said, “Be there every Sunday and help your cousin.” So there I was—very religious, you know—every Sunday.

  The status of the church came before the board of directors. We were having a meeting. Hubert Coy, my brother, talked about it at a Board or Directors meeting, and, of course, I was a member. He said the church ought to be stopped. They should be told they can’t meet here: this reservation was established as a Catholic reservation from the beginning; that is why the priest is here. We don’t want anything like that established here. Some of the other board members said they had not established a congregation and something ought to be done. They should be stopped.

  Then I spoke up. “We can’t do that.” I was proud of myself. I said, “We can’t do that.” I couldn’t say “you” can’t. I said “we” can’t stop them. Our Constitution (or by laws) specifically states those rights which are guaranteed to the people: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peacefully gather wherever they wished. I said, “We can’t stop any religion from meeting. They already have a church building. We can’t pass a law here for this board and for this reservation that says ‘There will be no Church of God, Presbyterian or Methodist.’ We can’t do it.”

  They were quiet. They started talking, and they said, “That’s right. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by our by-laws.” Hubert said, “Yes, but that’s outlandish! It ought to be stopped!”

  So they almost received a letter from the board saying that they couldn’t establish or build a church. To think they would have gone ahead with it if I hadn’t reminded them that it specifically says in our Constitution and by laws that “freedom of religion is guaranteed”! So I say that I helped them get established. It would have been established anyway.

  I knew Adam Williams before he came here because he was in Tulalip Indian School. He was several years younger than me, and he was from La Conner. He lived in British Columbia, where his mother came from. So we didn’t see him much. They had a difficult time getting established anyway, because the congregation didn’t have enough money, and the piece of land where the church is was donated to them. Quite a lot of the lumber was donated by somebody from Everett. Anyway, it got built.

  Wayne was talking one evening about Adam, and what a marvelous person he was. Adam got sick and died recently, but the tribe adopted all of his children; they are members of this tribe. They never lived in La Conner. People there don’t know them at all. Adam was six feet two inches tall, and I was always supposed to listen to what he had to say.

  He used to get so worn out. I saw them at least every Thursday and Sunday. Mrs. Adam would talk about where he had been the night before. Sometimes he would be way around by Tacoma or Edmonds, driving around to pick up people who call him. Someone was stuck someplace with no money. He would get up in the night and go and look for them and bring them home. Busy, busy, busy. Every time there was any kind of trouble—a death in a family—they would go after Adam, and he would drive them around. They would have to go down to the undertaker and pick out caskets, things like that. Adam would just take care of everything. Sometimes he was in juvenile court or some other court hour after hour, helping somebody. Nobody had such loving patience as he. I used to sit by and be so thankful he came. I loved him.

  I drove around like that at night, too. Somebody would call me, maybe, from Edmonds. They wanted me to come after them. They left here, and they were going somewhere, Port Gamble or somewhere, and they didn’t have enough money, and they couldn’t come back. They couldn’t go across on the ferry. So I would drive over there and find them and bring them back home. I did that quite a bit. Sometimes they found me in town and wanted me to bring them back home. Then I would bring them home, and there would be some kind of an upset. Maybe their daughter or somebody is gone, and maybe they didn’t come home from school. So then they have to go out again and look for them. Maybe the children who are in the eighth or ninth grade are just walking around town. Just . . . I don’t know what you would call it—just little family upsets.

  When Adam came, I didn’t have to go out anymore after anyone. Then Adam got overloaded, and Wayne began getting calls. He would be called to “please come and get us. We are stuck in Seattle or way up here in Mount Vernon.” Both of them were driving around in the middle of the night.

  An organization asked me to put on Indian dancing. I had Wayne and Herman Williams. They were pretty much the same size as Bernie Gobin’s boys and Herman’s boys—there were about six or eight or ten of them. They did the spear dance. Then Wayne and Herman were grown up and married and they couldn’t do that anymore. Way back then, I had Earnest, a real good Indian dancer. He was always willing and happy to go. I told him what I was always saying to people, “Now, remember, I love you deeply and devotedly. I would do anything in the world for you, so now will you do such-and-such for me?” Of course, they all laughed. One time I said that to a young couple here, and about two or three months later I met them in Marysville on the street, and the first thing they said to me was, “Harriette, you remember you said you loved us deeply and devotedly, and you would do anything in the world for us? Could you give us ten dollars?” I was thinking, I had better not say that to anyone again, because I got into places where they ask not only for money but they wanted me to go way o
ver the mountains to take them to Warm Springs or on long trips, using my car and me paying for the transportation. Sometimes I would say that to some people, and they would say, “I know, I know. Just skip that part and tell me what you want.”

  The Church of God built up quite a large congregation because a lot of people, white people, came from Everett and Marysville. They would come a long ways to hear Adam preach. It seems to me it has started to fade away. Very few are here, but maybe it is building up again. I don’t think the Catholic Church has very many people, either. Churches are not filled. If people work on Saturday, they all go shopping, and on Sunday they are resting. They would rather stay home. If the mother works, then they are doing laundry and all of the housework.

  They Looked at Their World

  When I was growing up, we came home in the summertime from the boarding school. Every Sunday we walked with my father and mother, way back, about two or three miles into the woods, and, of course, in the summer we picked wildflowers and other things. One of those times, my father had us sit down by a small stream in the woods. Small forest streams always have a lot of ferns and wild flowers, shrubbery that grows on the edges. We were sitting on ferns and things right close to the stream, and my father told us, “Listen to the water talk.” I didn’t recall hearing something like that, and so we sat still, and we listened to the water. After a while, it sounds like there are a lot of people talking. Some of the bubbles are kind of high and some are kind of low sounding, but it is gurgling along. We just sat there. It seemed like a long while; maybe it was half an hour. It seemed so cool and damp there because it was a hot, hot summer day. My mother was sitting a little higher above. She heard what he said, so she came part of the way down. We were right next to the stream. We listened, and we heard the water talk. Sometimes we could imagine a lot of people talking; it sounds like notes in a song or somebody’s voice.

  My father did that quite often. We would sit by a stream. Every time we went by, we sat and drank water. It is nice and pure and cold. My father always used skunk cabbage leaves for cups. I was just thinking, nobody would ever use them today. Skunk cabbage has large leaves and an attractive yellow flower. My father used to say, “I wonder why the white man called it skunk cabbage.” He said that is terrible because it is actually a pretty flower. “It doesn’t smell like a wild rose, but it is a pretty smell.” Anyway, he would take the cabbage leaves and turn them in a certain way, and they would form what we called cups. We dipped them into the stream and drank out of the leaf. We drank so much cold water, I could feel it in my stomach; it was just loaded with water. It was so much fun drinking out of those leaves. If anybody did that now, I think, maybe you would get sick, because so many places are polluted. But way back then, there was no such thing as pollution in the water or any part of the wilderness. It was all clean and fresh. But I remember sitting there among those ferns and listening to the little stream gurgling along.

  After that experience, if I am someplace and there is moving water I usually listen. But sometimes you can’t hear it if there are a lot of cars going by or lots of people talking together. We’ve lost all of that quietness and appreciation of the wilderness places. Our young people never ever heard of it, although I used to tell my own two boys. They know all about it. Maybe a lot of people would think it is the silliest thing to think that the water talks.

  My mother and father liked walking through the wilderness trails in the late afternoon. If there was a strong breeze, they would stop and my father would say, “Listen to the wind in the trees.” Sometimes my mother would say it. She would stop and say, “Listen to the wind in the trees.” Then you listen to the different kinds of leaves and trees; they make slightly different sounds. Sometimes it sounds like they are just sighing. Certain kinds of leaves flicker; they almost turn completely around in their sockets. So they make a silk swishing sound. That was something because then we would listen. You can be alone in a wilderness place and stand still and listen to the wind in the trees. Whenever I said that to Marie Sneatlum, the girl who used to sing (she wrote from Boston, where she was going to a conservatory of music school), she said, “I get so lonely for Tulalip, the sound of the tides and the wind in the trees.” I think the majority of white people never realize the Indians looked at those things. They looked at their world: they noticed every kind of animal, all of the changes in the sky. I think that was one of the first things I noticed too: how the world looked; I mean, my little world.

  I used to walk with my grandmother up to what is now Mission Beach. She was getting blind, but she knew where Everett was and she knew the islands—Whidbey Island and Hat Island—and she knew where Mukilteo was, because I told her. She asked me, “What color is the sky?” I would tell her, “It is real blue,” and I would tell her, “The clouds are very puffy.” They are way over or around, or they are not up above. She asked me if we could see Everett, and if Everett had smoke mist above it, or if we could see Mount Rainier, and she wanted to know where the mist is on the mountain. Sometimes it is on the right and sometimes up above, and sometimes it is streaked all over. So I told her where the clouds were. I noticed then if the clouds were dark, if they were moving across the sky.

  There were so many things my mother and grandmother asked about. Sometimes I got to my grandmother’s house when it was dark. By the time I was fourteen years old, I would run down there and maybe bring her something. She always came out of the door and tried to look around at the night sky. Maybe it was a clear summer night and the stars are sparkling, and she has an idea where the dipper might be. Although, the Indians had a different legend for what is called the Big Dipper. They called it the Four Elk. The dipper part is four stars, and the handle part is three stars. The stars in the bowl of the dipper are elk, and the stars on the handle are the elk hunters. My father and grandfather said the middle star on the handle is the tiniest little star, and that is the hunter’s dog; that dog’s name is TIməlIš.18

  One of our cousins, Martha Lamont, had a dog named TIməlIš. Dozens of people knew he was almost like people. I don’t think he knew he was a dog. Martha used to give him a bath, put a child’s coat on him; and there he would be, sitting outside in the sun with this coat on, and it looked kind of funny. Sometimes she put a small straw hat on him that just fit his head. He sat there with a funny-looking coat on him and a straw hat and still put up with it. I would say, “Oh, my! You look so nice.” Sometimes he looked a little embarrassed, but he put up with it because he loved his mistress. He was a smart dog. He didn’t look like much of anything. He was black and white with short hair. A whole lot of people knew TIməlIš. If they saw TIməlIš walking down the road, they would say, “Where are you going? Go home.” He would wag his tail. He might run home and run back again.

  In that way, I came to notice everything. Anyway, my mother and father noticed everything. Once in a while, in summer or even in winter my folks would stand outside in the cold, frosty night and look up at the sky. The dipper was far away, in a different direction. It was turned differently, and my father and mother would talk about how bright the stars looked—a cold, glittering night sky in winter.

  My father and mother loved to be outdoors—to be camping on the beach, camping anywhere, walking through a wilderness trail. We used to go to Whidbey Island. I don’t quite remember where, but there was a cranberry bog of native wild cranberries. We used to go there—a whole lot of Indians did—to pick cranberries. I think it was late summer or maybe early fall, because I used to just love it. You could crawl all over in the cranberry bog and never, ever get scratched like you do when you are picking raspberries and blackberries. I fell into all kinds of holes and got nettles, got scratched up. You could crawl on the moss for hours and pick gallons of native cranberries. They all did, but I picked most of the day too. It’s easy. I asked somebody who lives on Whidbey Island if there is still a cranberry bog somewhere over there. They said, “Oh, yes. They are somewhere on south Whidbey.”

  We used to
go out there and pick huckleberries. They are the small lowland huckleberries. Whidbey Island had acres and acres of them that were easy to pick: no thorns. We went every fall. We camped on the beach, and my mother and another woman had big baskets, and they picked them full of wild huckleberries. The basket was covered with green ferns to keep the berries cool. Much later, we covered the berries with a piece of wax paper, but then the berries just sort of wilted and were mashed on the bottom. The green ferns kept them whole and fresh.

  We were outdoors whenever possible. My father had a canoe with an engine on it. He called it his “gray motor.” He was very proud of it. I didn’t see anything to it: to me it was just a big hunk of something that moved the canoe around and made noise. The canoe could go through the water just like an arrow. It was forty feet long. If we left Tulalip Bay, we could be in Everett within fifteen minutes; it could really travel. My father rarely let it go so fast, but it went through the water like an arrow.

  All of the years I was growing up, I rode in a canoe. My mother rode in the stern of the canoe. She was the captain. The women were the captains. They used the big, wide paddles for the rudder. They looked bigger than the paddles the men had. But we sat close to our mother. It seemed like I was always hungry. She had bread and butter and water. By the time we got over to the island, my father could make a fire in seconds, and it would be burning good, then the coffee or tea could boil. We drank quite a bit of marsh tea, or it is also called Labrador tea. It is a very pretty bright color. I haven’t had any for three or four years.

  Wayne and I were just talking about how to make sand bread. Anywhere we would go, such as Hat Island, Whidbey, so many places where we would go, we would make bread in the sand under the hot ashes of a campfire. My mother and them would turn it up like this and give it a sharp crack on the sides against the table and the sand falls off, and then they take a butcher knife and scrape it. Annie Fredericks used to live near us. She would bake the bread in our yard, where my father and mother had hauled in several bucketsful of sand. Then they would barbeque salmon, and my mother would have wild blackberries, already canned, from an earlier season, and then we would have sand bread.