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sʔadacut Hagan Sam

Ethel and Hagan Edward Sam
Ethel and Hagan Edward Sam

sʔadacut Hagan Edward Sam
1907-1973

Lushootseed learners at Tulalip are familiar with the photograph of Hagan Sam that they see at the beginning of their first book of Lushootseed stories: he appears as a white-haired elder in a Sunday suit, Bible under his arm, standing by his wife Ethel and posing for a photograph on their way to or from the Shaker Church. Hagan is also one of the first Lushootseed speakers they hear, as he tells on tape the stories transcribed in the present volume. He is a modem man and an ancient man, and it is hard not to think of him as almost two separate beings.1

We wonder what it must have been like to be ‘all at once the descendant of a line of tribal leaders whose known history extends back into the mists of time, a virtuoso of traditional verbal art, a Shaker healer, a logger, a fisherman, a driver of horses across the mountains, a practical joker, a singer of Country Western songs in demand at local fairs and on the radio, and an enthusiastic buyer of new cars. He shares with his generation the mind-altering transition from a life imbued with tradition to a life in which tradition must be sought out.

Hagan Sam with parents and grandparents
Hagan, in his mother’s arms, looks at his grandparents, s?adacut and k’wuyai. In the chair is his older brother Alfred Photo courtesy of Virginia Carpenter.

The photograph of Hagan as a baby gives a sense of the antiquity and importance of his family. A story is told about the encounter between one of his ancestors and a prehistoric water being. The story illustrates how far back the Snohomish presence along this part of the coast extends. One of his ancestors was a hereditary leader of the main Snohomish village in the 1820s or ’30s when the only known tsunami to have occurred in Puget Sound killed large numbers of Snohomish people. Hagan’s grandfather sʔadacut was a traditional healer whose work among the community is talked about even today. His father, Casimir, was a celebrated storyteller, against whose memory our storytellers are still measured. The child sitting in the chair grew up to provide testimony in federal court that helped secure tribal fishing rights and illuminate for succeeding generations the importance of the Killer Whale for the people of Tulalip.

In the work that he did with Thom Hess, Hagan Sam carried on his family’s work of upholding the traditional culture and being of use to the community. The language of his tellings he kept relatively simple for beginners, but in doing so he did not betray the high art of which he was a master. These tellings abound in examples of the narrative strategies that have kept the Lushootseed story community alert and alive through the centuries.

1This introduction combines the memories of William (Sonny) Sam, the late Thom Hess, the late Marya Moses, and the late Hank Gobin.


Some of Hagan Sam’s stories

Mink and Tetyika
Bear and Ant
Coyote and Big Rock
Bear and Fish Hawk

dxʷsyəhubtxʷ – Story tellers

The Lushootseed word syəhub, is often translated into English as “traditional story.” As we continue to speak, write, and think in English about these written texts, we shorten “traditional story” to “story,” a word that results in the blending of our concept of syəhub with an English-language concept that can refer to everything from a spontaneous lie, to an art narrative composed in writing by a sole author and published as a fixed text. “Traditional story” is an ineffective rendition because it fails to address the basic characteristics of syəhub, which is an oral tradition; and it is a dangerous rendition because it serves to dilute our awareness of those characteristics.

Hagan Sam in the 1920’s

As we are taught, the syəhub is a cumulative unwritten tradition, not any one realization of it. It is also a cloud of possibilities with a particular but unstable center around a group of potentialities remembered and forgotten, realized and unrealized, constantly changing, known only fragmentarily by any one person or any one tribe or at any one time. It is a gyre of motifs, rhetorical strategies, characters, plots, teachings, commentary, names, formulas, places, histories, customs, songs, specialized knowledge, and much else. The syəhub contains private property but also regional borrowings, as well as overlaps with every other oral tradition in the world. However, every realization of a syəhub tradition is culturally and individually specific.

Susie gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ Sampson Peter
Lushootseed Research

When we come to the task of talking about heritage rights and the tribal duty of heritage guardianship as these apply to a syəhub tradition, we find that there are no English-language resources available that do not distort what we need to say. This is due in part to the fact that English-language discourse about rights and the legal protection of rights to oral narrative has yet to develop concepts of heritage and oral tradition. What we can do, however, is state as a basic principle that, whether it is done by tribal members or nontribal members, all work that makes use of our traditions should be done in such a way as to benefit the people of Tulalip. When we are talking about the syəhub tradition and traditional oratory, “benefit” means specifically to be of help to our work in the revitalization of our language and oral traditions.

Our tribal duty of heritage guardianship involves the assertion of protocols to ensure that our traditions are not misconstrued or decontextualized. syəyəhub do not exist for the purpose of teaching reading skills or for the purpose of linguistic analysis. For people who work with our syəhub tradition, no matter what kind of work they are doing, it is vital that syəyəhub continue to serve the purposes for which they have come into existence. The most important of these purposes is to ensure the survival of those who hear them.

Harriette Shelton-Dover

Research and curriculum development are not tasks that in themselves permit syəhub to do its work. It is not that we do not want these tasks to be done (we do them ourselves); it is that the research or curriculum “use” of the tradition must not stop with that “use,” which is so far short of allowing syəyəhub to work. Otherwise, the “use” of the tradition is like girdling the cedar tree from which you are taking bark: you kill it in the course of your work.

Here are some examples of deeds that we hope our assertion of heritage guardianship will prevent in the future: the context-shorn, reductive translation of our stories so that they lose their ability to save lives; the use of such translations in classrooms at all, but especially in classrooms serving Native students; the exclusive use of translations in the classroom; the exclusive reliance on written texts in cross-cultural work involving our traditions; the mining of transcribed texts of our oral tradition for data of various kinds, with no respect for the life-giving nature of the traditions; and the failure of outsiders to share with the Tribe the fruits of their study of our traditions.

Mink and Tetyika

Page-14




huyəxʷ tiʔiɬ dsyəhub[tubi]cid, siʔab dsyaʔyaʔ.
huyəxʷ čəd.

I’ve finished telling
this story honorable friends. I have finished.

A traditional story told by Edward Hagan Sam
Translated and illustrated by David Spencer, Sr.

The material in parentheses was added by David Spencer to make
the meaning clearer for readers who cannot hear how Hagan Sam’s
voice changes to indicate which character is speaking.


Copyright 1996 The Tulalip Tribes of Washington

Previous – bəlkʷ

Begining- yəhaw̓

Mink and Tetyika

bibščəb ʔi tiʔiɬ suʔsuq̓ʷaʔs, tətyika

Little Mink and his younger cousin, Tetyika

A traditional story told by Edward Hagan Sam
Translated and illustrated by David Spencer, Sr.


Next -hiwil

Bear and Ant

Page-14

A Note on the Text and the Translation The Lushootseed text of the story is a transcription
of the tape-recording of Hagan Sam made by Thorn Hess at Tulalip in 1963. Some spelling changes have been made to clarify the grammar, and false starts
have been omitted. In both the Lushootseed and English versions, groups of words that were written as short sentences in the original transcript have been combined to create a written
style that reflects more accurately the way Hagan Sam sounded when he was talking.

The Bear and Ant story has been told all over Lushootseed country
for many generations, sometimes with different animals in the main roles. Stories like it have been recorded as far away as the pueblos of New Mexico.

An annotated Lushootseed text of Hagan Sam’s story, along with a grammar and glossary, appears in Lushootseed Reader with Introductory Grammar, Vol. 1:
Four Stories from Edward Sam, edited by Thorn Hess and published jointly by the Tulalip Tribes and the University of Montana as volume 11, Occasional
Papers in Linguistics, 1995.

 

Previous – bəlkʷ

Beginning – yəhaw̓txʷ