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Harriette hayalc̓aʔ
Shelton-Dover

In 1904 Harriette hayalc̓aʔ Shelton was born to Chief William Shelton (1869-1938) who was of Snohomish, Skay-whah-mish, Puyallup, and Wenatchee ancestry and Guemes Island’s Ruth (siastənu) Sehome (1857-1958) of the Klallam and Samish tribes. Chief William Shelton was a renowned storyteller, carver, and ambassador to the world for native peoples. His daughter, hayalc̓aʔ, carried on the traditions of her father.
Among Harriette’s many accomplishments was that of helping revive traditional dances, the Lushootseed language, and tribal appreciation for a proud past. In addition, Harriette served as the second female elected to the Tulalip Tribes’ Board of Directors (and first Tribal Council Chairwoman), and she took a lead role in reestablishing the ancient First Salmon Ceremony at Tulalip — the now-thriving reservation located just west of Marysville and north of Everett.

ləqəcəbš – Listen to Me, sung by Harriette


Some of Harriette hayalc̓aʔ Shelton-Dover stories.

Mudswallow’s House

sɬukʷaləb / pədx̌ʷiwaacus

thirteenth moon

sɬukʷaləb – The thirteenth moon according to Chief William Shelton was the called the “Little moon.” pədx̌ʷiwaacus – The thrirteenth moon according to Harriette Shelton Dover was called the “Whistle of the Robin. This moon was placed sometime in the middle of the year.”

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.

t̕iwiɬ – Prayers

This text comes from Harriette Shelton-Dover “hayalc̓aʔ”, the daughter of Chief William Shelton. She made these comments in 1979, while the Salmon Ceremony was being revived.

Dear friends, I’ll try not to talk too long. What I wanted to say was, sometimes some of our people, with all the things that have passed by in the last 125 years of our history, we no longer know our language. In my language, the Snohomish tribe, we have two words which mean to ask, one of them is wiliq̓ʷ, wiliq̓ʷ, to ask. The other one is t̕iw̓iɬ, t̕iw̓iɬ; which means also to ask, but it is more like pleading, like a prayer, almost like begging, but not quite. Pleading, and it is a prayer, t̕iw̓iɬ, and so when people say the Indians did not know about prayer, we did, because we have two different words for the verb, to ask, wiliq̓ʷ to ask for information, and t̕iw̓iɬ to ask, it’s a prayer. All the songs you hear today will be prayer songs. We are thanking dukʷibəɬ, the all mighty creator, for all the world we see.

In my anthropology class, they spoke of the Indians worshiping a tree or something, and I told them “Teacher, the word is not quite worship, the word is reverence. The Indians had a very deep feeling of reverence for everything that lived, from grass and trees and birds and the salmon. They all have a great gift of life which we call shəliʔ.”

My name is Harriette Shelton-Dover. I come from the Tulalip Indian Reservation and my tribe is the Snohomish tribe. Snohomish, same as the county and the name of a town. My Indian name is hayalc̓aʔ, hayalc̓aʔ. I am named after my great-great-great grandmother. I am in my 70’s now, my middle 70’s. This is a recreation of a ceremony that our people, the Snohomish tribe, used to have for hundreds of years, really thousands of years. Morris is my cousin from LaConner, and we talked about this salmon ceremony. The beginning of the salmon ceremony that we recreated here, really took us hours to put it together, because we were just remembering things we heard. All of those things were just severely repressed way back in the 1860’s by the Catholic priest. He said all those things were things of the devil.

“I’m going to sing my song, it is a blessing of the longhouse, so if you join in the singing, please do. Hold your hands like this, this is the way the Indians used to pray. Empty hands, only by the goodness of an all mighty creator do we have food in our hands.”