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səswix̌ab
Martha Williams Lamont

Martha Lamont
Martha in 1956, photographed by Leon Metcalf, with whom she recorded the first half of a unique legacy.
Photo courtesy of Tulalip Lushootseed Department.

Martha Williams Lamont
c. 1880-1973

səswix̌ab Martha Williams Lamont
Although for us today Martha is known as a person who devoted herself to preserving treasures from the past, during her life she welcomed and supported
important changes.1 During the 1930s, tribal leader William Shelton and his family conducted an outreach program designed to make the people of Tulalip better known to the non-reservation world. Many tribal people at Tulalip disapproved of this innovative work, but we have photographs that show Martha standing with the Shelton’s, beating the drum and singing to support their efforts. She endorsed these occasions further by wearing her special white dress decorated with shells. (We see a later version of the dress in the photograph above.)
Martha was an active member of the 1910 Shaker Church. Her grandson Hank Williams tells us: “She always knew when somebody needed prayer. She would be sitting there talking and pretty soon, ‘Somebody needs a prayer; I have to pray for somebody.’ So she would get that message, just out of nowhere she would say that. She was a very strong religious woman.” Martha was appointed an assistant minister of the Tulalip church and continued to serve until she became bedridden in the last decade of her life.
Perhaps because she never learned to read or write, Martha was an enthusiastic participant in projects to tape-record traditional teachings. She spent extended periods ten years apart working with different collectors, to whom she told some of the same stories. Thus, her legacy gives us a rare chance to investigate change and stability in the syəhub tradition. Martha’s tellings of “Crow and Her Seagull Slaves” ten years apart are very different. Both are funny, but in the later telling Martha uses humor to convey her feelings about the loss of tribal lands and the consequent devaluing of Native identity. To hear this second telling is to realize that these issues are latent in the first telling and would have been perceived by her Tulalip audience even without the enhancement they received later. For several decades the “Totem Entrance” stood across a road leading to the tribal center. The Entrance was composed of two figured posts, one on either side of the road; atop the posts and spanning the road is a canoe that carries a girl and two slaves. The Totem Entrance represents yet another telling of the “Crow and Her Seagull Slaves” tradition, though without Crow or seagulls. When we take account of the fact that both of Martha’s tellings are parodic realizations of the version on the Totem Entrance, we see that all three variants are anchored in a tradition that as yet bears only the names of its separate tellings. In her enthusiasm for the new recording technology, Martha has enabled us to travel more deeply into our heritage than we could have imagined.

1This introductions combines the memories of Hank and Geraldine Williams, the late Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert, the late Thom Hess the late Marya Moses, and Wayne Williams.


Some of səswix̌ab Martha Williams Lamont’s stories

The Seal Hunter Brother’s
Pheasant and Raven
Crow and Her Seagull Slaves

c̓iʔsalalc̓səb – Lizzie Krise

Lizzie Krise
Lizzie Krise

Lizzie Krise
1875-1969

A firm believer that it takes a village to raise a child, Lizzie Krise played an active role in helping to raise many children at Tulalip.1 Frieda Williams, herself a grandmother now, remembers that one day when she was a small child, she was out walking with her father and Lizzie came up to them. “This child is old enough to know right from wrong,” Lizzie told Frieda’s father, and from that time on, Lizzie took Frieda to church each week and then home for Sunday dinner afterward. Because she was often feeding more kids than there was room for at the dining table, Lizzie had someone make child-sized tables and chairs for the others. Frieda still pictures Lizzie, who was about four-and-a-half feet tall, walking up to her father, who was over six feet tall and borrowing his child.

The late George Taylor, Lizzie’s grandson, recalled that when he was about eleven, Lizzie returned from a trip to the other side of the mountains with a shotgun for him. She took him out to teach him how to hunt and taught him how to hang up his game on a forked stick and return to collect it later. The first thing he shot was a robin. That night in the kitchen, George saw Lizzie plucking and cleaning the robin. “What are you doing, grandma?” he asked. “I am getting this robin ready to cook,” she told him. ”You don’t shoot anything you aren’t going to eat.”

Lizzie fed the children from her own garden. She kept rabbits and chickens, and later added a goat, when she heard that goat’s milk could help prevent tuberculosis. At every gathering, you could find her in the kitchen. Experiencing life as a series of teachable moments, she was herself an embodiment of all teachings.

It was to Lizzie that the tribal chairman recommended the young linguistics student Thom Hess when he first came to Tulalip. Lizzie had the courage to take a chance on working with this young man who appeared out of the blue, and her decision set in motion the preservation of our language. The recordings that Thom Hess made with Lizzie are still in use in our Lushootseed classrooms today. Her gentle voice and laughter testify to a warm working relationship, and she takes pains to speak slowly, as though she could envision all the young ears that would be trying to follow her speech down through the decades. Through Lizzie, Thom was introduced to the two people who became his greatest advisers and teachers, Martha and Levi Lamont.

Lizzie’s descendants are the George Taylor family and the Ron Kona family, as well as all the tribal members who have benefited from her legacy.

1 This introduction combines the memories of the late George Taylor, the George Taylor family, the late Thom Hess, Frieda Williams, and Rebecca Posey.


One of Lizzie Krise’s stories

Lady Louse