Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert
1918-2008
Vi Hilbert was born July 24, 1918, in Upper Skagit, as an only child to Charlie and Louise Anderson. Vi was a Mother of three, Denny, Lois, and Ron. Growing up, Vi went to 15 different schools. Vi was a story-teller, linguist, a Fluent speaker in Lushootseed and co-author of the second Lushootseed dictionary, advisor on the first one and an educator.

Vi’s father was a fisherman, logger, canoe carver and led canoe races to victory. Her mother was known as a kind, vivacious, loving, generous and dramatic. As a child, both Vi’s mother and father spoke only Lushootseed to her. While growing up, Vi and her parents moved around a lot due to job opportunities.

When her parents went to the Yakima reservation to pick hops and fruit, Vi attended a boarding school located in Tulalip. Later on, in her high school years, Vi chose to attend the Chemawa Indian Boarding School, located near Salem, OR but for her last years, she transferred to Franklin High in Portland in order to get the best education she could, working as a household helper in exchange for room and board.

In 1936 Vi married Percy Woodcock and they lived together in Tahola, WA on the Olympic Peninsula. In 1937 she had her son Denny was born. In 1938 she had her daughter Lois. A couple of years later, her son Denny died from Meningitis in 1940, and Vi and Percy were separated. He moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, and Vi went home to Nooksack (an Indian reservation East of Bellingham) to be with her parents.

In 1942 Vi remarried to Bob Coy from the Tulalip Reservation (just west of Marysville and North of Everett). Her third child, Ron was born in 1943. After Vi separated from Bob. She remarried for the third time in 1945 during WWII to Don Hilbert, who was in the navy. They had built their own house in South Seattle, where they lived until 2003. They then moved to Bow, WA, in the Skagit County, to be with daughter Lois.

Vi learned the responsibilities of hard work. If anyone could work it was Vi. She went berry picking, she did ironing, all kinds of housework, she ran a pool hall, she worked in a cannery, she was a stock clerk, a cookie wrapper for a Danish bakery, she had worked at Todd’s Shipyard as an electric welder, she was a waitress for a Chinese restaurant, she did cashiering at Boeing for a food wagon, she worked as an executive secretary at a Seattle Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, and she finally trained as a hairdresser.

In 1967 Vi was introduced to Dr. Thom Hess, who was writing a grammar book of Lushootseed, then called Puget Salish. In 1972 Vi attended a Lushootseed class that Hess had taught at the University of Washington and passed all the tests easily. The next year, Hess had arranged it so that Vi taught the class. From there Vi had turned her hair salon into the “brain room”. Together Thom and Vi had written lesson plans for daily language classes, a textbook and her first Haboo Book of traditional stories that were told by her elders. She had shared traditions, stories and the Lushootseed language with the Burke Museum, United Indians of all tribes, Tillicum Village, the Seattle’s Story Teller Guild, and the National Storytelling Association. Vi taught at the University of Washington for 15 years before retiring in 1988. Vi was named a Washington state living treasure in 1989. Then in 1994, she received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of Arts which was awarded to her by President Bill Clinton and presented in person by First Lady Hillary Clinton.

The books include the lessons, dictionaries, and story collections, often bilingual, of Lushootseed Press. She is best known for the story Lady Louse. Haboo, in four versions, tells Native American stories from Puget Sound. Loon and deer were traveling, is a Parabola audio recording. She also contributed chapters and sidebars to several collections.

At the age of 90, Vi passed away in her La Conner home on a Friday morning of December 19, 2008. She was surrounded by her family as she took her journey to the other side. Because of the freezing conditions, her funeral was held a week later at Upper Skagit and her ashes are in the family plot at Nooksack.

Some of Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert’s stories

Her first Basket

Wal-La-Sub – Harry Moses
1878-1955

Harry Moses was born on November 15, 1878 up the Skagit river Valley in the town of Marblemount. Harry and his wife Jessie had eight children, William Moses, Zatha Moses, Regina Moses Dallaire, Persina H Moses, Mahcina L Moses, Rydnillo W Moses, Anna B Moses and Arnold C Moses.
Harry’s father was Will-Ab-To-Chub Charley Moses, who was born in 1853. His mother was Sha-Sha-Bow-Lits-Ah or Mary, she was born in 1852. Jesse’s father was Bon-Quah-am
The Moses family were heavily involved with their relatives and fellow members of the Shaker church. They lived mainly in the Upper Skagit area, around Marblemount. They spent a good deal of time with the Anderson family. Vi Hilbert in Haboo wrote that her, and her parents, visited quite often because her parents thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. She wrote, “I loved to listen in. Harry had a wonderful sense of humor, which was well known. He loved to tell stories and his audience knew that they could count on him to embellish the facts, with a twinkle in his eyes. Why, Harry saw the eyes of the woman in the moon, and the fish he caught in the Cascade river behind his house were so big that when he lifted them onto his shoulder, the tails would drag far behind him on the ground.
Harry died on October 24, 1955 in Sedro-Woolley.

Some of the Stories he told were:

How Daylight was Stolen
Flood Story

se’nine – Dora Williams Solomon
1892-1981

Dora Williams was born on June 16th 1892 in Lyman Washington east of Mount Vernon. She was married to Felix Solomon in an arranged marriage. Dora’s granddaughter Vernell Lane says she was told how the two arrived at a set location in separate canoes when they were joined together. That took place on July 3, 1907. The pair settled on the Lummi Reservation. Dora and Felix had eight children, six boys and two girls.
Dora Solomon spoke Lushootseed, Lummi and broken English. Dora Solomon says her grandmother known as se’nine and se’hash, and she often switched between Lushootseed and Lummi as she spoke. She loved to tell numerous stories to all her children and grandchildren. And later shared them taqʷšəbluʔ, Vi Hilbert.
Dora was a skilled basket weaver and was active in the tribal communities of Lummi and Upper Skagit as well as Swinomish. She was a member of St. Joachim’s Catholic Church.
She was known as a gracious host, with her husband Felix, having plenty of salmon, crab and clams to serve guests. In her later years she worked with Vi Hilbert to record the stories she knew along with the teachings she learned in her younger years.
She was preceded in death by her husband Felix Peter Solomon in January 1981.

Some of the Stories she told were:

Star Child
Flood Story

gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ, Susie Sampson Peter, lived on the Swinomish Indian Reservation. She spoke the highest forms of the Skagit language, a northern dialect of dxʷləšucid. Born at a time of uncertainty, she knew that many things would change. She understood that the life she knew, the life she was taught, would not be learned by future generations in the same manner. A historian for her culture, for her people, she welcomed the opportunity to preserve the language through recorded oral traditions of history, storytelling, and song.
Born in 1863 in the area along the Illabat Creek, across from Rockport, Washington, gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ was the eldest of seven children.

Her mother was pačtalo, and her father was an Indian Doctor known as sbaqʷəbaʔɬ, or Dr. Bailey. She grew up at Utsaladdy, though her family often traveled for work, as many families did at that time. Picking hops, cutting firewood, catching and trading fish. This was her life.
She first married Joseph Sampson, also known as Sam, in 1887. Together they had two children, Martin and Alfonso, before Joseph died. She then married William Peter and had three other children whose names remain unknown. She also adopted William’s other two children, Richard and Lavinia, and his stepdaughter Elizabeth Adams.
gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ endured great change, born only eight years after treaty times. From recordings, she recounts the subtle nuances of cultural shifts. Her father,sbaqʷabaʔl, raised her under a strict discipline, as culture demanded at that time, in order to groom her to be a keeper of the culture.
“Even though I was a woman, he trained me to be an Indian Doctor,” she said.
gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ accepted the responsibility set in front of her.
“I did not balk,” she said.
Even at ten years of age, gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ understood the importance of the teachings, she recognized the purpose of her training, and she humbly submitted herself to the hardship.
She spoke of her power with a certain respect and reverence. “I earned it, by the hardship,” she said.
At this time Indian Doctors were not safe. Her father and younger brother were killed for doctoring people. And so it ended with her. She did not pass it on to her children in order to protect them.
More change came with the coming of the Bostons, settlers who often originated from Boston. Chinook Jargon, a trade language of the area, was used to communicate with the Bostons. They also brought new food to the area, such as flour and sugar. The Bostons brought new ways of cooking and new clothing. These were fine. gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ remembers her father welcoming the settlers. He helped them many times and acted as an intermediary.
The advent of the Boarding Schools, however, marked the decline of their way of life. At the schools, Indian children were forbidden to speak anything other than English. They were taught the ways of the Bostons.
gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ became burdened with worry. The next generations would not know the language, they would not understand who they were. And so, she was excited when there was a chance to preserve it.
Leon Metcalf traveled throughout the region recording the oral traditions of tribal elders. It is said that upon meeting him she coyly responded, asking what took him so long to get there.
dxʷləšucid is a language that is alive. It has the power to immortalize people, stories, and legends, but only if the speaker has the power to do so. gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ had that power.
Her niece and adopted daughter, taqʷšəblu, Vi Hilbert, describes gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ speaking.
“She became every animal who was in her story, and that animal, of course, was a person, but she could go into the psyche of that animal, become its voice, become its psyche,” taqʷšəblu said.
These new ways of life, new ways of knowing, meant that people would no longer have to rely on their oral traditions. They would no longer have to commit things to their mind. gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ decided to leave her knowledge for the coming generations in the recordings made with Metcalf. It is up to the new generations to engage with the ancient teachings now.

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