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Susie gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ Sampson Peter

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.

"gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ
Susie Sampson Peter “gʷəqʷulc̓əʔ”
Lushootseed Research

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.

Beaver and Snake

David Stories
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The Lushootseed story Beaver and Snake by Susie Sampson Peter, gʷəqʷulc̕əʔ. As told by Tulalip Lushootseed Teacher Lois Landgrebe.

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.

Push your dxʷləšucid language skills to the next level!