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.”