Tulalip, From My Heart
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15
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Average rating4
In Tulalip, From My Heart, Harriette Shelton Dover describes her life on the Tulalip Reservation and recounts the myriad problems tribes faced after resettlement. Born in 1904, Dover grew up hearing the elders of her tribe tell of the hardships involved in moving from their villages to the reservation on Tulalip Bay: inadequate supplies of food and water, harsh economic conditions, and religious persecution outlawing potlatch houses and other ceremonial practices. Dover herself spent ten traumatic months every year in an Indian boarding school, an experience that developed her political consciousness and keen sense of justice. The first Indian woman to serve on the Tulalip board of directors, Dover describes her experiences in her own personal, often fierce style, revealing her tribe’s powerful ties and enduring loyalty to land now occupied by others.
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I'm so glad this exists. Dover lived a long and extraordinary life, from surviving the Tulalip Indian School to participating in the long legal battle to restore salmon fishing rights to the coast Salish tribes. Her attention is sweeping and unsparing: we hear about everything from the "drifting, deep fog or mist" that partially obscures prehistory from modern awareness to the boarding school uniforms made of blue wool serge, "the heaviest, scratchiest material that was ever invented on the earth." The book feels less like a book than the series of conversations that it was, and anyone interested in the history and ongoing issues in the Pacific Northwest would benefit from hearing Dover's story.
