VIRGINIA CROSS

“WE CAME FROM A LARGE FAMILY”

Bertha McJoe was a beautiful lady. She was also Levi Hamilton’s mother. He was tribal chairman for a short time, and he passed away in a fishing accident.

We had no tribal office to keep our records in. She kept two or three boxes under her bed and that was where we kept the tribal enrollment. That was our archives department, under her bed. I would go to see her because I became the Head Start director, and she would haul the materials out from under her bed, and we would go through them. That was how we started.

I think you sacrifice your kids, your own family, because you are committed to the tribe. My kids were supported by my family and husband at that time. I divorced him later, but when the kids were small, he was home with the kids. And I always had a sister or friend who would come in and help with the kids when I was at work. Even when we would have to go to the hospital or on urgent trips, one of my sisters would come and watch my kids for me. They were real supportive.

My dad was a Puyallup. So, I’m Puyallup and Muckleshoot. My grandma and grandfather on my mother’s side were Muckleshoot. On my father’s side, they were both Puyallup. Grandma used to say, “Oh well, we’re Cowlitz, we’re Yakama.” And she would name off all kinds of tribes.

Our dad let us choose our tribe, I remember, when I was about nine or ten years old. They wanted us to enroll in a tribe, and so he asked us what we wanted to be. And we told him Muckleshoot. I’m sure it hurt his feelings, because he wanted us to be Puyallup, but we lived here. It was home.

I think we still stick together as a family somewhat, but I don’t think it’s as tight as it used to be. I think we were a lot closer when I was younger. We didn’t have anything else. We grew up with no electricity and no water. You know, like everybody did at that time.

Our grandma, Mary King George Charles, was my mother’s mother, and she was “everybody’s grandma.” She traveled quite a bit, and she would take us with her. She would visit people, sometimes to visit the Shaker Church, sometimes for celebrations. At that time there were no phones or internet, so if you wanted to see somebody, you had to go see them. She would take different grandchildren with her, and so we got to travel to different reservations, even with no money.

I am most proud of what we’ve done in education. The tribal council is committed to education, our favorite cause.

We have the birth-to-three preschool program, and then we have the Head Start program, then we’ve got the K–12 tribal school, then we have a nonaccredited college for now. Every year we contribute funding to educational departments, homeless organizations, classroom Indian education, and sometimes veterans’ organizations. We try to give as much as we can to the schools. Most of our money came in from bingo and the casino. We finally had enough funds to provide the tribe with a variety of services—housing, health, education. I pressed a lot for elder services. We put a lot of money into our scholarship program. It’s paying off now. We probably approve about a hundred scholarships per year. When we first started the scholarship program, there were only four of us with college degrees. Now we have over a hundred who have degrees.

TANANAMOUS FOREST

We bought a forest about eight years ago. With the forest, we have ninety-six thousand acres of land that is within our traditional territory along highway 410. It goes through Mount Rainier to Enumclaw and up the road on either side of the highway, to Chinook Pass. People ask us what we’re going to develop on that. We’re not developing anything. We’re just going to keep it. We’re going to keep it for the tribal members who want to go fishing, hunting, and gathering. The White River runs through it, and there are trees, deer, and elk. We get a lot of cedar out of the forest for making baskets and things. We have one day per year called Tananamous Day for all tribal members to go up there. We have a forest crew up there of kids—young people. They spend a lot more time there. There’s about twenty of them, young men and young women. They’re up there making trails, providing a road for Tananamous Day, they do a variety of things. My granddaughter’s up there working with them, and they love it. It’s done so much for them. We just want to keep it.

One of the fish that the tribe invested in, even before we had the land, is the springer salmon (Chinook), because we had won a case with Puget Sound Power and Light on the White River in 1978 or so. Since we didn’t have any money in 1978/1979 to pay the attorney fees, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) won that case for us. One of the conditions was to restore the springer salmon in the White River, and that has finally paid off. I had notice just recently that one of the first springers has come back up the river. So the springer salmon was a major fish product for our tribe, and we just love it. There are also trout and other kinds of salmon in the river now. We hunt for deer and elk, and once in a while we do drawings for goats and sheep, the rams—no more than five per year for the goats and rams.

A lot of gathering goes on throughout the year. In the spring and early summer we gather cedar. We have one tribal member, Val Seagrest, who got her degree in native plants and nutrition, and she has really pushed all of us to try to use natural medicines and remedies rather than some of the medicines from the clinic. I called her a few weeks ago because my sister has cirrhosis of the liver, and she recommended nettle tea for kidney and liver problems. She provides us with elderberry syrup and just about anything she can gather naturally.

The land is sacred because that’s where our families traveled—our ancestors traveled in those woods. The trails, and the berries, and the hunting, they did all of that before we were here.

We named it Tananamous: Land of Power.

Right now, it’s about land. We’re trying to buy as much land back as we can get. I think some of the non-tribal public are threatened by it a little bit. Right now we’re trying to put Emerald Downs racecourse into a trust. That’s going to take the property off the tax rolls, so we’ll have to negotiate with the city of Auburn. We’re doing pretty well with our water rights. We had a lawsuit against the power company back in the early 1980s that resolved the water rights on the White River,which comes down from Mount Rainier. With the help of the Native American Rights Fund, we won that fight.

It has taken years, but now we have over a hundred people with college degrees. It’s a big jump from when we started out in the 1970s.

I went to the University of Puget Sound and then got a master’s degree in education at the University of Washington in curriculum and instruction. I started the Virginia Cross Program when I was with the Auburn School District in the 1980s, and it has grown. It’s now known as the Virginia Cross Native American Education Center. When I started the program, we had a lot of kids who had dropped out of school, and we designed the program to serve the cultural, social, and academic needs of teenagers who weren’t in school. The program now supports students from over seventy tribes across a range of areas that are all connected. It’s important for our tribal students and future leaders to learn and share their culture as part of their education. It’s important to share this with non-tribal students and neighboring community members.

I have a lot of hope for the new legislation requiring Washington State public schools to offer a Native Education curriculum. We helped. Our lobbyists worked really hard on that. When it was signed, we went to the signing ceremony. If the public schools follow through and teach what they’re supposed to be teaching—the history of how tribal sovereignty came to be, treaty rights, Native science, opportunities to learn our traditional languages, opportunities to participate in traditional practices—then I think that our kids will have an easier time than we did at school. I worked for the Auburn School District for over twenty years, so I know very well the kinds of history books they approve and are distributed into our school system. Nothing has to do with tribal history or the plants you might gather. They don’t mention anything about Muckleshoot tribe or hardly any Indian tribe. They don’t recognize that we have our own constitution and bylaws—they only study the US Constitution. They also celebrated holidays that we don’t honor—Columbus Day, now Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I don’t think they have treated our kids well for their special needs.

I’m thinking back to when I was in school. I graduated in 1957, and at that time I was the only Muckleshoot graduate. My sister two years before me was the only Muckleshoot graduate. We would start in kindergarten with ten or fifteen tribal people, and by the time we were out of the eighth or ninth grade, they would all be gone. It just didn’t serve our kids or our people well.

I think there was just so much prejudice. There were very few of us who were in high school at that time, probably not more than ten of us in the whole school of thousands of kids. Our dad wanted us to be in school, that’s why we were there.

I think it’s the education department that has really progressed, mostly because that’s where our primary interest has been. We now have a tribal school and a Lushootseed language program with a program director, where we teach and qualify five full-time language teachers every year, who then go out to teach. And now we have hired another five more. Hopefully we’ll end up with everybody speaking Lushootseed language. And hopefully this work will continue.

And we have very good elders’ programs. That’s an emphasis I’ve received from my elder women mentors. When our people turn fifty-five, they are eligible to have a home built, and they are eligible for a small monthly income, handicap assistance, and chore service.

We try to take care of our elders. We don’t give much of a guaranteed income, or per capita payments, here. That’s probably a contention here on the reservation. We give three per capita payments to tribal members a year, and they’re small. We provide services rather than per capitas.

We have daycare. We have childcare. We have the education programs, scholarships, and all those kinds of things. And we have a resource center for families in need. All of our members can have however many years they want to attend college with expenses paid. We’ve had three people earn doctorates in the past five years, and they’re all women.

The men—well, there are not many fish out there. They’re not making a living at it anymore. They would love to fish and would spend their life fishing if they could. They now just do it for fun.

The biggest challenge for the Muckleshoot tribe has been retaining our sovereignty. Most tribes that I know have had to wait out previous presidential administrations—even to realize our voting rights. A lot of our cases that we’ve had to file against the United States have been decided in our favor. There are cleanups that need to happen in our rivers, and most of us would like to gain back our traditional lands. There is so much work to still be done. We’re trying to retain our sovereignty and get along with the non-Indian communities around us. We haven’t paid as much attention to that as we should.