Tulalips mourn loss of last native speaker (fwd)

Tue Oct 3 17:28:05 UTC 2006

Published: Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Tulalips mourn loss of last native speaker
Marya Moses, 95, was one of the last ties to a time when their own
language was widely spoken.

By Krista J. Kapralos
Herald Writer
http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/06/10/03/100loc_a1maryamoses001.cfm

TULALIP - Marya Moses was still in primary school when federal officials
took her from her home and moved her to the Tulalip Boarding School.

>From then until she was 15, Moses was forced into an immersion course in
English. Lushootseed, her native language, wasn't allowed.

"We all had late starts because of talking Indian," Moses said in an
interview six years ago. "We were kind of shy."

When she died last week at age 95, she took with her knowledge of a
language she kept locked away in her heart for decades.

She was the last native Lushootseed speaker on the Tulalip Indian
Reservation, said her son, Ray Moses.

Linguists spent years tapping Marya Moses' understanding of Lushootseed
in an effort to preserve the language.

In 1995, the Tulalip Tribes compiled a book of Lushootseed grammar from
the knowledge of Marya Moses and native speakers from other tribes in
the region. Many of those who spoke the language fluently have passed
away.

"(Marya) was one of the last that really knew the Indian language
totally," Tulalip Tribes Chairman Stan Jones said.

Marya Moses worked with Toby Langen and the tribes' Cultural Resources
Department to develop the Lushootseed Language Department. Her death
came less than two weeks after the death of Katherine Brown Joseph, the
last native Lushootseed speaker in the Sauk Suiattle tribe in
Darrington.

"As we lose people who had Lushootseed as their first language, our
relationship to the language is certainly changing," said professor Tom
Colonnese, director of the American Indian studies program at the
University of Washington.

"One of the things that defines culture is language, so that link
between culture and language exists more strongly in people who have
had the language as their first language," he said.

More than 500 people gathered at the Tulalip Tribes administration
complex Monday for Marya Moses' funeral. They wept for the loss of one
of the tribes' last links to an era when their language was widely
spoken.

Marya Moses was born in a barn on the reservation in 1911, amid the
tribes' poorest and most desperate years. She gave birth to 11 children
and struggled to care for them.

Food rations came to the reservation by train from the East Coast, Ray
Moses said.

"My mother would have to clean the cereal and flour and pick out the
worms," he said.

Marya Moses sent Ray Moses and other sons to live in the woods near
Darrington, where federal officials were less likely to police tribal
hunting and fishing.

"There was no food on the reservation," Ray Moses said. "We could live
off the land in the mountains."

In the 1960s, Marya Moses became the first woman to own and operate a
commercial fishing boat out of Tulalip Bay. She employed her six
daughters as her crew.

"She was competitive," Stan Jones said. "She was a really strong
fisherman."

The boys raced to the bay after work at a local mill to help pull in the
day's catch, Ray Moses said.

On Monday, tribal members and friends of the tribes remembered Marya
Moses as a whip-smart woman who never shied away from blunt honesty.
She was proud of being Indian, and she had a deep faith in God, said
the Rev. Patrick Twahy, her priest of many years.

"She was like the most giant cedar," he said. "She had her roots deep in
her culture. She had the interior strength of her faith. When a cedar
like that goes down, it leaves enormous absence."

Marya Moses was buried at Priest Point, only a few miles from where she
was born.

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos at heraldnet.com.