Tulalip From My Heart discussion questions
Prologue
-Who’s Native territory did you grow up on and how did that relate to your sense of the place? What were your interactions with Indigenous people and communities like and how did you hear and see them talked about or depicted?
-What role does the natural ecology of Western Washington play in Harriette Shelton Dover’s narrative? What role does it play in your life? What does it mean to you to be on Coast Salish territory now?
-How does history shape present conditions? What sort of responsibilities come from how our ancestors moved through the world and what we did or did not inherit from them in terms of possessions, experiences, and ideas? How does Dover describe her relationship to and inheritance from her ancestry?
Chapter 1
-What did the Treaty of Point Elliot do to Dover, her family, and her nation? How did the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliot reflect existing power imbalances across difference in the Pacific Northwest? How did it create new imbalances?
Chapter 2
-What expectations shaped relationships between Native women of different generations in the early decades of the Tulalip reservation? Between women and men? Between Native and non-Native people?
Chapter 3
-What sort of work could Native people find in the early decades of the reservation? How did this affect the community then and how might it relate to contemporary ideas about economic development on reservations?
Chapter 4
-How were Native and settler lives intertwined in Western Washington in the early 20th century? What did Native people seek from settlers and what did settlers seek from Native people?
Chapter 5
-What religious beliefs did Dover receive instruction about and what beliefs has she held on to? How does accounting for religious diversity within Native communities complicate the notion of a nation sharing a single, common culture?
Chapter 6
-What role did the Tulalip Indian Boarding school play in shaping Dover’s ideas about work, gender, religion, and other aspects of life? - How did the death of Dover’s sister Ruth result from some of the vulnerabilities produced by reservation life? How did Ruth’s death affect Dover?
Chapter 7
-What was the significance of World War I to the Tulalip reservation? How the experience of going to war, or not going to war, change life there?
Chapter 8
-How did Dover make the decision to attend a majority white high school in Everett and how did her experiences there further change her relationships? How did Dover’s first marriage and move to Seattle once again reorganize her priorities, her experiences, and her plans for the future?
Chapter 9
-What drew Dover into a leadership position in the Tulalip Tribes and how would you describe her philosophy on leadership? How did health continue to be a vexing issue for communities like Dover’s well into her adulthood?
Chapter 10
-How have recent events demonstrated or challenged Dover’s assertion “that is the way a lot of white Americans feel: they are Americans, and the rest of us are something else on the face of the earth that they would rather not see” (243)?
Chapter 11
-Dover shares a piece of her father’s advice, to “listen to the water talk” (285). What have you learned from listening to the natural world (or experiencing it with your other senses)? What do you think Bellingham Bay, the Sehome Arboretum, or other parts of the local ecology is telling you?
Other
-How do the three sets of photo plates (on pages 31, 47, 151, and 291) add dimension to Dover’s narrative? What can you draw from these pictures and what would require more research?
-How does the schedule from the Tulalip Indian Boarding School (297-302) resemble or differ from your current schedule as a Western student?
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