Janet Campbell Hale, “The Only Good Indian” (1993)

“It has always seemed to me that the heaviest penalty the servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company were obliged to pay for the wealth and authority advancement gave them was the wives they were expected to marry and the progeny they should rear. What greater happiness to the father, what greater benefit to mankind than noble children. I never could understand how such men as John McLoughlin and James Douglas could endure the thought of having their name and honors descend to a degenerate posterity. Surely they were of sufficient intelligence to know that by giving their children Indian mothers, their own Scotch, Irish, or English blood would be greatly debased. . . . They were doing all concerned a great wrong. Perish all the Hudson’s Bay Company thrice over, I would say, sooner than bring upon my offspring such foul corruption, sooner than bring into being offspring of such a curse.”

―H. H. BANCROFT

The History of Oregon―1884

One of my earliest memories is of being taken to Oregon City to visit McLoughlin House, which was Oregon’s first museum.

Oregon City, just south of the metropolis of Portland, Oregon, came before Portland―Portland grew from it. My great-great-grandfather, Dr. John McLoughlin, founded

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Oregon City when he built his last house and his lumber mill there. Today Oregon City blends into Portland. McLoughlin Boulevard connects the two.

McLoughlin House is a magnificent, two-story wood-frame house, a near-mansion. It looks as though it came from the East, as though it could have belonged to a New England sea captain. But it is a Northwest house and it belonged to the man who, as chief factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded Fort Vancouver (which is just north of what is today Portland, just across the Columbia River). Before Fort Vancouver there was nothing here. A valley. A river. Woods. Wilderness. The small city of Vancouver, Washington, grew from the fort.

“Don’t touch,” my mother warned me. “Don’t touch a thing, you hear?” Not even the maroon-velvet-covered ropes that kept tourists from entering open bedrooms and restricting them to the narrow strip of red carpet that ran down the hallways and across the big rooms. “Look. Don’t Touch! Don’t let go of my hand until we get out of here.” Her tone told me she meant what she said.

The house contained a few things that had belonged to the McLoughlins: his writing table, a lacquered Chinese cabinet, a grand piano (for some reason our guide told us the piano had come via ship from Boston but didn’t mention where the other things had come from), an Oriental rug, a beautiful long dining table with twelve chairs, each place set with the McLoughlins’ elegant china and silver as if the family and their guests were about to sit down to dinner. All the rest of the furniture (like the high-canopied beds with the little stools people had to step onto to get into bed) hadn’t belonged to the family, but were authentic period pieces. We

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were supposed to imagine that this was, more or less, the way the house had looked when the McLoughlins had lived in it, that this was the kind of furniture they would have chosen. My mother told me the people who had built this fine house for their later years and who lived in it for a long time and both died here were our relations. We were their descendants. Of course I didn’t get it.

Did I understand that Gram, Mom’s ma, was my grandmother? And that Gram’s husband, who died before I was born, was my grandfather? Sure. Mom’s dad, Sullivan, of whom Mom was so fond. My grandfather. Sure. I got that. I knew what grandparents were.

Well, these people, whose house this had been, were Gram Sullivan’s grandparents. Gram’s grandpa had been a very, very important man. Dr. John McLoughlin, who came from a place called Quebec, was chief factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company a long time ago. This was sort of the same as being governor, my mother said. I didn’t know what a governor was exactly. I was just a preschool child. So I didn’t have an inkling what McLoughlin had been. Actually he had more power, as chief factor, than any governor.

In those days the Northwest Territory stretched from California to Alaska. The Territory was held in joint occupancy by the United States and Great Britain. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the quasi-government, and as chief factor, Dr. McLoughlin was its head. His word was law in the Northwest Territory. It was his domain. He was called King of the Columbia and Emperor of the Northwest (and posthumously, officially, the Father of Oregon). He became chief factor in 1821 and ruled for a twenty-one-year period that came to be known as “The Age of McLoughlin.” That

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important man was my gram’s grandpa, and his wife, Margaret (my mother’s name too), was from a place called Ontario, and she was my gram’s gram.

I held my mother’s hand and looked up at their portraits, not understanding what these people were to me.

Dr. John McLoughlin (Mom and Gram insisted on the proper, Canadian, pronunciation: “McGLOCKlin,” rather than the American “McLAWFlin”) certainly looked formidable in his portrait, painted when he was in middle age. He was a powerfully built man (he stood six feet four inches tall―a giant of a man in his day―which was 1784-1854) with a stern countenance and dressed in a formal black suit. His hair, a long, wild white mane, flowed well past his shoulders. He was famous for his hair. I would learn much later that it was said to have turned white overnight when his canoe overturned on Lake Michigan during the Great Fur War, when he was in his twenties. The Indians of the Territory called him “The White-Headed Eagle.”

Margaret McLoughlin is an old woman in her portrait, which is a photograph, not a painting. She is also wearing black. Maybe because she was a widow then. Maybe old women in her day always wore black. Her hair, though she is in her seventies, is still mostly dark. She wears it parted in the middle and neatly pinned back. Mrs. McLoughlin is dressed like a white woman. But she is not white. She is an Indian.

She was a Chippewa, my mother told me. “Doctor McLoughlin was not ashamed of her,” my mother said, as though it were mighty big of him not to have been.

Not ashamed of her? I studied her portrait. Solemn. Sad eyes. An Indian woman. What was there about her to be ashamed of? (My mother said things like that sometimes. I

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didn’t like it.) I resented my great-great-grandfather then, the eminent Dr. John McLoughlin, disliked him even. How dare he have such a condescending attitude towards his own wife? I resented Dr. McLoughlin as if my mother’s attitudes were his.

There is another memory that goes with the one of our visit to Oregon City:

“White people respect good Indians,” my mother said rather casually as she sat darning socks and mending small tears in our clothes. I was about four at the time. I sat on the floor beside her chair, coloring in my (probably Carmen Miranda) coloring book. “Good Indians are clean and neat, hardworking and sober,” she said. I wanted to get away from her. I hated it when she talked like that and I could not, even to myself, articulate my feelings because I was too young. I couldn’t get away because it was raining. She wouldn’t let me out. No escape. “White people look down on the other kind, the bad ones, the drunken, lazy louts.” I stopped coloring and went to a window and watched the rain pour. Mom’s voice droned on.

She would often instruct me on being a good Indian, the kind white people approve of (and sometimes, when I was a little older, on being the kind of woman men respect). I would feel the resentment rise in my blood. Why should I care? Why don’t they worry about being the sort of person I respect? Why should I have to be the one to live up to someone else’s expectations? Anyway trying to be a “good Indian” was a futile endeavor. Several years before Gram Sullivan was born, General Sheridan had made his famous remark regarding the old good Indian being a dead Indian. I didn’t care to be a good Indian. . . .

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. . . . Spokane, even today, is a sort of wild-West kind of town. Country western music is, and has always been, very big in the region and lots of men wear cowboy boots and drive pickup trucks with gun racks. And it’s conservative. Very conservative. It’s surrounded by five Indian reservations (including my own, which is about sixty or seventy miles east of the city. The first Kootenay rez is about one hundred miles north.). If you are Indian in Spokane, you are always aware of it. There is not a great multitude of people from many diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds (I don’t recall ever seeing a black person in Spokane until I saw one walking down the street one day when I was thirty years old.). In Spokane no one ever mistakes me for Hispanic or Middle Eastern. No one there has ever asked me, as I’ve often been asked in New York and San Francisco, “What is your ethnic background?” They know what it is.

Even today, in Spokane, Indians pretty much keep to themselves and whites to themselves, though there are peo-

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ple on both sides striving for racial harmony. But there’s a word that was used to describe an Indian, a “dirty”, denigrating word, sort of like nigger. The word is Siwash. My parents first told me about the word and told me I should just ignore it if I heard it, that I should feel sorry for a person who would say it because such a person has a bad heart and is ignorant.

It was sort of like squaw, but worse. Siwash. It had the power to cut like a knife. “Dirty Siwash.” The last time I heard it was on the street in Spokane when I was thirty-one. A group of young white men in cowboy boots who had obviously been drinking passed me. One of them turned his head and looked back (but didn’t slow his pace) and muttered, “Siwash. Goddamned Siwash.” I was startled. I’d even forgotten such a word existed. It still had the power, after all those years, to cut like a knife.

That was what my mother’s first husband called her, she told me when I was older. Despite her beauty. Despite her white looks. Nobody could tell she wasn’t white if they didn’t know. Her husband knew. And he was one of those people my parents told me about. “Squaw,” my mother’s first husband would call her when he felt mean, which was a lot of the time. “Stupid Siwash squaw.” The psychological wound he suffered when she left him for a full-blood must have been deep.

So Mom had had to suffer racial slurs, too, as I had when I was growing up. Probably not just at the hands of her first husband either. She and her white-looking sisters, after all, couldn’t hide their mother very easily (nor, I think, did they wish to hide or deny her).

I didn’t know Gram Sullivan before her hair turned white

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and don’t remember her before she was an invalid and her daughters began to keep her hair cut short and neat and easy to care for. My mother and aunts said Gram’s hair had been thick, blue-black and smooth as satin. She often wore it, when she wasn’t working (and it had to be pinned up), hanging loose. It fell nearly to her waist.

Gram Sullivan’s hair was like black satin. The looks of a full-blood. But not the soul of one. Not like Poulee, my other grandmother, who spoke not a word of English, never wore a pair of shoes in her life and was nothing if not secure in her idea of herself, her acceptance of herself as an Indian woman. Not a Siwash. Not a squaw. An Indian woman.

My mother identified very strongly with her Irishness. Maybe because she looked Irish. Maybe because she was her Irish grandparents’ favorite person in all the world. Her happiest childhood memories were of staying with them on their farm. Mom knew all about County Clare, where they had come from, and she could speak with an Irish brogue just like theirs. She did speak with an Irish brogue, a little, every St. Patrick’s Day.

Mom enjoyed the social life of the railroad camps too. Feast days. Parties. Dances. Even a wake was a social event. Once, Mom won a local beauty contest. I don’t know what the title was, but it was little like homecoming queen in that the railroad men all voted for the girl they believed the fairest one of all. It was a highly coveted honor. Mom didn’t expect to be chosen―partly because she didn’t believe she was beautiful, ever, no matter what anyone said, and because she was years younger than the girls, of marriageable age, who did expect to be chosen.

They were all gathered at this yearly event, a party and

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dance that children as well as adults attended. The time came to announce the homecoming queen (or whatever it was called). They called out the name: “Maggie Sullivan.” That was Mom! The older girls, the girls who would be queen, were shocked. One of them wept. But Maggie Sullivan was happy and she would never forget that time, not ever.

Gram Sullivan was the only nonwhite wife in that society. She didn’t participate in any of it, Mom said. She had no friends. When her husband and children went to the wakes and parties and dances and feasts, Gram stayed home alone. She had things to do, she would say, you all go ahead and have a good time. Or she would have a headache. Or she would want to relax and enjoy a little peace and quiet. Mom said she thought Gram felt inferior because she wasn’t Irish. I wonder if this was true. Did the woman who washed so much dirty Irish laundry that year her husband was disabled feel inferior because she wasn’t Irish? . . .

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Janet Campbell Hale, “The Only Good Indian,” in Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (New York: Random House, 1993), 109-13, 118-21.