Natalie Pascale Boisseau Reviews Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed
Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed
by Janet Yoder
reviewed by Natalie Pascale Boisseau
With her book, Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed, published in 2022, author Janet Yoder explores the world of Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert—an Upper Skagit Indian Tribal Elder in Washington state. We discover her life, her humor, her traditional wisdom as a guide to navigate an everchanging reality, and her life purpose which was to uplift the human spirit.
With a broad stroke of her brush and intimate storytelling, Janet Yoder writes about Vi Hilbert’s contribution to safeguarding and preserving the Lushootseed language; how the language of the people of the Salish Coast is connected with culture, a deep sense of belonging to the land, and to spiritual life. Through Vi’s life story Yoder documents how the stories are kept alive and connected to Spirit, which pervades the human experience, the animal realm, and nature and places.
Where the Language Lives is a collection of essays, stories, recollections—many beads woven together and creating an arc hinged together with smaller stories. Yoder uses different narrative structures: braided, fragments, mosaics, transformative, or simply told. The themes and metaphors overlap, creating a necklace, one story leading to the next. The book can be re-read in many different orders, allowing one to find layered meanings. Yoder manifests herself as a good student of Vi’s, showing us what she has learned from her teacher, while respecting the fact she is not native-born to the Lushootseed-speaking people and their culture.
Janet Yoder writes about Vi Hilbert’s contribution to safeguarding and preserving the Lushootseed language; how the language of the people of the Salish Coast is connected with culture. . .
Her book is a living demonstration—carrying its own stories, living plants and landscapes, its multifaceted meanings, its revelations and inscrutabilities—which the reader follows at his or her own rate of absorption. The book is also a basket of stories and resources: tracking Vi Hilbert’s life, with all her challenges too, as she is credited for saving a nearly dormant language, and how she inspired teams working at her side—elders, volunteers and scholars, including the author.
Janet Yoder first met Vi Hilbert in 1978, when she enrolled in her class at the University of Washington where Vi was teaching the Indigenous language Lushootseed which was her native language from infancy. Also spoken by Chief Seattle (the city of Seattle was named after him), Lushootseed in 1978 was on the brink of disappearance. With the help of a group of tribal members, students such as author Yoder, and scholars, the language has resurged like an underground creek resurfacing in the modern world. Vi Hilbert was 60 years old when Janet met her, and for the next 30 years Janet was a student, then a companion and friend, to the Skagit elder, until she died in 2008.
A lineage
To make a living, Vi Hilbert ran a beauty shop off her kitchen in her house on Des Moines Way South in Seattle. Gradually, from her dining room table, Vi started transcribing and translating recordings from spoken Lushootseed. The oral language underwent a major transition into a new written form, with its own orthography using forty-six characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Needing more space, Vi eventually moved the office into her hair salon next to the sink and beauty products. “The Brain Room,” as it became known, included an early microcomputer, Terak, to save, edit, reformat, and print from files in English into Lushootseed. Vi was 65 years old and recovering from her first aneurism.
It is from this room that Vi spearheaded numerous projects and inspired her students. She believed that the right people to do the work will show up, “that each dancer has his or her helper—no one does it alone,” reports Yoder.
Where the Language Lives takes both native and non-native readers on a journey, documenting the ways Vi Hilbert taught and preserved the language with the stories—which inform the people of ways of living and seeing the world, and also how their words shape world views for hundreds of years. For many of us, non-natives, the book may quench a thirst; it makes a hungry guest feel at home in the openness of the unknown, yearning to belong to a much layered landscape.
Janet Yoder mentions in passing the special birthday celebrations for Vi that lasted for days. Her community, her students, and her family, gathered together for many summers for one long storytelling event. A few years before Vi died, in the summer of 2005, I was invited through another student of Vi’s, Laura Simms, to attend the gathering. The festivities were held in the Long House at the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, across the Swinomish Channel—separating them from the mainland and the town of La Conner—where the waters run very fast or slow, depending on the tides. Tables full of shared food dishes were pushed along the walls. Children running around were called to order. We all sat in a large circle, and from her chair, sometimes with her eyes closed, her presence vivid, Vi listened to her collaborators, her students, her family, and to the storytellers who had been learning with her from across the continent.
The best homage a student can offer to the teacher is to make a gift of returning the story, to tell it in a way that is true to the teller—genuine and manifesting insight and connection to the story. Vi called a name, and the person stood to speak, lifting our spirits.
Yoder does an amazing job guiding us through a festival of multifaceted stories, steeped in this tradition of storytelling, allowing the reader to enter multiple realms and the timelessness of the presence of Vi as a storyteller. Vi’s stories weave into each other: River Talk, Rich Old Indian, The Bone Game, Burning at Nooksack, Story Places, Finding Spirit, Wrapped in a Blanket, Basket Song, and so many others. Through these stories we learn so much about Vi Hilbert—stories that can change one’s life, about connections to ancestors, about songs of belonging, the heart of drumming, the meaning of gift, and how wealth manifests as the quality of the living.
Yoder writes about how Vi and her life were guided by spirit, and how she inspired others. Vi opened her heart to people of other faiths. She believed there were “many paths leading to spirit.” Through Yoder’s eyes, we see how Vi was a spirit seeker. In “Story Places,” Vi offers a map to find places in the Puget Sound area, where time and story overlap. In “Wrapped in a Blanket,” Yoder describes the meaning of blanket: when it is given in periods of “vulnerable time, when spirit world and our world is so close, it could kiss.”
Old Canoe Is the New Canoe
The essay “Old Canoe Is the New Canoe” appears central to me as a powerful expression of the legacy of Vi Hilbert, and the ability of Yoder to capture the paradox of communication from the ancient to the modern, and how all the stories as sources of knowledge and ways can interface in the present times.
The old ways unravel before our eyes in this essay. When people die, they may “travel between worlds in a canoe that held their body. . . .” The spirit is connected to something as practical as a canoe for transportation. Yoder weaves her complex reflections of Vi Hilbert’s life with the clarity that Vi conveyed through her teachings. Vi’s father was also a canoe carver, carving out of cedar—adding the knowledge from ethnobotany that is pervasive with the sense of place and nature. A whole culture is part of the journey, as a canoe voyage is something else altogether; the sense of danger becomes a source of knowledge and wisdom; the riding, a philosophy of life—becoming the passage into worlds.
The narrative in the essay moves into how information and stories are also placed into new canoes flowing down a river. Consider the recording machine: every story and teaching in Vi Hilbert’s life went into this canoe, like Aunt Susie’s stories and teachings also recorded years earlier in her native Lushootseed.
“No doubt all this will go into another new canoe, one just at the horizon, a canoe we yet don’t know. But we know it is coming, just as Aunt Susie knew that a new canoe was coming, the one she was waiting for all her life, “writes Yoder. She quotes Vi Hilbert saying: “In order for cultural information to travel, it had to have a way to go forward.” In our modern days, traveling in canoes allows a personal quest, a pilgrimage to ancestors’ times, the slowing down with the landscape and nature. The same canoes carry the culture forward to inform the future.
Janet Yoder has gifted us with the living legacy and complex telling of Vi Hilbert’s story, and has generously connected us with the perspectives of Indigenous culture. She has described the generational changes in Vi’s life; the richness, and contexts she grew up in; the paths shared with her family, her community, and those who have studied and worked with her, and who continue her work. The book contains eight pages of resources and references, in addition to the gems of information layered into the fabric of the pages.
The Foreword to Where the Languages Lives is co-written by Vi Hilbert’s family: her grand-daughter Jill LaPointe, tsisqʷux̌ʷaɫ, who accompanied Vi in her endeavors, and great-granddaughter Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, also a writer and poet, who also learned at her side. Sasha writes: “Reading these pages brought Vi Hilbert back to us.”
Yoder’s book goes beyond an homage or a testament or a documentary. It embodies the living spiral of the trajectory of a life into the heart, where the language lives and transforms. It is a new canoe that takes us into the future. One that Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert might have certainly enjoyed riding in.
Natalie Pascale Boisseau is a bilingual Québec writer from Montréal now living in Washington State. She is currently writing “Exiles and Migrations in the Landscape of Maternal Suicide,” a memoir on finding refuge in the midst of storms. She is recipient of a 2023 4Culture Project Grant. Her stories appear in Isele Magazine, Crab Creek Review, and This Light Called Darkness, a Raven Chronicle Anthology. Her life’s work has also included working for Cirque du Soleil, being a former copyright attorney, practicing as an acupuncturist, and saving a forest near her new home in Lake Forest Park, Washington..
Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed
by Janet Yoder
ISBN 978-1-954854-26-0
Girl Friday Books
https://girlfridaybooks.com/catalog
https://girlfridaybooks.com/titles/where-the-language-lives?rq=Janet%20Yo
2022, paperback, 240 pages, $16.95