Vi Hilbert
The Savior of a Language
Our language is the way we contextualize all the things in our lives from what we see to what we feel. When a language is lost, part of the culture that it was attached to is also lost. Expressions particular to a people, oral traditions, names, customs, and heritage can also be lost. However, when language is preserved, traditions, customs, and the history of a society are also kept alive.
Vi Hilbert, the last fully fluent speaker of the Lushootseed language, understood this and worked tirelessly to ensure that her language and her people were not forgotten.
Vi Hilbert was born to Charlie and Louise Anderson on July 24, 1918 near Lyman, WA on the Upper Skagit River. Of the couple’s eight children, Vi was the only one to survive past the age of 3. Her father, Charlie Anderson, was a canoe maker who fished, logged, and led canoe-racing teams. Her mother, Louise Anderson, was described as “vivacious, dramatic, and generous.” (1)
The family lived in various places around the Upper Skagit River. Vi remembered, “Each place that we lived, my mother and dad spoke of the people who had lived here before and the things they left for us to remember about each place. I felt enriched living in so many places.” (1)
Vi’s parents spoke Lushootseed, but often spoke “Indian English” to her. She had to coax them to speak Lushootseed to her, which she enjoyed learning.
“Their Lushootseed was so much more beautiful, in my estimation ... So I continued to try to talk Lushootseed to them.” (1)
Because they moved so often, vi attended 15 different schools. The constant upheaval in her life was traumatic for her and she was unable to make long-term friends. Yet, Vi was dedicated to gaining the best education she could. In high school she chose to attend the Chemawa Indian Boarding School and then transferred to Franklin High School in Portland where she worked as a domestic while completing her studies.
Vi was married three times. Her first marriage was to Percy Woodcock in 1936. She married Baby Coy in 1942. And her final marriage was to Henry Donald “Donny” Hilbert in 1945.
Vi’s life was full of work. She held many jobs including berry picking, ironing, housework, running a pool hall and cafe, processing pears in a cannery, working as a stock clerk, a cookie wrapper for a Danish bakery, and electric welder at Todd’s Shipyards, waitressing at a Chinese restaurant, cashiering at a food wagon at Boeing, being a secretary at Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, and working as a hairdresser.
It was in 1967 while running a hair salon from her home that she got a call from linguist, Thom Hess. He had been working with a Nooksak elder, Louise George, to preserve the Lushootseed language. When they began translating a recording of Vi’s mother telling the Basket Ogress story, they called Vi.
Hess stated that Vi only agreed to help because she wanted to, “look into this white kid who was writing down in Skagit [Lushootseed] one of her own mother’s stories.” However, Vi was pleasantly surprised. Hess proved himself by pronouncing her traditional name correctly and then by demonstrating the writing system.
“She seemed intrigued by the fact that there was a system for spelling the language which had a symbol for every sound; and she was definitely interested when I told her that she could learn to read and write it in a month or less (which she later did). By the end of that Session with Louise George, it was arranged that Vi would come again to our next meeting and that she would begin to learn to read and write Skagit.”
Vi attended Hess’s class at the University of Washington in 1972. Her presence there reassured students that what was being taught was accurate. The following year, Vi taught a class.
Vi converted her hair salon into a work station. She and Hess wrote lesson plans, a textbook, and then a dictionary, as well as the first Haboo book of traditional stories. For the next fifteen years, Vi used these materials as she taught at the University of Washington and then at Evergreen College.
In addition to her teaching, Vi transcribed in Lushootseed and translated into English tape recordings made by Leon Metcalf. Metcalf had also feared the loss of Lushootseed wisdom and so traveled around Indian country to seek out and record the most fluent speakers. Hess described the importance of this work:
“I do not believe anyone can fully appreciate what Vi has accomplished with those Metcalf tapes. First of all, there are lots of them. Secondly, very many of them are in poor quality so that they are difficult to hear — sometimes well nigh impossible. Thirdly, the people recorded spoke sophisticated Lushootseed with lots of words unknown today. With all this Vi grappled indefatigably, listening over and over and over again. She scoured the entire region seeking out the best remaining speakers to listen to this and that passage in hopes that still more might be gleaned. No one else could have done this work and almost no one would have been willing to. Thanks to her Herculean efforts, much more history, grammar, lexicon and myth has been saved from oblivion than posterity had any right to expect. Only she knows at what effort this has been done” (Hess).
Through her tremendous volume of work, Vi ensured that the Lushootseed language and much of the culture’s stories, traditions, and wisdom was preserved for future generations. She also inspired those future generations to pursue their own studies, to respect the culture, to revere their ancestors, and to lift their spirits with knowledge.
There are many ways you can aid indigenous communities. One way is to help preserve their culture by saving their languages. Below is a list of organizations that do just that. Donations are always helpful, or you can even start learning an endangered language yourself. We can all take part in spreading the word about this crisis and take action to support the survival of endangered languages.
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
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(1) https://www.historylink.org/file/7130
(2) https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/vi-hilbert-revered-upper-skagit-elder-who-preserved-her-native-language-dies-at-age-90/
(3) http://www.skagitriverjournal.com/SCounty/Indians/Hilbert/ViHilbert-Obit2008.html
(4) http://news.unm.edu/news/saving-a-language-preserving-a-culture