Living to Tell the Story: The Legacy and Future of the Lushootseed Language

In 1967, Vi Hilbert set out to save a language — today, her legacy lives on

Vi Hilbert poses for a portrait photo. In 1967, Hilbert began attempting to save the Lushootseed language, an effort that has continued through 2023. // Photo courtesy of Jill La Pointe

Written by Olivia Palmer

The sun glimmered through the groves of cedars surrounding Jill La Pointe when I met her on the porch of her sister’s quiet cabin outside of La Conner, Washington.

When I asked La Pointe to describe her grandmother, Vi Hilbert, she didn’t immediately respond. Leaning her head back, a rich trace of laughter danced across her face. Her lips parted into a faint smile as she gazed out toward the trees.

“Oh my goodness. She was incredible.”

Few would argue with La Pointe’s assessment of her grandmother. Born in 1918, Vi Hilbert was raised in the language and traditions of the Upper Skagit Tribe, spending her winters attending longhouse gatherings and her summers picking berries in Canada.

In 1967, she began a journey of nearly single-handedly saving the Lushootseed language.

“It was her dream that everybody that lived in Lushootseed-speaking territory would know the language, would have the opportunity to hear it and even speak it,” La Pointe said. “The word ‘can’t’ was not in her vocabulary, and she said the word ‘can’t’ did not exist in the Lushootseed language either — so everything was possible.”

Lushootseed is a language of the Coast Salish Peoples, spoken from Olympia to the Skagit Watershed and from the Puget Sound to the Cascade Mountain Range. La Pointe estimates that thousands of people can understand at least elements of the language — but when Hilbert first began her work, there were likely fewer than 200 living Lushootseed speakers. A severe lack of education, combined with the pervasive legacy of boarding schools, made Lushootseed revitalization an uphill battle.

According to an investigative report released by the United States Department of the Interior, the United States operated or supported 408 boarding schools between 1819 and 1969. These boarding schools intentionally targeted American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children, with the goal of assimilation and territorial dispossession. Schools often forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes, stripped them of their traditional names, cut their hair and discouraged or banned the use of traditional languages and cultural practices.

Michele Balagot, director of the Tulalip Tribes’ Lushootseed Language Department, said her own grandmother endured the trauma of the boarding school system, where she and other children would be beaten if they spoke in Lushootseed. When Balagot went home and spoke in her native language, her grandmother always understood, but never spoke the words back.

For as much support as Hilbert received in reviving Lushootseed, La Pointe said she also experienced a certain amount of pushback from community members who were afraid of what might happen if they shared their language and culture.

“It broke her heart when her own people weren’t available to make the time to help out,” La Pointe said, “and oftentimes it was non-native people that had funds and had time to help with the tremendous amount of hours of labor that went into things like entering data into a computer.”

The road to revitalization began with a set of tapes of Tulalip elders speaking Lushootseed, recorded by Leon Metcalf from 1950 to 1954. For years, the tapes sat untouched.

Hilbert changed that.

After over a decade, Hilbert found herself in a partnership with Thom Hess, a leading linguist at the University of British Columbia. Together, the two worked to create the first-ever Lushootseed dictionary. Hilbert spent thousands of hours listening to, transcribing and translating the Leon Metcalf tapes, and went on to teach Lushootseed at the University of Washington for 15 years.

La Pointe said part of the reason her grandmother was able to achieve so much was her remarkably high expectations. Hilbert consistently instilled a sense of respect and responsibility in her.

“That was the main thing that she impressed upon me over and over growing up, even from the time I was little, was being responsible and being your best,” La Pointe said. “She used to always say that her parents would tell her she’s the best — she’s no better than anybody else, but she’s the best.”

Former students and longtime friends Janet Yoder and Robby Rudine were struck by Hilbert’s high expectations too. They were also struck by the sheer amount of laughter that echoed through her classroom.

“She created a world in her classroom,” Yoder said. “In Denny Hall, you didn’t feel like you were on campus anymore. You felt like you were somehow being welcomed into something more intimate.”

After just a few days of attending the class, Hilbert invited the couple into her home, where they quickly joined the growing community of volunteers helping her complete her life’s work. Gatherings and work sessions were always fueled by a giant thermos of Hilbert’s unfailingly strong coffee, which Yoder described as utterly black.

“That powered a lot of fun,” Rudine recalled.

Thanks to Hilbert’s storytelling and research, Lushootseed education has increased by leaps and bounds, with groups across the Pacific Northwest — including the Lushootseed Research Nonprofit that Hilbert founded and La Pointe is now the president of — working to revitalize the language.

Teachers through the Tulalip Tribes teach Lushootseed at the tribes’ early learning academy, Quilceda Elementary, Totem Middle School and Heritage and Marysville Pilchuck High Schools, as well as at the college level. The tribes’ curriculum focused solely on words at one point, but Balagot said they’re working to expand that.

“I always thought, in my mind, if we’re going to try to produce speakers, we need to teach more than just words,” Balagot said. “Language and culture go hand in hand. If you don’t have one, you don’t have the other.”

For almost three years, the tribes have been developing a preschool curriculum that incorporates elements of culture into language learning, including salmon ceremonies, regalia, dances and songs, gathering cedar and harvesting berries to make jam. To Balagot, the practices and the language are intertwined to the point of being inseparable.

Lushootseed is a spiritual language, La Pointe said, down to the pronunciation of its individual words. x̌ʷəlč, the word for saltwater, mimics the sound of a wave hitting a rocky shore. Baqʷuʔ, the word for snow, likens itself to the sound of crunching feet on snow.

The meaning of Lushootseed phrases also speaks to their interconnectedness with cultural values.

A typical greeting in Lushootseed, ʔəsčal čəxʷ, might be understood as “hello,” but La Pointe said it more directly translates to “how are you?” The word siʔab roughly translates to “noble person.” But in Lushootseed, La Pointe said, all people are referred to as siʔab.

“If you think about treating all people as having worth and value, all people are treated as siʔab,” she said. “Instead of tearing people down, we’re always thinking of lifting people up and instilling them with that confidence, from the moment that they come into this world, and throughout life.”

Despite the deep spiritual significance of Lushootseed, Balagot said it’s often challenging to maintain interest in the language because it doesn’t have the same “practical” uses that English does, like when applying for a job. La Pointe admits there was even a point where she shared some of this same skepticism in teaching her own children Lushootseed.

For Michelle Myles, a Tulalip Tribes Lushootseed teacher at Heritage High School, part of the solution is reminding her students what Lushootseed means for them personally.

“This is yours … and nobody can take that away from you,” Myles said. “This is something that you should embrace and be proud of, because when you speak, you’re speaking for your ancestors that weren’t allowed to speak at one time, or the people that can no longer speak today and wish that they could. It means a lot.”

With no living first-language speakers, revitalizing Lushootseed is more important now than ever. As researchers and educators envision a future for the language, they balance tradition and innovation.

Tami Hohn, an assistant teaching professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a member of the Puyallup Tribe, said her hope is that her students remain true to the language.

“I listen for every sound, every stressor, the dialect or the fluency bar levels,” Hohn said. “We cannot lose the glottalization, we cannot lose the full words and phrases. … No matter how large they are, it’s not too difficult to learn.”

But Myles recognizes that another aspect of engaging the next generation is allowing the language to evolve. Some words, like “cellphone” or “computer”, don’t exist in the original language.

“You have to be creative and invent those words,” Myles said. “We’re still taking a root from the old Salishan language and putting it together with lexical suffixes or prefixes on the front to make it a new word that they can adapt to.”

Myles has captured the attention of students at Heritage High School by helping them create new slang. The words aren’t traditional — but they are encouraging kids to keep speaking Lushootseed.

“The ownership in that is wonderful, because then those are the words that they can use,” Myles said.

La Pointe believes a combination of adaptability and reverence for tradition is part of the path forward.

“Grandma used to say we need to become like the cedar: to be flexible and bend, but not break,” La Pointe said. “And it’s true, you know, in life you do have to be willing to be flexible to adapt to change, to adapt to different circumstances and situations without breaking. It’s just part of living.”

By the end of our interview, the afternoon light that initially dappled La Pointe’s porch had softened to a hazy dusk. As she looked back out at the trees, silvery-black hair falling generously at her shoulders, you could still recognize the memories playing behind her eyes.

La Pointe is living in a time where she can go to the local movie theater in Tacoma and hear a Lushootseed land acknowledgment. She’s heard snippets of Lushootseed spoken on Grey’s Anatomy. She sees the flourishing efforts of Lushootseed educators.

Thanks to her grandmother and those carrying on Vi Hilbert’s legacy, this is only the beginning.

“Just imagine,” she said, “if you had 50 people — even 20 people — that took on the language and culture with the passion and energy and life that she brought to it, what we could accomplish.”