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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 15, 2004)
Smoke Signals 5 NOVEMBER IS, 2004 93rd Birthday Party Brings Tribal Elder To Town By Ron Karten When Tribal Elder Elsie Cummings, of Tacoma, turned 93 recently, her grandson, Randy Dugger, invited her and his mom, Dolores Dugger, to the casino for a little celebration. Dugger is a Tribal member and Director of Guest Services for the Spirit Mountain Casino. "It was real nice," Cummings said. "We had champagne." To set the stage correctly, Cummings is no shrinking-with-age violet. She is still quite active. She loves to dance and at our meeting was anticipating meeting a new Mr. Right. Here's how the discussion went: "She would go dancing every night if she could," said daughter Dolores Dugger. "She's looking for a boy friend." "Oh, I am not," said Cummings. "Well, just somebody I could go out for dinner with or dancing." Then she added, "I've been taken for sixty or sev enty." She also is a devoted Seattle Mari ners fan. And not just a passive fan. "They got rid of all their good players," she said during the interview. "I turned them off the last two times I watched them." She also is a fan of North wood an tique dishes and what she calls 'Little Mudmen.' These are Chinese figures made out of mud. She is so attracted to Asian arts and antiques that she wonders if somewhere in a past life, she was Asian. "We go antiquing once a month," said Dugger, who lives nearby her still in dependent mom. She does watercolor painting and crocheting, too. She loves flowers. She worked for awhile at a cannery and also at a bulb ranch. She studies his tory. THE FAMILY STORIES Looking back, Cummings' grand mother was Sarah Hudson. The Hudsons, Cummings said, were big in Friday Harbor. (The Mitchell Bay Band of Indians lived there.) "We had buggies with the fringe on top," she said. Sarah Hudson was Kalapooia, ac cording to her grandson, Randy Dugger, and met William Jones, a Lummi, at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem. They had many children. Later, she divorced Jones and married his brother, according to Dugger, and then died while still young after a battle with tuberculosis. "I remember her but I wish I had a picture of her," said Cummings. In 1954, when the Grand Ronde Tribes were terminated by the federal government, she remembered looking without luck for the records of her grandmother. The Grand Ronde Tribal Cultural Resources Department, repository of the Tribe's photographs and artifacts, has as yet no record of Sarah Hudson. Following Hudson's death, said Randy Dugger, "there was some sort of family disagreement over her estate that sent everybody in different direc tions. So, I think that she didn't see her relatives a lot." Not, at least, un til Restoration. She grew up on McNeil Island and in Roy, Washington. "Her father worked for the U.S. government, so they lived in white communities," said Dugger. Hudson's children included Cummings mother, Grace Jones, and an uncle, Bill Jones. Cummings recalled that her mom attended the Chemawa Indian School in Salem. During her early life, Cummings lived on McNeil Island. When Cummings was very little, she said, "My father took us away from my mother. Kidnapped us." She recalled two separate incidents. "He took us and put us into the Cushman Indian School (in Tacoma). Elsie was less than five years old at the time. She was separated from her brother at the school, she said, and "I Cummings. Well, excepting her aunt Marguerite Horsfall (known as Babe'), who belonged to the Steilacoom Tribe. Cummings married first in 1927 at the age of 15 to Cecil Webber. Webber was Dolores Dugger's father. Cummings left him in 1931, though the family stayed in contact over the years. In 1935, she married Frank Goodwin, whose grandfather was the first County Commissioner of Pierce County in Washington. Goodwin is the grandfather that Randy Dugger remembers best. "My father was in college. . . I spent a lot of time at Grandma's house when mom needed to work and dad needed time to study." "I got to do a lot of stuff with my "' '''';' , " f " -S 'if j I - ?' ". f - " " SEE Tribal Elder Elsie Cummings would cry when I went to bed." Her daughter recalled, "She had nightmares for years. When somebody would knock at the door, she'd run into the clothes closet and hide. She was afraid (her father) was coming back. Cummings said that her brother broke a leg at the school, and that ev ery chance the siblings got, they would meet secretly "around the corner and love each other." A few years later, her father took the children again. This time, he dropped them with a family on McNeil Island. The feds ran a prison on the island at the time, and by then, Cummings was six or seven. She remembered an attempted prison break "through the orchards and down to the beach.." "The sirens went off and us kids saw the body from the beach," she said. The prisoner had drowned in his attempted escape. Later, in her early teen years, Cummings and her brother shared the pitching for a local baseball team. "There were not enough boys," she said, explaining her participation. Dolores Dugger recalled that her mom used to take lunch in old lard buckets, and from time to time, she showed up to school with a bucket full oflard. Cummings recalled few meaningful Indian experiences in her early life. "I don't think I knew any (Indians)," said grandfather Frank used to take me fishing. When we stayed there, it was grandma and grandpa that made pan cakes. It was kind of a rural and safe place. He remembers they "had a garden, compost, burn barrels I have a lot of memories of those things. I grew up in the city so they were novel things. We got to pick apples and play and grandma used to make root beer and we got to do that." "She was a very kind and patient and loving grandmother for me." After Goodwin died in 1972, Elsie married her third husband, Charlie Cummings, a foot doctor whose grand father had been in Parliament in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Cummings took Elsie everywhere. "He bought a small mobile home," Cummings recalled, which they took across the country, up into Nova Scotia where Charlie was born, and later, in a caravan of 45 rigs, they went through Mexico together. "We've been in every state in these United States," she said, quoting her third husband, who according to her daughter was 'the love of her life.' In Arizona, Cummings learned to do the hula and tap dancing, but her love of dancing started much earlier, at age 11. A friend of her father had a pho nograph player and she remembered him saying, "Let's dance!" "She said she was born to dance," her daughter recalled. Charlie who managed a lumber mill in Roy, Washington for Weyerhauser after he lost his hear ing and left the medical field - was a straightforward kind of guy. The sec ond time he came to see Cummings, he said, "I'm comin' a courtin'." And twenty three years later, when he was dying, he said, "We had a pretty good 23 years together, didn't we?" "I wish I had told him that it was the best 23 years of my life," said Cummings. RESTORATION IN THE LIFE OF ONE FAMILY Since Restoration, Cummings has joined family at Grand Ronde pow wows and other events. It also provided the impetus for Cummings to search for her family roots. "She used to talk about her Indian background," said Randy Dugger, "but she didn't have a lot of detailed infor mation. We knew we were part In dian and we knew a little about the Lummi side of the family. "In the late 1950s, she was looking for her Indian heritage," said Dugger. "I remember when I was nine, we had some conversations about establishing relations with the Grand Ronde Tribe." Cummings knew that possibilities were afoot. "But there weren't any records avail able," said Randy Dugger. "We had lost touch with the Jones family. It had gone its own way. "We didn't reconnect with any of them until the late 1980s. Through a series of coincidences, we got a hold of Tom Jones (Cummings' first cousin), who was working for the Tribe at that time. "We had scattered records of her enrolled at Chemawa, and in BIA records, but the challenge was to con nect all of the dots. The BIA office in Bellevue was not an easy trip. You had to drive to the office and ask to see the files. "When she finally got a hold of Tom, he was able to give her copies of a lot of records that she was missing. That was truly a big moment for her. When we went on that search, it was some thing that my brother initiated, an attempt to help her fill in some gaps that she really wanted to know but hadn't been able to do on her own." Tom Jones's funeral was the first time that Cummings got to meet a lot of the members of the Jones family. "My grandmother had photos that they didn't have. There was a lot of shar ing and reconnecting at that time." "I hope she conveyed how proud she is to have reconnected," said Randy Dugger. "The financial help has meant a lot in her quality of life. She's been very grateful and very proud." Today, thanks to the Tribe, she said, her life is much easier. She recently had successful cataract surgery and is looking forward to life at 100 and beyond. She attributed her longevity to God, but her daughter asked her the ques tion in another way. "What do you attribute your long life to?" she said, and then finished the question to the reporter: "other than being spoiled rot ten by husbands who adored her."
