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
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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."