Library celebrates Vi Hilbert, legendary Lushootseed linguist

An overflow crowd was on the same page with author Janet Yoder at La Conner Swinomish Library last Friday.

Nearly 50 people attended Yoder's one-hour presentation honoring the legacy of revered late tribal linguist Vi Hilbert, who made preservation of the Lushootseed language and culture her life's mission.

"We're so thrilled with this turnout," library director Jean Markert told the Weekly News afterward. "It's pretty incredible."

Incredible is also a word often used to describe Hilbert, whom Yoder met in 1978 while enrolled in Hilbert's Lushootseed class at the University of Washington.

"She became a living treasure for Washington state and the United States," Yoder said of Hilbert, who passed away in 2008 at age 90 in La Conner.

During her long life, Hilbert worked variously at Todd Shipyards as a welder, for The Boeing Co. and as a restaurateur.

At the Seattle shipyard, Yoder said the petite Hilbert was valued for her nimble fingers and fine motor skills. Those traits made her much in demand as a welder, a real-life example of the "Rosie the Riveter" generation of women who shouldered industrial jobs during World War II.

"Vi always worked," Yoder, author of "Where the Language Lives," said admiringly.

Yoder drew from 30 years of friendship and interviews with Hilbert to develop the book, a tribute to her mentor's quest to preserve Lushootseed – previously referred to as Puget Sound Salish – the traditional language of tribal groups from the Skagit River south to Squaxin, near present-day Olympia.

Yoder said that as Hilbert entered middle age, she received her calling to preserve and teach the Lushootseed tradition in which she was raised by her Upper Skagit parents.

According to Yoder, Hilbert got encouragement from noted scholar Thom Hess, who earned his doctorate at the University of Washington with a dissertation on the grammatical structure of the Snohomish dialect of Lushootseed.

After attending a Lushootseed class at the UW, Hilbert was later asked to teach it. That's when Yoder arrived for required non-English language credits for her degree program.

"My academic advisor had suggested I take Arabic or Japanese," Yoder recalled.

Shortly after meeting Hilbert, Yoder knew she had made the right choice. Yoder was immediately inspired by Hilbert's commitment to preserve Lushootseed.

"I became a volunteer for Vi," Yoder said. "She wanted us to understand her drive to preserve Lushootseed."

An only child, Hilbert grew up listening to her parents speaking Lushootseed, for which each sound has a symbol.

"She said that 'maybe if I had siblings I wouldn't have listened as much,'" Yoder said.

Hilbert's parents also wanted her to learn English, said Yoder. So, she was enrolled at the Tulalip Boarding School, Chemawa (Oregon) Indian School, and Franklin High School in Portland, Ore..

It was in the late 1960s, Yoder said, that Hilbert had what she called her "Lushootseed wake-up call."

"Lushootseed nearly disappeared and was saved in a large part by Vi Hilbert's work," Yoder said.

That work hasn't gone unnoticed. Seattle University named a student residence hall and ethnobotanical garden for Hilbert. The school also awarded her an honorary doctorate.

"She earned that Ph.D.," Yoder said.

Hilbert's storytelling skills are featured in a documentary film.

"In her prime," Yoder said, "Vi had 40 stories that she could bring out just like that."

Hilbert's lasting local impact is visible through the instruction of Lushootseed at La Conner High School, first by Janie Beasley and currently by Kyle Bailey, both Swinomish Indian Tribal Community members.

Bailey joined Yoder for the question-and-answer segment of the April 26 library program. When asked about the unique characteristics of Lushootseed, Bailey compared the native Pacific Northwest language to Latin.

"You can start from scratch," he said. "You're able to build a word."

Lushootseed stories engage themes from daily life, Bailey said. The characters in those tales don't necessarily live happily ever after, said Bailey, but instead their plights serve as teachable moments.

"They're not fairy tales," he said. "They're not anything you'd get from Disney."

Hilbert, however, easily translates into the kind of heroic figure who could star in a modern feel-good movie. Her advocacy of Lushootseed, in the second half of a storied life, is marquee-type stuff.

"Vi always believed that everyone who lives here needs to know a little about the language," Yoder said.