Storyteller Keeps Native Tongue Alive -- Vi Hilbert Embraces Modern Techniques To Help Preserve Ancient Language, Ideas

The storyteller's house sits on a hill above the Duwamish River valley, which Native legend places near the center of the world.

It is also on the flight path for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, so every few minutes jet planes roar overhead.

But, inside, the modern world is muted. The first people of Puget Sound still feel close by. Their dignified faces stare from sepia-toned photographs. Bookshelves and tables overflow with hand-woven baskets, beaded bags, small carved canoes and dolls in cedar-bark dresses.

In the midst of it all sits the indefatigable Vi Hilbert at a computer. Recognized as one of the most important storytellers in America, she has also over the last 30 years helped save Lushootseed, the native language of the Puget Sound region, from extinction.

Nearly 76 now, she looks both modern in a short, tailored haircut and traditional in a long black dress with a necklace of colorful antique mollusk-shell trading beads.

Surrounded by cardboard cartons bulging with her life's work - translations and transcriptions of the histories, stories and songs of her people - she puts the ancient words into the high-tech machinery, a safer place than the boxes.

"No one else could have done this work and almost no one would have been willing to," writes Thom Hess in a book about Hilbert by her friends. "Thanks to her herculean efforts much, much more history, grammar, lexicon, and myth has been saved from oblivion than posterity had any right to expect."

For her work, Hilbert was recently named one of 11 National Heritage Fellows by the National Endowment for the Arts. She will receive $10,000 and a place in a folk-arts hall of fame in Washington, D.C.

The national honor was announced at the same time Seattle University awarded her an honorary doctor of humanities degree. In 1992, she received the Washington State Governor's Nancy Blankenship Pryor Award for unique contributions to the literary culture of the Northwest, and in 1988 was named a Washington State Treasure.

She is not content.

The director of the nonprofit Lushootseed Research Corp., she has now started a Lushootseed Theater. This summer it will begin videotaping native stories before a live audience. And a new Lushootseed dictionary that she helped compile with Hess and Dawn Bates has just been released.

Hilbert believes creating this legacy fulfills her destiny.

"I am the only child of two traditional people who expected me to carry on their work and the work of their ancestors. To meet that obligation, I've been attempting to leave as much as I can for coming generations."

The storyteller, who is an Upper Skagit elder, grew up in the Skagit Valley in the 1920s. It was a time when her people were expected to adapt to white ways, but most still spoke the native tongue.

Her illiterate parents encouraged her to speak only English, so she could succeed in the white world. But they spoke only Lushootseed to each other and their friends. When they went visiting, they took Vi along.

The little girl was taught to sit quietly next to the adults and never ask questions. Rather she was to learn by listening and observing. Hard rules for a child; good training for a storyteller and translator.

After high school, Hilbert married. By age 30, she'd borne three children and divorced twice. She mastered many trades, from wartime riveter to telegrapher, restaurant owner and secretary. Finally, she settled down with Don Hilbert, her husband for almost 50 years.

"She did not, however, return to the Skagit Valley to live," writes Hess in another book called "Haboo." Thus, "Her memory of Lushootseed continued to fade."

In the late '60s, she met Hess, then a young researcher and linguist, who was trying to preserve the Lushootseed language, also called Puget Salish.

"At the time of white contact," says Hess, "there appeared to have been 23 Salish languages covering an area in the Northwest about the size of France; languages as different from each other as Italian from French from Spanish."

Several of these languages, with no written alphabet and no remaining speakers, have died out. But Hess had already developed written symbols for the sounds of Lushootseed and was writing a dictionary.

One of her relatives urged Hilbert: "You should meet this young man who is saving our language."

"It wouldn't do any good," said Hilbert. Too many years had passed since she'd sat at her parents' side. She couldn't remember anything of the language.

"Well, just come watch him work," urged the relative.

Hess turned on the tape recorder.

"He'd play a tiny little fraction of maybe one sentence and he'd write it down," Hilbert recalls. "I was surprised that I still understood . . . and I knew how it should be translated."

Slowly, the white researcher taught the Native woman how to read and write her own language.

Not long after, Hilbert suffered a serious stroke. Full recovery took years. But the illness inspired a re-evaluation of life. She set aside a home beauty-parlor business to save Lushootseed.

In 1972, she began helping Hess teach the language at the University of Washington. She took over the course when he left for a teaching post in Canada. He is now an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Victoria and she since has left teaching at the UW.

But while they were still working together, they learned about the Leon Metcalf tapes at the Burke Memorial Museum in Seattle. The scholar Metcalf died last year.

In the early 1950s, he traveled the state asking tribal elders to tell stories, sing songs and send messages to each other in their native languages. "I'm going to visit your cousin in Tulalip tomorrow," he might start. "Is there something you'd like to say to her?"

For hours, the elders talked in the beautiful old way from their hearts into the tape recorder. Metcalf ended up with reels and reels - none transcribed or translated - and handed them all over to the Burke.

For 10 years, Hilbert tirelessly transcribed those tapes that were in Lushootseed and collected more material on her own.

A relative, for example, had the gift of remembering every song he'd ever heard.

"Now, cousin, would you sing me an example of this song," she asked. "And what kind of drum beat do we use for this?"

One thing led to another. The teaching and translating resulted in the publication of "Haboo - Native American Stories from Puget Sound" and "Coyote and Rock and Other Lushootseed Stories."

And along the way, Hilbert became a storyteller, for which she quickly developed a national, then international reputation.

"There is a big difference listening to a live storyteller. There is a chemistry there that's lacking when you watch TV," she says.

She lets people decide for themselves what a story means.

"I was taught that you never, ever tell people the meaning of something. The Creator gave them minds that are completely different from yours," says the storyteller.

The most pressing goal now is to store all the Lushootseed archives on a high-tech medium that won't disintegrate.

Hilbert also will keep revitalizing the language through publishing and such projects as the Lushootseed Theater.

What benefit can an ancient tongue be in a modern world?

"As far as the linguist is concerned, every language, regardless of the number of people it served, has its bit to contribute to our overall understanding of human speech," says Hess.

It's also true that basic values, such as treating all living things with respect, sometimes take on new meaning when they are voiced from a different culture, says Hilbert.

"What I say is not unique or unusual. These are things that have been said by many people down through the ages . . . They are not things that come from me. They come from the ancestors."

As she tells her grandchildren: "If you don't listen, you're never going to learn anything."