In July 1993, a collection of stories, essays, and poems was published about the life of Vi Hilbert. Edited by the Seattle-based author Janet Yoder, the collection was a celebration of Vi's 75th birthday. As Janet describes it in her foreword, "The stories weave together like cedar bark to create a picture of this marvelous woman" who was "a language teacher, a storyteller, a translator, a researcher and a traditional elder" from the Skagit and Upper Skagit tribes.
In this Beaver Tales episode, I read from a story that Vi Hilbert tells about herself -- a story that begins with her birth in 1918 into a world very different than the one she found herself in at the time of its telling, nearly three-quarters of a century later.
