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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Lindsay Buxton 
April 24, 1996 
Cassette 5, Side 1 
 
 
Debbie Guerrero  00:01 
-- Washington, working on the Washington Women's Heritage Project. Today, I'll be conducting 
an oral history interview with Lindsay Buxton, who is presently residing in Seattle, Washington. 
This interview is taking place in her home there. This is tape number five. Now, the last time we 
ended our conversation, we were discussing your children, and would you like to... 
 
Lindsay Buxton  00:29 
Elaborate? 
 
Debbie Guerrero  00:30 
Elaborate on your children? Yes. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  00:34 
If I remember correctly, what I was saying is that I had regrets and was remorseful over the fact 
that I hadn't spent as much time with my children because of my work schedule, my school 
schedule, and my community activities. And I had mentioned to my eldest son that I regretted 
that, and I thought that perhaps maybe I was too strict. And I explained to my son that, through 
my childhood experience of being in the juvenile center and the various foster homes, and 
comparing that experience, you know, with my experience with my mother, who was very open 
with her relationship with me, and I had a lot of free time. Comparing the structure of my foster 
homes and the juvenile center with my mother, I began to equate discipline as a means of care, 
and so I adopted that discipline to my children. And I was apologizing to my son, saying, I'm 
sorry if I was overly strict, and he assured me, which really made me feel very good and very 
proud, of-- not only of my son, but of myself too, because his words were, Oh mother. He said, 
We all love the way you raised us, and in fact, I'm going to be adopting how you raised us with 
how I'm going to raise my children. And that was-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  02:23 
Validated you. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  02:24 
That validated my being [laughs]. And also my daughter had mentioned, when I had gone 
through the series of apologizing to my children individually, my daughter had stated, Oh 
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Mother, the way you raised us taught us to be independent and still know where, you know, our 
heartstrings were. And we learned how to do the housework, and the cooking, and they all 
looked forward to hurrying with their household chores, you know, on Saturday, and I gave them 
allowances, like my dad did to me when I was a little girl. And after I checked their household 
chores, I gave them their allowances, and they would go to movies and, you know, jaunting off 
with their buddies. So anyway. From there--  
 
Debbie Guerrero  03:21 
So all in all, do you believe that your mothering skills were far different from your mother's? I 
mean, because she let you come and go as you pleased, and at times, was neglectful. Is that why 
you compensated and decided to be more caring and loving towards your children, to discipline 
them?  
 
Lindsay Buxton  03:53 
Yes [laughs]. I must remember, though, when I was a little girl, I think, really beginning 10, up 
to 12 and 13, well, I was still playing with dolls. And I made a determination that, you know, 
outside of my dreams of wanting to be a movie star or, you know, a doctor, what I really wanted 
most all of my life, was just to be a wife and a mother. I knew that I would be a better mother 
than my mother, but I had greater opportunities than my mother because I had other women 
influences. In Seattle, with the juvenile center, with my foster, you know, mothers, and TV. Used 
to watch Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, [?already?] young. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  05:09 
That'd be a perfect-- 
 
Lindsay Buxton  05:10 
So I had a role models. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  05:14 
From those outside influences? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  05:16 
Yeah.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  05:18 
But you know, it seems to me that, you know, looking back at your life, I've listened to you, and 
at 10 years old, you were very disciplined, and maybe it was self-discipline. Do you ever reflect 
on that? Because if you remember what you told me earlier about when your father left and you 
were alone, you knew how to take care of yourself. It wasn't anything that anybody showed you 
how to do. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  05:47 
That was survival instincts.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  05:48 
It was, yeah. 
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Lindsay Buxton  05:49 
Yeah, it was. It was almost as if somebody had left me in the wilderness in Alaska, but I was left 
in the city, you know, in Seattle. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  06:00 
Yeah. But your children never had to go through that either.  
 
Lindsay Buxton  06:05 
No, no.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  06:06 
And maybe that's one of the reasons why you were, you know-- was that one of the reasons 
maybe why you mothered the way you did? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  06:18 
Yes, I ha-- My mother was a great teacher in the fact that I took mental notes. I'm going to have 
to remember when I'm a mother, not to neglect my children, to be home when they came home 
from school, not to drink, not to smoke, you know, not to have so many daddies for them. But 
you were talking I think, really-- I think what even baffles my mind to this day is, back in 1950 
when I was 10, and my mother and I were in southeast Alaska, and Mother was distraught about 
how things were turning out, you know, with our visit there. She couldn't decide whether or not 
we were to return to Seattle or stay in Alaska. And I decided. She said, You decide. I thought for 
a long time. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to go back to Seattle. I made the decision 
and my mother went along with it. Also-- [gasps] you know, I was named after my mother's 
mother, who was a medicine woman in Angoon, and I'm told that was spiritually strong. I 
believe that my grandmother, Kaygaywat, helped me. I believe that a lot of her spirit was within 
me. One incident where that came to my attention was my mother was drinking a little bit and 
getting silly, and she slapped me for some reason. I was talking back to her, I guess it was. And I 
slapped her back, and I told her, I said, Start acting like a mother. What's the matter with you? 
You know? 
 
Debbie Guerrero  08:23 
How did she take that?  
 
Lindsay Buxton  08:25 
She was shocked. I was shocked. I-- here I am slapping my mother. And we both startled, looked 
at one another, and to-- my mother started crying, and then just grabbed me and she said, I'm 
sorry, Mama, I'm sorry. You're right. And I was kind of astounded she called me Mama, and then 
she started calling me Kaygaywat, that's my grandmother's name. And I said-- I got caught up in 
the spirit of things, and I patted her on the back, and I said, Well, that's okay now, you be a good 
girl now. And she said, Okay. Well, I didn't know for sure or not whether my grandmother's 
spirit was in me or not, but it sure gave me a leverage over my mother, and I'm afraid I used it 
[laughs]. Every now and then, I would have the strength. A lot of times, I surprised myself, and 
somebody would have a hard time convincing me that my grandmother's spirit isn't in me, 
because a lot of times-- when you are surprised at your own wisdom, I mean that's baffling, right 
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there. So I have no doubt. Anyway, all that to say I had good medicine, working for me. I had 
good spirits, looking out for me. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  09:57 
That'll lead into your spiritual faith. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  10:00 
Yeah.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  10:01 
Where you gain your strength, which is-- well, how did you come about your religious journey 
that you've been on for [inaudible]? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  10:12 
I guess we really have to go back to, you know, talking about my grandmother's spirit. My 
grandmother was, this, you know, a medicine woman. I had uncles that were medicine men.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  10:25 
Was she a medicine woman in Angoon? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  10:27 
Yes, yes. And the-- if you remember, in Alaska Native history, our land had been occupied by 
many nationalities, and with those nationalities came many religious doctrines. Beginning with 
the Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, a strong influence still, you know, in Sitka, Alaska. 
It's where my grandfather is from. My mother visited Sitka often, and from that-- I don't know 
how it came, but my mother had converted to being a Catholic. My godfather was a Filipino, my 
godmother was Black. I was baptized as a Catholic, and I remember going back to Alaska when I 
was 10, and attending a Protestant church, and they gave me a white Bible, and I remember 
singing and enjoying that. My experience with my Black godmother came years later in 
California, when-- she was a Baptist before she became a Catholic. I shared that experience. 
When Mother and I came back to Seattle after summer in Alaska, predominantly, I had been 
going through public schools. And every day, I would pass by the Sacred Heart Church and 
School in Queen Anne to go to Ed Warren, a grade school that was in Queen Anne-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  12:22 
Right on Warren Avenue, was it? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  12:24 
Yeah. It's no longer there. It's-- you know, they've restructured that whole district now to 
accommodate the World's Fair, right? But anyway, I would often pass this Sacred Heart with my 
childhood buddy, Dorothy Kelter, and I remember that I was a Catholic, and one day, I went into 
the school and said I was Catholic, and I enrolled myself. I enrolled myself, and I was really 
excited, and the church was calling to me. And what I liked about going to the parochial school 
was that all the students wore uniforms, and it was hard to decipher whether you were rich or 
poor. I was poor, so the uniforms was a wonderful thing. I liked being a Catholic because I 
learned discipline. They struggled with me. I rebelled too.  
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Debbie Guerrero  13:43 
How about guilt? Did you learn guilt? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  13:47 
No. Well, I learned pain. I learned to suffer, you know, and offer up, you know, my suffering to 
the poor souls in purgatory. Anyway, I question a lot of the Catholic doctrine. I recited and 
memorized a lot of Catechism. I wanted to learn more from the Bible. The nuns just really knew 
that they had a headache on their hands. One day I went to church, I was-- after a visit from my 
uncle, who was a medicine man-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  14:35 
What was his name?  
 
Lindsay Buxton  14:36 
Hank, Hank Davis. He's from Angoon. He was a longshoreman and he-- remember, I was sickly 
as a child, and my uncle had put a medicine bag around my neck, and he told me never to let the 
nuns see that medicine bag, or they would take it away. And whoever took it away would 
become ill. Well, one day I was playing baseball, and the medicine bag strap around my neck 
came up from under my white collar. I was called aside, and nun had taken me into Sister 
Superior's office, asked me to take it off, and I said, I'm not supposed to take it off. Whoever 
takes it from me will become ill. And one of the sisters had made some remark about this-- they 
had to take this heathenism away from me. Well, they took my medicine bag and I went home. 
And that was the last day that my uncle was visiting us, and I was crying, and I was really more 
scared, because I believed what my uncle said about that medicine bag and somebody being hurt, 
punished for taking it from me. He told me to pray for that sister and to always be tolerant and 
respectful of other people's religions, and that, since I was living in white world, I needed to 
know about white man's God, and since I was going to the school to learn as much as I could, 
understanding and respecting the rules and regulations. Well, when I went back to school the 
next day, the nun that had taken my medicine bag was in the hospital. That was enough to 
convince me that there was power in Indian beliefs. I began to keep the questions I had about the 
Catholic doctrine to myself. I didn't like being called a heathen or an Injun, and... I think up until 
my freshman year in high school, I was not really satisfied with the Catholic religion. As an 
example, they said that if a child died before he was baptized, that child would never get to know 
God. I thought that was unfair. They were strong advocates of childbirth-- birth control, I mean. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  17:20 
Well, and childbirth, too. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  17:21 
Yeah, a lot of little things that bothered me. I didn't like having to go to Mass and not 
understand, genuflect, you know, I never understood that. And I thought that perhaps if I took 
Latin, you know, which I took in the freshman year that it would help me get closer to God. 
Anyway, to make a long story short, my first marriage was in the Catholic Church. My husband 
and I had befriended a couple of priests. We sympathized with them. They would come in and 
have wine with us. They would have dinner with us. We would sit down and we would talk 
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about doctrines, you know, and our faith. And these two male priests would have liked to have 
had a family life themselves. We thought way back in the '50s that it seemed unfair for the priest 
not to have married lives where all other, you know, religions do sanctify, you know, marriage 
and recognize that you can be a family man and still preach The Word of God. Slowly after that, 
I began to drift. And I remember one of my foster parents that I had for a short time, they were 
Japanese, and they practiced Buddhism. They never tried to teach me anything, but to me, their 
whole lifestyle, demeanor, charm, disposition, family appreciation was more Christian than some 
of the Christians that I knew. I never understood what their chant was, but I liked the idea that 
they had an altar at the house, and they lit incense and, you know, candles, and rang bells, and 
had evergreen, and fruit, you know. Many years later, my children, you know, had-- their friends, 
were pretty much like mine when I grew up multi, you know, ethnic, and they had a Japanese 
little boy, and I met their mother and father, and they were Buddhist, and I think I'd always 
spiritually been inquiring. I really wanted to find out more about Indian religions. There was 
hardly anything, if anything at all, on Alaska Native spiritualism. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  20:03 
Wasn't it forbidden [clears throat]?  
 
Lindsay Buxton  20:05 
Well, yes, they considered it really witchcraft. Years later, when I was in my early 40s, I went to 
Southeast Alaska. And when I had spent some time with relatives in Angoon, I-- it's pronounced 
Angoon-- I had asked about the spiritualism and my relatives, Shh, shh, we don't talk about that. 
And I said, But I'm family, aren't I? I want to know. I feel something because I felt something 
when I stepped on the island. I knew I belonged there. This is my home. I felt something spiritual 
there. But I was-- my aunt told me that about five years before my visit, they lost federal and 
state funds because the natives were-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  21:07 
For what? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  21:09 
Because the natives were practicing witchcraft. And she said, the white people look at our 
religion as witchcraft, as bad medicine, so you don't talk about it, and you be careful of who you 
ask questions. So I really didn't learn much there. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  21:32 
But I mean the funds. What were the funds for? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  21:36 
Social services? So... Educational funds?  
 
Debbie Guerrero  21:41 
They just cut back on the funds because they were practicing the religion so-- 
 
Lindsay Buxton  21:44 
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They-- not just cut back on the funds, they took the funds away from the people of Angoon 
because it was predominantly practiced native spiritualism, was practiced.  
 
Debbie Guerrero  22:00 
Undercover or openly? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  22:02 
They tried not to make it-- they tried to make their religious practice open. I mean, this is the 
native way, and they were penalized. And they-- this is a matter of state and federal, you know, 
records, and so, to regain their lost funding, if you recall-- Angoon is a small village. You get 
there by boat or plane, and if the weather is not good, you're hurting, yeah, and you have to really 
live, you know-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  22:39 
Off the land-- 
 
Lindsay Buxton  22:39 
By your wits and subsistent living. Anyway, to get their monies back, they had to renounce 
native spiritualism practices. It's really hurt me. I talked to relatives about their fridge-- freedom, 
religious act, and how the Constitution. Well, they just didn't want to talk to me.They may even 
thought I was maybe a government plant there, you know, check on them. But my quest was 
serious. After my marriage with Sonny Buxton-- actually, he was the one that had suggested 
[clears throat] that I look into, you know, Buddhism. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  23:31 
And did you-- you got into it through your children's friends' parents? Is that how you were first 
introduced to it-- I mean, you like that? So... You didn't finish that story. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  23:43 
Yeah, with-- okay, well, I'm going about it in a long way, I-- round way, I guess. After my 
marriage to Sonny Buxton, I was pretty depressed. The second marriage down. I left my husband 
still loving and respecting him, and-- but our marriage was polarized at that time. And my first 
husband had just died, my second son had just returned from the Philippines, and it was just a 
major, you know, upheaval of our lives and trying to restructure everything. I was pretty 
depressed at that time, and one of my friends had said he had just met a couple of Buddhist 
people, and they chanted Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, and the meeting where this-- the old 
Japanese men was just so happy. He talked about human revolution and how we would never 
know happiness in the world until we had undergone human revolutions within ourselves, and 
we would have to be happy and peace with ourselves before we would ever recognize a world 
peace. That each individual had to begin with themselves. That intrigued me. It sounded too 
practical, too reasonable. I wanted to hear for myself. I went. I was impressed. I signed up. That 
was 25 years ago. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  25:26 
Amazing. 
 
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Lindsay Buxton  25:26 
I have been chanting ever since, for world peace, human revolution within myself. Gradually 
introduced family members, you know, to the Buddhist philosophy. My mother even chanted. 
My mother had stopped drinking for a couple of years. The Buddhist practice is very difficult. 
It's easier to be a Christian-- 
 
Debbie Guerrero  25:55 
Is it? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  25:55 
Especially a Catholic. Yes, it is. Go to Confession on Friday, go to Mass on Sunday, receive 
Communion, and you walk in the state of grace. Well, Buddhism-- Buddhism, you have to chant-
- pray in the morning and the evening. So a lot of discipline involved in it. Everything that's 
placed before your altar is to return back to you in your life. And if you look at the things that are 
on my altar, all we really need in life is water, food, evergreen, smell, incense, and light. This is 
to constantly remind us-- I love the concept. The scroll-- it's not-- the scroll that we chant to is 
not a deity. It's not a god. It's in Japanese, and some of the words are in Sanskrit. It has all the 
conditions of mankind on there. And we chant to this scroll as a reminder, we don't look to a 
deity. We don't look for miracles outside of ourselves. We believe that the God-like nature or 
Buddha-nature is within ourselves. And it seems as if I had remember my uncle Hank saying 
something to this effect, and when he talked about the bells and the rattles, to me, Buddhism was 
very Indian. Tlingits believed in reincarnation, so do Buddhist. As he said, it's a hard practice. 
When I was married to John Skan, he was very upset about the fact that I was different from 
village people in that they were Christian. So, when I would walk around the island, I would 
chant to myself, and of course, I would-- for the memorials, I learned very early in age to be 
respectful and tolerant of all people of nationalities, their culture, their heritage, and never, ever 
would I ever speak against anybody's religious practice, because I believe that all lead to the one 
source, and that's the greater spirit. Our methods are different [laughs]. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  28:31 
They all end up in the same place. 
 
Lindsay Buxton  28:34 
Except Buddhist Tlingits believe in reincarnation. 
 
Debbie Guerrero  28:41 
Did your husbands accept this practice? You mentioned John Skan, but how about Sonny 
Buxton? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  28:48 
Sonny was the one that first introduced me to Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō. It was really funny. 
Sonny was not very happy about my working, but since he travels so much and my children were 
out, I accepted a job as a secretary, working for Kaiser Aluminum in Oakland, California. And 
one day, my husband had taken me out for lunch, we went home, had a luncheon delight 
[laughs]. 
 
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Debbie Guerrero  29:25 
Afternoon delight? 
 
Lindsay Buxton  29:26 
Yes, thank you. And woke up and I realized that I was going to be tremendously late from 
returning from my lunch, and I was so furious with my husband. I said, You did this on purpose. 
You didn't want me to have work, and, you know. So anyway, as we were in the car, he said, 
Well, some, some Buddhist gave me this card, and they said that if you chant this Namu Myōhō 
Renge Kyō, things will-- you will get in the rhythm in the universe, and, you know-- [tape cuts 
off]. 
 