Governor's Heritage Award - Selma Muller

Selma Muller of Tacoma, Washington taught at schools in Ritzville and Tacoma. The daughter of parents from Germany, she was born in Puyallup and grew up in Odessa. In Odessa and Ritzville Muller became involved with the local community of German Russians, an ethnic group that had left Germany, moving to Russia during the eighteenth century. Many of them settled in the Inland Northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Muller became interested in the unique German dialects spoken by her neighbors and in their history and culture. Eventually moving to Tacoma, where she taught high school German for thirty years, Ms. Muller devoted her retirement years to translating the letters and diaries of German-Russian immigrants and the archives of their pioneer churches. In the words of historian Richard Scheuerman, “She can read the old handwritten script and the Low German dialects that many of the immigrants spoke.”