Native Seattle
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Native Seattle

Histories from the Crossing-Over Place

Coll Thrush

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eBook - ePub

Native Seattle

Histories from the Crossing-Over Place

Coll Thrush

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About This Book

Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography

In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.

On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself.

After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms.

In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region.

Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345

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1 / The Haunted City

EVERY AMERICAN CITY is built on Indian land, but few advertise it like Seattle. Go walking in the city, and you will see Native American images everywhere in the urban landscape. Wolf and Wild Man stalk the public spaces of downtown in the form of totem poles. Tlingit Orca totems adorn manhole covers, and a bronze Indian chieftain raises a welcoming hand as the monorail hums past. Street musicians, protesters, and holiday shoppers move across a plaza paved with bricks laid in the pattern of a cedar-bark basket. Souvenir shops hawk dreamcatchers and sweatshirts with totemic Frogs, while only doors down, a high-end gallery sells argillite totem poles, soapstone walruses, and Earthquake spirit masks carved by modern masters. Massive car ferries with names like Klickitat and Elwha slide across Puget Sound, passing an island where, since the 1962 world's fair, Kwakwaka'wakw performers have welcomed visitors and world leaders to a North Coast–style longhouse. Out in the neighborhoods, schoolchildren have adorned bus shelters with Haida designs of the Salmon spirit, and Coast Salish spindle whorls have been soldered into a sewage treatment station's security gates. And then there are the names on the land itself: one park named for a red paint used in traditional ceremonies and another for an ancient prairie; a marina called Shilshole and an industrial waterway known as Duwamish; the lakefront enclave of Leschi, named for an executed indigenous leader. Seattle, it seems, is a city in love with its Native American heritage.1
Indeed, it is the totem poles, motifs of the Salmon spirit, and ferries with Indian names that tell you where you are: without them, Seattle would somehow be less Seattle. Every carved image, every statue of an Indian, every indigenous name on the land implies that you are here in this place and not in another. They are part of how you know you are not in New York or New Orleans, London or Los Angeles. They are what we expect from Seattle. They are stories about place.
Iconic western writer William Kittredge has described how stories and places are connected:
Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a “sense of place,” we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having “a sense of self ” means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.
In Seattle, visitors and residents alike tell and are told stories about this city: that it is built on Indian land, that that land was taken to build a great metropolis, and that such a taking is commemorated by the city's Native American imagery. These stories in and of place, these place-stories, define Seattle as a city with an indigenous pedigree.2
But Seattle is also a haunted city. In a metropolis built in indigenous territory, and where cellular phone towers only recently outnumbered totem poles, it comes as no surprise that Seattle has Indian ghosts. There is the tale of Joshua Winfield, a settler who built his home on an Indian cemetery near Lake Washington, only to be frightened into eternity by indigenous revenants one night in 1874. The spectral pleas of another Indian ghost, allegedly that of a murdered Native prostitute, have been heard since the Prohibition era in a rambling Victorian home near the Duwamish. At a nearby golf course, a naked Indian described as a shaman has been seen since the 1960s, dancing at night on what is rumored to be another indigenous burial ground. And at Pike Place Market, the apparition of an Indian woman in a shawl and floor-length skirt has appeared for generations in the windows of the magic shop and in the aisles of the bead store. Meanwhile, members of the local tribes pray for the dead on the banks of the industrial river named for their people, and Native storytellers lead purification ceremonies in the underground streets and storefronts beneath Pioneer Square, in hopes of bringing peace to wandering indigenous specters.3
By far, though, the most famous haunting of Seattle is accomplished by the city's namesake, a man called Seeathl. A local indigenous leader of Duwamish and Suquamish heritage who facilitated the city's founding, Seeathl is best known for words he is said to have spoken during treaty discussions in the 1850s, when Seattle's urban promise seemed to require the dispossession of local Native peoples:
Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God lest you forget. The red man could never comprehend nor remember it. Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our leaders, and it is written in the hearts of our people.
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of their tomb; they wander far away beyond the stars and are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They always love its winding rivers, its sacred mountains, and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in the tenderest affection over the lonely-hearted living and often return to visit, guide, and comfort them.
We will ponder your proposition, and when we decide, we will tell you. But should we accept it, I here and now make this the first condition, that we will not be denied the privilege, without molestation, of visiting at will the graves where we have buried our ancestors, and our friends, and our children.
Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks, which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur, thrill with memories of past events connected with the lives of my people.
And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe; and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the fields, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.
At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead—did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.
According to Seattle Times writer Eric Scigliano, the Chief Seattle Speech, as it has come to be known, is a “ghost story like no other.” It represents not just the words of one man but also “the innumerable souls who fished and sang and made art along these shores and had no inkling of cities.” Seeathl gave voice to those “wraiths,” and the city's modern residents, Scigliano warns, should “tread lightly and treat the land softly. You never know who might be watching—from above, or even nearer.”4
But like any good haunting, the authenticity of the speech cannot be proven. It first appeared in print more than three decades after Seeathl put his mark on the Treaty of Point Elliott, and it bears a suspicious resemblance to Victorian prose lamenting the passing of the “red man.” There is no question that Seeathl spoke eloquently at the treaty proceedings—he carried Thunder, which gave skills of oratory, as one of his many spirit powers—but his exact words are lost. What we do know, however, is that the speech has become a key text of both indigenous rights and environmentalist thinking, with some of its adherents going so far as to call it a “fifth Gospel.” Simultaneously urtext and Rorschach test, the words of Seeathl haunt Seattle, telling stories of Native nobility, American colonialism, and longing for a lost environmental paradise. Somewhere between fiction and fact, these place-stories haunt any history of Seattle. But they often have little to do with the more complicated story of the real Seeathl, who died in 1866 on a reservation across Puget Sound from Seattle and was buried in a grave bearing his new Catholic name: Noah. Instead, these ghost stories of Seeathl have far more to do with the people telling them.5
This is the power of ghost stories, of phantoms at the Market, and the sage wisdom of dead chiefs: they tell us more about ourselves, and about our time, than they tell us about other people or the past. In writing of the role of ghosts in medieval European society, historian Jean-Claude Schmitt has claimed that “the dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them,” and recent scholarship on American ghosts has shown that hauntings are among the most telling of cultural phenomena, expressing powerful anxieties, desires, and regrets. As Judith Richardson has illustrated in her work on ghosts in New York's Hudson Valley, hauntings are in fact social memories inspired by rapid cultural and environmental change, arising not so much from moldering graves as from the struggle to create a meaningful history. Ghosts are also rooted in places, perhaps none more so than the ghosts of Indians. In her analysis of hauntings in American literature, RenĂ©e Bergland has argued that stories of Indian ghosts are also place-stories about what happened in particular places and what those happenings meant. “Europeans take possession of Native American lands, to be sure,” Bergland writes, “but at the same time, Native Americans take supernatural possession of their dispossessors.” Thence springs the resonance of the Chief Seattle Speech, which is not easily separated from the winding rivers and sequestered vales it mourns. It is a story about a place as much as it is a story about a people, and it is a story about us in the present as much as it is about historical actors.6
There is also an intimacy to Seattle's ghost stories. Among the indigenous people of Puget Sound, the phantasms most feared were those of the recent dead and of kin; these sorts of ghosts vexed the living and put them in great danger, particularly in the rainy winter months. The ghosts of strangers were far less dangerous. The greater its entanglement with the living, it was thought, the greater a phantom's power. And so it is in Seattle's ghostly history: the closer we have lived to each other, the more we have been haunted.
At the same time, the problem inherent in Seattle's Indian ghost stories—indeed the central problem of Seattle's Native American history—is that none of these imagined Indians was ever real. While there may be some kernel of historical truth to some of them, for the most part they are historical creations, both because they spring out of the city's past and because they are ways to make sense of that past. The danger in this, however, is that they all too often tell us exactly what we expected to hear. The restless Indian dead confirm the city's story-line, which is this: Native history and urban history—and, indeed, Indians and cities—cannot coexist, and one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. The standard story told about Seeathl and the city named for him is perhaps the best example of this narrative; take, for example, New York Times correspondent Tim Egan's version. In his bestselling meditation on Pacific Northwest history and landscape, The Good Rain, Egan writes of kayaking on Elliott Bay and pondering the connections between Seeathl and Seattle. Looking back and forth between the modern urban skyline and the site of the indigenous leader's grave across Puget Sound, Egan summarizes the story of the man and the city: “He lived to be a very old man, going from aboriginal king of Elliott Bay and the river that drained into it, to a withered curiosity on the muddy streets of what would become the largest city in the country named after a Native American.” To understand Seeathl and Seattle, it seems that this is all you need to know, and it tells us what we knew all along: that the Native past must give way to the urban future. The place-story of Chief Seattle is about the change from one world to another, with Native history surviving only as a prophetic shadow, a disturbing memory, an instructive haunting.7
This is not to say that Indian people do not exist in the urban present. Of course they do—in the thousands. Some of them, in fact, have also become part of the city's narrative. Along with totem poles and Seeathl, the homeless street Indian completes the city's trinity of Native imagery. This third kind of Indian place-story, however, is less often an indictment of the injustices of the urban political economy than it is a tale about racial inevitability. In short, stories about Native people on Seattle's streets are also a kind of ghost story. In Jack Cady's murder mystery Street, for example, the shape-shifting narrator takes on the form of “an aging Tlingit seduced south from Alaska” who dreams of killer whales and talking salmon, while in Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins's heroine Princess Leigh-Cheri wanders through downtown, noticing that “Indian winos, in particular, were unhurried by the weather.” Both Robbins and Cady conflate street Indians with the very atmosphere of the city: Robbins cloaks his version of Seattle in a “shamanic rain” that whispers “like the ecstasy of primitives,” while Cady's city hunkers down under weather systems “more gray and ancient than a solitary old Indian.” Meanwhile, in Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, Jonathan Raban recalls seeing homeless Native people sprawled in a bricked-over doorway in Belltown on his first visit to Seattle. They were “like sacks of garbage waiting for collection by the early-morning truck. I tiptoed past them,” he notes, “as one walks needlessly quietly in the presence of the dead.”8
And so here is the moral of the urban Indian story as we think we know it: that Native people in the city are barely people; they are instead shades of the past, linked almost mystically to a lost nature. Cady spells it out directly: one of his characters, a homeless Haida-Filipino man named Jimmy, is described as “turning into a ghost right before our eyes. That's not a white man's metaphor,” Cady's narrator tells us. “It's an Indian fact.” It is as though the returning hosts, those phantoms prophesied in the Chief Seattle Speech, have turned out to be nothing more than homeless Indians. Even Seattle resident Sherman Alexie, the Spokane–Coeur d'Alene Indian author rightly lauded for the complicated humanity of his Native characters, slides effortlessly into this urban parable. In his novel Indian Killer, in which “every city was a city of white men,” racist cops and a serial killer share Seattle with a troupe of Indians living under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, all dampening in that same rain, here an “occupying force.” But his hero, John Smith, who may or may not be the murderer scalping white men throughout the city, has nothing to fear from the rain: “He was aboriginal,” Alexie writes. “He stepped through this rain and fog without incident.” Even in Indian Killer, otherwise a powerful meditation on what it means to be both modern and Indian, cities are somehow places where Native people cannot belong except as half-fulfilled people or as ciphers for nature. Being a metaphor in Seattle, it would seem, is an Indian fact.9
And if cities indelibly mark their Indian inhabitants in urban ghost stories, then these homeless Indians also mark the city in return, and not just in fictional accounts. Although more than ten thousand people of indigenous ancestry—including lawyers and activists, bus drivers and artists, bankers and newspaper editors—now call Seattle home, it is the homeless Indians who are most visible in Seattle's urban landscape and who in fact seem to make Seattle Seattle. They make Pike Place Market's public restrooms one of the city's “true” landmarks according to one local alternative weekly, because the toilets are “the one place where bustling tourists, drunken Indians, and desperate junkies come together
in a sort of cultural nexus, representing all that is truly great about this fine city.” For some like local essayist Emily Baillargeon, Native people on the streets signify urban inequality. “As new corporate legions rush home or to their after-hours playgrounds,” she wrote during the high-tech boom of the 1990s, “they brush past alcoholic Native Americans camped out on rain-slicked corners.” Even among the homeless themselves, Native people are part of Seattle's geography: one white street kid in the University District, for example, noted that “downtown it's all drunk Indians.” So while we can infer from some ghost stories that Native people are somehow incapable of being fully human in Seattle—that the urban and the Indian are somehow antonyms—we also learn more about this place through stories about Indians: what kind of city Seattle is, and who belongs where.10
None of this is to say that homelessness and other, more subtle forms of dislocation are not central to the urban Indian experience. On the contrary, loss of cultural identity, debilitating poverty, and institutionalized racism have each shaped the lives of many Native people throughout Seattle's history. The history that follows makes this clear. The problem with stories about metaphorical urban Indians, however, is that they allow us to imagine only certain kinds of Native history in the city: the parts we are prepared to see by the stories we tell. These stories mask more complicated experiences: the surprising opportunities offered by urban life, the creative struggles to carve out Indian spaces in the city, and, most importantly, the ways in which Native women and men have contributed to urban life. Stories of ghosts and totem poles and dispossessed chieftains cast Indians only as passive victims of, rather than active participants in, the urban story. These place-stories are the easy way out, allowing us to avoid doing our homework. In other words, they make appealing fiction but bad history.
If the prophetic chieftains and totem poles, like the shamanic rains and homeless ghosts, are all supposed to make Seattle somehow unique (and each of these stories is tied closely to urban boosterism and marketing, as we shall see), then it is surprising how closely Seattle's stories track with national narratives. Our city's place-stories and those of our nation mirror each other—Indians and cities exist at opposite ends of the American imaginary; one represents the past, while the other represents the future. For all their differences, last Mohicans, final showdowns at Wounded Knees, and lone Ishis wandering out of the California foothills are variations on the same theme: the inevitable disappearance of indigenous peoples before the onslaught of American progress. Cities, on the other hand, are the ultimate avatars of that progress, representing the pinnacle of American technology, commerce, and cultural sophistication. It comes as no surprise, then, that many nineteenth-century representations of American expansion show Indians watching forlornly as townscapes appear on the horizon. John Gast's famous American Progress (1872), for example, shows Progress embodied as an enormous (and, dare we say it, ghostly) white woman floating westward over the continent, trailing telegraph wire. Behind her, a locomotive steams across the plains and a great city of bridges and smokestacks sprawls in the sunrise, while ahead of her Indians and buffalo flee into the shrinking darkness. Seattle's counterpart is a 1906 brochure selling real estate on the tideflats south of downtown; it features figures that look suspiciously like Hiawatha and Pocahontas gazing over placid waters toward a belching urban skyline. These are place-stories, telling us how...

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