Native Seattle (2 page)

1.
Mark Fogarty, “Stats say Big Apple has most urban Indians,”
Indian Country Today
, February 25, 2003; on-line at
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1046182689
.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
—meaning in the early phases of graduate school—I had the idea that I was going to have to write about everything that ever happened to every Indian person in Seattle, but I soon realized that this was neither possible nor would it make a book anyone wanted to read. The stories included in this book, then, are intended simply as examples of the kinds of experiences Native people have had in the city and its hinterland and, just as important, how those experiences have intersected with larger questions about urban development and urbanity itself. As with the Duwamish and their struggle for recognition, I hope that this book will create new opportunities for Indian people in Seattle to speak about their lives and be heard, even if the stories they tell differ markedly from, or even contradict, the broader urban narrative I have written.

And the narrative is indeed intended to be a broad one, stretching from before the landing of the “Denny Party” at Alki Beach in 1851 to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Chapter 1
sets the stage by examining the current state of Seattle's “place-story,” which is dominated by metaphorical Indians and the notion—promulgated both by scholarly literature and by popular culture—that urban and Native histories are somehow mutually exclusive. The narrative then continues with two chronological chapters.
Chapter 2
retells the founding of Seattle as a complex historical process, a
longue durée
rather than a snapshot singularity, which took place within a dynamic landscape whose indigenous inhabitants shaped the founding process in important ways.
Chapter 3
examines the even greater role that indigenous people such as the Duwamish played in the creation of an urban frontier on Puget Sound. Throughout Seattle's “village period,” the 1850s through
the 1870s, the Duwamish and other Indian people literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation in town life, even as they were scapegoated as symbols of urban disorder.

Chapter 4
is the first of two “hinges” in the narrative, both focusing closely on Seattle's Indian landscapes during narrowly defined but critically important periods of change in Seattle's urban Native histories. The first hinge, in the 1880s, uses the federal census and other fine-grained sources to show a nascent city in which multiple kinds of Indian history—of local indigenous people, Native migrants to the city, and Indian images in the “urban vocabulary”—began to intersect in complicated ways. The second hinge,
Chapter 8
, focuses on the 1930s, when these three histories had matured into dominant facets of Seattle's urban story and when the city stood poised for the transformative experience of the Second World War.

Chapters 5
–
7
, instead of proceeding chronologically, each look at one of these three Native histories in the period between the two “hinges” of the 1880s and the 1930s.
Chapter 5
examines the experiences of local indigenous people through Seattle's massive environmental transformations and their near-total dispossession from the urban landscape through the seemingly self-fulfilling prophecy of the “vanishing race.”
Chapter 6
is about the creation of a vast Native hinterland woven together by the movement of Indian people and things to and from Seattle and places along the broader Northwest Coast. Non-Indians' use of Indian imagery to tell (and sell) Seattle's story, and contention over what exactly that story was, are the subjects of
Chapter 7
.

After the second “hinge” of
Chapter 8
, the final two chapters examine the postwar period through two related but distinct stories.
Chapter 9
is about the multiethnic, pan-Indian urban community that took shape in the postwar years, while
Chapter 10
is about the resurgence of local tribes such as the Duwamish in the arena of civic discourse. Both chapters illustrate the ongoing legacies of earlier periods in Seattle's Native pasts, the ways in which Indian people have claimed space and authority within the city, and how these legacies and claimings continue to interact with Seattle's Native symbolism and urban storyline.

The idea that Indians and cities are mutually exclusive—or, more
to the point, that Native people do not “belong” in urban places—is, in addition to being an outgrowth of broader American ideas about progress, also a result of the simple fact that Indian people can be very hard to find in cities. Collecting the histories included in this book was at times like looking for a handful of needles in an even greater number of haystacks. I always operated, however, under the axiom that “absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence,” and so made few assumptions about what kinds of sources might include references to Native people. I used the sources typical of any ethnohistorical project such as anthropologists' field notes, oral tradition, Indian agents' reports, and archaeological studies. I also mined standard sources of urban social and cultural history—memoirs, newspapers, locally produced neighborhood studies, federal censuses, and subscription histories—for any mention of Native people. In many cases, these sources had to be analyzed on two levels: I used them both to establish the presence of Native people and to assess non-Indian attitudes about the presence of Native people in the city. Lastly, I spent a great deal of time examining urban sources such as engineers' reports that made no mention of Indians at all. It was here that absences turned into evidence: by triangulating between these sources, Native sources such as oral tradition or indigenous topographical names and sources speaking to the environmental consequences of urban transformation, I was able to link both engineers and elders—and thus urban and Indian histories—through close attention to place and environmental change. The highly interdisciplinary, even omnivorous, methodologies of environmental history were thus critical to unearthing Seattle's Native pasts.

Unearthing those pasts also involved resurrecting the racism of the past. While looking for non-Indian narratives about Indian people in the city, I all too often encountered words and phrases that have been used to demean, marginalize, and even kill Native men and, especially, women. Some people fear that repeating such racist language perpetuates racism. I am of the belief, however, that the only way that we can talk critically about racism is to understand—and see clearly—the language that reinforced it. Let me say here that I understand (as much as any gay white man truly can) the pain associated with terrible words
such as “squaw,” “Siwash,” or “savage” and with the mischaracterization of Native women as prostitutes. I hope that the reader will understand that my use, for example, of quotations containing these words and ideas was done with the goal of laying bare the ignorance and racism of the past. I also hope that this book will contribute to the ongoing struggle against the ignorance and racism of the present, which, if often masked, run surprisingly deep.

Writing Native histories in English is by definition an imprecise art. Scholars and tribal people have come up with many ways, for example, to write down Whulshootseed words. (Even the name itself is up for debate. Some call it Puget Sound Salish, while others call it Lushootseed; Whulshootseed is the southern, Seattle-area dialect version of the name.) With nonspecialist readers in mind, in the main text of this book I have used indigenous names for local places only in English translation. Readers interested in more detailed information on these places, including the Whulshootseed versions of their names, should visit the atlas at the back of the book. There, the Whulshootseed names are spelled using a practical orthography developed by atlas coauthor Nile Thompson. Within the main text, I have chosen to spell individual Native people's Indian names—Whulshootseed or otherwise—using English approximations. At times, these spellings differ from those in most historical sources. For example, the man after whom Seattle is named is referred to in this book as Seeathl rather than as Seattle—or Sealth, another common anglicization of his name—both to distinguish the individual from the city (and the Chief Seattle Speech attributed to him) and to suggest a pronunciation as close as possible to the Whulshootseed original. (It should be pronounced something like “see-ahthl,” with the break between syllables like the break in “uh-oh” and the final sound like the Welsh “ll.”) I hope that any loss of linguistic integrity will be compensated for by greater readability.

W
ITHOUT A DOUBT
, the most important collaborators in a project like this are Native people themselves. There is no longer any reason (or excuse) for a scholar to write Indian history without the active participation of tribal
people. The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in my hometown of Auburn, Washington, granted me access to oral histories dealing with Seattle and supported my interest in publishing the material included in this book's atlas. I especially want to thank the members of the tribe's Culture Committee, tribal staff members, and archaeologist Lynn Larson, who suggested that I talk to the Muckleshoot in the first place. Without the accounts of Ollie Wilbur, Art Williams, and other Muckleshoot community members, this would have been a very different, and much less interesting, book.

The Duwamish Tribe of Seattle, on the other hand, chose to participate only indirectly in this project. I am grateful for the suggestions they did make and have done my best to incorporate them and to include Duwamish voices past and present, garnered from archival and press sources, wherever possible. Based on what I know of the tribe's archives and oral tradition through conversations with other researchers, I am not convinced that the overall shape of this book would have been radically different had the Duwamish participated more directly. It might have included some additional specific information on the mixed-race families of “Seattle Illahee,” a few more details about the 1916–25 “break” in Duwamish leadership, and a clearer picture of what Duwamish community members were doing between that alleged break and their new visibility beginning in the 1970s. But my portrayal of the roles that their ancestors played in early Seattle history and the part present-day tribal members have played in reshaping the city's narrative would likely change little. My hope is that this book will spark even greater public interest in the Duwamish and their stories, and I wish them the best in their continued search for federal recognition and in their efforts to build a longhouse on the river that bears their name.

Because this book is not only about the indigenous peoples of Seattle and their descendants, it was important to gain insights from within the multiethnic, pan-tribal, urban Indian community in the city. I especially want to thank Teresa Brown Wolf Powers, and indirectly the American Indian Women's Service League, for granting me access to hours of unedited interviews Teresa taped with Service League members. As with the tribal oral histories, these interviews filled what would have
otherwise been silence. Sandy Osawa, Roger Fernandes, and Jeanette Bushnell also helped me think about present-day urban Native issues, and my interview with former “Skid Road queen” Bill Regan provided a window into a community that left virtually no records behind. If nothing else, these people proved just how diverse and complex Seattle's urban Indian community is.

There is also a person whose life and history sit at the crossroads of almost all of Seattle's various Indian histories and who deserves special praise for her generosity and insightfulness. Although a member of the Muckleshoot Tribe, where she also works as a grant administrator, Jackie Swanson is also the great-granddaughter of Chesheeahud, a Duwamish man who figures prominently in Seattle's early history. She was also deeply involved in the American Indian Women's Service League in the 1970s and, through that experience, knew intimately the now-largely-disappeared world of Indian Skid Road. Whether sharing her own writings about the history and significance of the Service League, inviting me to examine old photos of powwows and other events, or showing me the baskets made by Chesheeahud's daughter Julia Siddle (her grandmother), Jackie helped me see just how closely interwoven these histories are and offered insights in a truly compassionate, helpful way.

Several remarkable scholars have been generous guides along the way to this book. John Findlay took great interest in my personal and professional development, reeled me in during some of my more excessive flights of fancy, and helped me understand what the word “edit” really means. Richard White quietly encouraged me to say what I mean and do it clearly, and his willingness to continue advising this project after his departure from the University of Washington to Stanford University speaks volumes about his commitment to students. Gail Dubrow reminded me to connect the work to the concerns of real people and supported my interests in public history. If Sasha Harmon was an invaluable resource for her expertise in local Indian affairs, then she has also proved an excellent trimmer of awkward prose. Suzanne Lebsock and Jim Gregory, both members of my PhD committee, provided important insights as well despite the fact that urban Indian histories are far removed from their own areas of interest.

The support of my fellow graduate students improved this work nearly as much as the advice I received from my faculty. I began graduate school with a cohort of Americanists whose names will no doubt become well known within the discipline in years to come: Jen Seltz, Roberta Gold, Andrea Geiger, Michael Witgen, Connie Chiang, Jeff Brune, and Liz Escobedo. The hours that I—the “local guy”—spent with them in readings courses and research seminars kept me from being provincial. Ray Rast joined us later and was a kindred spirit thanks to his interests in place, landscape, and memory. I also received encouragement and criticism—as well as lessons on writing for audiences who do not spend their days thinking about Native issues—from Susan Smith, Ali Igmen, Michael Reese, David Biggs, and Joe Roza, among others. Ned Blackhawk, Pam Creasy, and Pauline Escudero Shafer kept me honest as a white guy doing Indian history. When my own writing bogged down, I often turned to Kate Brown's beautiful study of the Ukrainian borderlands for inspiration. Matt Klingle, however, deserves more credit than any other graduate colleague. While writing his “companion volume”—an environmental history of Seattle—Matt was both big brother and research assistant, offering personal and professional guidance while also keeping an eye out for Native people in the archives. I look forward to seeing his book next to this one on the shelf.