Native Seattle (27 page)

This vision of civic and national origins was not limited to the pioneers. Pioneers and Potlatchers alike told stories about interracial violence as a way to remind modern Seattleites of the travails of their forebears. Abbie Denny-Lindsley, one of Arthur and Mary Denny's daughters, cautioned in 1906 that if modern urban residents could “awaken from their uneasy slumbers some night and find Seattle as she was forty-five years ago, they would think it a pipe dream and feel for their scalp locks.” That same year, attorney and civic busybody W. T. Dovell—a candidate for future Tilikum membership if ever there was one—echoed Denny-Lindsley's sentiment, contrasting the softness of twentieth-century city life with the grim realities of the frontier. “Where in those days the stranger, who struggled to these shores, found no warmer welcome than that accorded by the lurking savage who coveted his scalp,” Dovell said in an address later printed in the
Washington Historical
Quarterly
, “he is now received into the abiding place of luxury and wealth.” And at a 1938 pioneer reunion, Mayor John Dore warned the younger people present that “the race is getting soft [but the] pioneers lived hard. It would be well if you children could understand the hardships these people went through.” Certainly, there were other Seattle Spirit stories: the lost railroad-terminus battle with Tacoma in the 1870s, the imposition of law and order during anti-Chinese violence in the 1880s, and the struggle for Alaska gateway status in the 1890s. But it was the Indian challenges of those first years that had the most power and that would continue to reverberate for much of the twentieth century.
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That power sprang from the resonance between local place-stories and the national narrative. American thinking about the frontier, best articulated by historian Frederick Jackson Turner at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago, linked the belief in a national character shaped by the frontier experience to concerns about the fate of a nation whose frontier had just “closed.” Just as Mayor Dore worried about the loss of the Seattle Spirit, Americans in general wondered who they were without the twin threats of Indians and wilderness. Meanwhile, the Indians in Seattle's stories also looked familiar: Seeathl was the noble savage par excellence, assuaging the guilt of conquest through hospitality and prophecy; the Big Bug and other icons of Potlatch reflected fascination with the exotic and, ultimately, the laughable and primitive; and the Seattle Spirit drew on the long history of American fear in which the ignoble savage, with his tomahawk and shrill war cry, skulked in the dim forests of the imagination. The creation of stories like these had become a national pastime. Like countless new local historical societies, Grand Army of the Republic reunions, and reenactments at Plymouth Rock, Seattle's Potlatches, pioneer gatherings, and Founders Days were part of what historian Michael Kammen has called a new civil religion of historical observance. Stories about Indians created meaning in modern America. They established pioneers' social status in a wealthy new metropolis, they voiced dissent regarding environmental and cultural change, and ultimately, they justified urban conquest. And in the years
leading up to the Second World War, Seattle's place-stories went largely unchallenged, even by Native people themselves.
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D
URING THE YEARS THAT
the “Changers” transformed Seattle's indigenous and urban landscapes and crafted civic place-stories using Indian images, few Native people resisted either development in explicit ways: the 1893 protest by refugees from Herring's House on Ballast Island was a rare exception. Certainly, indigenous people had their own place-stories of the city's growth—Chesheeahud's comment about “too many houses now,” for example—but those stories were almost never told in public. Instead, Native men and women often participated in the events through which white place-stories were transmitted. They were there at the 1911 Potlatch, paddling a canoe against the University of Washington's crew team. (The Indians lost, proving yet again, according to the
Post-Intelligencer
, that “the red man and his handiwork could be no match for the white man and his skill.”) They sometimes came to pioneer gatherings; Suquamish elder Jennie Harper, for example, was brought across Puget Sound to sit at the head table during Rolland Denny's final reunion at the Stockade Hotel. And in 1936 Snohomish elder Harriet Shelton Williams unveiled the new official city seal—a suspiciously Roman-looking profile of Chief Seattle—on Founders Day, while her father, Tulalip chief William Shelton, told stories about Seeathl in Whulshootseed, Chinook Jargon, and English. At events like these, indigenous people's participation seemed only to confirm the civic story. Meanwhile, Native people from Seattle's hinterland, lacking the authority that being local bestowed, had even less of a voice.
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Even at Chief Seattle Day celebrations, held on a reservation, Native people were active participants in observances that told stories serving white urban interests. Beginning with the first Chief Seattle Day in 1911 and continuing through the 1940s, the Suquamish were gracious hosts to hundreds of visitors from the city, decorating Seeathl's grave, coordinating massive clambakes, playing the bone game, and entertaining with “quaint old Indians [
sic
] songs.” In formal speeches, hereditary chiefs and other tribal leaders spoke of Seeathl's generosity, called
for peace between whites and Indians, and conducted graveside ceremonies. In doing so, they asserted their own ceremonial and political presence, but if there was resistance to the Seattle place-story embedded in Native participation in Chief Seattle Days, no one outside the indigenous community seemed to notice. Native people surely had their own Seattle place-stories; as historians of other places have shown, private stories shared among communities with limited access to public discourse can be the basis for a vibrant alternative historical consciousness. Around kitchen tables, at winter dances, and in tribal council meetings, tribal people surely told their own stories about what Seattle—the man and the city—meant from their own perspectives, keeping alive their own memories of urban conquest. It would be years, however, before those place-stories reached white audiences.
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Stories have a past; they come from somewhere. Stories also perform work; when they are told, they enact power. Seattle's place-stories both reflected and reinforced the city's patterns of power, as illustrated by two final Potlatch stories. Leon Metcalf, who spent many years recording the stories of Puget Sound Indian people, saw firsthand the power of Seattle's urban narrative. Late in his life, he recalled attending the Golden Potlatch of 1912, where the Big Bug and the Tilikums commanded the thoroughfares, where totem poles decorated downtown, and where indigenous people were among the throngs. “My father and I were walking across a street after the parade had gone past,” he told an interviewer,

but there was still lot of racket, it was very loud. There were two Indian women, probably Duwamish Indians, that were there selling clams and baskets, probably. One turned to the other and I listened to hear what she was going to say. What she said was [we are making noise]…it was kind of a pun, a play on words, on her part.

From our perspective almost a century later, it is hard not to see the Duwamish woman's Whulshootseed wordplay as a sardonic reference to the extravagant chaos that the Tilikums had orchestrated, or perhaps even as a protest against the public silence of local indigenous people in civic discourse. In a city that used Indian images and stories to make
sense of itself, real Native people, and especially those not affiliated with totem poles, were pushed to the margins of urban society. They now had little impact on the shape of Seattle's urban narrative—except maybe as metaphors.
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More than two decades later, in 1939, Snohomish elder Harriet Williams fondly recalled the Potlatches and expressed hope that more would be held in the future:

I have a jumbled, but happy memory of Seattle's Potlatch—walking along avenues full of many shops—many people and the hum of many voices—the thrill of watching various drill teams and bands march with perfect precision—so many beautiful floats, the result of thought and work… yes, I had a most enjoyable time.

Like Skagit shamans visiting the optometrist, Plains warriors on the AYPE Ferris wheel, or Haida assembly-line workers, Williams's memories of Potlatch reminded readers that Native people, so often relegated to Seattle's urban past, were also part of Seattle's urban present. But as she continued, Williams also drew attention to all that had been lost:

But I somehow still long for those past days—I can see the approach of countless canoes, the sounds of drums and the rhythms of different chants—my own language, which I hear so seldom now. But such is progress—and so the Indian of today brings his dollars and cents to Potlatch and receives various pleasures in return—and hopes Seattle will keep on having Potlatch.

By the 1930s, this kind of image—the sweeping away of the city's complicated past (and most of its Indians) before a crushing wave of metaphors, marketing, and metropolis—had become received wisdom and common knowledge. But just as tides come in, they rush out again, and Williams's words were spoken on the eve of a new era in Seattle's complicated Native histories in which the place-stories told in Seattle, and the people doing the telling, would change yet again.
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M
ARIAN WESLEY SMITH
, an anthropologist at Columbia University, spent much of the 1930s conducting research among the Native peoples of Puget Sound. Her travels brought her into contact with the descendants of the indigenous people of Seattle, and the urbanized landscape of the pre–Second World War maritime Northwest shaped much of what she had to say about the state of Indians in the region. Native people on Puget Sound, Smith argued, had “come through remarkably well” considering the “rigorous mushroom development” of places like Seattle. “No other Indians of the whole continent have been similarly engulfed by the sudden growth of city populations [or] have been exposed to the full impact of twentieth-century urban society,” she wrote in the 1940s. To Smith, the successful adaptation of Puget Sound's Native peoples was “certainly better than that of many Indians classified as less primitive.” In fact, she wrote, “it is this sort of dilemma that throws doubt upon classification schemes.” Despite the near-total dispossession of indigenous people from Seattle's urban landscape, surviving Native peoples' accommodation to urban change in Puget Sound seemed to challenge her discipline's very foundations.
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The conditions of Indian people in urban Puget Sound also threw doubt upon another kind of classification scheme: the boundaries between past, present, and future. Smith saw this just as clearly. “If today Salish life is mingled with, and sometimes indistinguishable from, modern American and Canadian life,” she wrote, “so much the better. If the past and the present converge, and the future may be expected to partake of both, so much closer to reality is our picture of the Northwest.” And for Indians in Seattle in the 1930s, the past, present, and
future did seem to converge. Like the years surrounding 1880, the 1930s were a transition between two periods in the city's urban and Indian histories, a hinge between one era and another. The years around 1880 had represented a transition between a strong indigenous presence in Seattle and indigenous dispossession, as well as the beginnings of a regional Indian hinterland. By the 1930s, Seattle had developed a complex interweaving of multiple Native histories: Duwamish descendants of the area's indigenous communities and Native people from far away shared a city studded with totem poles and explained by stories about Indians. Mr. Glover's bird's-eye panorama, the 1880 census, and other sources had offered glimpses of Native Seattle on the eve of a massive urban transformation. Sources from the 1930s show the results of that transformation and offer their own glimpses into a city that, unbeknownst to its residents (Indian or otherwise), was on the eve of yet another great change.
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In 1930, Seattle was a bona fide metropolis, a city of 350,000 people. Few vestiges of the indigenous landscape remained—the Duwamish River had been straightened, the waters of Lake Washington now flowed through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks rather than the extinct Black River, and new neighborhoods of bungalows and apartments blanketed hills that had once been barriers to urban growth. It seemed that Seattle had made good on its urban promises. But instead of optimism, there was anxiety. Seattle was experiencing the first throes of the Great Depression and, as it had during the Panic of 1893, Seattle's boom-and-bust economy was suffering greatly. The crash of 1929 also changed the lives of Indian people in Seattle. Many of the small firms that had fueled annual migrations of Native men and women to Seattle—farms, sawmills, canneries—laid off their Indian workers first, then closed as banks failed. Layoffs and business failures slowed the widespread movements of Native people up and down the coast and from reservations in Puget Sound, where many of the descendants of Seattle's indigenous people now lived. The Depression also wreaked havoc on Indian attempts to establish a permanent presence in Seattle. For example, Ralph Young (or Looshkát), a Hoonah Raven Tlingit and founding member of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, found his fortunes
changing in the 1930s. After helping discover the wildly successful Chichagof Mine in Alaska, Young and his uncle had traded their shares in the mine for property along the industrializing Duwamish. Soon after the market collapse, however, the men were forced to forfeit the profitable land (which would eventually be occupied by the Boeing Company) because of unpaid taxes and return to Alaska.
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