Native Seattle (31 page)

At the same time, the successes of Seattle's Indian community had profound impacts far beyond the city, as volunteers, activists, and service professionals earned their stripes in the urban milieu and then took their skills and experience back out into Indian country. Women who had been involved in the American Indian Women's Service League (which carried on with its work even as United Indians of All Tribes
grabbed most of the public attention) were among the best examples of this new generation of Native leadership that had been forged in Seattle. Adeline Garcia went on to become a board member of the innovative Seattle Indian Heritage High School and served as a liaison among reservations, the Seattle Public Schools, and colleges. Ramona Bennett became chair of her Puyallup Tribe, while Joyce Reyes, wife of Lawney and president of the Service League after Pearl Warren, became a Bureau of Indian Affairs administrator. These and other women would play crucial roles in the ascent of self-determination—Indian control over Indian lives—in the 1970s.
¹⁸

But back in Seattle, where the Daybreak Star Cultural Center, with its origins in the work of the Service League, told a new place-story by claiming that the city could indeed be Indian land, there was another new urban Indian place-story taking form. This one told a very different tale from that of United Indians of All Tribes and the American Indian Women's Service League. As it would turn out, the postwar successes experienced both by the Indian community and by Seattle itself were a double-edged sword. As public dollars poured into the city to support programs like Model Cities, Daybreak Star, and the new Indian Center, other forces of urban renewal were at work. During the same years that Indians and other activists claimed spaces in a newly multicultural city and demanded public investment in communities of color, other civic leaders began to invest in the city's historical heritage. For Native Americans on Skid Road, life was about to get more difficult, as the same forces of urban affluence that helped to create new Indian spaces in the city forced the city's poorest Indians, quite literally, onto the streets.

I
N 1991, THE SEATTLE ARTS COMMISSION
launched an ambitious program called In Public, a citywide set of installations designed to inspire dialogue about the role of art in everyday urban life. From the enormous proletarian
Hammering Man
in front of the Seattle Art Museum to huge banners hung from light poles demanding “
do you prefer being on welfare?
” In Public was edgy and controversial. One of the most confrontational pieces, by Cheyenne-Arapaho artist
Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, was installed in Pioneer Place Park alongside the Chief-of-All-Women pole and the bronze bust of Chief Seattle. Called
Day/Night
, it consisted of two ceramic panels inscribed with dollar signs, crosses, and text in Whulshootseed and English that read “Chief Seattle now the streets are your home. Far away brothers and sisters we still remember you.” Dedicated to the city's homeless Indians,
Day/Night
challenged Seattle's other place-stories. “In the city of Seattle there are countless references to our indigenous people,” wrote Heap of Birds, “from professional football helmets [of the Seahawks, Seattle's NFL team], to towering totem poles…to the name of the city itself [but] we do not find institutionalized evidence of the living indigenous people.”
¹⁹

Day/Night
also drew attention to the fact that the city's new Indian institutions did not necessarily benefit all Indian people. “Daybreak Star…is beautiful,” Heap of Birds told one reporter, “but Pioneer Square and Occidental Square are also Indian centers.” In fact, by the 1970s, Skid Road had become “Indian territory,” as one observer called the area around Pioneer Square. It was an urban neighborhood with its own traditions, institutions, and ways of operating. But as urban renewal, historic preservation, and heritage tourism—all supported by the same kinds of public reinvestment that had helped fund the Indian Center and Daybreak Star—became dominant themes in the 1970s and beyond, Native Skid Road would disappear, to be replaced by historic districts catering to tourists. And as downtown was transformed from historical Skid Road to historic Seattle, it would be filled with art like
Day/Night
. Here was the ironic history behind Heap of Birds' installation: at the same time that it told a radical new place-story, confronting the inequalities of postwar urban Native life, it was also made possible by those inequalities and by the destruction of an Indian neighborhood.
²⁰

And a neighborhood it was: for all its dysfunction, for all the poverty and discrimination and cheap booze, Indian Skid Road was a community with its own rules and its own distinctive identity. To begin with, the Native population on Skid Road tended to be fairly stable. According to one source, they accounted for half the city's “home guards”—residents whose home base was in Seattle, as opposed to the rootless
“bindle stiffs,” many of them increasingly elderly white men, who migrated from place to place. And unlike the general population of Skid Road, the downtown Indian community included many women, who often held down jobs as barmaids and cooks. One former Skid Road resident said it seemed as if every tavern had a Native woman in the kitchen. Like their Service League counterparts, the women of Skid Road were problem solvers; they could be depended on, for example, to know about openings in berry picking, dock work, carpentry, and other jobs. Among the black jazz clubs, gay cabarets, Chinese restaurants, and Filipino night cafés that had also sprung up in the area, Native Skid Road had by the 1960s developed into a functioning, if troubled, community with three key institutions: the Indian bar, the single-resident occupancy (SRO) hotel, and the streets themselves.
²¹

At the end of the Second World War, it remained illegal to sell liquor to Indians in Seattle, and most downtown taverns refused entry to Indian men and women, relegating them to the streets. But in the late 1950s, a general relaxing of state liquor laws allowed the formation of what the local bartender's union called “bow and arrow joints”—Indian taverns like the Lotus, the Anchor, and El Coco—scattered along First Avenue from Pioneer Square to Belltown. Each had its own niche: one attracted Native Alaskans, who left the bar virtually empty during the summer fishing and logging season; another served a younger crowd, with more expensive drinks and Indian go-go girls; while a third, frequented by both Indians and Mexicans, had the roughest reputation. The best documented of the Skid Road Indian bars, the Britannia Tavern, catered to veterans, loggers, railroad men, and migrant laborers, most with tribal origins in Canada, Washington, Alaska, and the northern-tier states. At the Britannia, Indians could catch up on gossip from the reservations, drop the guards required by urban life, and simply be Indian. As at the Service League's Indian Center, there was a sense of family at the Brittania; patrons often referred to the bar's co-owner, a Puget Sound Indian woman, as “Ma,” “Mom,” and “Little Cousin.” Even Native people who did not live on Skid Road found the Britannia to be “home territory”; one veteran who lived in a middle-class neighborhood often came to the tavern on weekends because “his people” were there.
²²

If the “bow and arrow joints” of Skid Road were homes away from home, it was another downtown institution, the SRO hotel, which often provided actual shelter. In more than two dozen hotels, some 1,700 single-occupancy rooms provided cheap accommodations for Native people and other Skid Road residents. Even the most run-down SRO hotel could be home. Despite the “long, dingy, and bitter-smelling corridors” of the Morrison Hotel, for example, one young Indian woman said, “I loved it here,” and having one's own hotel room was a sign of status among the Indian Skid Roaders. For those who were not so fortunate, the Romanesque terra-cotta portico of the Pioneer Building, the benches under the totem pole, and the alleys off the main streets were often the only option. These public spaces were also Native meeting grounds, where answers could be found to questions like “What's happening?” “Who's around?” “Is Joe at the Anchor?” “Will he lend me five dollars?” Skid Road, then, was truly Indian territory.
²³

But time was not on the side of Skid Road, Indian or otherwise. Since the 1950s, civic leaders had been entertaining proposals for the revitalization of downtown, and especially of Pioneer Square. Most proposals included historic preservation (after all, this was the city's birthplace), but the plan that became the favorite of business leaders, John Graham and Company's 1966 design, proposed razing all but four blocks around Pioneer Place Park. The Chief-of-All-Women pole and the bronze bust of Chief Seattle would stay as part of a historic plaza—those place-stories merited preservation—but skyscrapers, parking lots, and a new highway would replace the rest of Skid Road. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, historic preservation and heritage tourism, like multiculturalism, had become part of Seattle's new civic language. Citizen activists quickly decried the Graham proposal, lobbying instead for the preservation of the entire neighborhood as a National Historic District. Not unlike the pioneers several generations before, who had looked to their Indian past as metropolis was born in their midst, now many of the city's residents had begun to look to the city's historic places as a balm against rapacious urban development in the postwar era.
²⁴

And so the Pioneer Square Historic District, among the first in the nation, was established in 1970 to much self-congratulation on the part
of historically minded Seattleites. But a nagging question remained: what to do with the people who actually called the ground of history home? The answers ranged from the derisively violent to the sympathetically exploitative. One downtown businessman simply called Skid Road residents “scum of the earth” who should be run out of town, while one Native Skid Roader remembered a policeman saying to him, “They didn't play cowboys and Indians long enough … they should have killed all you bastards off.” As for Graham and Company, the foiled levelers of Pioneer Square, they argued that the people of Skid Road added “little, if anything, to the economy of downtown” and suggested relocating those who could not be institutionalized in prisons or asylums. Some supporters of preservation, however, saw the “denizens” of Skid Road as having value—not as urban citizens but as part of the historic urban landscape. Mayor Wes Uhlman, for example, delighted in welcoming visitors to the city with a tour of Skid Road. “I was the only mayor in America who could do that,” he mused, proud of the combination of historic buildings and seedy characters that Pioneer Square provided. Bill Speidel, who led wildly popular historical tours of Pioneer Square's underground network of streets and storefronts, agreed, pointing out that “if we didn't have the bums around, we've have to hire them from central casting.” For Uhlman and Speidel, the people of Skid Road had a role to play—literally—in the district's place-story. This would be especially true for Indians, who for so long had been used to represent so much.
²⁵

Armed with new preservation and safety ordinances, city officials shut dozens of SRO hotels, and by the mid-1970s, three quarters of the city's downtown housing stock had been lost and nearly 60 percent of Pioneer Square's countable population had disappeared. The Morrison Hotel, for example, closed in 1976. It eventually reopened, but by 1981, more than 15,000 units of SRO housing had been lost in downtown Seattle. Meanwhile, the Britannia had shut its doors many years before—in 1970, the same year that the first historic preservation ordinance was passed—and many of Seattle's downtown “bow and arrow joints” followed suit soon after.
²⁶

For people who remained on Skid Road, downtown's “renaissance”
was a disaster. “A large portion of the city's heritage and architecture has been saved, business has been improved, tax revenues are up,” noted one critic in 1972. “Everything is fine except for the people who used to live here. Their condition has not been improved, but has been made worse.” And as the hotels closed, the people who remained downtown tended to be poorer, sicker, more often homeless and unemployed, and less likely to be white. Skid Road residents who could move on did so, while those left behind depended upon the few missions and social services that remained downtown. In just a few short years of urban renewal and historic preservation, the Skid Road Native community and many of its diverse neighbors had been almost entirely erased by a district of art galleries, bookshops, restaurants, and taverns catering to tourists and the young and middle class. Indian people, meanwhile, remained the most visible minority on what was left of Skid Road, struggling to survive alongside more new totem poles. One writer noted that “victims of the white man's scorn can still be seen in doorways and around Seattle's taverns near Pioneer Square, or lolling on the area's few park benches,” as though the Britannia, the Morrison, and the other institutions of Native Skid Road had never existed. Seattle's third Indian place-story, of the homeless Native person as an urban allegory, had been literally built into the landscape.
²⁷

Indian people on Skid Road were more than aware of their own visibility. As early as the 1970s, a handful of voices from Skid Road expressed defiance toward the role Indians had been told to play in Seattle's urban narrative. Mexican Indian J. A. Correa, for example, wrote in 1972 about the visibility of Indian people in the district:

Pawn shops / and / broken people / who drink and sing / and beg for wine / they provide amusement/ for the tourists / who believe in / historical sites / and little kids / from school / are taken there by / devoted bored teachers / to see the heart of their / grandparents' city.