Native Seattle (36 page)

But the desire to protect and restore urban nature using the Native past can also make for bad history. Not far away from Poverty Hill, for instance, more than a thousand tons of contaminated soil has been removed to create a new estuarine refuge for salmon on the polluted and channelized Duwamish River. Named Herring's House Park after the indigenous town razed in 1893, the site aims to link restoration to local history. The problem, however, is that the park is in the wrong
place: it is not on the site of Herring's House, which is downstream; it is on the site of Basketry Hat. Herring's House was a more “ecological” name, though, and so marketing trumped history. Meanwhile, ironically, native-plant restoration on the site obliterated some of the last visible evidence of Seattle's indigenous geography: broken shells that were part of Basketry Hat's middens. In this case, restoring (and repackaging) the landscape for ecotopian Seattle has only further muddled this place's history. Meanwhile, across the street, a large sign proclaims that someday, if the funding (far less than the cost of restoring the park) can ever be found, the Duwamish Tribe will have a longhouse here again.
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In repairing Seattle's landscape, restorationists were also re-
storying
that landscape. Like city leaders warning of Indian-borne apocalypse in Seattle Illahee of the 1870s, Tilikums using totem poles to sell the city in the 1910s, and pioneer descendants playing Indian to lament urban growth in the 1930s, restorationists were using the Native past to understand, and in some ways to mitigate, the urban present. But restoration of indigenous places is deeply problematic: there is no guarantee that the salmon or anything else can be brought back or that such efforts will actually improve the material conditions of modern Indian lives. The question remains, then: good intentions aside, whom do these place-stories of “restoration” truly benefit? To
when
, and to
whom
, is
what
being restored, exactly?

O
BSERVERS OF U.S. HISTORY
have often written that one of the central American cultural projects has been to find a way to belong here on this continent, to craft an identity from Old World origins and New World circumstances. Very often, that project has involved using Indian imagery to tell American stories: Boston Tea Party activists dressed as Indians, James Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales
, the YMCA's Indian Guides, Chief Seattle's fifth Gospel. But this need to become Native in order to be American runs counter to the real history of our nation's engagements with indigenous societies. For every buckskin-clad frontier hero of American folklore, there was a Sand Creek or Trail of Tears; for every literary
Noble Savage, there was a smallpox blanket or a boarding school; for every New Age eco-shaman there was a missionary's insult or a game warden's handcuffs. If the chief American cultural project has been to bury Indian facts under American fictions, then perhaps the new project in Seattle's case, means moving beyond the recycled place-stories—beyond the seeming inability of Indian and urban histories to coexist—and understanding the work our stories have done in this place: what they have ignored, what they have allowed, whom they have benefited.

One way to begin is through knowing, and sharing, the history that has woven lives together in the city and its hinterland, and imagining what might have been different. In
Facing East from Indian Country
, his provocative account of early American history from the vantage point of the continent's indigenous peoples, historian Daniel Richter has argued that the chaos and violence of that history were never inevitable. Indians and whites had to
learn
to hate each other. This is also true on Puget Sound, where the future was never preordained and where the idea that Indian history and urban history were somehow separate had to be created in town ordinances and racial theories, transmitted through pioneer memoirs and Potlatch parades, and literally built into the environment through ship canals and historic districts. Comprehending Native pasts entails connecting urban and Indian histories and understanding the processes through which indigenous places have been dispossessed, expropriated, and transformed. It means knowing the history of the indigenous peoples on whose homelands Seattle was built, the Shilsholes and Lakes and Duwamish and Suquamish and Muckleshoots, as well as the history of the Native peoples and territories who have been drawn into the city's urban orbit, the S'Klallams and Tlingits and Coeur d'Alenes and Aleuts and Blackfeet. Unearthing Seattle's Native pasts requires us also to look critically at which stories we tell about our shared past and why we tell them. Lastly, it demands that we see the ways in which Native people have actively contributed to, shaped, or resisted those stories.
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Stories matter. Throughout Seattle's history, actions have sprung out of stories, just as actions—tidelands filled, basket weavers paid, “bow and arrow joints” shut down—have in turn resulted in new narratives
about this place and who belongs here. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Seattle's urban palimpsest surely has room for new stories. It is possible, as some of the elders once said, that the horned serpents are gone, banished by “too many houses” and too much change. There are so many moments where Seattle's history might have gone in other directions: a longhouse unburned, a mortuary pole left where it stood, a lake not lowered. We may look back, but we cannot go back. The past will not be undone. “For better or worse, this native history belongs to us all,” Daniel Richter writes, continuing by saying that understanding that past might allow us to “find ways to focus more productively on our future.”
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Perhaps in the revival of indigenous place-names and in powwows at Daybreak Star, in the growing respect for the treaties and in every college diploma earned by an Indian, in the restoration of urban nature and in the willingness to challenge narratives of progress, there is hope that Seattle's Native past—or, more accurately, its many Native pasts—can be unearthed. These place-stories, linked to urban and Indian presents and futures, will not simply be cautionary tales, smug jokes, or nostalgic fantasies but will be dialogues about the transformations of landscape and power in the city and about strategies for living together humanely in this place. Bringing new stories to light and considering how those stories can inform new kinds of action should be our agenda for the future, and it is crafted in the moments when we simply ask each other,
What happened here?

Coll Thrush and Nile Thompson Maps by Amir Sheikh

Historical Introduction, by Coll Thrush

ANSWERING THE QUESTION
What happened here?
requires asking another:
What was here before?
In Seattle, as in most cities, the pre-urban landscape has been transformed almost beyond recognition. Tracing the course of the Duwamish River as it was in 1851, for example, can be a daunting task. Understanding the ways in which indigenous people inhabited that landscape, meanwhile, can be even more difficult. In short, there is virtually nothing left to see—earlier generations of Seattleites made sure of that—and so comprehending the city's indigenous geography involves peeling back decades of development and imagining the possibilities. Even then, the risk remains that we will imagine only what we expected to see all along—noble savages, empty wilderness, totem poles—rather than what might have actually once been there. Seattle's Native pasts have been full of such imaginings. Luckily, through the work of two men and the Indian people who collaborated with them, we have a rare opportunity to envision in specific, concrete ways the places that would eventually become Seattle. In the 1910s, both men collected information about traditional indigenous geographies of the Seattle area, working both with Duwamish men and women living in and around the city and with Muckleshoot and Suquamish informants from area reservations.

The first of these researchers was Thomas Talbot Waterman (1885–1936). A student of Franz Boas, Waterman taught anthropology and sociology at the University of Washington in the early twentieth century. Although he lived in Seattle for only a handful of years, the city held a special fascination for him. “The actual topography is very
interesting,” he noted, “and the spot is doubly interesting because of the great city which has grown up there.” Even better, though, the urban landscape that had grown up on central Puget Sound was still populated by Indian people. Some of them, like Seetoowathl in his float house, shared their knowledge with him from within the city limits. Others, like Jennie Davis and Amelia Sneatlum from Suquamish and Betsy Whatcom from Muckleshoot, educated him in their reservation homes. The resulting manuscript, entitled “Puget Sound Geography,” includes the names of hundreds of places, from the Cascade Mountains in the east to the western shores of Puget Sound and from Whidbey Island in the north to the many-armed southern reach of the Sound. The names speak about the everyday practices of life here: places where fish were caught, places where canoes could be portaged, places where games were played. They tell of the landscape's intellectual elements: the connections between bodies, houses, and the earth; ways of measuring the land and moving on the waters; spirit forces that gave life meaning. Most importantly, they are proof of the profound “inhabitedness” of this first country: the towns, the trails, the stories from deep time.
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Waterman's work did have its problems. He often misunderstood the elders and sometimes failed to obtain the meanings of the place-names he was offered, and his maps are consistently bad. His greatest error, though, was in the attitude he brought to his research. Noting, for example, that indigenous people on Puget Sound might have twenty names for places along a river but no name for the river as a whole, Waterman commented that “from our own standpoint, the Indian's conception of the size of the world is startlingly inadequate.” Waterman saw indigenous people as his intellectual inferiors, inhabiting a lower rung on the ladder between Savagery and Civilization. To strengthen this point, Waterman compared, for example, place-naming practices among the peoples of the Pacific: some Polynesian societies had names only for small places, while others, like the Samoans, had achieved a “national and archipelagic designation.” It was clear which societies Waterman found to be more civilized. While his work is a testament to the richness of indigenous inhabitance in Seattle and Puget Sound, it is also an example of the kind of thinking that placed
Indians in the category of “primitive”—and that justified their dispossession.
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For all its biases, the biggest problem with “Puget Sound Geography” has been its inaccessibility. Available for decades only in the Ban-croft Library, Berkeley, a photocopy of the unfinished manuscript was obtained by the University of Washington in the 1980s. Despite its poor quality, outdated and inconsistent orthography, and chaotic strikethroughs and marginalia, the University of Washington copy has been a boon both to archaeologists and to historians but has remained inaccessible and unusable to all but the most intrepid or formally educated researchers. In the 1990s, Upper Skagit tribal member Vi Hilbert, anthropologist Jay Miller, and amateur linguist Zalmai Zahir edited the manuscript, putting the elders' words into modern orthography, translating a number of place-names that Waterman had not, and, most importantly, linking the work to present-day efforts to reawaken the indigenous language of the region. Even though their edition was published in 2001, the information remained relatively inaccessible because the limited printing run of this latest incarnation of Waterman's research meant that it was expensive and difficult to find. The present atlas builds on the work of Hilbert and her colleagues but also returns to the original Waterman manuscript in an effort to expand the number of translations and to correct past mistranslations.

In addition to the material gathered by Waterman, this atlas makes use of certain field notes of John Peabody Harrington (1884–1961). Heavily influenced while at Stanford University by the work of the renowned anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, Harrington began graduate studies in Germany but soon dropped out to become a high school teacher in California, using his summers off to conduct fieldwork. In 1910, he came to Seattle to teach summer courses in linguistics and Northwest Coast ethnology at the University of Washington, as well as to conduct a series of public lectures entitled “The Siberian Origin of the American Indian.” During the summer of 1910, he conducted fieldwork with Duwamish people, including hereditary Duwamish chief William Rogers, on the Suquamish Reservation. Rogers, an Indian man named Moore, and the informant and interpreter Edward Percival joined Harrington
on visits to the Seattle and Renton area, contributing the place-names included in this atlas. This research, along with his more extensive work on the last speakers of several California languages, brought Harrington to the attention of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which hired him as an ethnographer in 1915.

Over the next four decades, Harrington went on to collect materials on more than a hundred additional indigenous languages of North America and became a pioneer of linguistic recordings. Reclusive and eccentric, Harrington received little academic recognition during his life, but after his death, his colleagues discovered enormous amounts of field notes, squirreled away in garages and storage units up and down the West Coast. These field notes have supplied subsequent generations of scholars with remarkable insights into languages and cultural practices that are now lost. (Also, unlike Waterman, Harrington rarely made explicit written judgments about Native societies but appears to have had a deep appreciation for the sophistication of Indian languages, technologies, and cultures.)
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