Native Seattle (5 page)

The histories in these pages are drawn not just from the mythic narratives of Seattle's received history but from archival materials and oral traditions. They are linked to particular places in the city, and to the dramatic changes that have, quite literally,
taken place
on Seattle's shores and hills and streets. While not as explicitly an environmental history as other studies,
Native Seattle
nonetheless combats the urban-Indian-as-metaphor stereotype by not only describing the lived experiences of Native people in the city and its hinterland but by grounding the city within particular Native places ranging from a fishing camp buried beneath fill in the heart of the city to a British Columbia village linked to Seattle by trade and migration. By examining the environmental transformations of these places and the movement of people, things, and symbols between and among them, this book links Seattle's urban Native pasts to the broader scholarship regarding the resettlement of indigenous territories, the ecology of cities and their hinterlands, and narratives regarding nature, culture, and history.

One place where these kinds of histories come together is Pioneer
Place Park at the corner of First Avenue and Yesler Way, where a long-vanished sawmill once powered Seattle's commercial beginnings. Here, a Tlingit totem pole, a bronze bust of Seeathl, and an art installation calling attention to the struggles of homeless Indians represent the three facets of Seattle's Native iconography: the exotic aesthetics of the northern Northwest Coast, the noble urban namesake, and the pathetic Indian of the streets. Pioneer Place Park, like the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood that surrounds it, is an archive of urban narratives. But in Whulshootseed, the indigenous language of Puget Sound country, neither carries the name “Pioneer,” a word that reflects only one version of history. In Whulshootseed, it is “Little Crossing-Over Place.” Long before Henry Yesler set up his sawmill, this was a tidal lagoon tucked behind a small island. It was home to great cedar longhouses, whose residents fished for flounders in the lagoon, gathered berries and bulbs in nearby prairies, drank clear water from springs in the hillside, and buried their dead on a bluff overlooking Elliott Bay. Before it was a place of narratives
about
Indians, then, this was a place inhabited
by
Indians. And long after Yesler's sawmill had burned, Pioneer Place became, for a while at least, the heart of an urban Indian community whose members eked out a living in the district of flophouses and taverns that birthed the term “skid road.” Different places with the same set of coordinates, Little Crossing-Over Place, Skid Road, and Pioneer Place Park are three layers in an urban palimpsest, a gathering of place-stories. In between them lie ashes and sawdust, brick and asphalt, opportunity and misery—in other words, the detritus of Seattle's Native multiple pasts.

There is Little Crossing-Over Place, where an indigenous community gave way to sawmills and single-resident occupancy hotels, but there is also the larger crossing-over place of Seattle as a whole. Go virtually anywhere in Seattle, and you are close to it. Among the bungalows and beachside biking trails are the home of a sacred horned serpent, the site of a burning longhouse, and an upland clearing full of marsh tea and cranberries. Between and behind the art galleries and gas stations are the first Indian Center, the riverside studio of a Native artist hired to carve totem poles, and the apartment of a woman down from Juneau to get an education. The entire city is a palimpsest, a text erased only
partially and then written over again. It is a landscape of places changed by power, of Indian places transformed into urban ones and sometimes back again. Or, to borrow the words of historian James Ronda, the story of Seattle is “a story about power and places, and what happens when power changes places, and then how places are in turn changed.” Seattle's past is rich with these kinds of crossings.
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Native Seattle
is also intended as a crossing of different kinds of history. Beyond bringing together urban and Indian histories, it also brings cultural, social, and environmental histories into conversation with each other. Literary criticism and postcolonial studies have emphasized the power of narrative to define, debase, and control the Other, and Seattle is no exception. The place-stories told in this city were a key method of dispossession and discrimination, and in trying to understand them,
Native Seattle
is a cultural history. But as Cole Harris, the elder statesman of Canadian geography, has shown, it is not enough to merely tell stories about stories: we must look beyond the literary and cultural forms of colonialism to examine the material conditions that ultimately implemented those stories. We need to examine the roles that physical power, the state, flows of capital, and technologies like law and mapping played in turning indigenous territory into a modern metropolis. I accomplish this here through the lenses of social history—the unearthing of the lived experiences of ordinary people—and environmental history. Nature may not have agency in this story as clearly as it does in most works of environmental history, but the irruptions of unfinished history, so common in Seattle's urban story, are grounded in place. As the land is transformed, it gives up new stories and reveals new layers of the past, and in those new stories can be found the agency of ancient, inhabited natures. Finally, it should not be forgotten that all environmental history in the Americas, by definition, is Native history, because it has all happened on Indian land.
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With these multiple Native histories in mind, then, Seattle's story can offer insights into other places. For all its uniqueness (again, few large American cities have so consistently used Indian imagery to define their own image), Seattle's history suggests that other cities may have urban Indian stories of their own. In Chicago, with its origins in the
Fort Dearborn “massacre,” or in New York City and its “$24 Question,” as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have called the Dutch purchase of indigenous Manhattan, the opportunities exist for a new kind of urban history that begins with those cities' place-stories. Meanwhile, bringing the benevolent friars and pious neophytes who haunt the place-stories of Californian cities into conversation with Native social history might reorient the meaning of places like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Every American city—Boston, Omaha, Honolulu, Savannah—has the potential for this kind of history, as do places like Vancouver or Veracruz, Sapporo or Sydney, or any other place shaped by encounters between the urban and the indigenous.
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In the end, though, all history is local, and so I limit my view to one city, and in doing so reorient Seattle's urban story by placing its Native histories at the center. I challenge narratives of civic progress by focusing on the costs, both planned and unforeseen, of urban development. This is not always a happy story. In his classic, remarkable study of the Marquesas, Greg Dening describes the metaphorical islands and beaches—the categories of “we” and “they” and the boundaries between them—that shaped the history of real islands and beaches in the Pacific. He notes that, for the people who experienced them, and to some extent for the people who study them, “the remaking of those sorts of islands and the crossing of those sorts of beaches can be cruelly painful.” This is certainly true of Seattle's history or, in the words of poet Colleen McElroy, “Seattle's awful history, where all that is breathtaking is breath taking.” This is not always a happy story, but perhaps more importantly, it is rarely a simple one either.
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Seattle is haunted by urban conquest and by its many Native pasts. But put the ghost stories aside, and see what happened here before the ghosts came. Begin at the supposed beginning, at the moment when the first breath was taken: in Seattle's version of the encounter between Pawtuxet and Plymouth, between indigenous and European worlds. On a beach, to be precise.

I
N THE WORDS OF ONE DESCENDANT
of the Denny Party, as Seattle's founders are typically called, the story of the city's origin “is an oft-told tale yet is ever new.” Indeed. In the century and a half since the landing of Arthur Denny and his compatriots on the beach at Alki Point on 13 November 1851, Seattle's creation story has been reduced, reused, recycled, and reenacted in books, plays, speeches, and art. Often, the telling of the story says more about the moment of the telling than about the event itself; we will encounter many such recountings throughout Seattle's Native histories. The basic story, however, has remained the same. Seattle historian Murray Morgan captured the scene best in his 1951 “history from the bottom up,”
Skid Road
. In this perennially popular tale of the politics and personalities of Seattle's first century, Morgan described the arrival of the twenty-four settlers on a rainy beach:

Three of the four women cried when the brig's boat put them ashore on the salt-smelling beach. Portland had been rude and the ship awful, but this was worse: the only habitation was a log cabin, still roofless, and the only neighbors a host of bowlegged Indians, the men wearing only buckskin breech-clouts, the women skirts of cedar bark, the children naked. The sky was low and gray, the air sharp with salt and iodine, the wind cold; but soon the women were too busy to weep.

Morgan's version of the story has it all: the miserable passage on the schooner
Exact
, the dismal weather, the crying women, the unfinished cabin. And most importantly, the story has Indians. Possibly dangerous, certainly alien, their presence makes the story all the more dramatic.
It is in this moment—in the tense introduction between two peoples—that Seattle's urban history begins. And to no small extent, it is the moment when, according to the standard version of Seattle's storyline, local Indian history begins to end.
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Seattle's creation story is not even really a story at all, but rather a snapshot. Certainly, the Denny Party's overland journey from Illinois is part of the back-story, but it is really the singularity of the landing at Alki Point, across Elliott Bay from present-day downtown, that is the mythic point of beginning, in which longer processes are collapsed into a frozen moment in time. In this respect, Seattle's creation story is like many others. In a 1991 essay about evolution and baseball, for example, natural historian Stephen Jay Gould argued that stories about beginnings “come in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of origin, a specific time and place of creation, or else it evolves and has no definable moment of entry into the world.” In his account of the differences between the sport's gradual evolution from a “plethora of previous stick-and-ball games” and the more mythic story of Cooperstown, Gould noted that “we seem to prefer the… model of origin by a moment of creation—for then we can have heroes and sacred places.” The same is true for American history more broadly: we love our Mayflowers, Lexingtons, and Fort Sumters. They are discrete moments chosen out of the complexity of the past and designated as the place where one thing is said to end and another to begin.
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In Seattle, where the heroes are the Denny Party and the sacred place is Alki Point, that snapshot in place and time has literally been turned into a shrine of sorts. At the Museum of History and Industry, the city's official repository of its past, a diorama displays the events of that blustery November day. Comprising wax figures, handmade miniature clothing, shellacked greenery, and a painted beachscape backdrop, the diorama was created in 1953 by local doll maker Lillian Smart to commemorate Seattle's recent centenary and to celebrate the museum's opening. It includes all the stock characters and props of the city's founding myth: a roofless cabin at the forest's edge, tiny handkerchiefs lifted to wax faces, and children's heads turned warily toward Chief Seattle and a few other Indian men. The tableau made manifest the story that Seattle
residents had already been telling themselves for decades, and within a few months of the diorama's unveiling, its sponsors—the Alki Women's Improvement Club and the West Seattle Business Association—claimed that “thousands of Seattle residents, tourists, and school children have stood in front of it, admiring its beauty and realism, and paying silent homage to Seattle's founders.” For more than two generations of Seattleites, visiting the diorama has been a kind of urban pilgrimage. Still on display at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Smart's powerful visual distillation of the city's creation story is the image that most likely comes to many local residents' minds when they think of Seattle's founding.
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Not unlike baseball's creation story or the origin myth of the nation itself, with its providential Pilgrims landing in that single sacred moment at the place they named Plymouth, Seattle's creation story is also one of predestination. For all the drama of crying women, threatening skies, and strange Indians, Seattle's future seems a done deal. Civic booster and local historian Welford Beaton, for example, reiterated the title of his book
The City That Made Itself
by claiming that “Seattle started deliberately.” Nearby titles on any local library shelf express the same sense of nascent destiny, of future greatness born in those first moments at Alki. Outdoing Beaton, Mayor George Cotterill's
Climax of a World Quest
reads Seattle's twentieth-century future back onto the voyages of explorers like Vancouver, Cook, and even Magellan. In local mythology, the arrival of “Seattle's Pilgrims” is deliberate, planned, and preordained, sprung like Athena from the collective forehead of Arthur Denny and the other members of his party. As for the indigenous people encountered in the creation moment at Alki Point, their future was also foretold, written in disease and dispossession. The powerful story of the “vanishing red man,” as we shall see, both informed the Denny Party's journey to Puget Sound in the first place and has informed the telling of their landing at Alki ever since. It is one of the foundational pillars of Seattle's standard civic narrative, in which one kind of history (Indian) begins to decline the moment another history (urban) starts its ascent.
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