Native Seattle (33 page)

Most important to our story, the legacy of Seattle's urban and Native histories would come back to haunt the city in the postwar era. As in the apocryphal Chief Seattle Speech, the white man—and all the other new people here, including urban Indians from other places—would “never be alone.” But it was not the ghosts of Seattle's indigenous people that returned to the city: it was their living descendants. Fueled by both the new activism shared by other urban Indians and growing unease about the legacies of urban conquest, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Duwamish and Shilsholes and Lakes began to exert new influences over both urban environmental affairs and the civic story. By the late twentieth century, even if Seattle continued to use Indian imagery to market itself on the global stage, it could no longer easily do so without taking into account the city's real Native past. It appeared that Seeathl's “returning hosts” had indeed come back to town, in ways that MacArthur and the Hiawatha Sparklers never could have imagined.

F
ROM ELVIS PRESLEY MOVIES
to reruns of the popular television series
Frasier
, the Space Needle has replaced Princess Angeline (and perhaps even her father) as the symbol of Seattle. Rising hundreds of feet over where Denny Hill once stood before it was washed away by the regrades, it symbolizes the squeaky-clean, nervous optimism of the Camelot-and-Apollo 1960s expressed at Seattle's second world's fair, the Century 21 Exposition, for which the Space Needle was built. The fair's logo was a circle topped by an arrow pointing skyward (the symbol for masculinity, as the city's budding feminists pointed out), and along with the Space Needle, Century 21's exhibits reflected Americans' unswerving faith in the future. At the World of Tomorrow, the Bubbleator carried fairgoers to showcases of personal gyrocopters, interoffice “micro-mail,” and kitchens that washed themselves. At the World of Science extravaganza, visitors were taken on a ten-minute expedition into outer space, while in the adult-entertainment
area of the exposition men could snap photos of nude “Girls of the Galaxy.” When the fair received its second
Life
magazine cover in May 1962, showing the futuristic Monorail streaking along with the Space Needle rising in the background, it was described as being “
out of this world
,” and there was some truth to this. For six months and ten million guests, the fair had captured the ethos of the era, in which ecological and technological constraints—even gravity itself—seemed a thing of the past.
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But less than a decade later, something had shifted: Seattle had become ecotopian. In truth, well before the 1975 publication of Ernest Callenbach's mediocre but wildly popular utopian novel
Ecotopia
, in which Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco became the centers of a secessionist nation organized around environmentalist principles, Seattle's culture of nature was undergoing a radical transformation.
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Confronted by the pollution attendant to rapid urban and suburban growth, and fueled by a growing emphasis on health, aesthetics, and an outdoor lifestyle, Seattleites began in the late 1950s to undertake massive campaigns to undo environmental damage in and around the city. Cleaning up Lake Washington, protecting green spaces, and enhancing salmon runs became major civic projects, while Seattle became a haven for environmentalist organizations that hoped to change policy throughout the region and beyond. By the 1970s, these efforts had helped to shape an environmentalist ethic in Seattle that, if by no means monolithic, dramatically reoriented the city's self-image. Gone was the Seattle that prided itself on lumber mills and regrades and rail connections; in its place was one of the few cities in the world that one moved
to
in order to get closer to nature. Now, the Space Needle simply offered the best view of Sound and mountains.
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Few things reflected this cultural shift more, or had more implications for Native people, than the symbolic resuscitation of Chief Seattle. Just as Seattle the city was born again as an environmentally friendly metropolis in the 1970s, Seeathl the symbolic Indian was reborn as well. More than the city's patron saint, he now became the city's first environmentalist. This was not just a local phenomenon. Following the publication of an augmented version of the speech in which Seeathl
anachronistically mourned the coming of the railroad and the passing of the buffalo, the words attributed to the Native leader became famous around the world, particularly among European environmentalists, progressive Christians concerned with human rights, and some Native rights activists. Soon, the city's public image became closely linked to the ostensible environmental message of its namesake, as well as to a growing concern for the predicament of Indian peoples.
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But the question remained: who was Seeathl now being asked to serve? While many Native peoples, and in particular Puget Sound area tribes, used the Chief Seattle Speech as evidence of their claim to the lands in and around Seattle, for many non-Indians, the words of the long-dead indigenous leader had a different purpose. Theologian and ecophilosopher Thomas Berry, for example, found the speech to be a “profound insight into the enduring trauma being shaped in the psychic depths of the white man,” referring particularly to the prophecy that settler society would never be alone and would be haunted by Indian ghosts. “These voices are there in the wind, in the unconscious depths of our minds,” Berry continued. “These voices are there not primarily to indict us for our cruelties, but to identify our distortions in our relations to the land and its inhabitants, and also to guide us toward a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.”
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For all their sympathy toward indigenous people, Berry's words were statements about history and about power. The words attributed to Seeathl were not about conflict but about healing, and at their core, they were most valuable, not in how they could serve Seeathl's own people or in how they might bring to light the injustices of the past, but in how they might assuage the environmental ills of modern American society. As has so often been the case in Seattle's history, stories that non-Indians told about Native people were in fact not about Native people but about non-Indians.

But beginning in the late 1960s, something new was happening. Whereas, in the past, whites and others had often been able to tell stories about Indians and the city without taking into account actual Native American people and their concerns, new political, legal, and cultural developments brought Indian people back into the center of urban life. Seattle's ecotopian turn was accompanied by a parallel resurgence in
Native American activism—not just among the urban Indians of the Service League and United Indians of All Tribes but among local tribes as well. These developments allowed the very real descendants of Seeathl and their tribal compatriots to assert a new kind of influence over the city. As new ideas about nature and progress came to dominate Seattle's civic consciousness, local tribes achieved a new degree of control over their ancient territories as ecological stewards and protectors of cultural patrimony, even if those territories had been changed irrevocably.

That local tribes would come to be seen as urban environmental stewards seemed unlikely in the 1960s, when members of the Muckleshoot Tribe, whose reservation was upstream from Seattle (and whose population included some descendants of the Duwamish), became scapegoats for the depletion of salmon runs. Criminalization of indigenous subsistence practices, begun decades earlier, continued well into the postwar period. In 1963, for example, Harold E. Miller, director of the new regional environmental and planning entity known as METRO, characterized the gillnetting practiced by Muckleshoots upstream from the city as anathema to urban environmental restoration. Miller claimed in the
Seattle Times
that “all we have done in the Duwamish is being offset by this [fishing] activity.” Never mind urban development and the wholesale transformation of local rivers; the disappearance of the fish was clearly the Indians' fault.
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Beginning in the late 1960s, however, Native people became increasingly defiant about the state-sponsored repression of treaty fishing rights and staged fish-ins throughout Puget Sound and even in and around Seattle, bringing salmon conservation and human rights to center stage in local, national, and international media. One morning in the early 1970s, for example, Muckleshoot fishermen convened on the shore of Lake Washington with members of the American Indian Movement and with other Northwest tribes. “Makahs were prepared to die for our cause,” recalled Gilbert King George, and until the drums and songs of the protestors convinced the well-armed fish and game wardens to back down, violence seemed imminent. The presence of the American Indian Movement, the National Indian Youth Council, and other allies also spurred fish-ins on the tidal Duwamish. “By then, our group was
growing and growing, and we outnumbered the state agents,” King George remembered. “What's one or two guys mean when they come down the river banks, and we are about 12, 18 ornery old Indian people, standing up for what they firmly believed in?” The fish-ins brought together many strands of Seattle's Native community: one Muckleshoot activist recalled that she already knew most of the American Indian Movement people from her days on Skid Road, and the American Indian Women's Service League got involved as well, publishing articles about fishing rights in
Indian Center News
. So while urban Indians and local tribes had very different histories in this place, this place also brought them together in defense of Native rights as a shared principle.
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Meanwhile, many non-Indian Seattleites had come to support treaty fishing rights, thanks in part to the savvy media techniques of Indian activists. By 1974, when George Boldt, U.S. District Court judge, finally ruled in favor of the tribes in
United States v. Washington
, ordering the state to allocate half the harvestable salmon to treaty tribes, many Seattle residents (with the noticeable exception of the city's large commercial fishing industry) had in fact already become outspoken advocates of both tribal sovereignty and a new, socially informed approach to conservation. Throughout the “fish fights,” progressive churches, civil-rights organizations, and other groups decried the arrests and intimidation faced by tribal members and played critical roles in garnering support for fishing rights. By the 1980s, Seattle had become a center of pro-Indian and pro-environment sentiment, perhaps best symbolized in the formal apology for cultural genocide and religious oppression that was issued by Seattle-area churches in 1987.
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These new urban attitudes toward nature and Native peoples were often linked to each other through the increasingly iconic image of the salmon, a connection that had lasting implications for tribal authority in the city in the years to come. The Muckleshoots and Suquamish, federally recognized tribes whose membership included many descendants of the indigenous people of Seattle, began to assert themselves as stewards of Seattle's environment. They focused their attentions in particular on fisheries, empowered both by Boldt's ruling and by Seattle's
growing urban environmental ethos. In 1982, for example, the tribes intervened against the proposed Seacrest Marina, a $13 million project that would have occupied 1,600 feet of shoreline between Duwamish Head and the mouth of the Duwamish. Tribal concerns over the impact on fisheries, along with opposition from urban environmentalists, led to the scrapping of the Seacrest proposal. Despite opposition from developers, right-wing ideologues, and many commercial fishermen, tribal efforts to manage urban nature earned positive reviews from environmental organizations and the mainstream press. When the Muckleshoots created a tribal fishing reserve in Elliott Bay in 1988, for instance, the
Seattle Times
referred to the tribe as a “fine conservation example,” a total reversal of the scapegoating so common only twenty years earlier. In the fourteen years since the Boldt decision, tribes had exerted their authority over environmental issues just as those issues were coming to dominate civic consciousness. In the city named for an indigenous man now thought of as its “first environmentalist,” Native authority had returned.
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But, like other developments in Seattle's postwar Indian history, the path to tribal control over urban places had its ironies. For example, the Treaty of Point Elliott was the legal basis for tribal fishing in the waters in and around Seattle. The treaty assured Indians access to the “usual and accustomed” places and resources that their ancestors had managed for millennia. But those places had often been transformed beyond recognition by urban development. As Muckleshoot fishing nets tangled with pleasure boats in the Lake Washington Ship Canal in the 1980s, for instance, they did so in a waterway that did not exist at the time of the treaty. The same engineering marvels that had destroyed indigenous subsistence in and around Seattle had also created a new and spectacular fishery that was neither usual nor accustomed. Similarly, tribes and their environmentalist allies won major concessions in a sixty-five-acre marina development on the north shore of Elliott Bay—concessions that included tribe-operated pens for up to one million farmed coho salmon. If tribal concerns sprang out of historic connections with the indigenous landscape, their modern manifestation sometimes
bore little relation to the indigenous geography of salmon. Finally, despite tribal claims on the city's environment and a strong environmentalist ethic among many Seattleites, by the end of the twentieth century, the salmon were almost gone; indeed, some of them had been placed on the Endangered Species List. For all the power local tribes had gained over urban nature, the city's environmental history had not been reversed. And resentments over the new tribal authority continued to simmer: when the Muckleshoots legally killed two sea lions that had been devastating salmon runs at the ship canal locks, the tribe received threats, including one warning that an Indian would be killed for every dead sea lion. The hunt also brought the tribe into conflict with environmentalists; the Progressive Animal Welfare Society and the Humane Society were among the hunt's most outspoken critics. Indians as symbols of nature were one thing; Indians as real-life hunters in the city were quite another.
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