Native Seattle (13 page)

Ling Fu's brief trial symbolizes the ways in which settlers—Boston, Chinese, and others—had been transformed by their life in Seattle Illahee. Accounts of Seattle's “village period” are full of settlers speaking Chinook Jargon and sometimes even Whulshootseed; of white men and women learning indigenous subsistence practices from their Native neighbors and employees; and of people from places like Illinois and Ireland, Gloucester and Guangzhou, learning to accommodate Indians' insistence on participation in urban life. Nearly thirty years after Seattle's founding, Native people were still in town, and their participation in urban life had changed the Bostons as well. The mad house known as the Illahee might have been destroyed, but the larger Seattle Illahee, in which indigenous lives were woven into the urban fabric, remained, even as Seattle stood perched on the brink of an urban revolution.