Native Seattle (28 page)

Despite the dislocations of the Depression, however, Indian people had found ways to call Seattle home. The manuscript of the 1930 census offers insight into the lives of the city's Native men, women, and children. Their numbers were not great—less than 1 percent of the urban population—but their circumstances speak to the roots that Indian people from other places were putting down in Seattle's urban soil. Those roots, like the city itself, were often thoroughly working class. Across the city, Indian men and women could be found in Seattle's bungalow neighborhoods of modest income. On Beacon Hill, Choctaw pipe fitter Franklin Turner came home from long days at the oil plant to a neighborhood of mechanics and construction workers where his white wife, Ellen, kept house. On Capitol Hill, mixed-blood, Canadian-born Lily Lee lived with her white husband, Lorn, who helped build and maintain the city's bridges. Like that of the Turners, the Lees' neighborhood was mostly white and thoroughly working class, with neighbors working as bakers and seamstresses, cashiers and electricians. So was the Admiral neighborhood on Duwamish Head, where truck driver Robert Lee (no relation to Lorn) and his full-blood “Washington Indian” wife, Minnie, provided for their eight-year-old son, Eugene. And Admiral was much like South Park along the Duwamish, where the white-Inuit Ryner family lived off the money husband Homer earned as a stone polisher in a local factory. There was also a cluster of mixed-race families around Salmon Bay. Swedish immigrant Paul Peterson, a deckhand on a tug, lived with his Skagit wife, Clara, and their teenage sons, Bernard and Chester, on the flats near the western stretch of the Ship Canal. Nellie Wooley, an Alaskan Haida, kept house for her boatbuilder husband, John, in the industrial area that had sprung up on the now-filled estuary between Salmon Bay and Smith's Cove. On the south side of Salmon Bay, not far from the site of Hwelchteed's old place, the Scottish and
Stoney Indian Darling family got by on John Darling's earnings as a construction worker.
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Although the experiences of most of these families are lost to history, two mixed-race families living near Salmon Bay left some records behind, giving us a sense of their lives beyond the census enumerator's rows and columns and offering insights into what it meant to be Indian in Seattle. One family, the Youngbloods, lived in the Crown Hill area north of Salmon Bay. Bowhertta Ladder, the matriarch of the family, had been born among the Nuu-chah-nulth but raised by the Makah, and now made baskets and sold them downtown for up to ten dollars each. Her daughter Minnie worked as a domestic servant, and son-in-law John Youngblood ran a gas station. For all their seeming success, the family faced challenges. Barry Hawley, whose father married into the family, recalled that “Indians … were discriminated against in many bad ways. It was very hard for those young people.” Meanwhile, Karl Peterson, a Swedish-born longshoreman, mourned the recent death of his Makah wife, Ann, and struggled to raise their daughter, Helen. Helen Peterson Schmitt described a city where “No Indians Allowed” signs hung in shop windows, leading her to hide her Makah ancestry. For Schmitt, the lutefisk, glögg, and hambos of her father's people were the ethnic traditions with which she identified, and only decades later would she reconnect with her Makah relatives. On the other hand, one of the few things Schmitt knew for sure about her mother was her visibility as an Indian. “When the police had a little lost Indian person who didn't speak English,” she told an interviewer decades later, “they brought her to my mother, so she'd help with them.” Despite the pressures to hide one's Native ancestry, then, the story of Ann Peterson suggests that Indians were recognized, and recognized each other, in the city.
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In the 1930s, Indianness could also shape white identities in Seattle. Poet and novelist Richard Hugo, for example, once described the death of an Indian first-grade classmate, who drowned after becoming trapped under a log boom on the Duwamish. (“His mother flipped and for years called him to dinner every evening in prolonged fits of scream,” Hugo recalled.) But despite their role as friends and neighbors,
Native people in Hugo's neighborhood were also markers of the lower class. To kids like Hugo who grew up in poor Duwamish River neighborhoods like Youngstown and Riverside, middle-class West Seattle “towered over the sources of felt debasement, the filthy, loud belching steel mill, the oily slow river, the immigrants hanging on to their odd ways, Indians getting drunk in the unswept taverns, the commercial fishermen, tugboat workers, and mill workers with their coarse manners.” For Hugo, Indian people were simultaneously neighbors and metaphors, members of the urban lower classes as well as symbols of urban poverty. He was not alone. In a 1935 master's thesis examining the social dynamics of Hooverville, the homeless encampment on the old Duwamish tideflats, sociologist Donald Roy described the residents as “natives,” noted that their homes resembled those of “the Siberian Chuckchee,” and described prostitutes who sometimes visited Hooverille as “squaws.” Although only 4 out of Hooverville's 639 residents were Native according to Roy's count, he nonetheless used Native imagery to highlight the poverty of Seattle's homeless. We might wonder whether the “natives” on the tideflats were called that thanks to memories of Native migrants camped in those same places only a few years earlier.
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There was some truth to the connections made by Hugo and Roy between poverty and Indian identity. Beyond the working-class neighborhoods where some mixed-race families lived, Native people in 1930s Seattle were most likely to be found in places inhabited by the city's poorest people. One such place was the district of single-resident occupancy (SRO) hotels that made up much of downtown's landscape, including Pioneer Square and Chinatown, two dense neighborhoods that had grown up on the site of the old Lava Beds. There, Indian men and women found shelter among the flophouses and apartment buildings. Frank Griffey, an Indian railroad worker from Indiana, lived at the Interurban Hotel on Occidental Avenue, while Tlingit radio musician Jimmie Thomas rented a room in the Grant Hotel on Seventh Avenue South. Other Native people found slightly more reputable accommodations in apartment hotels further uptown: Estelle Hovland, a Métis waitress from North Dakota, lived in the “Newly Decorated and Refurbished” Hotel Rehan on Seventh and Union, while Greek immigrant
track layer George Ramos and his Blackfoot wife, Hazel, lived with their newborn son in the Yale Apartments at Sixth and Columbia. Hotels and apartments like the Yale and the Interurban often had their own reputations among Native people. Makah people told one anthropologist, for example, that some SRO hotels were quite notorious among their people:

Those who make short trips to the cities stay in hotels patronized by whites, though the hotels most generally frequented would be regarded as third or fourth rate. One hotel popular with the Makah is over a noisy dance hall where incoming sailors gather. One of the hotel chambermaids swore that she would not stay in the place overnight, that it was bad enough to have to work there during the day. However, both white men and white women stay in the hotel which was once one of the good hotels in the city. Others from Neah Bay patronize hotels in quieter locations, which are said to have better reputations.

Just as the presence of Indians could be a marker of poor neighborhoods in the eyes of white observers, whiteness, as well as class distinctions, played a factor in Makah people's understandings of the city.
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Life in Seattle in the 1930s brought Native people into contact with more than just the city's white residents. Both the Interurban and Grant hotels—as well as the Hotel Marion, where Joseph Carrasco, a Chilean–Alaskan Indian steelworker, lived, and the Kenney Apartments on James Street, where widowed Tlingit domestic worker Mary Bezonoff roomed—were run by Japanese immigrants and their American-born children. Meanwhile, life in the SRO districts also meant that many Indian people had everyday encounters with Filipino sailors, agricultural workers, and laborers, who made up a significant—if often transient—part of Seattle's downtown population. Some of these men would also become the fathers of a generation of mixed-ancestry people. Diane Vendiola was one of these; her Swinomish mother met her Filipino father, a laborer and boxer, in Seattle in the 1930s. According to Vendiola, “it was natural for them to come together.” Similar Indian-Filipino relationships resulted in the birth of a generation that would go on to shape Seattle's
politics in the decades to come: both Bernie Reyes Whitebear, founder of the United Indians of All Tribes, and Bob Santos, a leader in the city's Asian–Pacific Islander community, were what Santos called “Indipinos.” In the working world of Depression-era Seattle, new kinds of Indian identities were being formed and the stage was being set for a new political landscape in the city.
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Finally, the 1930 census includes the institutionalized Indians of Seattle: the men, women, and children of the city's asylums. At the Sacred Heart Orphanage, four young children from Washington tribes, including the Makah and S'Klallam—James Henry, Angeline La Belle, and the siblings Bernice and Carl Kavanaugh—appear in the rosters among their majority white compatriots. At the King County Hospital, where full-blood Yakama Ernest Spencer worked as a truck driver, the list of Native patients and their tribes is like a directory to Seattle's Indian hinterland: Tlingit, Haida, Snohomish, Tsimshian, Canadian Métis. These were also perhaps some of Seattle's poorest Native people; ranging in age from twenty to nearly sixty, all but one of the hospital's Indian patients were listed as unemployed. This was also the case for Cherokee Harry Marshall and “Siwash” Dorothy Martin, the two Indian residents of the city jail. These were men and women for whom life in the city had not been easy, particularly in the lean years of the 1930s.

Census tables for the hospital and jail suggest that there were other Native people in Seattle in 1930, people the enumerators would have missed: the homeless, the transient, and the seasonally migrant. Surely, many of these harder-to-find (or easier-to-ignore) Indians existed, invisible to the census takers. And except for people like Ann Peterson, the Makah woman who opened her Ballard home to needy Indians, and the Native neighbors whose presence shaped Richard Hugo's class consciousness, Indian people were largely invisible in Seattle's urban landscape. Unlike the Seattle of the 1880s, where well-known Indian enclaves existed on the Lava Beds and the waterfront, in 1930 Native people were integrated into the city's poor and working-class districts but had little public presence. And unlike in 1878, when real Indians and their canoes appeared matter-of-factly in Mr. Glover's drawing of the city, living Indian people were largely absent from the city's self-image.
Indian images, however, were not. The urban landscape in which these Indian people lived had changed dramatically in only a few short decades. Through stories of Chief Seattle and doomed “last” Indians, and through the city's encounter with its Indian hinterland, Seattle had developed not only a new set of place-stories but also a new landscape that was marked by Indian symbols. By the late 1930s, Seattle had become a city of totems.

Indian images guarded most approaches to the city. On the west, a totem pole stood on an overlook offering views of the city from Duwamish Head, while others graced the ship canal locks and the downtown waterfront. On the north, tourist establishments—the Thunderbird Hotel, the Totem Pole Motel, and the Twin Teepees Lounge—used Indian images to attract travelers motoring on the new Pacific Highway. On the east, visitors plying the state-of-the-art floating bridge across Lake Washington entered a tunnel under the city's hills by passing through a portal surrounded by Northwest Coast–style designs and text that read “Seattle: Portal to the Pacific.” Along with the Potlatches, Founders Day events, busts and seals and statues of Chief Seattle, and other urban place-stories, the urban landscape itself spoke to the importance of Indians as defining elements of Seattle's civic self-image.
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In Pioneer Place Park, at the heart of the city's oldest neighborhood, the Chief-of-All-Women pole that had been stolen from On the Cottonwood in 1899 remained the grandest and eldest of Seattle's Indian icons. But then, just after 10
p.m.
on 22 October 1938, an unidentified man placed gasoline-soaked rags against the base of the pole, set the rags on fire, and disappeared into the darkness. To this day, no one knows why. But as Seattleites decided how best to replace the irreparably damaged artifact, a clear distinction was made between Indian imagery in the city and urban Indians themselves. At first, two local Suquamish men, accomplished lumbermen employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were asked to carve the new pole. However, many observers feared that Richard Temple and Lawrence Webster (the grandson of Wahalchoo, who had once dived for power off Alki Point) might introduce “some goofy innovations,” and one reporter who visited their homes across Puget Sound was disturbed to find that they
spoke English fluently and even drove trucks. Ethnographer Melville Jacobs, for his part, argued that only his white colleague Viola Garfield could do the job right. Meanwhile, the
Times
solicited opinions from Native people at a baseball game in North Seattle, only to find that these Indians hardly seemed Indian at all: they were playing an “American” sport, one of the men was carving a pole with Teddy Roosevelt on it, and another suggested painting the pole with store-bought paint instead of traditional pigments. This was the standard kind of urban-versus-Indian history at work: Indians in the city were in fact no longer Indians, and Native truck-drivers and ballplayers were ignorant and undeserving of the Indianness the Chief-of-All-Women pole represented. In the end the job was given to carvers at Saxman in Alaska, some of whose ancestors had once lived in On the Cottonwood, in exchange for the remains of the original pole. Never mind that the carving of the replacement pole was sponsored by a federal agency, the Civilian Conservation Corps; these were real Indians, not only because they came from a “totem pole culture” but because of their perceived distance from urban life. Far-off Indians, exotic and abstract, were preferable to familiar ones who called Seattle home, and were the only ones deemed fit to hew “sixty feet of freshly-carved monsters ferocious enough to set a lady tourist tittupy with horror.”
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