Native Seattle (29 page)

Despite this tension between Seattle's Native imagery and its Indian residents, Native people were sometimes active participants in the creation of the city's Indian iconography. Enumerators of the 1930 census, for example, found a family from Ucluelet on Vancouver Island living along the Duwamish River, not far from where Seetoowathl and his wife had starved to death in 1920. Like many other Nuu-chah-nulth people, Simon Peter, his wife, Annie, their grown son, Solomon, and their younger children, Evelyn, Arthur, and Elsie, had come to Seattle in search of opportunity. For Solomon, that meant hard work as a general laborer on the docks and in the industrial areas of town. But for Simon, work in the city meant carving totem poles, which were then sold to places like Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. For Simon Peter, being urban and being Indian were not necessarily in conflict—in fact, one facilitated the other. This was also the case for Jimmy John, another Nuu-chah-nulth.
From the community of Mowachat on the west coast of Vancouver Island, John had traveled regularly to Seattle with his family and often sold items he carved from wood and silver to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and other tourist outlets. One of his most lucrative opportunities, however, came in 1936, when he was hired by a curio-shop owner to carve a series of totem poles that would be incorporated into the design of a new building. By 1937, the misnamed Haida House was doing a brisk business in baskets, masks, model canoes, and miniature totem poles out of a building adorned with Thunderbirds, bears, and eagles carved by John in return for room and board. The Haida House—now the Totem House Fish and Chips shop—was part of a new 1930s vernacular that used totem poles, tipis, and other Indian images to capture the attention of tourists, but behind the seeming kitsch lay the labor and expertise of a Native artisan. For John, who lived in Seattle for ten years before returning to British Columbia to become a leader in the renaissance of Northwest Coast art, urban life provided not just economic opportunity but a chance to establish himself as a Native artist. And in doing so, he helped craft Seattle's Indian iconography.
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In the late 1930s, though, the shape of the city, and of urban history itself, was about to change. The lean years in the city of totems were about to end, as mobilization for global conflict dramatically transformed the city, its population, and its economy. In later decades, many of Seattle's older residents, as well as some of its historians, would come to see the 1930s as the last years of “old Seattle.” In a series of interviews conducted at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, Seattle residents who remembered Depression-era Seattle—wealthy and poor, black and white, radical and conservative—described the traits that made Seattle of the 1930s so different from the city of later decades. For WPA artist Bill Cumming, broadcasting heiress Patsy Collins, unrepentant Wobbly Jesse Petrich, African American dietician Marian Valley-Lightner, and Puget Power technician Tom Sandry, seemingly intractable racial and social divisions, radical politics, and an economy still driven by extractive industries distinguished the 1930s. Their descriptions of “Old Seattle” are exercises in nostalgia, but they also reflect the very real transformations that took place during and after
the Second World War. As the lean years came to an end for many of Seattle's residents, so too did one era of the city's history.
¹²

This was true for Seattle's Indian history as well. In the years surrounding 1880, Seattle had been on the cusp of an urban and Indian revolution. Back then, “Seattle Illahee”—a mixed-race town on the urban indigenous frontier—was about to give way to a modern city of the Changers that used Native imagery to explain itself to the world, that dispossessed local indigenous people, and that spawned an Indian hinterland. In the 1930s, that imagery, dispossession, and hinterland remained largely in place, but the beginnings of a new kind of urban Indian history were visible as well. Stoney and Choctaw women and men arriving from beyond the city's regional hinterland, a Makah woman helping lost Indian children, and a Hesquiaht carver using a job in the city to launch a Native renaissance each helped lay the foundations for a new chapter in Seattle's Indian and urban histories. But in the 1930s, on the cusp between past and present, Indian people were often overshadowed by Indian imagery. When Mac and Ike, the heroes of John Dos Passos's working-class epic
The 42nd Parallel,
arrived in Seattle, for example, their experiences there reflected not only the fears and aspirations of the Great Depression but the landscape of urban conquest:

The next day was sunny; the Seattle waterfront was sparkling, smelt of lumberyards, was noisy with the rattle of carts and yells of drivers when they got off the boat. They went to the Y.M.C.A. for a room. They were through with being laborers and hobos. They were going to get clean jobs, live decently and go to school nights. They walked round the city all day, and in the evening met Olive and Gladys in front of the totem pole [
sic
] on Pioneer Square.
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Of course they did.

I
N THE CITY OF TOTEM POLES
and Native ghosts, real live Indians seemed to reappear suddenly in 1970. On the morning of 8 March, more than a hundred Native men, women, and children gathered at Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base on high bluffs in northwest Seattle. Spreading out, they quickly entered the fort from all sides, scaling the fences while a diversionary force raised a ruckus at the main gate. As military police descended, Puyallup activist Bob Satiacum read a statement addressed to the “Great White Father and All His People” claiming Fort Lawton “in the name of all American Indians by the right of discovery.” Invoking treaties supposedly promising surplus government land to tribes, the activists demanded the fort. Most of the proclamation went unheard in the ensuing chaos of scuffles and handcuffs, but news of the invasion quickly spread around the world. According to the
Seattle Times
, an Italian News Agency correspondent had asked, “You can't imagine how fascinating this story is in Europe. Indians attacking a fort in the West of the United States. Tell me, do you have an Indian problem out there?” Meanwhile, front-page photos of uniformed white men carting Native women and children off to jail ensured that Seattle's “Indian problem” joined student protests and carpet bombings as early-1970s hot political topics.
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This was political theater at its best. The Native invaders of Fort Lawton had no legal authority on which to claim land in Seattle. Even if their proclamation did riff on the legal frameworks established by treaties, these were urban Indians, most with no connections to the Duwamish, Lake, and Shilshole peoples whose territories had become the city of Seattle. But by 1970, what it meant to be Indian in America—and what it meant to be American on Indian land—was changing, and
as a result, the place-story Native activists were telling in Seattle was a new one. This city and this land are ours, they shouted—and for the first time, Seattle, and the world, seemed to be listening.

But this was only one of several place-stories being told by urban Indians in postwar Seattle. As Native people from many tribes and nations worked to make the city home, they told stories as diverse as their communities of origin. Some actively participated in the city's romantic narrative of the Denny Party, while others wove Seattle's urban history into a broader story of genocide and dispossession. Still other urban Indians, including the city's most destitute, struggled simply to assert their basic humanity in a civic story that cast them as little more than symbols of racial decay. In each case, the stories Native people told about their place in Seattle had everything to do with the changes in the city and in what it meant to be Indian and American. As cultural, political, and even environmental landscapes shifted in the decades after the Second World War, so would Seattle's Indian place-stories, and those stories would be as complicated and diverse as urban Indians themselves. Urban renewal would have many conflicting meanings as Native people worked to make Seattle home.

T
O SAY THAT SEATTLE'S URBAN
Indian activism began with the invasion of Fort Lawton in 1970 is a bit like saying that Seattle's urban history origins lie only at Alki Point. If the “Indian attack” of the Vietnam era took most of Seattle by surprise, it was only the latest and most visible of a series of efforts by urban Native people to claim space in Seattle. To understand the origins of Indian struggles to find home in Seattle, we must go back to an earlier war. Epidemics and railroads had been the great forces that shaped Seattle's urban history in the nineteenth century, but the pivot on which the city's twentieth-century history turned was war. The Great War had helped complete Seattle's arrival on the world stage, but it was the Second World War that would truly transform Seattle into a city of global significance. More than perhaps any other American city, Seattle would be changed by the necessities of prosecuting war in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. The changes were most obvious in the kinds of work people
did in the city. Where in the 1930s lumber mills and canneries were the main industry in the region, by the 1950s the shipyards and hangars and foundries that supplied the Allies with machines of war had changed the city's economy in profound ways. Between 1939 and 1941, for example, Seattle's manufacturing base doubled; the number of people employed in manufacturing went from 35,000 in 1940 to 115,000 in 1943. Across the American West, cities were being transformed by wartime industry. The battleships and warplanes from Seattle—including one called
Chief Seattle
—helped turn the course of global conflict, just as they cemented Seattle's new role in the global economy. Seattle was now Boeing's town.
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The Second World War had begun a new chapter in Seattle's urban story, and it also marked a turning point in Indian history, as Indians moved to the city to work on behalf of the war effort. Adeline Skultka, a young Kaigani Haida from Craig, Alaska, was one of these. After graduating from high school, she came to Seattle with her sister and a cousin and immediately found work on a Boeing assembly line and as a welder in a local shipyard; soon after, she met her Filipino husband, Genaro “Gerry” Garcia. Despite the long history of Indian migration to Seattle, for people like Skultka, moving to the wartime city involved a steep learning curve—but as before, the city beckoned with opportunity, especially compared to the grim prospects back home. “A lot of them had never been off the reservation before,” remembered Lillian Chapelle (Cowlitz-Yakama), “and yet there were jobs here in Seattle.” Like service on the battlefield, work on the home front proved that Native people could be both Indian and American.
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The enthusiasm and opportunity of the war would soon fade, though. When, at war's end, cancellation of government contracts at the shipyards and factories led to layoffs and as returning soldiers clamored for jobs, women and people of color were the first to go. Meanwhile, Native veterans struggled to reintegrate into civilian society, and Indians who depended on the waning extractive industries of Old Seattle found themselves increasingly adrift. Although the economy regained its footing in the 1950s, the benefits of the boom rarely trickled down to urban Indians, who experienced discrimination in virtually every aspect
of life: Chinese restaurants that refused to hire nonwhite waitresses, vacant apartments mysteriously rented, hospitals that refused to serve Native people, murders of homeless Indians that went uninvestigated. During a period when federal Indian policy enthusiastically encouraged assimilation into mainstream society and few, if any, resources existed for the Native community, the economic and social realities of 1950s Seattle afforded urban Indians little security and even less hope.
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The result was that many Indian men and women who came to Seattle ended up on Skid Road, the area that included Pioneer Square and much of First Avenue, stretching all the way north to Belltown. In his much-beloved 1951 history
Skid Road
, Murray Morgan described “men sitting on curbs and sleeping in doorways …, condemned buildings …, missions and taverns and wine shops and stores where you can buy a suit for $3.75.” For Morgan and many other Seattleites, downtown—particularly Belltown, First Avenue, and Pioneer Square—had become “the place of dead dreams,” populated by the aging workforce of Old Seattle, which one 1950 memoir called “the discards from the maelstrom of industrial activity.” The streets and run-down hotels of Skid Road were also home to hundreds of Indians. Colville architect Lawney Reyes, for example, recalled that during those years “if you wanted to see an Indian in Seattle you'd jump in the car and go down to Skid Row.” In the 1960 census, 30 percent of Pioneer Square's inhabitants were either “Indian or Oriental,” and the district included the largest, most concentrated population of Native people in the city. Out in the hinterland, many Indian reservation residents described skid roads as places where people disappeared, almost as if they had died—and, sometimes, the deaths were real: cirrhosis, a fall under a passing train, tuberculosis, a knife in the ribs. After the brief window of wartime opportunity, life in Seattle was almost as bleak as ever for its Indian population—if not worse.
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The seven women who came together in the 1950s to address this problem were unlikely activists. Most had come to Seattle during the Second World War to work in the defense industries and, unlike most Native people, now enjoyed the relative security of working- and middle-class life, focusing their energies on volunteering at churches and their
children's schools. On the surface, they were paragons of assimilation—Christian, married with mixed-race children, and productive members of postwar society. At the same time, it was these seven women who would lay the foundations for the radical action at Fort Lawton more than twenty years later. They first met in 1958 under the leadership of Pearl Warren, a Makah who had come to the city after the war. Pearl's daughter Mary Jo Butterfield had recently brought home a desperate Indian couple, left on the streets after the wife was discharged from the hospital. Like Ann Peterson's home in 1930s Ballard, this postwar Makah household was a refuge for urban Indians. Inspired in part by that experience, Warren, Butterfield, Adeline Skultka Garcia, and their friends decided that if resources for Native people in Seattle were going to exist, Native people needed to create them. They began visiting apartment buildings, downtown hotels, and the Greyhound station—anywhere they might find other Indian women. By the fall of 1958, they had more than fifty members, whose tribal communities ranged from Washington and Alaska to Canada and the Plains. With the help of Erna Gunther, a University of Washington anthropologist, the group incorporated that year as the American Indian Women's Service League.
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