Native Seattle (3 page)

Lisa Scharnhorst, Sandra Kroupa, Carla Rickerson, Gary Lundell, and the other staff of the University of Washington Special Collections deserve praise for their tolerance, interest in my research, and deep knowledge of the trove they guard. Beyond the University of Washington, many other people made this book possible. John Lutz, of the University of Victoria, helped me flesh out the British Columbia side of things, while Paige Raibmon, now a colleague at the University of British Columbia, offered important insights arising from the intersections between our two projects. Carolyn Marr and Howard Giske guided me through the Museum of History and Industry's collections, while Greg Lange and the staff of the Puget Sound Branch of the Washington State Archives in Bellevue suggested sources I never would have thought to examine. Miriam Waite and the Daughters of the Pioneers honored me both with a small scholarship and with an afternoon among the descendants
of people who appear herein. Local historian David Buerge deserves credit for writing a series of
Seattle Weekly
articles that inspired my interest in Seattle's indigenous history in the first place. Peripatetic anthropologist Jay Miller helped with insights into local oral tradition and language. And with one eye on the local details and the other on the broader scholarship, Lorraine McConaghy was a compatriot in civic iconoclasm and a counselor in times of academic insecurity. Her passion and rigor helped to make this a better book and me a better scholar. Local historical and ecological activists such as David Williams, Valerie Rose, Tom Dailey, Monica Wooton, Paul Talbert, Georgina Kerr, and others proved to me that there was an audience for this history. To some degree, this book was written for people like them. I hope it inspires them to continue their efforts to engage the places where they live and the histories to which they are party.

As editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series, of which this book is the first Indian-centered volume, Bill Cronon encouraged me to rethink whether this book belonged in the series and provided nothing but enthusiasm along the way. Julidta Tarver, meanwhile, kept me on track for publication, showed great warmth during some trying times, and paid me a great deal of attention despite the fact that she is semiretired from the University of Washington Press. Two anonymous reviewers also provided critically important feedback on the manuscript, seeing things I no longer could after all the years of living with this project. Pam Bruton deserves credit for the thankless task of copyediting, and Marilyn Trueblood oversaw the production of the book at the Press.

Two collaborators deserve their own paragraph. Nile Thompson, a gifted linguist with an eye for detail (to say the least), has made an irreplaceable contribution through his work on the “Atlas of Indigenous Seattle” at the end of this book. I dread to think what might have ended up in print without his expertise in Salish linguistic structure and world-view, his working knowledge of Whulshootseed, and his attention to fine nuances of logic and evidence. Now I truly understand why linguistics is its own discipline, and why historians should keep to their own turf. Amir Sheikh, who designed the maps for the atlas, was both
a stalwart friend and an intellectual co-conspirator. As he pursues graduate studies of his own, I only hope I can contribute as much to Amir's future scholarship as he has already contributed to mine.

Finally, this book is dedicated to three people who have shaped my life in profound ways. First, Robert H. Keller Jr., the resident historian at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College, saved me from law school and showed me that all the things I cared about in fact counted as history. It is difficult to imagine having been anything other than a historian, and I have Bob to thank for that. Second, my husband, Simon Martin, has been my therapist, keel, and accountant through the neuroses and vagaries of graduate school and the academic life. Over the past dozen years, he has sacrificed a great deal in my pursuit of a career, but I think he would agree that it's been worth it. Lastly, this book is dedicated to my mother, Paula Thrush, who died of cancer in February 2005 and thus never had the chance to see this published or even to know that I'd been offered a position at the University of British Columbia. She made me who I am through her utter inability to sit still and do nothing, through her passion for place and the environment, and through her unswerving (if not always uncritical) support of her only child. I wish I could talk to her again.

E
VERY AMERICAN CITY
is built on Indian land, but few advertise it like Seattle. Go walking in the city, and you will see Native American images everywhere in the urban landscape. Wolf and Wild Man stalk the public spaces of downtown in the form of totem poles. Tlingit Orca totems adorn manhole covers, and a bronze Indian chieftain raises a welcoming hand as the monorail hums past. Street musicians, protesters, and holiday shoppers move across a plaza paved with bricks laid in the pattern of a cedar-bark basket. Souvenir shops hawk dreamcatchers and sweatshirts with totemic Frogs, while only doors down, a high-end gallery sells argillite totem poles, soapstone walruses, and Earthquake spirit masks carved by modern masters. Massive car ferries with names like
Klickitat
and
Elwha
slide across Puget Sound, passing an island where, since the 1962 world's fair, Kwakwaka'wakw performers have welcomed visitors and world leaders to a North Coast–style longhouse. Out in the neighborhoods, schoolchildren have adorned bus shelters with Haida designs of the Salmon spirit, and Coast Salish spindle whorls have been soldered into a sewage treatment station's security gates. And then there are the names on the land itself: one park named for a red paint used in traditional ceremonies and another for an ancient prairie; a marina called Shilshole and an industrial waterway known as Duwamish; the lakefront enclave of Leschi, named for an executed indigenous leader. Seattle, it seems, is a city in love with its Native American heritage.
¹

Indeed, it is the totem poles, motifs of the Salmon spirit, and ferries with Indian names that tell you where you are: without them, Seattle would somehow be less
Seattle
. Every carved image, every statue of
an Indian, every indigenous name on the land implies that you are here in this place and not in another. They are part of how you know you are not in New York or New Orleans, London or Los Angeles. They are what we expect from Seattle. They are stories about place.

Iconic western writer William Kittredge has described how stories and places are connected:

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a “sense of place,” we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having “a sense of self ” means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

In Seattle, visitors and residents alike tell and are told stories about this city: that it is built on Indian land, that that land was taken to build a great metropolis, and that such a taking is commemorated by the city's Native American imagery. These stories in and of place, these place-stories, define Seattle as a city with an indigenous pedigree.
²

But Seattle is also a haunted city. In a metropolis built in indigenous territory, and where cellular phone towers only recently outnumbered totem poles, it comes as no surprise that Seattle has Indian ghosts. There is the tale of Joshua Winfield, a settler who built his home on an Indian cemetery near Lake Washington, only to be frightened into eternity by indigenous revenants one night in 1874. The spectral pleas of another Indian ghost, allegedly that of a murdered Native prostitute, have been heard since the Prohibition era in a rambling Victorian home near the Duwamish. At a nearby golf course, a naked Indian described as a shaman has been seen since the 1960s, dancing at night on what is rumored to be another indigenous burial ground. And at Pike Place Market, the apparition of an Indian woman in a shawl and floor-length skirt has appeared for generations in the windows of the magic shop and in the aisles of the bead store. Meanwhile, members of the local tribes pray for the dead on the banks of the industrial river named for their people, and Native storytellers lead purification ceremonies in the
underground streets and storefronts beneath Pioneer Square, in hopes of bringing peace to wandering indigenous specters.
³

By far, though, the most famous haunting of Seattle is accomplished by the city's namesake, a man called Seeathl. A local indigenous leader of Duwamish and Suquamish heritage who facilitated the city's founding, Seeathl is best known for words he is said to have spoken during treaty discussions in the 1850s, when Seattle's urban promise seemed to require the dispossession of local Native peoples:

Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God lest you forget. The red man could never comprehend nor remember it. Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our leaders, and it is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of their tomb; they wander far away beyond the stars and are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They always love its winding rivers, its sacred mountains, and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in the tenderest affection over the lonely-hearted living and often return to visit, guide, and comfort them.

We will ponder your proposition, and when we decide, we will tell you. But should we accept it, I here and now make this the first condition, that we will not be denied the privilege, without molestation, of visiting at will the graves where we have buried our ancestors, and our friends, and our children.

Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks, which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur, thrill with memories of past events connected with the lives of my people.

And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe; and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the fields, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.

At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you
think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead—did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

According to
Seattle Times
writer Eric Scigliano, the Chief Seattle Speech, as it has come to be known, is a “ghost story like no other.” It represents not just the words of one man but also “the innumerable souls who fished and sang and made art along these shores and had no inkling of cities.” Seeathl gave voice to those “wraiths,” and the city's modern residents, Scigliano warns, should “tread lightly and treat the land softly. You never know who might be watching—from above, or even nearer.”
⁴

But like any good haunting, the authenticity of the speech cannot be proven. It first appeared in print more than three decades after Seeathl put his mark on the Treaty of Point Elliott, and it bears a suspicious resemblance to Victorian prose lamenting the passing of the “red man.” There is no question that Seeathl spoke eloquently at the treaty proceedings—he carried Thunder, which gave skills of oratory, as one of his many spirit powers—but his exact words are lost. What we do know, however, is that the speech has become a key text of both indigenous rights and environmentalist thinking, with some of its adherents going so far as to call it a “fifth Gospel.” Simultaneously urtext and Rorschach test, the words of Seeathl haunt Seattle, telling stories of Native nobility, American colonialism, and longing for a lost environmental paradise. Somewhere between fiction and fact, these place-stories haunt any history of Seattle. But they often have little to do with the more complicated story of the real Seeathl, who died in 1866 on a reservation across Puget Sound from Seattle and was buried in a grave bearing his new Catholic name: Noah. Instead, these ghost stories of Seeathl have far more to do with the people telling them.
⁵

This is the power of ghost stories, of phantoms at the Market, and the sage wisdom of dead chiefs: they tell us more about ourselves, and about our time, than they tell us about other people or the past. In writing of the role of ghosts in medieval European society, historian Jean-Claude
Schmitt has claimed that “the dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them,” and recent scholarship on American ghosts has shown that hauntings are among the most telling of cultural phenomena, expressing powerful anxieties, desires, and regrets. As Judith Richardson has illustrated in her work on ghosts in New York's Hudson Valley, hauntings are in fact social memories inspired by rapid cultural and environmental change, arising not so much from moldering graves as from the struggle to create a meaningful history. Ghosts are also rooted in places, perhaps none more so than the ghosts of Indians. In her analysis of hauntings in American literature, Renée Bergland has argued that stories of Indian ghosts are also place-stories about what happened in particular places and what those happenings meant. “Europeans take possession of Native American lands, to be sure,” Bergland writes, “but at the same time, Native Americans take supernatural possession of their dispossessors.” Thence springs the resonance of the Chief Seattle Speech, which is not easily separated from the winding rivers and sequestered vales it mourns. It is a story about a place as much as it is a story about a people, and it is a story about us in the present as much as it is about historical actors.
⁶