Native Seattle (30 page)

For almost two decades, the Service League would be Seattle's leading urban Indian organization. Pearl Warren, Adeline Garcia, and the other founders described the role they hoped to play in the inaugural issue of the Service League's newsletter:

The newcomer to the city will find [the Service League] a good place to meet other Indian women and make new friends; and those who want to learn more about conditions and developments that may eventually affect their own lives—Indian legislation, medical care, employment, etc.—will hear new and vital information at each meeting. And to those who can see a way of picking up and straightening out the threads from the tangle of Indian affairs, there is the opportunity of doing a real service to the Indian community—locally, statewide, or even nationally.

And always, the leaders of the Service League connected everyday life both to tribal traditions and to Indian politics, on scales ranging from
the local to the national. “Where else but in an Indian paper,” asked one writer in the newsletter, “would you find such unique receipts [
sic
] such as ‘Sturgeon Spinal Cord’ and ‘Buckskin Bread,’ legends written as told by the old people, the ‘Lord's Prayer’ in Chinook?” She then continued by pointing out that the newsletter would also cover “land and claim decisions, inter-tribal meetings, fishing and hunting, House and Senate Bills pending on local and national levels” and other key issues in Indian political life.
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But creating community in the city also meant finding a place. With that in mind, the Service League opened Seattle's first Indian Center in 1960 in a rented storefront at First and Vine at the northern end of Skid Road. Two years later, they moved into a larger space across from the Greyhound Bus depot. Where totem poles and statues of Chief Seattle greeted non-Indian visitors to Seattle, here real Indians greeted real Indians as Service League members kept an eye on the bus station, looking for new arrivals.
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Fond memories of the Indian Center highlight the sense of community created by the women who ran it. In 1970, for example, Choctaw Seattleite Harvey Davis and his wife, Nellie, recalled the many things the center had provided over the years:

Food if he was hungry. A friend if he was friendless. Shoes if he was barefoot. Sympathy and advice if he was troubled. Thrown out if he was drunk. Returned to his people if he was lost. A quiet place to sit and read or contemplate. Free clothing on Thursdays. An opportunity to help our less fortunate tribesmen.

Most important for the Davises, the center provided “a feeling of warmth and friendship which can be found in few, if any, other places in Seattle.” In a city where most Indian people were at worst ostracized or at best neglected, the center was a kind of home, where even the poorest of Seattle's Indian community could contribute. Adeline Garcia recalled how “those bums on [First] Avenue, they'd come in and clean up the place,” bringing produce and fish from the Public Market when they could afford it and offering skills such as carpentry in return for a hot meal and a place to “stretch out and rest.” Mary
Jo Butterfield, meanwhile, described the struggles of one Blackfoot Indian Center volunteer:

Sitting in a house out at High Point [public housing] with five hungry kids and you're an alcoholic and you're trying to dry out and take care of your kids and you can't feed them and you don't have any money—you don't have bus fare to get to the Indian Center to get groceries. And you don't have a phone. Those kind of people were the ones that worked the hardest and got the most out of it.

Here was self-help, here were grass roots, here were Indian people of many nations, creating a place in the city.
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But despite the efforts of the Service League, not everyone felt comfortable being Native in Seattle, where those “No Indians Allowed” signs still hung in windows and, according to Puyallup activist Ramona Bennett, “a lot of Indians were still trying to pass as Italian.” In response, the Service League saw public relations as a critical element of its mission, equal to providing services to Native people. The 1961 North American Indian Benefit Ball at the Masonic Temple, for example, showcased crafts and dances and used television and radio spots to encourage non-Indians to attend. Similarly, well-attended picnics at Seward Park on Lake Washington involved Lummi dancers, speeches and stories in the Makah language, and door prizes of baskets and handmade sweaters. But the group's signature event was the salmon bake at Alki Point, which by 1967 was feeding more than two thousand people and had become a highlight of the annual Seafair festivities, often as part of reenactments of the Denny Party's landing at Alki. League members, then, did not work to overturn the city's place-story in the 1960s. Instead, they lobbied to become part of it—as living Indian people.
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Participating in celebrations of urban founding did not preclude outspoken advocacy on Native political issues. In particular, Service League members worked to increase non-Indians' awareness of the shortcomings of federal Indian policy: most notably the relocation and termination policies of the postwar years, one of which sent Native people to cities only to abandon them, and the other of which sought to negate
treaties by dissolving reservations and annulling the federal-tribal relationship altogether. Pearl Warren, for example, represented the Service League in particular and urban Indians in general before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Indian affairs in 1968, and that same year, the Service League helped organize an international urban Indian conference in Seattle that welcomed activists and community organizers from the United States and Canada to share stories and strategies. But funding for their efforts was hard to come by, even as the city's political landscape shifted toward a multicultural civic politics and as the federal government began to fund programs in other minority communities. “So much money was coming into Seattle,” recalled Lakota Service League member Letoy Eike, “and Indians were not getting anything.” For two years, Service League members tried to convince city officials to earmark money for an Indian Center in a vacant site at the south end of Lake Union, but as one observer commented, the city “passed the buck” while “millions of dollars poured into the [predominantly African American] Central District.” One Model Cities project even paid for Central District youth to carve a totem pole portraying the nation's black history, which must have underscored the disparities between the city's black and Indian communities.
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Urban Indian strategies in Seattle were about to change, however. For some younger urban Indians, including an Indian Center volunteer named Bernie Whitebear, the frustration was building. Whitebear, born Bernie Reyes and a Colville from eastern Washington, was one of many who had come to Seattle to work at Boeing. In that sense, he was like Adeline Garcia, but Whitebear's activism represented a new style of Indian leadership in Seattle. Although concerned by the dominance of African American concerns in Seattle racial politics, he was also inspired by the work of Seattle's black, Latino, and Asian American communities. Whitebear and his allies began to formulate a more multicultural—and more radical—approach to claiming space in the city. And so when the city, the army, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs dragged their feet on a proposal for a new Indian Center at the recently decommissioned Fort Lawton and Indian activists took over Alcatraz Island, the stage was set for a new chapter in Seattle's urban Indian history.
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The occupation of Alcatraz by American Indian Movement activists and others in 1969 had garnered international attention, and by capitalizing both on the successes of other movements' radical strategies and on a growing popular interest in (and sympathy toward) indigenous peoples, the occupation of Alcatraz was a turning point for Native activism, focusing international attention on the everyday lives of Indian people in the United States. While the takeover of Alcatraz was a failure in the sense that Indian people and institutions never achieved permanent tenure on the Rock, it was a phenomenal success in that it inspired similar tactics among “Red Power” activists throughout the nation and brought public attention to Native issues. And so on that brisk March morning in 1970, more than a hundred Indians “took” Fort Lawton.
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The invasion was a radical departure from the more diplomatic traditions of the Service League activists. Nothing made this more obvious than the allies the takeover attracted: Alcatraz veteran Leonard Peltier, radical black comedian Dick Gregory, and antiwar feminist Jane Fonda all came to offer their support. (So did the radical Seattle Liberation Front, which had recently held a protest naming part of the University of Washington campus “The People's Republic of Leschi” after the man who led the 1856 attack on the city.) The tactics of the takeover were a far cry from the salmon bakes and mayoral meetings of the Service League: protestors were more than willing to be arrested, and they even hired a skywriter to pen “A New Day…Fort, Give Up…Fort, Surrender” over the city. There were, however, connections between the Fort Lawton activists and the Service League. League founder Ella Aquino, for example, was among those who scaled the fences at Fort Lawton, and she and other League members, “armed with sandwiches and coffee,” supported the occupation from behind the scenes and reprinted the Fort Lawton proclamation in
Indian Center News
. And in a broader sense, the Fort Lawton leadership carried the same hopes as the Service League. In their proclamation, protestors described their vision for Fort Lawton:

We feel that this land of Ft. Lawton is more suitable to pursue an Indian way of life, as determined by our own standards. By this we mean—this place
does not resemble most Indian reservations. It has potential for modern facilities, adequate sanitation facilities, health care facilities, fresh running water, educational facilities, and transportation facilities.

Point for point, this was the same vision that Pearl Warren had pursued for years; she had always wanted to move beyond a crisis-driven Indian Center and create lasting, proactive Indian institutions in the city. Despite their more radical and visible tactics, the “invaders” of Fort Lawton were the political descendants of those first seven women who had come together back in 1958.
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Many non-Indian Seattleites dismissed the invasion of Fort Lawton as mere silliness; one Native woman, for example, quit her job after her boss told her that the takeover “was pretty stupid, and that the Indians were dumb for doing it and had no reason for doing it.” But despite negative reactions from some non-Indians (eggs and insults thrown, death threats made, and neighborhood petitions calling for an end to the “noise and stupid acts”), by the end of the invasion, more than forty non-Indian organizations in the city had come to support the occupation, including the Seattle Human Rights Commission, whose bias toward African American concerns had frustrated Indian leaders in the past. And within two years of the invasion, United Indians of All Tribes, as the activists came to be known, had negotiated an agreement with the city with the help of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Sixteen acres of Fort Lawton, soon to be renamed Discovery Park, would be leased for an Indian cultural and social-services center. When the Daybreak Star Cultural Center finally opened in 1976, the
Post-Intelligencer
called it a “proud day,” not just for Indians but for the city that had found ways to compromise with activists. As Service League member Arlene Red Elk put it, “They got their spot.”
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The spot they had gotten was a distinctively Indian one. Designed by architect Lawney Reyes, Bernie Whitebear's brother, the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was inspired by Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk's vision of a star that had come down to earth and taken root to form a sheltering tree, and the building's four wings, built of timber donated by Northwest tribes, represented the four directions. Meanwhile, the
public spaces of Daybreak Star were filled with art made by Indian people of many tribes: Creek, Tlingit, Chiricahua Apache, Caddo, Cowlitz, and Aleut, among others. Just as Seattle's connections to the world had widened in the years since the Second World War, so had its Indian hinterland. No more was that hinterland just a woven coast; it was now a woven continent.
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But the outward successes of the urban Indian community, symbolized by the opening of Daybreak Star, masked new rifts that were starting to open within that community. One rift came from the leftist, multiracial mode of organizing that Whitebear and his supporters had pursued. According to Diane Vendiola, whose Filipino father and Swinomish mother had met in Seattle back in the 1930s, these activists had pursued what she called “the city mode.” Its confrontational strategies and connections to other minority communities—especially African Americans and antiwar radicals—alienated some older activists. This same tension would also arise on reservations as Indian men and women, energized by leftist tactics honed primarily in urban places, brought those visions of revolution back to their home communities. Other rifts were widened by success itself; as urban Indian programs began to finally receive public funding, they seemed to become less Indian to many community members. As Marilyn Bentz explained it, “once money came into the picture, things changed, and it got a lot more political… that turned off a lot of people.” Harvey and Nellie Davis felt the same way, recalling the early Indian Center as a place “without a lot of gobbledy-gook, double talk, social service workers lingo,” unlike the new post–Fort Lawton institutions. For many members of the urban Indian community, the institutional success of the Indian Center made it less of a Native place and more like any other social-service agency.
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