Native Seattle (32 page)

Correa's poem is a dramatic alternative to the story of downtown's “renaissance,” illustrating the human costs of urban renewal and what it meant to try to live in what was now the ground of Official Urban
History. Meanwhile, architect Laurie Olin described meeting some of the remaining Skid Road Indians while sketching Pioneer Square streetscapes in the 1970s:

One morning under the pergola an Indian sat down next to me and said: “How are you at drawing scars?” and grinned.… These people whose identity has been so brutally denied wanted to see that they were still there. My drawings seemed to reaffirm their existence. “Draw me, man, draw me; draw me next, I'll hold still right here,” said one.

A quarter century later, Earle Thompson, a Yakama writer who had spent years on Skid Road, highlighted the ongoing visibility of homeless Indian people downtown:

In a mission / doorway / a in-num [Indian] / puts / a green bottle / up to his lips. / He begins / to sing: / “Gimme 5 / minutes / only five minutes more; / let me stay / ah-yah-aye …” / He pounds his fist / on the wall. / A couple passes / and he smiles / at them.

Like the Service League members holding their public events and the Fort Lawton activists reading their proclamation, here at last, twelve decades after the founding of Seattle, were Indian voices telling a new place-story. Or more to the point, here at last, twelve decades after the founding, someone was listening and writing it down.
²⁸

It was against this backdrop of historic preservation and the erasure of Skid Road's Indian history that Edgar Heap of Birds'
Day/Night
was installed to wide acclaim. Columnist and cartoonist David Horsey wrote, for example, “Amid the human wreckage congregating around the Pioneer Square pergola, it seemed that it would be redundant to point out the tragic circumstances of some of Chief Seattle's tribal descendants. But, instead, the panels stand like exclamation points among the living proof of their indictment.” The irony of
Day/Night
, though, is that it too is part of the gentrification of the neighborhood, created to speak to those who visit Pioneer Place Park and Pioneer Square in search of stories about the city. When asked in 1997 what she thought of
Day/Night
, Margaret, a homeless Aleut woman, referred to it simply as “fucking white man bullshit.” To some extent, she was right. Without the crowds who frequent historic Pioneer Square,
Day/Night
would have little meaning and even less of an audience. And perhaps most importantly, it says what many expected all along: that Indians and cities cannot coexist. After all, Heap of Birds took his piece's title from one version of the Chief Seattle Speech: “Day and night cannot dwell together. The red man has ever fled the approach of the white man, as the changing mist on the mountainside flees before the blazing sun.” In both English and the first language of this place called Seattle, here again is what we mistake for history: a place-story telling us what we already thought we knew.
²⁹

D
AYBREAK STAR,
DAY/NIGHT
: two astronomical metaphors, speaking radically different place-stories. One tells us:
This city is Indian land.
The other:
This city is no place for Indians
. Their conflicting tales of the connections between Native people and the city capture the conflicts inherent in urban Indian history: What does it mean to be Native in the city? Can people even
be
Native in the city? And what about the fact that, throughout Seattle's history, whether during the creation of the ship canal or the ouster of Native Skid Road, civic leaders seemed determined to make the city into a place that was no place for Indians? The story of Indian activism in the city and the destruction of Indian Skid Road can be understood only in the context of the changing nature of Seattle itself. Before the Second World War, Seattle was a city of lumber mills, racial segregation, and Skid Road. Fifty years later, it was city of white-collar industry, multicultural politics, and urban renaissance, in which reinvestment in city-hood meant both the creation of institutions like the Indian Center and Daybreak Star and the destruction of an Indian neighborhood in the name of historic preservation. As in earlier periods in Seattle's past, changes in the city led to new possibilities and challenges for the Native American community, just as changes in Seattle's Native community led to new urban stories. For all their complexity, these stories together attest to a single, clear fact: that Indian history can, and does, happen in urban places.

More than thirty years after the invasion of Fort Lawton, new stories are still being written. In 1970, there were some four thousand Indians in the city; by the end of the century, there were nearly three times that number. Despite the rise in Native population, though, voluntary groups like the Service League had begun to fade soon after the successes of the 1970s. “Indian people were more able to get jobs and education and so forth,” recalled Marilyn Bentz, with the result that “the volunteers weren't as necessary.” Meanwhile, the radical activism that had helped reconfigure civic politics faded as well, as life in the city got better and ethnic institutions became more bureaucratic.
³⁰

But challenges remained, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the range of Native organizations in Seattle attests both to the ongoing pressure to reconcile what it means to be Indian with what it means to be urban, and to the amazing capacity of the Indian community to respond to its members' needs. At Daybreak Star, United Indians of All Tribes offers Head Start classes, foster-care advocacy, culturally appropriate therapy, outpatient treatment for substance abuse, GED (general equivalency diploma) courses, and housing referrals, in addition to its annual powwow and an ongoing art market. The Seattle Indian Health Board—housed in a building named after Leschi—offers medical and dental services and coordinates access to traditional healers. A group called Queer Oyate supports Native people with HIV and AIDS, while the Chief Seattle Club, founded without permission by a Jesuit priest in the 1960s to serve homeless Indians in Pioneer Square, still manages to operate among the galleries and nightclubs. There are even a couple of Indian bars in town. Meanwhile, the Service League is undergoing a renaissance of its own, with members involved in virtually every aspect of the community, and the I-Wa-Sil youth group has recently formed the nation's first urban Indian Boys and Girls Club. All speak to the enormous creativity and strength of Native people in Seattle, according to Lawney Reyes, the architect of Daybreak Star:

I'm very proud of the survival of urban people. The government, they're still scratching their head.…We're supposed to be extinct by the help of our own government. And somehow we have managed to survive even when
Native people have been placed in environments that are unlivable. We still find a place to create home.

All that was unlivable—the benches in Occidental Park, the dingy rooms in the Morrison Hotel, the projects at High Point—is being transformed.
³¹

Perhaps the most ironic result of that transformation, and of Seattle's urban Indian story, comes from this place itself: from ideas about the connections between Indians and nature and from the simple fact that the city's Native community, made up of families and individuals from scores of tribes, has grown up on territory that once belonged to other Native people. Back in 1970, Bernie Whitebear had played the nature card: “If we're allowed to take over this land we would leave it in its natural state,” he told the press at Fort Lawton. “We wouldn't destroy the natural areas there. We would preserve the land, the way the Indians have always done.” Later, when Daybreak Star finally opened, the progressive
Seattle Weekly
saw the new facility as part of an “Indian Renaissance” that would lead to preservation of the earth. But twenty years later, the idea of Indians as inherent environmentalists would come back to haunt Daybreak Star when United Indians of All Tribes proposed building conference and museum facilities—a People's Lodge—in Discovery Park. Concerned over aesthetics, parking, and open-space preservation, local non-Indian residents highlighted the plans' seeming betrayal of “Indian environmental values.” Having played the ecology card in their claims to Fort Lawton, the founders of Daybreak Star were now held accountable to the stereotype of the ecological Indian.
³²

In responding to the complaints just before his death in 2000, White-bear unwittingly highlighted the deepest irony about an urban Indian community built on indigenous land. “From the window of my office,” he wrote in the
Seattle Times
, “I look north from Magnolia Bluff and imagine the warriors of the Haida Nation who once paddled their great canoes into Puget Sound and beached them on the shores below in what is now called Shilshole Bay.” Thinking of those ancestors, he recalled the words attributed to Seeathl that claimed that the white man would never be alone in the city. But Whitebear neglected to mention that those
ancient Haida warriors had been raiders, come to enslave and kill the Shilsholes. And so the place-story of one urban Indian activist came into conflict with another kind of place-story that had been rising during the same years. For while Seattle's urban Indian community had been making a place for themselves in the city, other Indian voices—the descendants of the indigenous people of Seattle—were also laying claim to the city.
³³

T
HE SEATTLE SPIRIT
, the story of a city's birth in pioneer stalwartness, could take its adherents in strange new directions. On the centennial of the landing at Alki, it could lead them into the Cold War. The Founders Day celebrations of 1951 were like those in the past, full of pomp and pageantry. Some celebrants attended performances of “The Landing of the Calico Pioneers” followed by baton twirling and a “God Bless America” sing-along at the Alki Field House, while more studious participants visited City Hall to view the city's original charter and various other “musty old files.” And like other Founders Days, the centerpiece of the centennial was a reenactment of the Denny Party's landing, where junior high school boys in badly dyed wigs played Indian, awaiting the arrival of grown-ups playing pioneer. As the founders strode ashore, Mayor William Devin smashed a bottle containing the commingled waters of Seattle's lakes and rivers against the Alki Monument, the Hiawatha Sparklers did an “Indian dance,” and serial salute bombs closed the program.
¹

The reenactment of the landing at Alki was the heart of the centennial program, but its headliner was General Douglas MacArthur. Thousands of Seattleites went to the University of Washington the next day to hear him extol the lessons of Alki Point. He told his audience that Seattle had been the “full beneficiary of what the pioneering spirit has wrought upon this continent” but warned that said spirit was still very much needed. “Should the pioneering spirit cease to dominate the American character,” MacArthur continued, “our national progress would end. For a nation's life is never static. It must advance or it will recede.” Invoking long-standing anxieties about the loss of the frontier, the man who so famously strode ashore in the Philippines proposed an agenda for
the nation: “To the early pioneer the Pacific Coast marked the end of his courageous westerly advance—to us it should mark but the beginning. To him it delimited our western frontier—to us that frontier has been moved beyond the Pacific horizon.” Broadcast on national television—one of Seattle's first appearances in the medium—MacArthur's speech linked the Seattle Spirit to the nation's interests in the Pacific. The story of Seattle's birth in a wilderness with its own “red menace” could now resonate for a new generation, and the Seattle Spirit, always linked to the nation's own place-story, helped lead the nation, for better or mostly for worse, into new places around the world.
²

For all its historical rhetoric, MacArthur's speech had little to do with the past and much more to do with the future. It was much like another centennial event: the burying of a time capsule on Alki Beach. The capsule's contents were not listed in the
Post-Intelligencer
story announcing its burial, but the author's vision of the future was richly detailed. Seattleites might, for example, “shoot over” to Alki Point in their “personal atomic cruisers” to watch the opening of the time capsule on 13 November 2051. “We'll probably be wearing a spun air afternoon dress with radium buttons,” imagined journalist Dorothy Hart, “and nary a qualm about the weather! Before the days of atmospheric control, we understand, Seattle women carried umbrellas!” Here was Seattle's space age future, full of technocratic optimism and personal affluence despite threats abroad. Here was a Seattle that had escaped its past (not to mention its ecology).
³

Although surely tongue in cheek, Hart's vision of twenty-first-century Seattle reflected its time, that period in the 1950s when consensus politics, consumer confidence, and scientific progress augured a bright future for Americans. In the years to come, however, history would intervene. The consensus would crack as social unrest transformed public discourses on race, inspired in part by the unjust ways in which postwar affluence had been distributed. The American Indian Women's Service League and United Indians of All Tribes made that point beautifully. Meanwhile, Hart's atomic cruisers and radium dress buttons would come to seem like naïve paeans to a nuclear industry that, only a few short decades after its inception, was seen by many to be an ecological
nightmare. Instead of a nuclear-powered, climate-controlled, deracinated futuropolis, Seattle became a place where both multicultural politics and environmental anxieties dominated much of postwar civic life.