Native Seattle (34 page)

The Muckleshoots and Suquamish emerged from the fish-ins and other wranglings of the 1960s and 1970s as legally enfranchised stakeholders in the urban environment. As federally recognized tribes, they asserted their treaty rights and sought, in many cases successfully, to become co-managers of significant elements of the urban environment. By the end of the twentieth century, the two tribes had become stewards of Seattle's waterways and shorelines, even if those places had been transformed almost beyond recognition. While their ascendancy was related to a broader national—even international—movement toward tribal self-determination beginning in the 1970s, local forces, including urban ones, had also helped to set the stage for this new development. Their activism, while rooted in their own reservation experiences, was also influenced and supported by Indian allies whose traditions of protest had grown out of the more radical, multicultural, urban work of groups like United Indians of All Tribes. Meanwhile, their successes, in the public eye if not necessarily the courtroom, hinged to no small degree on the fact that the non-Indian Seattleites, questioning the social and environmental legacies of their city's growth, seemed readier than ever before to acknowledge tribal peoples as having a stake in environmental management. But the Suquamish and Muckleshoots were
not the only local Indians to place new claims on Seattle in the late twentieth century.

T
HE BOLDT DECISION
, as
United States v. Washington
soon came to be known, was a stunning victory for the people whose ancestors had settled the shores of Salt Water millennia earlier. It was also a victory for indigenous peoples around the world: its basic premise—that indigenous peoples, by definition, have unique claims on their territories—has become the basis for successful legal arguments throughout the United States as well as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. At the same time, it also set local tribes against each other, creating legal conflicts over shared or overlapping traditional territories. The Duwamish Tribe, including descendants of the Lakes and Shilsholes, had been involved in land claims cases throughout the twentieth century, its members giving testimony alongside relatives and allies from reservations at Muckleshoot, Tulalip, Suquamish, and elsewhere. But in many ways, the Duwamish had always been different, for one simple reason: their territory included the Pacific Northwest's largest city and the region's most valuable real estate. Arbiters of Indian law rarely recognized that value; after decades waiting for settlement of their claims, Duwamish tribal members each received $64 in 1971 for lands in what was now Seattle.

But for the Duwamish, a greater offense was yet to come. In 1979, five years after his decision in
United States v. Washington
, Judge Boldt determined that the Duwamish and four other Puget Sound Native communities no longer met all of the seven criteria required for inclusion on the list of tribes eligible for treaty fishing rights. In the case of the Duwamish, the disqualifier was an apparent ten-year break in the tribe's political leadership (one of the seven criteria required showing continuous tribal organization from the signing of a treaty to the present). The decade in question stretched from 1916 to 1925, the years immediately after the completion of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the destruction of the Black River, where many Duwamish people had still been living. The chaos of those years now had its consequences some six decades later. The modern-day Duwamish officially ceased to
exist in the eyes of the federal government and thus were considered to have no legal claim over the city named for their ancestral leader. (Never mind that government agents had included the Duwamish during discussions of proposed tribal termination policies of the 1950s.)
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Bureaucratic extinction is one thing; actual disappearance is quite another. So while the decision to extinguish Duwamish treaty status might have been a massive blow to the tribe's claims, it also opened new doors in terms of public sentiment. During the same years that the Muckleshoots and Suquamish were angling—literally—for control over the city's environment, the Duwamish, even without federal recognition, laid their own claims on Seattle. Stripped of legal authority, the Duwamish capitalized on changes in what it meant to be urban—most notably, the ascent of environmentalism and multiculturalism in civic politics and new ideas about history—to assert a kind of cultural authority. In doing so, they would not only challenge their own alleged extinction but capsize the city's very story of itself.

The Duwamish River was a place utterly transformed by 1975, the year after
United States v. Washington
. Only a single curve of the indigenous estuary still existed, near the place where Seetoowathl and his wife had starved half a century earlier. This backwater bend sheltered by a sliver of scrubby island was all that remained of the once-fecund interface between river and Salt Water. For some, though, even that was too much “unproductive” nature: in 1975, the Port of Seattle proposed to dredge and fill it to make way for a new container ship terminal. During initial surveying, an Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist identified the riverbank—then sporting five dilapidated houses—as a site of significance; historical documents and shell middens suggested that the site had once been an indigenous town. It appeared that the Duwamish village of Basketry Hat had been rediscovered. But in early 1976, the Port made a mistake. While demolishing the old houses, a bulldozer operator obliterated most of the archaeological layers at the site. Almost immediately, the local press blasted the Port for destroying a crucial piece of Seattle's heritage. (Business and maritime editors were less outraged; one longed rather confusingly for the days “when there were many more acres of clams here and digging for those clams was the only dig that
man worried about.”) In its own defense, the Port contended that it did not know the houses were on top of the archaeological site, and since public corporations could not be sued, it could not be held accountable anyway. These excuses did little to satisfy those who saw the Port's actions as the wanton destruction of civic patrimony.
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Then Cecile Maxwell stepped into the fray. As the young chairwoman of the Duwamish Tribe, Maxwell was, like many Indian leaders in her generation, including Bernie Whitebear, unafraid of controversy and extremely media savvy. Her own activism, however, was also shaped by her family's connections to local places and by watching, for example, her brother being arrested for fishing on the Duwamish. Soon after the bulldozer had done its work in 1975, Maxwell used her anger and expertise to begin telling a new kind of place-story. With the help of other Duwamish tribal members and allies in the local press, Maxwell connected what had happened at Basketry Hat to broader urban and Native narratives. In one interview, for example, she lamented that “we have no culture left, no history left. That's because we have no land base,” linking the Port's blunder to a longer history of dispossession. Meanwhile, activist and journalist Terry Tafoya pointed out in the
Post-Intelligencer
that Europeans “were in the dark ages” when the longhouses of Basketry Hat were built and that “perhaps a thousand years from now, Indians will discover the decaying remains of the Space Needle.” For their part, the
Post-Intelligencer
's editorial staff noted that the pioneers who arrived at Alki Point were “Johnny and Janie-come-latelies,” going on to ask, “Who says that Seattle was founded in 1851?” And when the dig went public in 1978 with free tours, the site was interpreted as “a boon, not only to the public, but also to the Duwamish people” and presented a chance “to learn about the way of life of the Duwamish people, whose past has almost been completely wiped out by a growing city.”
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Here, then, was the overturning of Seattle's narrative. Like the “treaty” read at Fort Lawton or the fish-ins on Lake Washington, these were new kinds of public place-stories about Seattle and about urban meaning and often seemed to arise directly out of the ground itself. In 1994, for example, construction crews disturbed cultural deposits
while building a new sewage treatment plant at West Point. Builders immediately halted construction and allowed excavation to take place under tribal oversight and at a cost of one month and $3.5 million.
Post-Intelligencer
arts writer Solveig Torvik noted that Seattle residents and the tribes would be “inestimably poorer” if sites like West Point were destroyed; as at the lauded opening of Daybreak Star, civic and Indian goals appeared to merge. But tensions remained. In early 1998, while digging footings for the new Seattle World Trade Center, a Port worker discovered a woman's skull attached to a piling. Having learned from past mistakes, the Port stopped work and contacted the Suquamish and Muckleshoots, but they neglected to notify the Duwamish, who learned of the discovery only through the media. Under the leadership of Cecile Maxwell—actually, now known as Cecile Hansen—the Duwamish picketed the dig. “Seattle promotes itself as a place of great cultural sensitivity,” Hansen told a
Seattle Times
reporter. “I am here to tell you this cultural sensitivity has not been measurably extended to Seattle's indigenous Duwamish Tribe and its people.” Even though the nature of Seattle's relationship to its indigenous past had changed, for some that change had not gone nearly far enough.
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Still, the fact that the Duwamish, with no legal standing as a tribe, were able to garner significant media attention and public sympathy spoke to the cultural authority they had acquired in Seattle's urban imagination. That attention and sympathy increased in the new millennium as the Duwamish worked to have their federal recognition reinstated. Working with local archivists and historians, they sutured together the alleged ten-year break in tribal organization using oral histories, Catholic Church records, and genealogical research. Recognizing the disruptions caused by environmental transformation, the Duwamish argued that what seemed like a break in organization was in fact simply a change from one generation of tribal leadership to another within a single, identifiable Duwamish community. Their argument must have been convincing: on the last day of the Clinton administration, Cecile Hansen received a phone call from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, telling her that the Duwamish had been recognized. The victory was short-lived, however; only a few days later, the new Bureau of Indian Affairs administrator
appointed by George W. Bush informed Hansen that the decision had been reversed. Stunned, Hansen, other members of the Duwamish Tribe, and their allies vented their anger in the local press. But the greatest opportunity to express their outrage was yet to come: fifty years after MacArthur's speech, Seattle was about to celebrate its 150th birthday.
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The coverage of the Duwamish recognition fracas, which included front-page stories in local papers as well as some international coverage, dovetailed with the run-up to the sesquicentennial of Seattle's founding. By November 2001, it was clear that it would no longer be possible to tell Seattle's story without the participation of Native people and in particular without the Duwamish. And so when actors playing the Denny Party came ashore in a drenching rain at Alki that 13 November, they were welcomed not only by hundreds of spectators as in past reenactments but by Cecile Hansen and other representatives from the Duwamish Tribe. After a series of speeches, many of which noted the tribe's recognition struggle, city leaders unveiled two new plaques at the Alki Monument: one commemorating the women of the group, the other honoring the Duwamish who had made survival at New York–Alki possible. Meanwhile, at a luncheon attended by members of the Denny, Bell, Boren, Terry, and Low families, Ruth Moore, the great-granddaughter of John and Lydia Low, told those gathered that “we need to let the federal government know that those Indians made the city possible—and I love them for it.”
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Sesquicentennial events often emphasized either the positive interactions between pioneers and Native people in the first months of settlement or the multicultural sentiments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They left out much of what had happened in between: the burning of the longhouses, the attempts to keep Indians out of town, the fish fights. In crafting a new, multicultural place-story, anniversary organizers had perhaps stilled the Manichean heart of the Seattle Spirit, but they had also whitewashed much of Seattle's real history. On a handful of occasions, however, a more confrontational version of Seattle's urban story rose to the surface. As part of a local museum exhibit, Anne Overacker Rasmussen described the shame she had once
felt at being Duwamish, even in a city named for one of her Duwamish ancestors: at long last, memories of “No Dogs or Indians Allowed” were creeping into the mainstream urban narrative. Meanwhile, at the pioneer family reunion, historian David Buerge, who had helped craft the Duwamish petition for recognition, pointed out that “if the Duwamish had a nickel for everyone who said something should be done for them, they could afford to buy back a considerable chunk of [Seattle].” He thus highlighted the difference between honoring the city's Indian past and addressing its Indian present. And at a sesquicentennial Rotary luncheon, Duwamish tribal member James Rasmussen balked at reciting the speech attributed to Seeathl. “The Duwamish are staring down the maw of extinction while you talk of progress. I won't do this,” he told them before abruptly walking off the stage. And as the final event of the yearlong sesquicentennial, Duwamish tribal members welcomed canoes full of Indian people from many tribes ashore at a new city park at the site of Basketry Hat, asserting their status as guardians of their traditional homeland.
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