Native Seattle (35 page)

The sesquicentennial might have ended, but the efforts of the Duwamish to obtain federal recognition did not. After a series of inquiries into criminal wrongdoing in the Bureau of Indian Affairs during both the Clinton and the Bush administrations, the issue came to down to technicalities: when a particular set of papers was signed and whether those papers were drafts or final copies. Finally, in the spring of 2002, Interior Secretary Gale Norton reaffirmed the government's position against recognition despite a concerted campaign on the part of Seattle-area religious organizations and other Duwamish allies. These included more than six dozen descendants of Seattle pioneers, who signed a petition calling for the creation of the Duwamish reservation that their ancestors had petitioned
against
more than a century earlier. Meanwhile, federally recognized tribes in the area had staked out a wide range of positions on Duwamish recognition. The Suquamish across Puget Sound supported it; the Tulalip Tribes to the north said they would not fight it, having lost a similar battle with the Snoqualmie Tribe in the 1990s; and the Muckleshoots announced plans to fight Duwamish recognition should it ever be granted through an act of Congress, the
only option left. This would be the great irony of
United States v. Washington:
in settling old disputes, it had opened new legal, political, and cultural rifts in the city and beyond. Meanwhile, the forces of urban dispossession that had rendered the Duwamish invisible in the early twentieth century continued to have powerful effects in the twenty-first.
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The Duwamish have continued their efforts to carve out a place in the city. With the financial support of individual donors, companies, and local governments, Cecile Hansen and her group purchased land on West Marginal Way, just across the street from Basketry Hat, with plans to build a longhouse and cultural center. “This longhouse won't just be for us,” Hansen told a reporter the summer before the sesquicentennial. “It will be for everyone who lives in and visits Seattle.” As with Bernie Whitebear's People's Lodge and Edgar Heap of Birds'
Day/ Night
, a large part of being Indian in modern Seattle involved showing yourself to non-Indians on your own terms. The Duwamish longhouse, once built, would be a way for one Indian community to tell its place-stories to a larger community that finally appeared to be listening. Recognition and a reservation, however, seem farther away than ever.
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B
ACK IN 1925, BOOSTERS
ruled the day. Only aging pioneers and a few Indian people saw fit to question Seattle's rise to metropolitan primacy, and their accounts of vanquished spirit powers and bucolic village life were not often heard among the shouts and bellows of the advocates of metropolis. One of those
cheechakos,
his name now lost to history, scripted one of the thousands of promotional brochures that beckoned visitors to look around, settle down, and buy in. He began with his own encounter with the city: “First impression! As I found her so will I always think of Seattle. As young and eager. Life still the great unexplored; living still the great adventure. With no old past to stop and worship; no dead men's bones to reckon with; no traditions chained to her ankles.” Here, then, was the prevailing place-story of the modern era (and not just in Seattle): that the past was irrelevant (although it had been a great adventure), that only the future lay ahead of the city and nation, that all negative consequences of modern urban life would be outweighed by the benefits. No old bones.
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Not so; just ask Jan Deeds and Ron Mandt. Three quarters of a century after that anonymous promoter crowed about Seattle's freedom from the past, laborers unearthed old bones—two adults and a child, to be exact—while repairing the foundation of Deeds and Mandt's home near Alki Point. As work came to a halt and the coroner was called, the homeowners soon learned that this was not the first time Indian graves had been disturbed here. Half a century before, an earlier resident had experienced “a little excitement” when he found bones under the house. In those days, aside from meriting a bemused article in the
Seattle Times
, such a discovery carried no consequences. But for Deeds and Mandt, who lived in a very different Seattle at the beginning of the twenty-first century and were trying to sell their house, there were definite consequences, which they bore with great decency: calls to the Suquamish and Muckleshoot tribes (but not to the Duwamish), thousands of dollars paid to privately hired archaeologists, and buyers who withdrew their offer. Finally reburied in accordance with tribal wishes and the state's Indian Graves and Records Act, the family first laid to rest here long ago showed that there are, in fact, old bones to reckon with in Seattle. Boosters may still run the show, but at least now they have to share the stage. Word has gotten around: the past has consequences.
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The central challenge of Seattle's Native histories, however, has been to acknowledge those consequences. The struggles of the Duwamish Tribe in the last quarter of the twentieth century typify the tensions inherent in Seattle's Native pasts. On the one hand, they show the lasting social and environmental consequences of the city's urban development. On the other hand, the attention the Duwamish received at the end of the century, and especially around the time of the sesquicentennial, shows the metaphorical place some Native people have come to occupy in the urban imagination: as environmental stewards, as indictments of injustice, and as indigenous hosts of civic history. And so we return to the central problem of Seattle's Native pasts: the distance between the imagined Indian in the city and the real experiences of Indian people and the tensions between fantasy and reality, symbolism and history, ghosts and humanity. All too often, the tendency remains to talk about Seattle's Indian imagery and Seattle's Indian people as though they have
little to do with each other. During the sesquicentennial, for example, the vocal presence of the Duwamish Tribe was at times overshadowed by Seattle's symbolic Indians, especially in discussions of one of the thorniest urban concerns of recent years: transportation.

Seattle has some of the worst traffic in the nation, and efforts to build mass transit systems have been hampered both by citizen-sponsored tax revolts and by infighting among transit organizations. What is fascinating about the transportation debates, however, is how often metaphorical Indians have been part of them. The winner of a
Seattle Weekly
poetry contest, for example, had Seeathl cursing Seattle with Tim Eyman, the notorious spokesperson for several antitax initiatives:

Arrrrrgh! Nixoney chu-ga roalhop Eyman non-shaman Hooog in facto. We Chinnok cho killa firebo an der baa baa Healtee err an errer!

(Arrrrrgh! Cursed, treaty-breaching fiends, may a smiling White Devil [Eyman] eviscerate your roads, your emergency and health services, and your quality of life and community for ever and ever!)

Meanwhile, Indian author Sherman Alexie penned a sarcastic column in the city's other alternative weekly,
The Stranger
, about the ancient monorail of the Kickakickamish people, which had been destroyed along with most of its builders by vengeful neighbors. “It was genocide,” Alexie wrote, noting that the current monorail was still haunted by the ghosts of the Kickakickamish, who would tear to pieces any expansion of the space-age sky-train's route. Then, for a story a few months later about sports utility vehicles, the
Weekly
's front cover showed the statue of Chief Seattle sticking out of an electric car's sunroof over the tagline, “What Would Chief Seattle Drive?” Like other Indian images in Seattle's past, these stories were not really about Native people at all. That is exactly the point: even today, Indians in Seattle are often more visible as metaphors than as people. When, for example, an emcee quipped at the Rotary's sesquicentennial luncheon that “Native canoes are moving smoothly through the Black River S-Curves” in a mock nineteenth-century traffic bulletin, he linked one of the Seattle area's worst highway
interchanges with the empty riverbed nearby—as a joke. No wonder James Rasmussen, whose Duwamish ancestors had once lived on the Black River, had walked out.
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Debates over traffic and mass transit are closely related to the urban malaise experienced by many Seattleites during the 1990s, when the phenomenal wealth and growth of the dot-com boom seemed to threaten the city's identity. Among the most vocal of those concerned was writer Fred Moody, who had spent years chronicling the high-tech industry's effects on the region. He lamented the loss of a more working-class, slower-paced Seattle, a place his intellectual forebear, the irascible newspaperman Emmett Watson, had dubbed “Lesser Seattle” back in the 1970s. Moody's lament drew from the Native past:

The better the city's material prospects, the worse its psychological prospects. I sat up late one night and regarded the history of Seattle as a history of diminishment, boom by boom. I remembered reading … how the tribes finally were forcibly put on a boat and sent out into the sound. … Now I saw their expulsion as equal parts exile and deliverance. They were our first lesser Seattleites. Fully aware that a material boom would bring a spiritual bust to their homeland, they served by their very existence to mock the pretensions of newcomers intent on bringing civilization and wealth to the Northwest's paradise.

In Moody's estimation, the Seattle of Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon.com had gone overboard: “New-York-Pretty-Soon had grown into More-Than-New-York-Right-Now,” he complained, continuing that Seattleites like him and his downwardly mobile friends were “practically the next best thing to Native Americans.” Arguing that the defining characteristic of a “lesser Seattleite”—and of lesser Seattle itself—was the forswearing of ambition, Moody realized that the question “What kind of city is Seattle becoming?” was also “What the hell am I turning into?” The interesting thing was how crucial Indians were to the answer.
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On the other side of the debate over Seattle's soul, Robert Ferrigno, a contributor to Microsoft's online
Slate
magazine, pointed out that Seattle's
problems in fact stemmed from the “sloth and poor economic policies of its other tenants: Indians, Scandinavians, and hippies.” The indigenous tradition of the potlatch, Ferrigno claimed, had prevented “research and development,” and the potlatch's supposed values (“No investments. No competition. No ego. No progress.”) had prevented Northwest Indians and their slow-growth descendants from reaping the rewards of urban achievement. A similar story about the so-called Seattle Freeze, the idea that people in the city are superficially friendly but distant and hard to get to know, meanwhile, referred back to Emmett Watson's tongue-in-cheek claim that “Seattle” was “Indian for ‘stay away from here.’” According to these observers of local culture, both the best and worst things about Seattle—its disappearing authenticity, on the one hand, and its stubborn resistance to progress and chilly social climate, on the other—could be explained by telling stories about Indians.
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These place-stories from millennium's end and new millennium's beginning, for all their postindustrial irony and anomie, sounded remarkably like those told generations earlier. Aging pioneers were replaced by aging lefties and upstart
cheechakos
shape-shifted into venture capitalists from California, but otherwise, the anxieties and conflicts were the same: between native and newcomer, between competing visions of urbanity, between the past and the future. Again, the debate centered on what kind of place Seattle was and who belonged there, and again, imagined Indians gave that debate its rhetorical heft. This is perhaps the most powerful historical impulse in Seattle: to try to understand the urban present through the Native past. Often, it is a noble compulsion, inspired by the need to question economic avarice, environmental degradation, or social disintegration. But only when it is grounded—in the specifics of local history and in the context of present-day Indian realities—does the impulse become something more than blurry-eyed nostalgia or insensitive mockery.

Occasionally, however, there are moments when Seattle's Native pasts have been connected in meaningful ways to its urban and Indian present. Near the boundary between Seattle and its southern neighbor Tukwila (“hazelnut” in Chinook Jargon), three hills guard the Duwamish River and its valley. These were the hills that Dosie Wynn's grandmother told
her about on trips to Seattle from the Muckleshoot Reservation back in the 1930s, sharing stories of battles between North Wind and Storm Wind and how the world came to be as it is. Members of the Duwamish Tribe, for their part, understood the landscape around the hills as the place where the world began. But urban history had not been kind to the hills: one had been quarried down to less than half its original size, another had been bisected by a freeway exit, and at the end of the twentieth century, the third—known locally as Poverty Hill—was put up for sale and was most likely going to be leveled. Then in 2000, a group of neighbors contacted local tribes and began to organize on behalf of Poverty Hill. In the end, the Friends of Duwamish Riverbend Hill raised over a million dollars to purchase and preserve the site through the auspices of the Cascade Land Conservancy. On the summer solstice in 2004, the Friends' coalition came together to celebrate the hill's preservation and unveiled plans for restoring the hill's native ecosystems and for building trails with signs interpreting the Duwamish Valley's history. Local and state officials, representatives of environmental organizations, and, most notably, members of both the Muckleshoot and Duwamish tribes (as well as Indian people from other places), all spoke of the importance of Poverty Hill: as a symbol of racial reconciliation and faith in good government, as much-needed open space in an underserved industrial neighborhood, and as tribal cultural patrimony. At Poverty Hill, ecotopian impulses for restoration, preservation, and the ever-elusive “sense of place” intersected with tribal interests in protecting sacred sites and traditional cultural properties. The key was that the parties involved moved beyond the metaphors. Indian people at Poverty Hill were not just symbols of an endangered landscape but active partners in, and beneficiaries of, its preservation.
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