Review of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place by Coll Thrush

Book Link: Amazon (smile)

Growing up in Michigan, every (or maybe most?) school has a local history section that they teach every 2-3 grades. I remember a lot from those times and the history museums we would visit on class trips. I don't have that same context for the Northwest and Seattle specifically. This was a really great dive into the origins of the city but told more from the perspective of Native American's that were already here. Having lived here almost 15 years now, the locations, names, and events resonated with me and I could start to add context to those in my head. The writing style was a little difficult to read at times at it provided a lot fo description and longer sentences than I am used to reading on the regular. The Seattle-area incorporates much more native imagry, names, and traditions than places I have lived before and this book provides a great representation to why that is, even from the first "Bostons".

Some highlights/thoughts from my reading:

1. 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.
2. The restless Indian dead confirm the city’s storyline, which is this: Native history and urban history—and, indeed, Indians and cities—cannot coexist, and one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other.
3. They make Pike Place Market’s public restrooms one of the city’s “true” landmarks according to one local alternative weekly, because the toilets are “the one place where bustling tourists, drunken Indians, and desperate junkies come together … in a sort of cultural nexus, representing all that is truly great about this fine city.”
4. natural historian Stephen Jay Gould argued that stories about beginnings “come in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of origin, a specific time and place of creation, or else it evolves and has no definable moment of entry into the world.”
5. WHEN THE DENNY PARTY LANDED at the point, they called it neither Prairie Point nor Seattle. Instead, the tiny American outpost was christened New York. Over time, it would come to be known as New York–Alki, a moniker meaning “New York by-and-by” or “New York eventually” in the local lingua franca of Chinook Jargon.
6. the naming of Seattle is typically portrayed in civic historiography as a critical turning point: a handing over from the indigenous to the urban.
7. On a more symbolic level, however, illahee, a Chinook Jargon term meaning “country” or “place” or “home,” suggested a truth about everyday life in early Seattle: it was as much an indigenous place as a settler one. David Kellogg, who arrived in Seattle in the
8. Such spirals of violence took place when indigenous notions of justice, which often mandated retaliation, coincided with a powerful strain of vigilantism in settler society.
9. Recalling the Mesatchie Jim case, for example, mill owner Henry Yesler described the effects of “lower class” emigrants on Indian-white relations, noting that “whenever there was trouble it was the fault of some worthless white man.”
10. The absence of a federal government capable of consistently enforcing its own Indian policies, along with the necessity of Indian labor, meant that the people of Seattle—settler and indigenous alike—had to craft their own strategies for dealing with each other in the first years of the town’s existence.
11. Ling Fu’s brief trial symbolizes the ways in which settlers—Boston, Chinese, and others—had been transformed by their life in Seattle Illahee. Accounts of Seattle’s “village period” are full of settlers speaking Chinook Jargon and sometimes even Whulshootseed; of white men and women learning indigenous subsistence practices from their Native neighbors and employees; and of people from places like Illinois and Ireland, Gloucester and Guangzhou, learning to accommodate Indians’ insistence on participation in urban life. Nearly thirty years after Seattle’s founding, Native people were still in town, and their participation in urban life had changed the Bostons as well. The mad house known as the Illahee might have been destroyed, but the larger Seattle Illahee, in which indigenous lives were woven into the urban fabric, remained, even as Seattle stood perched on the brink of an urban revolution.
12. In many ways, 1880 was a brief interlude between two dark periods in Seattle’s Indian history. The chaotic violence of earlier decades had largely quieted, the epidemics had waned, and the legality of Native homesteading allowed for some semblance of independence and economic stability. But the urban ambition reflected in Mr. Glover’s bird’s-eye drawing of Seattle, and the changes attendant to it, were about to reach new heights, and indigenous people who had worried themselves into the tight weave of the city’s rapidly urbanizing landscape would face challenges on a completely new scale. Fire, water, and iron would soon change everything.
13. The Great Fire of 1889 had spurred growth in West Seattle, which in turn encouraged the fiery ouster of indigenous people living in places slated for “improvement.”
14. “when the settlers came, they drove us away and then they destroy the house and even set fires to get us away from these villages.”
15. As more and more newcomers arrived, many indigenous people were pushed aside, their services no longer necessary. For the Duwamish man Dzakwoos, who had kept a homestead on Lake Union, the loss of work forced him to abandon his homestead and relocate to the east, where he would become part of a Native community living at Monohan on Lake Sammamish, where mill jobs remained. This community would come to be part of the modern-day Snoqualmie Tribe, and present-day tribal members understand the changing demographics and economy in and around Seattle as a key reason for the development of this new community. Snoqualmie elder Ed Davis recalled, for example, that the people at Monohan, including Dzakwoos and his extended family, “all come together when they run out of jobs.”
16. SEATTLE IS A BAD PLACE to build a city. Steep hills of crumbly sand atop slippery clay, a winding river with a wide estuary and expansive tidal flats, ice age kettle lakes and bogs, and plunging ravines and creeks are all sandwiched between Puget Sound and vast, deep Lake Washington. But it was built anyway, despite all this, and today Seattle’s watersheds in particular are among its most transformed landscapes: where four rivers once joined to become the Duwamish, now only one flows; Lake Washington empties to the west instead of the south and is shallower; other lakes, creeks, and beaches have been filled, dredged, culverted, and bulkheaded. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth—roughly the same years that the “last” Indians populated Seattle headlines—the city undertook a series of massive engineering projects that turned hills into islands, straightened one river and obliterated another, and reshaped entire watersheds, driven by what one urban scholar has called the “leveling impulse.”
17. In a pattern that had begun with the old Lava Beds and that would continue into the late twentieth century, Indianness became a marker of urban disorder. In the case of Thomson, Chittenden, and their fellow Changers, though, those in charge of landscape change were more likely to ignore indigenous people altogether.
18. Arthur Denny might have been Seattle’s founding father, but Seeathl—generous toward the settlers at Alki, powerfully articulate during treaty negotiations, and unswervingly loyal during the “Indian War”—was its patron saint. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the bad poetry inspired by visits to his grave.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. But restoration of indigenous places is deeply problematic: there is no guarantee that the salmon or anything else can be brought back or that such efforts will actually improve the material conditions of modern Indian lives. The question remains, then: good intentions aside, whom do these place-stories of “restoration” truly benefit? To when, and to whom, is what being restored, exactly?