Native Seattle (4 page)

There is also an intimacy to Seattle's ghost stories. Among the indigenous people of Puget Sound, the phantasms most feared were those of the recent dead and of kin; these sorts of ghosts vexed the living and put them in great danger, particularly in the rainy winter months. The ghosts of strangers were far less dangerous. The greater its entanglement with the living, it was thought, the greater a phantom's power. And so it is in Seattle's ghostly history: the closer we have lived to each other, the more we have been haunted.

At the same time, the problem inherent in Seattle's Indian ghost stories—indeed the central problem of Seattle's Native American history—is that none of these imagined Indians was ever real. While there may be some kernel of historical truth to some of them, for the most part they are historical creations, both because they spring out of the city's past and because they are ways to make sense of that past. The danger in this, however, is that they all too often tell us exactly what we expected to hear. The restless Indian dead confirm the city's story-line,
which is this: Native history and urban history—and, indeed, Indians and cities—cannot coexist, and one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. The standard story told about Seeathl and the city named for him is perhaps the best example of this narrative; take, for example,
New York Times
correspondent Tim Egan's version. In his bestselling meditation on Pacific Northwest history and landscape,
The Good Rain
, Egan writes of kayaking on Elliott Bay and pondering the connections between Seeathl and Seattle. Looking back and forth between the modern urban skyline and the site of the indigenous leader's grave across Puget Sound, Egan summarizes the story of the man and the city: “He lived to be a very old man, going from aboriginal king of Elliott Bay and the river that drained into it, to a withered curiosity on the muddy streets of what would become the largest city in the country named after a Native American.” To understand Seeathl and Seattle, it seems that this is all you need to know, and it tells us what we knew all along: that the Native past must give way to the urban future. The place-story of Chief Seattle is about the change from one world to another, with Native history surviving only as a prophetic shadow, a disturbing memory, an instructive haunting.
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This is not to say that Indian people do not exist in the urban present. Of course they do—in the thousands. Some of them, in fact, have also become part of the city's narrative. Along with totem poles and Seeathl, the homeless street Indian completes the city's trinity of Native imagery. This third kind of Indian place-story, however, is less often an indictment of the injustices of the urban political economy than it is a tale about racial inevitability. In short, stories about Native people on Seattle's streets are also a kind of ghost story. In Jack Cady's murder mystery
Street
, for example, the shape-shifting narrator takes on the form of “an aging Tlingit seduced south from Alaska” who dreams of killer whales and talking salmon, while in
Still Life with Woodpecker,
Tom Robbins's heroine Princess Leigh-Cheri wanders through downtown, noticing that “Indian winos, in particular, were unhurried by the weather.” Both Robbins and Cady conflate street Indians with the very atmosphere of the city: Robbins cloaks his version of Seattle in a “shamanic rain” that whispers “like the ecstasy of primitives,” while Cady's city hunkers
down under weather systems “more gray and ancient than a solitary old Indian.” Meanwhile, in
Hunting Mr. Heartbreak
, Jonathan Raban recalls seeing homeless Native people sprawled in a bricked-over doorway in Belltown on his first visit to Seattle. They were “like sacks of garbage waiting for collection by the early-morning truck. I tiptoed past them,” he notes, “as one walks needlessly quietly in the presence of the dead.”
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And so here is the moral of the urban Indian story as we think we know it: that Native people in the city are barely people; they are instead shades of the past, linked almost mystically to a lost nature. Cady spells it out directly: one of his characters, a homeless Haida-Filipino man named Jimmy, is described as “turning into a ghost right before our eyes. That's not a white man's metaphor,” Cady's narrator tells us. “It's an Indian fact.” It is as though the returning hosts, those phantoms prophesied in the Chief Seattle Speech, have turned out to be nothing more than homeless Indians. Even Seattle resident Sherman Alexie, the Spokane–Coeur d'Alene Indian author rightly lauded for the complicated humanity of his Native characters, slides effortlessly into this urban parable. In his novel
Indian Killer
, in which “every city was a city of white men,” racist cops and a serial killer share Seattle with a troupe of Indians living under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, all dampening in that same rain, here an “occupying force.” But his hero, John Smith, who may or may not be the murderer scalping white men throughout the city, has nothing to fear from the rain: “He was aboriginal,” Alexie writes. “He stepped through this rain and fog without incident.” Even in
Indian Killer
, otherwise a powerful meditation on what it means to be both modern and Indian, cities are somehow places where Native people cannot belong except as half-fulfilled people or as ciphers for nature. Being a metaphor in Seattle, it would seem, is an Indian fact.
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And if cities indelibly mark their Indian inhabitants in urban ghost stories, then these homeless Indians also mark the city in return, and not just in fictional accounts. Although more than ten thousand people of indigenous ancestry—including lawyers and activists, bus drivers and artists, bankers and newspaper editors—now call Seattle home, it is the homeless Indians who are most visible in Seattle's urban landscape
and who in fact seem to make Seattle
Seattle
. 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.” For some like local essayist Emily Baillargeon, Native people on the streets signify urban inequality. “As new corporate legions rush home or to their after-hours playgrounds,” she wrote during the high-tech boom of the 1990s, “they brush past alcoholic Native Americans camped out on rain-slicked corners.” Even among the homeless themselves, Native people are part of Seattle's geography: one white street kid in the University District, for example, noted that “downtown it's all drunk Indians.” So while we can infer from some ghost stories that Native people are somehow incapable of being fully human in Seattle—that the urban and the Indian are somehow antonyms—we also learn more about this place through stories about Indians: what kind of city Seattle is, and who belongs where.
¹⁰

None of this is to say that homelessness and other, more subtle forms of dislocation are not central to the urban Indian experience. On the contrary, loss of cultural identity, debilitating poverty, and institutionalized racism have each shaped the lives of many Native people throughout Seattle's history. The history that follows makes this clear. The problem with stories about metaphorical urban Indians, however, is that they allow us to imagine only certain kinds of Native history in the city: the parts we are prepared to see by the stories we tell. These stories mask more complicated experiences: the surprising opportunities offered by urban life, the creative struggles to carve out Indian spaces in the city, and, most importantly, the ways in which Native women and men have contributed to urban life. Stories of ghosts and totem poles and dispossessed chieftains cast Indians only as passive victims of, rather than active participants in, the urban story. These place-stories are the easy way out, allowing us to avoid doing our homework. In other words, they make appealing fiction but bad history.

If the prophetic chieftains and totem poles, like the shamanic rains and homeless ghosts, are all supposed to make Seattle somehow
unique (and each of these stories is tied closely to urban boosterism and marketing, as we shall see), then it is surprising how closely Seattle's stories track with national narratives. Our city's place-stories and those of our nation mirror each other—Indians and cities exist at opposite ends of the American imaginary; one represents the past, while the other represents the future. For all their differences, last Mohicans, final showdowns at Wounded Knees, and lone Ishis wandering out of the California foothills are variations on the same theme: the inevitable disappearance of indigenous peoples before the onslaught of American progress. Cities, on the other hand, are the ultimate avatars of that progress, representing the pinnacle of American technology, commerce, and cultural sophistication. It comes as no surprise, then, that many nineteenth-century representations of American expansion show Indians watching forlornly as townscapes appear on the horizon. John Gast's famous
American Progress
(1872), for example, shows Progress embodied as an enormous (and, dare we say it, ghostly) white woman floating westward over the continent, trailing telegraph wire. Behind her, a locomotive steams across the plains and a great city of bridges and smokestacks sprawls in the sunrise, while ahead of her Indians and buffalo flee into the shrinking darkness. Seattle's counterpart is a 1906 brochure selling real estate on the tideflats south of downtown; it features figures that look suspiciously like Hiawatha and Pocahontas gazing over placid waters toward a belching urban skyline. These are place-stories, telling us how the nation became what it is and who belongs where—and when.
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If popular culture has placed cities and Indians at two ends of the nation's historical trajectory, then academic scholarship has given that place-story its legitimacy. The connections between urban and Indian histories—both in Seattle and across the nation—have yet to be made, even in studies of the American West, a region defined both by its urban nature and by the persistence of Native peoples. From the Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific Coast, towns and cities were the vanguards of American conquest, appearing (and sometimes disappearing again) with stunning rapidity. The survival of western cities hinged on their ability to control hinterlands of people, places, and things—loggers, goldfields,
water—and so the consolidation and conquest of the American West were urban phenomena. In urban histories, however, Indians all too often appear only in the introduction or first chapter, then exit stage left after a treaty or a battle. Its regional mythology, and much of its scholarship, still defined by the battle between civilization and savagery, the American West seems to have room for either cities or Indians but not both.
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Meanwhile, the vast literature on Native peoples in the American West has uncovered the economic, political, cultural, and social components of Indian dispossession, as well as the diverse ways in which Native people responded, ranging from accommodation to resistance. Much of this western Indian history has focused on reservations, and for a good reason: these are the places where colonial policies created long paper trails, and these are the places where indigenous and tribal ways of life have remained most visible. In cities, Indians are harder to find, and as a result, among the thousands of books, monographs, and articles on Indian history in the West, only a scant few focus on urban places.
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When scholars do study Indians in cities, their research falls into two camps. First, there are studies of the problems facing Native people in urban places, often focusing on the notion of “disaffiliation.” While offering insights into the experiences of Native people in cities, such studies (including many conducted in Seattle) often pathologize their subjects and take for granted the alleged inability of many Native people to cope with urban (and, by association, modern) life. The second kind of scholarship about urban Indians, based in the New Social History inspired by the civil-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, focuses on the development of urban Indian organizations in cities throughout the country. More than simply institutional histories, these works also examine the role such organizations have played in the creation of new Indian, and especially pan-Indian, identities. Increasingly, they are written by Native people themselves. But virtually none of these works of recent urban Indian history include the deeper, indigenous histories of the places where those organizations took form. If urban and Native histories rarely speak to each other, then the histories of indigenous peoples on whose lands cities were built and the histories of present-day urban Indian communities are also estranged.
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In
Native Seattle
, I bring together multiple kinds of Native history in order to challenge the assumption that Indian and urban histories are somehow mutually exclusive. I include histories of the indigenous people of Seattle—of the Duwamish and Shilshole and Lake peoples who helped birth the city and yet who bore its greatest burdens. I also include histories of the many Indian migrants, from dozens of tribes and communities, who have been coming to this place for much longer than most of us realize. Lastly, I include the Chief Seattle Speech and other Indian imagery that has often been closely linked to debates about who belongs in the city and what it has meant to live in a place that has been transformed so quickly and so utterly.

Throughout Seattle's past, the strands of urban and Indian history have been entwined, and there is very little distance, in either space or time, between the dispossession of local indigenous people, the rise of an urban pan-Indian community, and the development of urban narratives populated with Indian metaphors. At almost every turn, what it meant to be urban and what it meant to be Native have been inextricably linked in Seattle.