Native Seattle (21 page)

Canoes going to and from Seattle changed both their home communities and the city. The most obvious effects were monetary: Indians fresh from the hop fields and other jobs injected large sums of money into Seattle's economy. One Seattle newspaper noted in 1879, for example, that Native visitors brought “great trade” to the city's merchants, and that “between their calls going and returning they will leave several thousand dollars in Seattle.” Native shoppers in Seattle quickly established a reputation for shrewdness, with one paper referring to them as “sharp, close traders [who] look upon the Bostons with a suspicious eye.” According to some observers, Indians' spending made them preferable to other minorities in the city. One paper reported that they were better than Chinese immigrants “as they spend the money they receive … and keep it in the country, instead of hoarding it and shipping it to a foreign land, from whence no dollar returns.” While not on a par with tourist dollars or large-scale capital investments—particularly in later decades, as the urban economy reached metropolitan proportions—Indian cash nonetheless helped to fill urban coffers.
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Things bought in Seattle could be used to maintain Native traditions
in the hinterland, as the purchase of material goods in Seattle and other urban centers meshed with indigenous notions of prestige. One observer, for example, noted that “it was a common thing to see several sewing machines in one Indian house or half a dozen phonographs, and beds and tables by the dozen but never used. …If by chance the owner of the house should die, to ease his condition in the next world all these household goods were piled upon his grave, often including the very doors and window sashes of his house.” Goods procured in urban places—phonographs and bedsteads as well as more mundane resources like flour and coffee—helped maintain and even augment indigenous institutions like the potlatch. Sometimes the potlatches, important ceremonies in which Natives displayed their wealth, reaffirmed their status, and cemented kinship and community ties, were even held
in
Seattle. Orange Jacobs recalled one such event in the 1880s, when a Canadian Indian named Jim gave away hundreds of dollars' worth of blankets, calico, suits of clothing, and “Indian trinkets” to dozens of participants on the tidelands south of town. Even the journey itself could be a display of status; Pacheenaht chief Charles Jones once boasted that he had paddled from Vancouver Island to Seattle in a single day. The urban experience did not necessarily erode indigenous traditions; it could in fact strengthen them. This was perhaps especially true for Native people whose homes were in British Columbia, where the potlatch was outlawed beginning in 1885.
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Casting one's lot with the vagaries of the American agricultural economy, however, brought risks for travelers and those they left behind. One Canadian Indian agent noted in 1891, for example, that Seattle-bound Tsimshians had “failed to obtain much labour, and realized but little profit.” Likewise, Kweeha Kwakwaka'wakw Charles Nowell recalled one season when he, his brother, and some in-laws stayed in Seattle for only two or three days after learning that hops were “all burnt,” and returned home virtually broke. Labor gluts and disasters like the hop louse infestations of the 1890s could wreak havoc with Native fortunes. In 1906, some unlucky Sheshahts from Vancouver Island were forced to spend the winter digging clams and selling them in Seattle for meager returns because of losses earlier in the season. Meanwhile, migrants'
absences could leave their kin vulnerable on remote reserves: an agent on eastern Vancouver Island reported in the late 1880s that Cowichan elders faced hardship as younger relatives spurned local subsistence activities to pursue wealth elsewhere.
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But perhaps the greatest challenge posed by annual migrations came from disease. Economic vectors between Seattle and its Native hinterland were mirrored by biological vectors, pathways where contagion traveled with the phonographs and cash. Those vectors had helped fuel Seattle city leaders' racist paranoia in the 1870s, but if the paranoia had mostly ended by the last years of the nineteenth century, the continuing effects of such diseases had not. In fact, the prevalence of measles, tuberculosis, and other illnesses among Native travelers allows us to locate them in the urban landscape. Death records for King County during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show clusters of Indian mortality among the tidelands and shanties near the old Lava Beds. Canoes lay at the foot of Weller Street, for example, while their owners and passengers died just blocks away. The diseases went home with the survivors. Indian agents on Vancouver Island were especially aware of the illnesses that struck communities whose members had gone to town. In 1888, Agent Harry Guillod reported that many Kyuquot and Chickleset children had died of measles on the way back to Vancouver Island from the Sound while the Hesquiaht, who had stayed home, had been spared. Two months later, the province's Indian superintendent reported that the same outbreak was now raging everywhere on the British Columbia coast. Hundreds of miles from urban centers, Native cemeteries bore the marks of diseases that blossomed in crowded cities.
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Migration to and from Seattle had its more subtle costs as well, eroding connections to indigenous places in the hinterland. Among the Tlingit, for example, the central element of social life, the
kwáan
, or clan, was a map of sorts, a linkage between a group of people and a place expressed through subsistence activities and oral tradition. Through relationships with urban places, however, these intimate connections between people and place were shifting. Charlie Jim Sr., or Tóok', a Hutsnuwu Tlingit Raven who often came to the city, told a biographer that
in the early twentieth century he sometimes felt “like a man without a country” because of his regular movements between southeast Alaska and Seattle. For someone who defined himself in large part by his
kwáan,
and thus his place, this was a telling statement. His story, likely not unique, suggests that, while the coast was being woven together in some ways, it was being sundered in others.
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For all its risks, though, migration to Seattle and Puget Sound gave Native people a chance at independence and presented challenges to federal Indian policies in both the American and the Canadian parts of the Northwest Coast. Treaties with Washington State and the rules of the reserve system in British Columbia allowed for the movement of Native people off of reservations and reserves, but it often seemed to agents that such travel undermined efforts to “civilize” Native people. From the Makah Reservation, for instance, whole families headed to the hop fields, leaving agency schools empty, Bibles unread, and lessons unlearned. Makah Daniel Quedessa wrote to a white friend in the 1880s that he would soon leave with his parents to go to pick hops, adding that “I guess every one of the School childrens will go up to pick hops.” Meanwhile, Canadian missionaries across the Strait of Juan de Fuca found it “very up-hill work” persuading families to stay on the reserve during the school year when work and wages beckoned from the south. Native travel to Seattle thwarted the larger goals of national policies, much as it had in earlier periods of Seattle's history. As before, efforts to define who belonged where rarely worked out as planned.
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For all the agents' complaints, though, canoe trips to Seattle actually helped Native people integrate themselves into settler society. Few extant sources indicate how Native people perceived places like Seattle, but it appears that, for some, encounters with urban life inspired new, cosmopolitan ambitions. It is likely that many found the material abundance, social opportunities, and general spectacle of Seattle an exciting change of pace. Many Native men and women may have agreed with Tsimshian Arthur Wellington Clah, who simply called Seattle a “great city” in his 1899 diary. Others seem to have aspired to an urbanity of their own; on Vancouver Island's west coast, one sign of prestige at the turn of the century was a home sporting bay windows and Victorian
fretwork, emulating houses seen in Seattle and elsewhere. The urban experience left subtle marks on communities hundreds of miles from the city itself, both augmenting traditions like the potlatch and inspiring a new, cosmopolitan Indianness.
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Over time, the attractions of the city even inspired some Native people to become longer-term residents, spending more than the summer months in Seattle. In 1886, for example, a group of Kyuquot families chose to winter over and dig clams to sell in the city. Meanwhile, an Indian couple from an unidentified Northwest Coast community worked as “fiery Baptist missionaries” in Seattle in the first years of the twentieth century, attracted by the souls that needed saving on what was left of the old Lava Beds. Among the Makah, living in Seattle for varying lengths of time became a normal part of life in the 1910s. Neah Bay was “almost deserted” in the summers as people went to the city and the hop fields, and some did not come back at all. In fact, Seattle had become so central to Makah economic life that Daniel Quedessa lamented in 1915 that “I can not even go to Seattle for a trip. I can't go some place for week so I stay here [in Neah Bay on the Makah Reservation] all the time. That's why I dont make money. I always wishing if I could go away and make little money.” For many of the Makah, Seattle had become an indispensable part of getting by, and for some, it was becoming a home in its own right.
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Coming to Seattle meant that Native people from the city's hinterland sometimes came into contact with local indigenous people. Suquamish elder Amelia Sneatlum, for example, recalled the time in the early twentieth century when her family was camping on the beach at Seattle and a Yakama man stabbed and nearly killed her father. At the other end of the spectrum, Muckleshoot elder Art Williams described friendly encounters with Native migrants on Elliott Bay, which were facilitated by the use of Chinook Jargon and, in later years, English. At the same time, the erosion of indigenous communities in and immediately around Seattle also provided openings for migrants from the hinterland. The Sheshahts who stayed in town to dig clams, for example, could do so because many indigenous Duwamish families with traditional rights to those beds had moved to area reservations or given up clamming.
The growth of one kind of Native presence in Seattle, then, existed in a sort of inverse relationship with another kind of Native presence—at least until the clam beds were destroyed altogether by urban change.
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Meanwhile, a new kind of urban Indian history was on the rise. As Native people arrived in Seattle in canoes (and, more commonly in the twentieth century, on steamers), they entered a city with a new vocabulary. Throughout the city, totem poles and other Native symbols, drawn from the very same hinterland places whence the travelers had come, marked shop fronts and street corners. If the movement of Indian people to and from the city had changed both the Native hinterland and its urban center, the movement of Indian things had also changed both places as well, providing a new iconography of urban empire.

S
OMETIME NEAR THE CLOSE
of the eighteenth century, a Tlingit noblewoman of the Ganaxádi Raven clan, Chief-of-All-Women, drowned in the Nass River while on her way to comfort an ill relative. After lengthy and heartfelt mourning rituals, clan members in her community of On the Cottonwood on Tongass Island in southeast Alaska hired a carver to commemorate her life and her heritage. Drawing on ancient stories of Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass and other figures associated with her lineage, the carver produced a fifty-foot cedar pole that was erected next to the clan's longhouse. For more than nine decades, the Chief-of-All-Women pole, with the dead woman's cremated remains inside it, reminded the Tongass Tlingit of Ganaxádi origins and social standing.
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Then, in 1899, a group of men from Seattle—among them clergymen, land developers, and bankers—arrived at On the Cottonwood on a ship chartered by the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. Coming ashore to see the “totem poles” and longhouses of the Tlingit community up close, they were particularly taken by the Chief-of-All-Women pole. Thinking it would make a fine souvenir of their journey to Alaska—and later claiming that the village was deserted—the men sawed through the pole at its base, discarded Chief-of-All-Women's remains, and floated the pole out to their ship, breaking off the beak of Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass in the process.
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Several weeks later, on 18 October 1899, the Chief-of All-Women pole was erected in Pioneer Place Park, a spot of sod at the heart of Seattle's first plats. “All day long people paused and gazed; went away, returned and gazed again,” crowed the triumphant
Post-Intelligencer
, “and said it was a great and wonderful thing and a grand acquisition to the city.” In a fit of Victorian flourish, another observer gave voice to the pole itself:

I am the only Civilized totem pole on earth,
And civilization suits me well

While all the others of my kind
Are slowly settling on their stems
Among the salmon scented Silences,
Sequestered from the sight of man,
Here in Seattle's surging scenes
I stand, incomparable

So here's farewell to all my past
And welcome to the things that are;
With you henceforth my die is cast,
I've hitched my wagon to a star.
And by the Sacred Frog that hops, And by the Bird that flies,
And by the Whale and the Bear, I sunder all the ties
That bound me to the ancient creed which holds my people flat,
And I will be a Totem pole
That knows where it is at.