Native Seattle (23 page)

At least one Native group came to Seattle explicitly to resist white authority. These were the Tsimshian of Metlakatla, a Christian settlement
founded in 1862 by the missionary William Duncan, who sought to isolate the Tsimshian from outside influences. Many Tsimshian people saw this isolation as a barrier to opportunity and began to rebel against Duncan's authority, and by 1909, various American governmental bodies had gotten involved as Tsimshians and others complained to the Department of Interior and the Alaskan educational authorities. While the Metlakatlan contributions to the fair—a brass band and a ladies' auxiliary known for its needlepoint—were portrayed as the products of civilizing efforts, several Tsimshian fairgoers were in fact trying to oust the man seeking to civilize them. The auxiliary president, for example, was Mrs. Bertrand Mitchell, whose husband was in the midst of a campaign against Duncan, writing to Alaska school commissioners, “We are slaves here. We are getting poorer all the time and Mr. Duncan is getting richer. What is the matter with the government?” Meanwhile, William Pollard, assistant leader of the brass band, had also vocally opposed Duncan's rule. Needlepoint and rousing marches, then, were a way for Tsimshian people to join the outside world. Coming to the AYPE was an act of resistance.
²⁸

Finally, Native people also came to the fair as full-fledged spectators, taking in the urban spectacle like everyone else. The
Post-Intelligencer
reported that Indian observers at the canoe races, for example, “put the organized yells of some rah, rah boys completely to shame.” Meanwhile, several Lakota Wild West Show performers and their families, “decked out in all the picturesque attire of the cow country—sombreros, chaps and all the rest of it,” went to the Pay Streak one afternoon for fun and encountered a group of Flathead Indians. “To the uninitiated it looked as if a real war whoop was the next thing to be expected,” winked the
Times
, but “then the chief of the Rosebuds gave a guttural command and his braves lined up in single file and slowly approached a similar file which formed on the instant among the Flatheads. For fifteen minutes the warriors of the two tribes shook hands silently. Not a word was passed between them and there was never a smile until the ceremony was over and then they fraternized as if they had come from the same reservation.” The two groups then went to visit the Eskimo Village, where they showed the Siberians, the Tlingit shaman Skhandoo, the “Eskimo
belle” Columbia, and the gawking crowds “what a war dance is like when danced among friends.” Then the Lakotas and Flatheads finished the day with a ride on the Ferris wheel.
²⁹

We cannot know what the Indians on the Ferris wheel thought of the Eskimo Village, the Baby Incubators, the Upside Down House, or the Temple of Palmistry. Native people probably found the AYPE awe inspiring, offensive, hilarious, and perhaps even boring. But they may also have seen deeper meanings for themselves—a Wild West Show as a mark of prestige, an invitation to the Pay Streak as a gesture of friendship, a “war dance among friends” as a step toward a shared Native identity. As the center of a vast regional empire, Seattle had become an important venue in which to pursue old and new Native ambitions. Not only did canoes represent Indian migration to and from the city, but when paddled in AYPE races, they also signified the development of a shared Native identity. Totem poles represented not only Seattle's imperial claims on the North but also the people who traveled to the city in pursuit of economic independence, social status, or a good show. While on its surface a spectacle of urban dominance and white racial superiority, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition also reflected the ambitions of its Native participants, who came from the far ends of Seattle's hinterland on their own terms.

O
NE OF THE MOST STRIKING PHOTOS
in any of Seattle's archives dates from the first years of the twentieth century. Taken by an unnamed photographer in front of the Frederick and Nelson Department Store at the corner of Second and Madison, it captures a Native woman, likely Makah or Nuuchah-nulth, sitting against the building's stone façade and selling baskets, blankets, and other handicrafts. She looks ahead and slightly down, avoiding the gaze of a well-dressed white woman who leans over her with an I-assume-you-can't-speak-English-so-I'll-talk-louder expression. A third woman of indeterminate race, possibly Indian, watches the exchange as busy urbanites rush by, among them a particularly dowdy older woman who seems to observe the scene with disdain. It is a moment
of encounter, where women of different races and classes came together for a moment on the streets of the city to haggle over a basket.

Weaving was not just a metaphor for what happened on this coast. Like canoes and totem poles, baskets were both product and symbol of Seattle's Indian hinterland. Throughout the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, sidewalk encounters between Indian vendors and white customers were a part of everyday life in Seattle. One 1905 newspaper article might have been describing this very photo: “Uptown, on First and Second avenues, many an important corner was given a touch of nature by the presence of a wrinkled old squaw, leaning her toil-bent back against the supporting columns, while around are arrayed canoes and baskets and mats, in reckless profusion, all ready to be traded for the money of whites.” Travel correspondent Nina Alberta Arndt described the ubiquity of similar “touches of nature” in the
Overland Monthly
three years later, noting that Indian women and their wares could be found “upon the steps of the principal banks, on the sidewalks of the business thoroughfares, or again … in the aisles of some department store.” Local newspapers identified Indians “squatting in characteristic attitudes with ‘hiyu iktas’ [many things] spread around them” as “one of the most common sights along the pavements of Seattle… intrud[ing] itselfon the vision of every pedestrian.” Meanwhile, “more eager seekers” of curios could visit Native encampments on filled land south of the city. No need to go to Neah Bay, Prince Rupert, or Sitka; the hinterland came to Seattle, bringing touches of distant nature to the heart of urban America. And, in fact, most of the basket vendors on Seattle streets at the turn of the century were not from Puget Sound. According to the
Post-Intelligencer
, many were Makah or Nuu-chah-nulth from Vancouver Island (and her baskets’ designs suggest that the woman in the Frederick and Nelson's photo was as well). An agent among the Sheshahts at Port Alberni on Vancouver Island confirmed that many Seattle vendors were his charges: “during the winter months the women often engage in the manufacture of baskets…which, being… a distinct novelty, are readily disposed of in the larger towns in the state of Washington.” Like canoes and totem poles, baskets connected Seattle
street corners to Native communities hundreds of miles from the city.
³⁰

Eastern tourists to Seattle often saw a basket or other Indian “curio” as the requisite souvenir of a trip to the city, meaning that a Sheshaht basket could easily end up in Boston or London or St. Louis. Indeed, for some Native vendors, eastern customers were preferable. According to one Seattle paper, “an Indian curio-shop manager at the corner of a Seattle block can tell an Easterner from a Western product. He knows the ‘cheechaco.’ A sale with an Eastern tourist is easily landed, and probably a hundred percent on the real value is assessed at that.” The sale of baskets, then, drew attention to the boundaries not just between white and Indian but between westerner and easterner, captured best in the Chinook Jargon word
cheechako,
literally meaning “newly arrived” but also glossed as both “easterner” and “greenhorn.” Baskets linked places to each other but also differentiated places as well, distinguishing Seattle and its people from their eastern counterparts. Here was a city where Native nature could be acquired without venturing into actual wilderness, and where urban America had an Indian edge.
³¹

Gullible easterners were not the only collectors of baskets, however. Throughout Seattle, in places socially, if not physically, distant from the tideflat encampments and street corners, white women added baskets and other items to “curio corners.” A
Post-Intelligencer
article describing the best collections in town reads like a clipping from the society page: the wives of mill owners and other civic elites all had extensive collections. Carrie Burke, married to a judge, even had a new wing added to her house specifically for her Indian collection. In fine homes on the hills of Seattle such as the Frye mansion at Ninth and Columbia, upper-class white women used the collection of Indian things to mark their own social status. Just as totem poles spoke of Seattle's metropolitan status, cedar bark and maidenhair fern from Vancouver Island could help a banker's wife in Seattle tell stories about privilege and power and showed how tightly the urban center and indigenous periphery were woven together along the coast that Seattle dominated.
³²

This was a new kind of imbrication, different from the landscape Mr. Glover had hinted at with his 1878 bird's-eye sketch of Seattle. The
treaties had been signed for fifty years, the indigenous towns had long been burned, Kikisebloo had died a decade earlier—and yet Indian people remained a highly visible part of Seattle's urban landscape. But instead of the Whulshootseed word
yiq
, these people might have used other words to describe the process of imbricating themselves into Seattle's landscape, taken from their own languages: words for “weaving” like the Quileute
tsikbay
, the S'Klallam
ekwel
, and the Kwakwala
yepá
, or words for “worrying into tight places” like the Tlingit
dik'eek'
or the Nuu-chah-nulth
pithlqa
. And as the indigenous languages spoken in Seattle had changed, so had the city's civic vocabulary. Croaking amid the urban din of Pioneer Square, Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass told a place-story of transformation, but he was not alone. Like Mrs. Burke displaying her baskets, Seattle's civic leaders had found new ways to talk about the city and its past. Inspired by the memory of urban conquest and the creation of a regional hinterland, the city's leaders set about crafting a new set of place-stories that cut to the very heart of what it meant to be white, American, and of this place.
³³

I
N 1866, SEEATHL, SEATTLE'S NAMESAKE
, died at Place of Clear Water, the community from which Jacob Wahalchoo had once gone out in search of power below the waters of Puget Sound. He was buried on the Port Madison Reservation across Puget Sound from Seattle, not far from the enormous main longhouse at Place of Clear Water that settlers called Oleman House or Old Man House, meaning “worn-out house” or “venerable house” in Chinook Jargon. The death of Chief Seattle garnered little official attention in the city that bore his name; no Puget Sound newspapers announced his passing, and while settlers who knew him surely noted his death—perhaps some even mourned—Seeathl seemed to fade quickly from prominence in Seattle's civic consciousness. A few years later, government agents burned Oleman House, seeing it as a hindrance to their civilizing mission. Meanwhile, the descendants of Seeathl and their fellow Suquamish tribal members tended his grave; occasionally a white visitor from off the reservation would place American flags there in memory of the indigenous leader's contributions to the birth of Seattle. But more often, the madrone-ringed cliff-top cemetery, facing Seattle across Puget Sound, remained a quiet place.
¹

In 1911, the scene at Seeathl's grave could not have been more different. Hundreds of visitors from Seattle were on hand, enjoying the late August weather and the U.S.S.
Pennsylvania
's brass band following a welcome from the local Indian agent. Seattle mayor George W. Dilling, jurist Thomas Burke, and University of Washington history professor Edmond S. Meany each gave an address describing Seeathl's hospitality toward the first settlers, and patriotic songs were sung in English and Chinook Jargon. As souvenirs, each guest was given a photograph
of the grave courtesy of printer (and future mayor) Ole Hanson. This was Chief Seattle Day. “The sentiment of a Chief Seattle Day, in commemoration of the Indian chief who befriended the white man in the early days of the Puget Sound country,” wrote one participant, “has appealed strongly to many of Seattle's prominent citizens.” Those citizens made good on their sentiment; by the 1930s, Chief Seattle Day included special Black Ball Line excursions, picnicking, and saltwater swimming, while plans were under way to construct a baseball diamond and tennis courts next to the cemetery. Place of Clear Water, once a fusty impediment to civilization, had become a pilgrimage site for those wishing to commune with their urban indigenous past.
²

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. One particularly florid example, penned by Professor Meany himself and using the old Whulshootseed name for Puget Sound, was read at the 1911 pilgrimage to Suquamish and later to the University of Washington's graduating class of 1912:

Peace be with thee in thy honored grave,
O, Chieftain, as pilgrims we lovingly come,
Drawn to a shrine by Whulge's cool wave;—
Suquamish, sad fragment, in fir-girdled home.