Native Seattle by Coll Thrush

Author:Coll Thrush [Thrush, Coll]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295741352
Publisher: U of Washington Press
Published: 2017-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

8 / On the Cusp of Past and Future

M ARIAN WESLEY SMITH, an anthropologist at Columbia University, spent much of the 1930s conducting research among the Native peoples of Puget Sound. Her travels brought her into contact with the descendants of the indigenous people of Seattle, and the urbanized landscape of the pre–Second World War maritime Northwest shaped much of what she had to say about the state of Indians in the region. Native people on Puget Sound, Smith argued, had “come through remarkably well” considering the “rigorous mushroom development” of places like Seattle. “No other Indians of the whole continent have been similarly engulfed by the sudden growth of city populations [or] have been exposed to the full impact of twentieth-century urban society,” she wrote in the 1940s. To Smith, the successful adaptation of Puget Sound’s Native peoples was “certainly better than that of many Indians classified as less primitive.” In fact, she wrote, “it is this sort of dilemma that throws doubt upon classification schemes.” Despite the near-total dispossession of indigenous people from Seattle’s urban landscape, surviving Native peoples’ accommodation to urban change in Puget Sound seemed to challenge her discipline’s very foundations.1

The conditions of Indian people in urban Puget Sound also threw doubt upon another kind of classification scheme: the boundaries between past, present, and future. Smith saw this just as clearly. “If today Salish life is mingled with, and sometimes indistinguishable from, modern American and Canadian life,” she wrote, “so much the better. If the past and the present converge, and the future may be expected to partake of both, so much closer to reality is our picture of the Northwest.” And for Indians in Seattle in the 1930s, the past, present, and future did seem to converge. Like the years surrounding 1880, the 1930s were a transition between two periods in the city’s urban and Indian histories, a hinge between one era and another. The years around 1880 had represented a transition between a strong indigenous presence in Seattle and indigenous dispossession, as well as the beginnings of a regional Indian hinterland. By the 1930s, Seattle had developed a complex interweaving of multiple Native histories: Duwamish descendants of the area’s indigenous communities and Native people from far away shared a city studded with totem poles and explained by stories about Indians. Mr. Glover’s bird’s-eye panorama, the 1880 census, and other sources had offered glimpses of Native Seattle on the eve of a massive urban transformation. Sources from the 1930s show the results of that transformation and offer their own glimpses into a city that, unbeknownst to its residents (Indian or otherwise), was on the eve of yet another great change.2

In 1930, Seattle was a bona fide metropolis, a city of 350,000 people. Few vestiges of the indigenous landscape remained—the Duwamish River had been straightened, the waters of Lake Washington now flowed through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks rather than the extinct Black River, and new neighborhoods of bungalows and apartments blanketed hills that had once been barriers to urban growth.

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