The Lake People were
different from the people down by Elliott Bay. They were what Marian Wesley
Smith called “Salt Water People.”
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| Adapted by Madeline Crowley from Coll Thrush's diagrams in his book, Native Seattle... Yellow dots represent Duwamish people's villages. Red lines indicate ancient Duwamish trails. Map is an approximation. |
In her estimation there
were four areal groups -- she called them ethnic groups. One would call them
the River People, the Saltwater People, and the Inland Prairie People. I posit
a fourth one; the Lake People. This is because there are a lot of large lakes
in west Washington from Lake Whatcom to Lake Washington, and the people who
lived on them were a named group. They were the “Hachooabsh.” Which is different
from the “Whuljabsh” or the “Duwabshs” or “Suquabsh” and those other groups.
But they are a named group;
they were unique.
Their watershed was radial
with all these streams that entered Lake Washington, whereas a river has a
linear characteristic with people related to villages upstream on the rivers
with whom agreements had to be made.
When the salmon came up
the stream you have a weir across the river or a part of the river. And the
technology for fishing was so advanced that they could have caught every single
fish if they had wanted.
Obviously they didn’t;
they had sense enough to know that the people upstream are going to get mad if
you take all their fish. So they would agree to put up the screens for a
certain amount of days or hours of a day, they would calibrate the distance
between the wize and the weir screens to let fish of a certain size through.
These were timed and there
were agreements all up and down the rivers. On the lake, if you put a weir
across a tributary there was nobody upstream, so you didn’t have to make
agreements with people upstream; except for the case of the Sammamish River. It
seems as though the kin structure on the lake was not as linear or as important
as it was on the river.
The River People, of
course, give their names to the reservations. You have the Nisquallys, the
Suquamish, the Nulalips, the Tulalips tribes are the Snohomish and the
Snoqualmie and Skokomish and the other tribes that came into the area after the
treaty process. A man named Sam said, “Every river has its people.” I think
it’s a wonderful, evocative phrase.
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| Lake Washington. Photo: Madeline Crowley |
In any case, that was not
true of the Lake People. So they’re the first group that disappears. The last we hear of them is in 1864, and after that there’s no more reference to Lake People
because they pretty much divided themselves amongst these 'rivering' groups who
got reservations – the few that received reservations.
As a result, they were
organized differently sociologically. Technologically they were different too.
A lake canoe would have been different from a river canoe, and certainly
different from a salt water canoe. Also, the resource base was different. And
that meant that the life was going to be somewhat different. It would give them
their own identity.
The Central Area was that
world between the salt water and the lake. It was this area where was this
connecting link, this portage. It also is the area where the horse was
introduced in the 1740’s. People from in the larger up-inland areas who had
larger prairies would come down onto the Sound regularly to go clam digging,
and they brought their horses. They needed a route that would get there
efficiently but would also give access to prairies with grass. Of course, the
prairies were kept open by repeated burnings every three-five years. Up until
that time there was no need for grass except maybe for basket making. Of course
when horses appeared then there was a need for fodder.
There was a route that
went from the mountains to the (Puget) Sound. It passed through the Central
Area. From that point on, you have two routes of communication. Instead of just
bay and or river and lake people, now you have the inland prairie people coming
in too. So, you have a mix of peoples meeting, and gathering to exchange
products and genes (laughs). So, it really becomes a connecting place. Out on
the lake shore, there were probably only temporary camps.
Elliott Bay was where
permanent residences were but that was only between November and February or
March. Then, the families in each household broke up and went to their various traditional
collecting places. Mary S.A. Smith said if you knew the family you knew where
they would be during the course of the year because they had a specific itinerary.
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| Cedar Tree Bark. Photo: Madeline Crowley | | |
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Sometimes families would
gather together to share work together or to celebrate; they were very sociable
people. They had to be, because relationships between groups and less distant
groups, whether they were friends or not, were based upon kinship. Also, this
was how news was passed around.
One pioneer who lived on
the Columbia River, who very wistfully talked about the natives (like a lot of
the pioneer settlers) said, “Oh, the Indians don’t do anything. They just go
fish like crazy or dig clams or whatever for an hour or three-four hours and
then they just sit around and talk”. Well, talk was very important because one
parlayed the news and also found out what your kin were doing in other areas.
It was how you passed on information. These communicating links were extremely
important. There were no villages within the land in the Central Area as far as
we’re aware. There would have been no reason to have them there.
However, surely there were
camps in the Central Area where people would gather: camas, tree bark, salal, berries,
and so on, and it was where the burns would have happened. The area was used,
but the most important aspect was this place was where there were these
trails.
You said that you
thought one of those trails might date back to pre-historic times.
Oh, yes. The portage trail
surely is prehistoric. You wouldn’t just use it to portage canoes, you would
use it to walk over to the lake. The interesting thing is there are enough
people who remember where it was into historic times so that we can actually
track the trail. Even if you go back and find the earliest maps that show the
earliest roads, the roads pretty much follow the trails because, well, the
people chose the trail routes because they made sense according to the grade of
the hill.
You would never hike, for
instance, along a stream bottom between hills, because you would never get
anywhere if you tried! It was just a mess, there were blowdowns and logjams.
You would try to at least be on the flank or the summit of a hill because that was
more open country. It was much easier to travel. So these roads, these routes,
were chosen with some sensibility. A lot of them became wagon roads for obvious
reasons; this was the easiest way to get from point A to point B. So, if you
look at the maps and see where some of the earliest roads you notice they
correspond rather closely to where people remember the trail to have been.
Then, it’s fairly likely that the oldest roads follow the trails. And so, we
can actually see this transmutation happening as these maps get printed over
time.
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Map Detail. Central Area of Seattle and Native Trails.
Adapted from Coll Thrush's diagrams in his book, Native Seattle... Red dotted line running horizontally indicates the ancient Duwamish trail from the village at today's Elliot Bay to
today's Leschi Park. This would intersect, very roughly, with today's Yesler Way. Trail running vertically goes to the Mountains and runsvery roughly about where Rainier Ave is now. Map is an approximation. |
Did any of these trails become roads we know now?
Yesler...The Indian trail
probably intersected Yesler at a couple of places. It ended up that there was
an Indian settlement, it had several names, “Guilguaetch” called by the
settlers Fleaburg. It was at the western end of the cable car line as it
reached Lake Washington (Leschi).
My guess is that portage
probably quickly became a wagon road. Whereas I don’t think there had been a
native village there before it became a road and certainly before it became a
streetcar. After, there was reason to have a (native) settlement there because
you could stop there and then take the road of the trail over to visit and to
trade at Pioneer Square; there was a big (native) village over
there.
There were villages
nearby, there was one near the exit of the lake to the south, there was one at
Atlantic City Beach Park. Princess Angeline was supposed to
have been born there. There
was one up at Genesee Park, I believe. There certainly were villages at Union
Bay. We know where the villages were located on Lake Washington. Neither Guilguaetch
nor Fleaburg are mentioned in the earliest records as Indian villages, but we
do know that there was an Indian settlement there in historic times.
That probably was because
of the great access that settlers and pioneers built from the Lake to the
Sound, which followed the Indian route, and then later (more) settlers
followed. After that happened then the native people came and sold things to
settlers. If they came from the Lake or east of the Lake; they would gather (at
Leschi) and they could either canoe that long distance around to get there, or
they could just park their canoes on the lake and walk over a mile with their
baskets full and then trade. That’s why I'd guess a native settlement developed
there. I don’t think it lasted much beyond the time that the lake began to be
populated with settlers’ homes. That was usually the pattern. Native people
could live, camp, wherever they chose until the settlers began to specifically
claim, fence, and develop properties (sometimes on land that was already worked
and farmed). Then the native people had to move unless there was a
reservation.
This area where the
cable car came through is what is now Leschi Park and the Marina.
Yes, of course. The park is named Leschi because it was said it was where the Leschi Nisqually war
leader Leschi camped before attacking Seattle, in January 1856.
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| Salal. Photo: Madeline Crowley |
Leschi probably wasn’t
anywhere near, there were an awful lot of other war leaders, people even from
east of the mountains to participate in that attack on Seattle. The Yakama and
the Wenatchi came over the pass on the trail in snowshoes during the dead of
winter.
The Americans (settlers) never
imagined they would do that. It was probably as many as 100 (warriors). They
crossed the lake, and of course they timed their crossing. This is a great
story, it just shows the bubble of ignorance that the settlers lived in. They
would serve in the militia. The militias were organized after the killings on the White River in 1855. (The Mashel Massacre)
Well, the town Seattle had
a sawmill. Well, who operated the sawmill? The Indians operated the sawmills
while the soldiers were marching. They (settlers) had forts, there was Fort Dent at the outlet of the Black River into the White River that led into the
Duwamish (River), and they had sentries cruising the lake. When their enlistment was
up, what did they do? Well, they went home.
So the next day, of
course, the Indians crossed the Lake. It’s like, ‘No one saw this coming!’ Then
they attacked, so that was probably a staging area. The initial staging area
was Mercer Slough, there were several houses there; it was a village site. When
the militia eventually went east of the lake after the Battle of Seattle, they
found the carcasses of the cattle and other animals that the settlers had
brought in. The warriors had used and eaten them. And so there were several staging
areas for the battle, but Leschi Park wasn’t one of them.
So what happened then
as settlers built homes? The Native peoples didn’t just disappear.
No, they moved to
different areas, there’s actually several. That’s the interesting thing. The
value of early history is people would write things down about these communities
in Seattle like Madrona, Mount Baker, Laurelhurst. People wrote these histories
in the 1920s and 30s, they had access to people whose memories went back to the
last decades of the 19th century. So there are written statements saying,
“Indians lived here and Indians lived there.”
As you mentioned, they
would have to move off of a specific local when settlers wanted their land and
they would move to other places. And so, McAleer and Lyon Creek, there’s a park
on the Northwestern shore of Lake Washington, that drains from Ballinger down
to Lake Washington where there was a village hidden behind a swamp there
probably as late as 1916. People would move around the lake. The big change was
when they lowered the lake (with the Chittenden Locks). That took out all the
sockeye spawning beds on the lake because they were high and dry--and it took
decades for the fish to reestablish themselves. And also the Wapato roots in
the swamps, used as food, became high and dry and they became brushlands.
Frankly, the economic value and benefit of the lake vanished for the native
people for many years.
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Snowberry, used by the Duwamish as a medicinal plant.
Photo: Madeline Crowley |
So, essentially the
people were able to make a living at the lake...
As they had done for tens
of thousands of years…
Then the Montlake Cut
brought the level of the lake down, some say as much as 20 feet.
Possibly. The interesting
thing is that the lake level was lowered at the delta of the May Creek on the
east side when it was exposed they found hearths! So, Lake Washington has a
very ambiguous personality in the (native) folklore. There are many places
along its shore that were looked upon as malevolent places inhabited by
malevolent beings. There were all these drowned forests that were inhabited by
spirit beings.
There was a story where a
man who was taking bark off these dead snags at this other end of Mercer Island
who began to feel strange. When he was dying the Medicine Man’s diagnosis was
that he had been taking tree bark and the spirits who inhabited these trees
weren’t pleased, so they’re were driving him crazy; so stop taking the bark off
the trees.
Well, the danger
attributed to these drowned forests - where did these drowned forests come
from? About the years 900-1100 there was a huge subduction quake,
on the Seattle Fault. It was an enormous earthquake; so enormous that it
shook major landslides into Lake Washington. These carried entire forests with
them, and the forests are still there.
If you go on the web and
look up Lake Washington Drowned Forest they have photographs and diaries taken
of all these trees; hundreds of feet tall and still with all the limbs. The
lake level naturally fluctuated during the course of the year, and so in the
low water the tops of the trunks of these forests would stick out of the water.
Later, the Coast Guard or somebody cut the trees down so that boats wouldn’t
snag or get cut up on them. But they’re still there.
So the memory of these events
was retained; they had these waves, huge tsunamis in the lake. It was like
getting in the bathtub, water sloshed back and forth in the lake; probably
caused untold damage. You had these enormous tectonic
slides.
So, the lake had a very
ambiguous history (for the Native Peoples). Nevertheless it was peoples’ home
so they went back and reestablished themselves. After the lake was lowered they
would have reestablished themselves, weren’t it for the fact that by 1916
settlers were flooding into the area. Waterfront property then, as now, was in
very much demand. And so, the lakeshore was settled, eventually to the point
where the native people could no longer sustain a traditional life along the
lake. So they moved elsewhere.
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| Lake Washington, Seattle. Photo: Madeline Crowley |
I read that Natives who
did try to stay starved.
Or assimilated. I mean,
there were always these interesting articles: Last of His Tribe, Lake John
is Holding a Potluck. Implying, 'Oh my God, they’re all dying.' No! Many of
them assimilated and are actually still living in the area. Or they moved out
like people do in a modern, industrial, commercial nation; so they scattered
across the country.
You know the Duwamish
tribe, even though it doesn’t have a reservation, most of its members still
live in the area that the Duwamish traditionally lived in as do a lot of the
assimilated.
This is much the same as
the Duwamish were before the city of Seattle was even created, because the
Hudson Bay Company changed the lifeways of the people in profound ways. That’s
assimilation; or acculturation in any case. But then there was the arrival a
very radical society (for the Duwamish) that came with the American settlers.
Then assimilation was the name of the game. So many chose out of necessity to
assimilate.
It sounds like they had
an existing out-marriage tradition, because you had so many peoples, the Lake
Peoples, the Salt Water, the Prairie. And so you married…
You extended your economic
base by marrying. This was essentially true of the nobility on the saltwater.
You would go up and down the Sound, so you would have people that are related
to all sorts of groups. Along the rivers it was primarily up and down rivers.
So you had the ramified kinship of rivers. On the lakes, since there was really
no one upstream from you except the Sammamish, they probably would have married
within the other named groups like the Sammamish. The Lake Washington people
were the Hachooabshs,
the Lake Sammamish people were the S-tah-pahbsh, which was the second lake, while the Lake Union people
were the Ha-achu-abshs, which means the smallest lake. Lake Union (Pictures of Duwamish living on Lake Union), Lake
Sammamish, and Lake Washington; all related because they lived on these lakes.
And so they almost certainly intermarried amongst themselves, but also with
outlying groups; again just to extend their economic base.
They tried to. Then, the
story is told that somehow they disappeared but really they were just
continuing their tradition.
Now, of course, a lot of
them did disappear to reservations. A lot of them were moved off. Nevertheless
you’re right. Also, conflict traditionally (with the Native Peoples) as far as
I can measure prior to contact (with settlers) was all through sexual politics.
If you had a beef with someone you could beat each other up, or you could
intermarry. Either way, the problem would be solved.
It was just war in a different
guise. Returning to the topic of intermarriage between natives and settlers,
Ellwood Evans, who was a very early historian of the area, believed that as
much as 60% of the total white population (which would have been single white
men) would have married native wives. You know there are famous or infamous
examples: Ulysses Grant, General Picket, Valentine Augustus Copps, all had
native wives. Also Chief Seattle gave his granddaughter Betsy to David Maynard
as a wife. I think his brother Curley gave his daughter Julie to Henry Yesler.
Now, both of those men (Maynard and Yesler) were already married, but their
wives weren’t here. This was just the way it was done.
The native people wanted
to intermarry with this obviously very influential and very wealthy incoming
group. That’s the way it had always been done. Similarly, with the peoples from
east of the mountains, when they came west on horseback over the mountains, the
Native peoples here wanted to intermarry with them. They were wealthy,
obviously they were powerful, they had horses -- a new mode of transport. People
just came in great numbers over the passes, especially after the epidemics
decimated the people on the coast, these interior equestrian people came over
in large numbers to the Puget Sound and intermarried with the local groups. We
have a lot of people here whose ancestors were Yakama, Wenatchi.
Can you talk a little
about their relations to the landscape? People may not know anything about the
native indigenous peoples here.
That’s a real popular
topic.
Let me start with a
wonderful story--I love this story. The whale has become an icon of people in
the Puget Sound area. So when the Makah decided to hunt whales…
It’s ambiguous because
people have mixed feelings still. They think native people have/were given
rights when in fact lands and rights were reserved to them from the treaties. In
any case, there’s this ambivalence as they’re often held up as icons of
cooperation with nature.
Well, then what happens
when, for example, the Makah decided to go whaling? (laughs) There are these
pictures of the Makah having caught a whale.
People were just totally
stunned because...how could they respond to this? Oh, my gosh! You have these
iconic people who are close to nature killing this iconic creature! How can we
apprehend this phenomenon?
This is a long way of
saying basically as far as I can ascertain, native people had a very ambivalent
relationship with the land. Obviously they depended on it, and they were very
sensible when it came to using the land.
For example, as I said,
their fishing technology was advanced. You really couldn’t get much more
advanced given the nature of the materials that they worked with. They had a
capacity to fish out every stream; they could have caught every fish. Yet, they
did not because they lived here for hundreds of generations, and they
understood how the landscape worked; how the populations lived. And they were
sensible.
This was a managed
fishery--this was not a wild fishery, this was a managed fishery in Puget Sound. Same with the land resources, regarding the fact that native people set
fires that burned huge tracts of land on a regular basis seems shocking to many
people today, but that was done. In 1792 when Vancouver comes in and sees these
beautiful green open areas surrounded by forest, it was open because people
burned them off quite regularly. We know that’s true because when they stopped
the practice of burning the clearings were overgrown by trees very
quickly.
Nevertheless, nature was
huge here, and the forests were immense. You know, native people could get lost
in the forest just like non-native people could. And even when you went into
them, you left the daylight, or whatever passes for daylight around here, you
went out into the forest it was darker and gloomier than elsewhere. It’s a
little creepy. The forest was inhabited by animals, but also by supernatural
beings that could steal your soul. Well, that’s what happens when you undergo a
panic when you’re lost. That would be interpreted as soul-theft.
Beyond that, you had to
contend with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. So you have Mount Rainier
(Tahoma), has a triple identity, Maiden, Mother, and Hag. It is the beautiful
wife who comes to grief and is sent away by her husband, or she is the
bountiful mother who nourishes her children, or she is the all devouring hag
who covers the lands with the bones of her victims. You have these powerful
images associated with this extremely dominant landmark.
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| Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room Postcards. Mount Rainer from Lake Washington. |
The rivers are inhabited
by beings, the lakes are inhabited by supernatural beings. They are expressions
of a highly ambivalent relationship with the land.
What’s really interesting
in a lot of initiation ceremonies, people/initiates were turned into wild
beings, but then they were brought back through ritual and made civilized
people. So the idea of wildness was very vivid in the native mind, probably
more than in ours. I mean we have natural parks where nature is safely bounded
within these areas that are relics of a much larger wild that figured deeply
into the Native imagination and intelligence. I think it was highly ambivalent,
and therefore very powerful.
One of the things that
Coll Thrush's book (which is excellent and a fun read: Native Seattle) mentions was around Leschi there was a very magical,
ambivalent serpent being.
Now, that's interesting because
there’s actually a series. The A’yahos was the horn headed serpent, and it was
believed that it lived within the land, and when it shifted that caused the
earthquakes. Three Tree Point was said to have had an A’yahos in the bluffs,
and that’s why gravel would sometimes tumble down. And sometimes it does
without an earthquake, just because it does.
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| Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room Postcards. Greenwood - 37.
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There is a lineup of these
kinds of monsters. It’s no accident that they coincide with the line of the
Seattle Fault. At Fauntleroy, there’s this reddish boulder that is said to be
an A’yahos. And essentially, it’s said that people wouldn’t even look in its
direction; if you went by it and looked at it your head would be turned on your
neck. Which is to say, don’t camp here. Don’t camp on this beach.
Radar maps show big
avalanches and mudslides pouring into the Fauntleroy area where areas
collapsed. Probably the rock is there because a slide brought it there,
emanating from a bluff. Four Mile Rock
is the same kind of thing. There was a hero,
Stah-koob, who would throw his net over the rock.
Whenever you have mythic
beings associated with any landmarks that underscores the potency of the
landmark. The A’yahos is distinct because it’s an earthquake monster, and
Colman Park is such a place. And there is an A’yahos
there. It is probably
there because of a historic event. There was a landslide that happened there
around 1880 that pushed the lakeshore there. If you look on a map there’s a big
bulge where Colman Park is, because that’s where the landslide was.
So when the ethnolinguist Thomas Talbot Waterman
came through here and
taught at the U, he collected lots of place names for the Puget Sound region;
about seven hundred of them. When he would ask people “What do you call this?”
or “What do you call that?” like Colman Park, “Oh yeah, that’s where the A’yahos
is.”
In Coll Thrush's book if I remember
correctly, people used to come and do ceremonies on the shore somewhere near
today’s Leschi. The nature of the serpent creature was ambivalent and
dangerous. Natives said as settlers moved in they disturbed the nature of
this being, and it fled.
That sounds very poetic. I
think there was a lot of atavism in those stories. One of the things was that
the rituals that were carried out on the lake shore, and certainly where Renton
is today and on the shore of Elliott Bay was the spirit canoe ceremony.
Spirit Canoe (Shamans and the Spirit Canoe) was held in
the wintertime during the winter solstice because that was the time when the
land of the dead was believed to be open, and ghosts who were lonely for human
company come and visit their human kin. Also, that’s when the most deaths
occurred among the old and the very young during those cold winter months. If
you were going to die, that was probably when, there was a spike of death
always at that time of the yeah. Or, instead people would get ill.
With soul-theft for
healthy people, the symptom was loss of property. If you had a bad run at
gambling or whatever, you would call in the shaman ceremonialists who would
carry out a soul recovery ceremony, which would last five or six consecutive
nights. It was probably the most elaborate of all rituals ceremonies held in
the Puget Sound. It incorporated and used large wooden planks that were shaped
like whales. And they had abstract paintings on them with images of spirit
figures on them.
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| Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room Postcards. Fisherman's Return. | |
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That style is the Puget
Sound style; it’s not the totem poles shown around the Puget Sound. The totem
poles are from the Northwest Coast. The art-style here was far more
abstract.
In any case, these boards
were covered in a white paint pigment, and then either black or red pigment was
used to outline these figures on them with many dots, and the dots were like
the notes of songs. They were the emanation of power from the spirit beings.
The red pigment for the red dots came from Licton Springs
in north Seattle. Licton,
isn’t an Anglo-Saxon name, it’s one of two Native American names that still
identifies specific features. One is the Duwamish River; the other is Licton
Springs. That is where a spring bubbles up ferric oxide (the area's importance to the Duwamish); my son and I did an
examination (of that) for a science fair project. Anyways, this oxide was
gathered and baked as red pigment.
There was a shaman who
lived at Elliott Bay where Pier 70 is today, who made these spirit boards in
his place. And there were figures, carved, painted figures there. These were
used once, and then they were hidden away; generally in the woods. So we don’t
know quite what the figures were. Probably these figures were used in a soul
recovery ceremony. Such a ceremony was held in the wintertime, and many
villages would hold it.
There’s no reason to imagine
that it wasn’t held at Jijilaetch (Little Crossing Over Place, near what is
today’s Pioneer Square) and Fleaburg too, because there would be a time when
people would gather there, if they were working at Yesler’s Mill or wanting to
trade in Seattle. After 1865 native peoples could not build their homes within
city limits. They could not, so they had to live outside. So 1865 may be a
beginning date for the village of Fleaburg. I just figured it out just now;
talking about it. Serendipity. They could have had a ceremony there. And what
that person may have remembered might have been that.
Just out of curiousity, what piece of knowledge
do you wish you had when you were 15?
I can tell you right off.
When I was 15, I was fascinated… I wanted to be a classics scholar. I was
really interested in Greek and particularly Roman history. I was just
overwhelmed by it. I became really interested in the books of Pausanias, which
was a Greek geographer who lived in the early part of the Christian Era. He
wrote a guidebook to ancient Greece, basically for Roman tourists. He would
tell about all these temples and where all things that happened in mythology
were.
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| Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library, Nortwest Room Postcards. Puget Sound Sand... | | |
I used to think, "Oh
my gosh, I’m going to have to go to the Mediterranean just to see these
places". Then in the 1970s, a fellow named Marshall Soll who lived on
Vashon Island gave me a copy of T.T. Waterman’s Puget Sound Geography. There
was also microfilm of it, I had to read the microfilm at the Seattle Public
Library. I was living on Vashon Island so every night I would take the ferry over
to read it.
I would have loved to have
known at age 15 that this world existed (here), it would have been so
fascinating to explore. That’s what I would have loved to have known. Anyhow,
is there value in it for everyone? I learned about it. I helped popularize it. I
helped provide information for people who wrote other articles. I wrote about
fifteen to twenty features for the Seattle Weekly relating Native American
mythology of the area.
So, what could people do
today? One is to learn about the lay of the land. I think when people are very
young, especially boys and a lot of girls, they like to play on the margins.
Where the house and lawn ends and the brush begins, where the wild begins to
appear; that’s where kids build their forts. That’s always been the case. So,
little kids are very close to the land; literally and figuratively. They
discover things like hills and ponds and lakes and ditches. They’re always in
the ditches poking around. And there’s a real affinity for landmarks and big rocks
and things like that.
Later on in life that
early template of childhood; the land you lived on as a child; if you were
fortunate enough to have grown up in a particular landscape, that’s going to
remain with you for your whole life and a meaning accretes to it. There’s
meaning that comes from it. To be able to understand what people before you
thought and felt about the same landscape is a way to enrich your life. It just
adds to the richness of life.
The other thing is, and
this is for us as we become adults. Native people have actually lived through
an apocalypse. They are the survivors of an apocalypse.
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| Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Public Library, Nortwest Room Postcards. Puget Sound Indians Siwash Seattle. |
When you think of
literature and films today there are always these apocalyptic scenarios.
And zombies.
Zombies...because people
are terrified of an apocalypse because they sense that we are actually living
through one. Global warming is just one manifestation of it.
Well, how can you live
through an event like this? A lot of people lose hope, a lot of people feel
like they need to go into realms of imagination because reality is too
threatening.
It’s good to remember that
there are actually people around who lived through something like that.
Therefore, their experience has value. Especially how they adapted to it and
how they responded to it.
I’ve always been amazed at
how generous in spirit that Native people that I’ve worked with are. Also,
their evident deep and abiding sense of humor. How they were actually able to
find humor in terrible circumstances. That knowledge humanizes us, and so I
would put forward those two elements as good connections between our present
lives and the past. One, is it helps us become more grounded in the land we
live on, so we feel responsible for it (as we should) and its maintenance, and its development should
be part of our thought process. Also, because we live with many kinds of
people.
Some of these people were
here before we came, we as settlers, as immigrants. There were people here
before. They’ve suffered greatly, but they’ve survived. And that survival
should give us hope.
Brilliant.
Great ending, huh?
(David came to this project via the efforts to Cecile Hansen, Chairwoman of the Duwamish Tribe, to whom we remain very grateful)
Special thanks also to our valued intern, Zachary Hitchcock of Seattle University, for his indefatigable help with many things, one of them this transcription
© Madeline Crowley People of the Central Area 2014 All material is covered by copyright. Express written permission must be given for any copyrighted material on this page. Email to request permission to copy or paste materials.
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This project was supported in part by
4Culture's Heritage Projects program |
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