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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 1 5 1 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. It seemed that Seattle had made good on its urban promises. But instead of optimism, there was anxiety. Seattle was experiencing the first throes of the Great Depression and, as it had during the Panic of 1893, Seattle ’s boom-and-bust economy was suffering greatly. The crash of 1929 also changed the lives of Indian people in Seattle. Many of the small firms that had fueled annual migrations of Native men and women to Seattle—farms, sawmills, canneries—laid off their Indian workers first, then closed as banks failed. Layoffs and business failures slowed the widespread movements of Native people up and down the coast and from reservations in Puget Sound, where many of the descendants of Seattle’s indigenous people now lived. The Depression also wreaked havoc on Indian attempts to establish a permanent presence in Seattle . For example, Ralph Young (or Looshkát), a Hoonah Raven Tlingit and founding member of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, found his for1 5 2 0] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07:37 GMT) tunes changing in the 1930s. After helping discover the wildly successful Chichagof Mine in Alaska, Young and his uncle had traded their shares in the mine for property along the industrializing Duwamish. Soon after the market collapse, however, the men were forced to forfeit the profitable land (which would...

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