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5 / City of the Changers W hen 0llie wilbur was a little girl living on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the horse and buggy ride from the Muckleshoot Reservation to Seattle was a long one and, in her words, “awful, you know—have to go uphill, downhill, we’d all get off and walk.” Even so, her family went every year to visit her grandmother’s brother, who lived in a ramshackle floating house near the mouth of the Duwamish. Seetoowathl—or Old Indian George, as his neighbors called him—still lived where he had been born, in a place known in his language simply as Tideflats. He shared the house with his wife, who was either “quite insane” or “the meanest old . . .” depending on whom you talked to, and he made a living by catching dogfish and rendering their oil for local sawmills. (“That’s all he does, is fish, the old man,” Ollie recalled.) The monotony of fishing was broken every September when Ollie and her parents came with canned berries from the foothills. Their journey linked Seetoowathl, who refused to speak English with visiting ethnographers , and his prickly wife to a reservation some thirty miles distant. Long past the treaty and the Battle of Seattle, indigenous people whose ancestors once lived in Duwamish, Shilshole, and Lake communities like Little Crossing-Over Place and Herring’s House still lived in Seattle , even as many of their kin found homes far from the city.1 Between 1880 and 1920, however, forces were at work that would make indigenous survival in Seattle virtually impossible. During those years, the city saw its most explosive period of urban growth, which spelled disaster for Native people trying to live in traditional ways and places. By the 1920s, in fact, indigenous Seattle—the geographies and communities that predated the founding of the city—would come to 7 9 an end, even if Indian Seattle would not. The wholesale transformation of the urban landscape dramatically altered indigenous subsistence practices and created a new place-story in which the “vanishing race” and the ghostly Indian haunting the city were self-fulfilling prophecies. The Indian people who remained in Seattle, meanwhile, became almost invisible as they adapted to life in a new metropolis. According to oral tradition, Seeathl had seen this change coming. During treaty negotiations in 1855, he had warned his people to pay special attention to the Americans and their government. “You folks observe the changers who have come to this land,” he told those gathered. “You folks observe them well.” In calling the Americans “changers,” Seeathl invoked the figure of Dookweebathl, the Changer, who had organized the chaotic landscape of deep time and made the world habitable for the human people. It was a particularly apt choice of terms. As powerful forces reshaped Seattle in the decades around the turn of the century, indigenous people found themselves caught up in a transformation of their world nearly as dramatic as those described in the ancient stories. By 1920, Seattle had become the city of a new kind of Changers.2 A t first glance, seattle’s two most important fires seem unrelated. The first, in 1889, utterly destroyed the city’s commercial district; the second, four years later, obliterated several Native longhouses along the West Seattle shoreline. In Seattle’s urban mythology, the earlier conflagration is one of the city’s great turning points, the phoenixlike moment from which the city rose up to become the Northwest’s premier metropolis. The other is a mere historical footnote, forgotten by nearly all of Seattle’s chroniclers even though it made headlines at the time. But the two stories they represent— Seattle’s urban triumph and the dispossession of local indigenous people—are in fact one story. The path between a boiling pot of glue in 1889 and an arsonist’s torch in 1893 represents not just the trajectory of those four years but a broader pattern: in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, indigenouspeopleinSeattlefoundthemselvesonthelosingsideof urban development. Although many of the specifics of this “dispossession by 8 0 ] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:16 GMT) degrees” are lost to the historical record, the shared context of these two fires offers insights into the seemingly inexorable, yet often invisible , marginalization of the Duwamish, Shilshole, and Lake peoples.3 Rudyard Kipling, imperial apologist and rhetorical bearer of the white man...

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