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An Atlas of Indigenous Seattle Coll Thrush and Nile Thompson Maps by Amir Sheikh Historical Introduction, by Coll Thrush answering the question What happened here? requires asking another: What was here before? In Seattle, as in most cities, the pre-urban landscape has been transformed almost beyond recognition. Tracing the course of the Duwamish River as it was in 1851, for example, can be a daunting task. Understanding the ways in which indigenous people inhabited that landscape, meanwhile, can be even more difficult. In short, there is virtually nothing left to see—earlier generations of Seattleites made sure of that—and so comprehending the city’s indigenous geography involves peeling back decades of development and imagining the possibilities. Even then, the risk remains that we will imagine only what we expected to see all along—noble savages, empty wilderness, totem poles—rather than what might have actually once been there. Seattle’s Native pasts have been full of such imaginings. Luckily, through the work of two men and the Indian people who collaborated with them, we have a rare opportunity to envision in specific, concrete ways the places that would eventually become Seattle. In the 1910s, both men collected information about traditional indigenous geographies of the Seattle area, working both with Duwamish men and women living in and around the city and with Muckleshoot and Suquamish informants from area reservations. The first of these researchers was Thomas Talbot Waterman (1885–1936). A student of Franz Boas, Waterman taught anthropology and sociology at the University of Washington in the early twentieth century. Although he lived in Seattle for only a handful of years, the city held a special fascination for him. “The actual topography is very 2 0 9 interesting,” he noted, “and the spot is doubly interesting because of the great city which has grown up there.” Even better, though, the urban landscape that had grown up on central Puget Sound was still populated by Indian people. Some of them, like Seetoowathl in his float house, shared their knowledge with him from within the city limits. Others, like Jennie Davis and Amelia Sneatlum from Suquamish and Betsy Whatcom from Muckleshoot, educated him in their reservation homes. The resulting manuscript, entitled “Puget Sound Geography,” includes the names of hundreds of places, from the Cascade Mountains in the east to the western shores of Puget Sound and from Whidbey Island in the north to the many-armed southern reach of the Sound. The names speak about the everyday practices of life here: places where fish were caught, places where canoes could be portaged, places where games were played. They tell of the landscape’s intellectual elements: the connections between bodies, houses, and the earth; ways of measuring the land and moving on the waters; spirit forces that gave life meaning. Most importantly, they are proof of the profound “inhabitedness” of this first country: the towns, the trails, the stories from deep time.1 Waterman’s work did have its problems. He often misunderstood the elders and sometimes failed to obtain the meanings of the placenames he was offered, and his maps are consistently bad. His greatest error, though, was in the attitude he brought to his research. Noting, for example, that indigenous people on Puget Sound might have twenty names for places along a river but no name for the river as a whole, Waterman commented that “from our own standpoint, the Indian’s conception of the size of the world is startlingly inadequate.” Waterman saw indigenous people as his intellectual inferiors, inhabiting a lower rung on the ladder between Savagery and Civilization. To strengthen this point,Waterman compared, for example, place-naming practices among the peoples of the Pacific: some Polynesian societies had names only for small places, while others, like the Samoans, had achieved a “national and archipelagic designation.” It was clear which societies Waterman found to be more civilized. While his work is a testament to the richness of indigenous inhabitance in Seattle and Puget Sound, it is also an example of the kind of thinking that placed 2 1 0 .31] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 21:20 GMT) Indians in the category of “primitive”—and that justified their dispossession.2 For all its biases, the biggest problem with “Puget Sound Geography ” has been its inaccessibility. Available for decades only in the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, a photocopy of the unfinished manuscript was obtained by the University of Washington in the 1980s. Despite its...

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