Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (review)

Coll Thrush’s ambitious and thorough telling of experiences of Native peoples in Seattle is an excellent contribution to recent and much-needed scholarship on urban Indians cultivated by scholars such as Renya Ramirez, Donald Fixico, and Susan Lobo. What makes Thrush’s book unique among these studies, however, is its cross-disciplinary and popular appeal; there is material here that illumines our understandings of geography, art, politics, tourism, historic preservation, urban planning, environmental justice, sociology, popular culture, linguistics, and more. As a result, the text may satisfy the interests of varied readers both within and outside of academia. It’s a fascinating read.

William Cronon’s foreword reiterates Thrush’s own description of the text as a counter to the Vanishing American myth associated with histories of the ‘frontier.’ The methodology that Thrush employs is as noteworthy as its content in its challenge to standard approaches to the histories of Indigenous Americans. The framework for its exhaustive store of information is ‘place stories,’ which are continually revised, ever-shifting, and sometimes myth-making evocations of community identity. Importantly, as Thrush makes his way in the text through many time periods and the many communities that intersect in these eras, he reifies storytelling, both written and oral, as the most accurate account of culture. This comes as no surprise to Indigenous peoples and/or scholars of Native American studies. It is stories – especially those linked to particular geographical locations – to which Thrush continually returns.

From the beach at Alki Point, to the gambling parlours, brothels, and saloons south of Mill Street, to Skid Road, geographical landmarks have set the scene in Seattle, Thrush argues, for creation stories that attempt to justify and naturalize colonization (in both historical and contemporary forms) in their telling. Often falsely estranged from urban histories, Indigenous accounts, especially oral narratives, are correctives to the metaphoric treatments of Natives in these creation stories. While it is the imagined moment of the city’s birth, Alfred Denny party’s landing at Alki Point does not register prominently in the oral tradition of local Native peoples, according to Thrush. ‘In fact, it does not register at all,’ he explains. Instead, in Indigenous accounts of nineteenth-century history, the Denny party, in which Seattle was a participant, is unexceptional among many interactions between newcomers and Duwamish, Lake, and Shilsholes residents of Indigenous towns such as Little Crossing-Over Place, Herring’s House, and Clear Water, all of which were increasingly affected by disease and transformations of the landscape. Similarly, in their association of Indians with threats of fire and outbreaks of illness, place stories regarding the ‘Lava Beds’ of the southern side of Mill Street around the turn of the century created a narrative of the need for ‘civilizing’ legislation and institutions that did not recognize Indigenous peoples’ contributions, in the form of labour, to the burgeoning urban economy. And in more contemporary times, new zeal for historic preservation, fuelled in part by efforts to tell the story of Seattle to tourists, ironically led to decimation of ground central for Indian Seattle: Skid Road. These are only a few examples of Thrush’s integration of geography with community narrative as a means of approaching culture in an innovative way.

Though Native Seattle’s readability and appeal to a range of interests is the source of much of its strength, it does limit its engagement with theory in parts, which will leave scholars eager for more. For example, Thrush explains that the influx of Indians from various nations into Seattle led to encounter with an urban landscape on ‘Indian (if not always indigenous) terms,’ drawing a distinction between local and multinational interests. Further, he argues that the urban experience sustained traditions such as the potlatch while leading to ‘a new, cosmopolitan Indianness.’ These observations touch on important current topics within Native American studies concerning tribal (trans)nationalism, intersections (and departures with) postcolonial theory, and political and intellectual sovereignty, but these topics are not given sustained...