Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place(Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native. On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself. After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms. In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region. Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345

Table of Contents:
Foreword: Present Haunts of an Unvanished Past / William CrononPreface1. The Haunted City2. Terra Miscognita3. Seattle Illahee4. Mr. Glover's Imbricated City5. City of the Changers6. The Woven Coast7. The Changers, Changed8. On the Cusp of Past and Future9. Urban Renewal in Indian Territory10. The Returning HostsAn Atlas of Indigenous Seattle / Coll Thrush and Nile ThompsonMaps / Amir SheikhNotesBibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Coll Thrush is assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.

Review :
"[A] vivid new book...Native Seattle chronicles the breathtaking and traumatic pace of change Seattle's Native people have endured, and the resiliency with which they have regrouped and reconstituted themselves...Its meticulous atlas describes the 'lost' places of the Indian landscape. But they're not really lost - they live today under the city's 21st-century skin." Seattle Times "Thrush shows just how important a role indigenous peoples served in the economic and cultural growth of the city and region and he traces their history through the twentieth century to the present day... Of particular value is the Atlas of Indigenous Seattle, which lists and locates the Salish names of dozens of geographic features ... Many land and water features have disappeared under concrete and asphalt, but Native Seattle keeps them alive." HistoryLink.org