Interview with Coll Thrush, author of "Native Seattle"
Seattle, fittingly known as Emerald City, is enjoying its cultural moment right now. In the past month, the Seattle Seahawks have nabbed their first Superbowl title and gay-friendly, local (white) hip-hop artist Macklemore took home four Grammy awards including Best New Artist, Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance. During the November 2012 election, Washington State voters approved Initiative 502 which would legalize the sale of recreational marijuana and pot shops are to be up and running sometime this year. After fourteen years, Microsoft has a new CEO with India-born Satya Nadella and local girl, Amanda Knox has gone from guilty to innocent to guilty in an Italian trial that has lasted longer than the building of Rome. Did we also mention that Seattle continues to be the home of high-performing Amazon, Boeing and Starbucks? As well as some of the most popular (and also wonderfully obscure) bands of the past twenty years? Think Nirvana, Death Cab for Cutie, Band of Horses and Math and Physics Club.
Going to school in Olympia in the late '90s, my roommate and I used to joke that Seattle didn't exist before 1970 and with all these newsworthy novelties, it's a hard stereotype to shake. The Space Needle itself looks like an office building from The Jetsons. Truly, Emerald City is a technological wonderland that rivals San Francisco. It's the city that created hipster coffee culture.
Seattle at Sunset
So it's a marvel that I was able to meet someone able to lift the veil on this burg's past and trace its early history. Specifically, I met Coll Thrush at a bookstore in Harvard Square back at the end of 2011. At the time, this professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia was attending a conference at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology while I was manning nearby Harvard Law School's campus by night. We hit it off immediately.
Thrush is the author of "Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place," a historical guide of Seattle's founding in 1851 to the urban present seen through Indigenous eyes. Having only rudimentary geographical knowledge of Seattle, I was still drawn into this book's arms. It's more of a testament to the not-so-black-and-white early relations between white settlers (many of whom were referred to as the Bostons) and the indigenous people at the time including (or who were to be later recognized as) the Duwamish, Shilshole, Suquamish and Muckleshoot.
Q: Tell me about your own relationship to the city of Seattle and what drew you to pursue Indigenous Studies.
A: I grew up about an hour from Seattle, in a town called Auburn that is paired with the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation. It was a fairly segregated place, but my mother, like most lower-class white kids in the 1960s, had grown up working as stoop labour in the surrounding farms alongside Native families, and so she knew some people on the reservation. It was clear to me even as a child that there was a Big Story going on there that no one was talking about, and I'm of the temperament that when there's something going on that no one's talking about, that's what I want to talk about.
As for Seattle specifically, the city was a bit of a refuge for me - a way out of my hometown, even as a teenager. I suppose in part because of this, I became quite obsessed at a young age with urban landscapes and the idea of hidden histories or spaces within cities. In Seattle, where there is so much Native imagery, it, again, seemed like there was a story out there that no one was talking about, even though the evidence of it - totem poles, place names, even the name of the city itself - spoke to something quite deep having happened. When it came time to develop a thesis for my graduate work in the late 90s, then, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
In general, I would say I'm a historian of place, and of the historical and cultural layerings - the palimpsest - that make up the identity of a place and the people who live there, Indigenous and settler alike.
Q: What is the current Native population of Seattle now? Are there any big social or political movements that is happening in the First People's community in 2014? What are the three biggest issues facing the Native American community today or at least in the Northwestern U.S.?
A Great Read
I can't give you exact numbers, particularly because the numbers tend to be a bit squishy. Sometimes, they're limited to members of federally recognized tribes; more often, they're based on self-identification, which means you get a lot of the my-great-grandmother-was-a-
I'm not all that engaged in the Seattle Native community these days (at least not directly), but I would say that some of the most important issues include a) the maintenance of Native institutions like Daybreak Star Cultural Center, which is in financial trouble, b) questions of social justice, particularly around police brutality (including the killing of Dididaht artist John T. Williams in 2010), and c) the ongoing struggle for recognition of the Duwamish Tribe.
I wouldn't want to give the impression, though, that it's all about struggle. There is an incredible renaissance taking place right now in Indigenous communities, especially among younger folks. In the Seattle area, you can really see that in the Canoe Journeys, in the revival of languages, and in the work of younger artists like Matika Wilbur and Shaun Peterson. There is an incredible energy out there right now. Meanwhile, the federally-recognized tribes continue to increase their political and economic influence in the region.
Q: Are there any books or articles you recommend on researching the life of Chief Seattle?
There's not a ton out there that doesn't suffer from the noble savage problem, which treats Seeathl as more a metaphor than a real person. I'd say that my footnotes pretty much include everything there is on him and on the famous speech attributed to him. There's certainly more work that needs to be done on just him, and I hope I've helped lay some of the groundwork for that.
Q: You write that between 1880 and 1920, the pace of modernity in Seattle really began to harm the Native American community. You said that there were plenty of Native people left but no longer any Indigenous people. Would you elaborate on that for my readers as well as describe if there are any "Indigenous" practices left where people are returning to ancient traditions?
I would write about this in a different way now. Since 2005, when I finished the manuscript, "Indigenous" has become the term of choice at the international (and increasingly, at the local) level, both among activists and academics. That's a new thing. I think the point still stands: that lower-case indigenous, place-centered ways of life - e.g. most of the fishery and participating in the seasonal round of harvesting - have been significantly impacted by urban development. But upper-case Indigenous activities - political organizing, cultural revival, and coalition work between different peoples - are continuing and getting stronger. The terminology is always tricky; there's very little consensus on the words to use. Although, again, there is a real consensus developing around the use of the term Indigenous, which, when used by scholars like me, signals a position of solidarity with a present-day political and cultural movement. I'm also happy in my current work to read that term back into the past. Some historians might call that presentist or ahistorical, but I don't mind being called those things; it's more important for me to produce work that supports the work being done on current issues by offering something of a genealogy through my research.
Chief Seeathl in 1864
Q: What about in European-American cultures? You've spent most of the last year in England researching your book Native London. How has that been going? Would you care to discuss your future book plans?
I think one of the biggest questions facing European-descent settler society is that having to deal with what it means to be local, or to belong to a place, in the context of colonialism. Particularly for people who are interested in environmentalism or other forms of local organizing, the question of what has happened here in North America can make for some very uneasy conversations. That's something that I'd written about in Native Seattle - pioneers and others trying to make sense of themselves in place. Certainly, no one of solely European descent can make any claim to inhabitance that in any way compares to the hundreds of generations of Indigenous presence in these lands. That said, I think learning to understand our local places can make some truly profound changes in the way relate to the environment and each other. But if that process doesn't include an awareness of historical forces such as colonialism, then it's not going to work. That raises the question, then, of building meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities, where appropriate.
As for my current book project, it's called Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire. It's a history of the city reframed through the experiences of Indigenous people who travelled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia, beginning in 1502 and ending in the present. The people I'm writing about came there for many reasons - as captives, as political emissaries, as performers, even in one case as a missionary - and their stories are incredibly rich. The book is organized around what I'm calling "domains of entanglement": abstract concepts that illustrated the ways in which London is entangled in Indigenous history and vice-versa. The domains are knowledge, disorder, reason, recognition, discipline, and memory, and the communities involved range from the Inuit and Eora (from what is now Sydney) to Mohawk and Cherokee, Maori and Coast Salish, and more. It's a huge project - I've been working on it full-time since 2008. It will be out in 2017 from Yale University Press.
After that, I'll be returning to the Northwest to write a book that's been in my head for about twenty years. It's going to be a meditation on colonialism, trauma, memory, and landscape, looking at four terrible things that happened in my hometown: massacres during the Treaty War of the 1850s; the destruction of a river ca. 1900; the Japanese Internment in 1942; and the US's largest serial killer case, the Green River Killer, in the 1980s. I'm interested in the ways in which these stories have been silenced and/or remembered, and the clues to them that are left layered in the landscape. I'll be intertwining it with stories of my own family's history of intergenerational violence, most of it linked to westward migration. It's going to be a very tricky book to write, but it will be quite a relief to return to landscapes I know and to a place with a very small archive (unlike London!). And the place has given me an amazing title: because my hometown was originally called Slaughter, the book will be called SlaughterTown. And it was built on top of an Indigenous town called Confluence, so there's that metaphor as well - the coming-together of different ways of being in one single place. Sometimes the Universe provides; sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.
You can purchase Native Seattle through Amazon.
Going to school in Olympia in the late '90s, my roommate and I used to joke that Seattle didn't exist before 1970 and with all these newsworthy novelties, it's a hard stereotype to shake. The Space Needle itself looks like an office building from The Jetsons. Truly, Emerald City is a technological wonderland that rivals San Francisco. It's the city that created hipster coffee culture.
Seattle at SunsetSo it's a marvel that I was able to meet someone able to lift the veil on this burg's past and trace its early history. Specifically, I met Coll Thrush at a bookstore in Harvard Square back at the end of 2011. At the time, this professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia was attending a conference at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology while I was manning nearby Harvard Law School's campus by night. We hit it off immediately.
Thrush is the author of "Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place," a historical guide of Seattle's founding in 1851 to the urban present seen through Indigenous eyes. Having only rudimentary geographical knowledge of Seattle, I was still drawn into this book's arms. It's more of a testament to the not-so-black-and-white early relations between white settlers (many of whom were referred to as the Bostons) and the indigenous people at the time including (or who were to be later recognized as) the Duwamish, Shilshole, Suquamish and Muckleshoot.
Q: Tell me about your own relationship to the city of Seattle and what drew you to pursue Indigenous Studies.
A: I grew up about an hour from Seattle, in a town called Auburn that is paired with the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation. It was a fairly segregated place, but my mother, like most lower-class white kids in the 1960s, had grown up working as stoop labour in the surrounding farms alongside Native families, and so she knew some people on the reservation. It was clear to me even as a child that there was a Big Story going on there that no one was talking about, and I'm of the temperament that when there's something going on that no one's talking about, that's what I want to talk about.
As for Seattle specifically, the city was a bit of a refuge for me - a way out of my hometown, even as a teenager. I suppose in part because of this, I became quite obsessed at a young age with urban landscapes and the idea of hidden histories or spaces within cities. In Seattle, where there is so much Native imagery, it, again, seemed like there was a story out there that no one was talking about, even though the evidence of it - totem poles, place names, even the name of the city itself - spoke to something quite deep having happened. When it came time to develop a thesis for my graduate work in the late 90s, then, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
In general, I would say I'm a historian of place, and of the historical and cultural layerings - the palimpsest - that make up the identity of a place and the people who live there, Indigenous and settler alike.
Q: What is the current Native population of Seattle now? Are there any big social or political movements that is happening in the First People's community in 2014? What are the three biggest issues facing the Native American community today or at least in the Northwestern U.S.?
A Great ReadI can't give you exact numbers, particularly because the numbers tend to be a bit squishy. Sometimes, they're limited to members of federally recognized tribes; more often, they're based on self-identification, which means you get a lot of the my-great-grandmother-was-a-
I'm not all that engaged in the Seattle Native community these days (at least not directly), but I would say that some of the most important issues include a) the maintenance of Native institutions like Daybreak Star Cultural Center, which is in financial trouble, b) questions of social justice, particularly around police brutality (including the killing of Dididaht artist John T. Williams in 2010), and c) the ongoing struggle for recognition of the Duwamish Tribe.
I wouldn't want to give the impression, though, that it's all about struggle. There is an incredible renaissance taking place right now in Indigenous communities, especially among younger folks. In the Seattle area, you can really see that in the Canoe Journeys, in the revival of languages, and in the work of younger artists like Matika Wilbur and Shaun Peterson. There is an incredible energy out there right now. Meanwhile, the federally-recognized tribes continue to increase their political and economic influence in the region.
Q: Are there any books or articles you recommend on researching the life of Chief Seattle?
There's not a ton out there that doesn't suffer from the noble savage problem, which treats Seeathl as more a metaphor than a real person. I'd say that my footnotes pretty much include everything there is on him and on the famous speech attributed to him. There's certainly more work that needs to be done on just him, and I hope I've helped lay some of the groundwork for that.
Q: You write that between 1880 and 1920, the pace of modernity in Seattle really began to harm the Native American community. You said that there were plenty of Native people left but no longer any Indigenous people. Would you elaborate on that for my readers as well as describe if there are any "Indigenous" practices left where people are returning to ancient traditions?
I would write about this in a different way now. Since 2005, when I finished the manuscript, "Indigenous" has become the term of choice at the international (and increasingly, at the local) level, both among activists and academics. That's a new thing. I think the point still stands: that lower-case indigenous, place-centered ways of life - e.g. most of the fishery and participating in the seasonal round of harvesting - have been significantly impacted by urban development. But upper-case Indigenous activities - political organizing, cultural revival, and coalition work between different peoples - are continuing and getting stronger. The terminology is always tricky; there's very little consensus on the words to use. Although, again, there is a real consensus developing around the use of the term Indigenous, which, when used by scholars like me, signals a position of solidarity with a present-day political and cultural movement. I'm also happy in my current work to read that term back into the past. Some historians might call that presentist or ahistorical, but I don't mind being called those things; it's more important for me to produce work that supports the work being done on current issues by offering something of a genealogy through my research.
Chief Seeathl in 1864Q: What about in European-American cultures? You've spent most of the last year in England researching your book Native London. How has that been going? Would you care to discuss your future book plans?
I think one of the biggest questions facing European-descent settler society is that having to deal with what it means to be local, or to belong to a place, in the context of colonialism. Particularly for people who are interested in environmentalism or other forms of local organizing, the question of what has happened here in North America can make for some very uneasy conversations. That's something that I'd written about in Native Seattle - pioneers and others trying to make sense of themselves in place. Certainly, no one of solely European descent can make any claim to inhabitance that in any way compares to the hundreds of generations of Indigenous presence in these lands. That said, I think learning to understand our local places can make some truly profound changes in the way relate to the environment and each other. But if that process doesn't include an awareness of historical forces such as colonialism, then it's not going to work. That raises the question, then, of building meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities, where appropriate.
As for my current book project, it's called Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire. It's a history of the city reframed through the experiences of Indigenous people who travelled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia, beginning in 1502 and ending in the present. The people I'm writing about came there for many reasons - as captives, as political emissaries, as performers, even in one case as a missionary - and their stories are incredibly rich. The book is organized around what I'm calling "domains of entanglement": abstract concepts that illustrated the ways in which London is entangled in Indigenous history and vice-versa. The domains are knowledge, disorder, reason, recognition, discipline, and memory, and the communities involved range from the Inuit and Eora (from what is now Sydney) to Mohawk and Cherokee, Maori and Coast Salish, and more. It's a huge project - I've been working on it full-time since 2008. It will be out in 2017 from Yale University Press.
After that, I'll be returning to the Northwest to write a book that's been in my head for about twenty years. It's going to be a meditation on colonialism, trauma, memory, and landscape, looking at four terrible things that happened in my hometown: massacres during the Treaty War of the 1850s; the destruction of a river ca. 1900; the Japanese Internment in 1942; and the US's largest serial killer case, the Green River Killer, in the 1980s. I'm interested in the ways in which these stories have been silenced and/or remembered, and the clues to them that are left layered in the landscape. I'll be intertwining it with stories of my own family's history of intergenerational violence, most of it linked to westward migration. It's going to be a very tricky book to write, but it will be quite a relief to return to landscapes I know and to a place with a very small archive (unlike London!). And the place has given me an amazing title: because my hometown was originally called Slaughter, the book will be called SlaughterTown. And it was built on top of an Indigenous town called Confluence, so there's that metaphor as well - the coming-together of different ways of being in one single place. Sometimes the Universe provides; sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.
You can purchase Native Seattle through Amazon.
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