Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place
By Coll Thrush
(University of Washington Press, 2008)
It’s Coll Thrush’s claim that Seattle visualizes Natives more than any other major American city—from the wildly displaced Alaskan totem pole in Pioneer Square to those many, many manhole covers under your feet as you walk throughout downtown, all bearing Native designs.
But the city has visualized Natives as convenient fictions: romantic and disappearing, exotic and othered, combatant enemies. Seattle has failed to simply recognize the reality of the people native to its land and the people after whom it is named, and in fact the federal government still doesn’t recognize its native tribe, the Duwamish.
Thrush’s 2008 book is a rejoinder to all that, a vivid retelling of Native history in Seattle, and it is an incredible history. At one point, he tells the anecdote of a man hauled in front of a judge because he doesn’t have his papers. He’s Chinese, the judge says, and asks for his papers. I’m Chinese American, the man says; I was born here. Prove it, the judge says: Tell me where you live in English, Chinese, and Salish, the language system of the Native people here…