Chief Seattle And The Town That Took His Name

This is the first thorough historical account of Chief Seattle and his times--the story of a half-century of tremendous flux, turmoil, and violence, during which a native American war leader became an advocate for peace and strove to create a successful hybrid racial community. When the British, Spanish, and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated land. Chief Seattle was a powerful representative from this very ancient world. Historian David Buerge has been researching and writing this book about the world of Chief Seattle for the past 20 years. Buerge has threaded together disparate accounts of the time from the 1780s to the 1860s--including native oral histories, Hudson Bay Company records, pioneer diaries, French Catholic church records, and historic newspaper reporting. Chief Seattle had gained power and prominence on Puget Sound as a war leader, but the arrival of American settlers caused him to reconsider his actions. He came to embrace white settlement and, following traditional native practice, encouraged intermarriage between native people and the settlers, offering his own daughter and granddaughters as brides, in the hopes that both peoples would prosper. Included in this account are the treaty signings that would remove the natives from their historic lands, the roles of such figures as Governor Isaac Stevens, Chiefs Leschi and Patkanim, the Battle at Seattle that threatened the existence of the settlement, and the controversial Chief Seattle speech that haunts to this day the city that bears his name.

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

This book traces the history of the three most famous versions of Chief Seattle's speech.

The origins of this book began with a discussion Eli Gifford had with Professor Edward Castillo, Department Chair of Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, about the historical inconsistencies in the environmental version of Chief Seattle's speech. Castillo recommended that Eli turn it into a research project. From there it evolved into a master thesis. Afterwards, Eli co-wrote How Can One Sell the Air? to correct the prevailing belief that Seattle actually spoke the words of the environmental speech. Using primary and secondary sources, this book explores the history behind the various agendas each author had in manipulating Seathl's speech. What is unique about this book is that the author was able to speak to the three key people who were involved in the environmental version: Professor William Arrowsmith, Professor Ted Perry, Producer John Stevens and to accurately tell their story. They were able to resolve unanswered questions. Both Arrowsmith and Stevens have since died. Professor Ted Perry, the original author of the environmental version, has played an integral part in unraveling the history of the environmental version. In the foreword he wrote: "The most thorough account of Seattle's speech, its origins and influence. Very impressive and very intelligent . . . That I am extremely indebted to the work of Eli Gifford is a great understatement, but I am certainly not the only reader who will be very grateful." Producer John Stevens who edited Perry's version wrote, "You [Eli] are the first person to accurately reflect my role in the editing of Chief Seattle's speech."

Lost Seattle traces the cherished places in a city that time, progress and fashion have swept aside before concerned citizens or the National Register of Historic Places could save them from the wrecker's ball or the graveyard of history.Organised chronologically starting with the earliest losses and ending with the latest, the book features much-loved insitutions that failed to stand the test of time, along with old-fashioned hotels and sports facilities that needed to be updated or built over.Buildings erected for the World's Fair Exposition are included in the book, along with movie theaters that the age of television made redundant. Losses include: Cable cars, Denny Hill, the Washington Hotel, the Fox Theater, Golden Potlatch, the losses of the Great Seattle Fire, Hotel Seattle, Jackson Ridge, Japantown, Joseph Mayer clock factory, Kalakala (Ferry), Kingdome, Carnegie Central Library, Longacres Racetrack, Luna Park, Moran Brothers’ Shipyards, Yesler Mansion, mud flats, the Waterfront Streetcar, and the Wawona (Schooner).

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and white settlers established their first settlements nearby. Industrialists later straightened the river’s natural turns and built factories on its banks, floating in raw materials and shipping out airplane parts, cement, and steel. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings’s compelling narrative restores the Duwamish River to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice—and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts—Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region’s culture and natural environment. She conducted research with members of the Duwamish Tribe, with whom she has long worked as an advocate. Cummings shares the river’s story as a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.

In recent decades, Native American literature has experienced a resurgence in prominence and popularity. Beginning with the 1969 publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel House Made of Dawn, and continuing with the work of Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Craig Lesley, American Indian writers have become an increasingly visible part of the literary landscape. In this collection of thirty varied and powerful short stories, almost all being published here for the first time, emerging talents carry on the tradition of their storytelling ancestors.