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

Coll Thrush (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0295987006 | ISBN-13: 978-0295987002 | Edition: Later Printing

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Coll Thrush quite brilliantly weaves together accounts of the lived experiences of Native peoples in Seattle with the very different ways in which those experiences came to be recorded in white folklore and place-names and in the environmental fabric of Seattle's cultural landscapes. The result is a tour de force.” -from the Foreword by William Cronon

“This is the best book, by far, that I have ever read about Indians and cities. Thrush's excavation and analysis are deep and wide-ranging, his narrative impassioned and engaging. A fantastic contribution.” -Ned Blackhawk, author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West

“This book is a concerted effort to mobilize a new telling of history in order to reject what is essentially an ideological narrative of the past. Indian people, Thrush argues, were not simply part of the prehistory of the city, destined to give way before modernity. They were, in fact, active co-participants in its development. Well written and argued, this book forces readers to understand Seattle-and perhaps, by extension, other cities-in whole new ways.” -Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places

From the Publisher

"Native Seattle is an interesting and lively history of Seattle with an unusual Native American focus, enhanced with many historic photos, copious notes, and a unique atlas of sites historically significant to tribes of the region. Strongly recommended for libraries in the Puget Sound region." - Multicultural 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 people s 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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press; Later Printing edition (April 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295987006
• ISBN-13: 978-0295987002
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,320,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Native Americans in the beginnings and history of Seattle, May 2, 2007

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Hardcover)

With regard to the beginnings of the city of Seattle, the local Native Americans were not part of what was called the "Vanishing Race" of Native Americans from the westward growth of America. Native Americans played a large, vital, and conspicuous role in the founding and early growth of Seattle. Thrush, an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, makes the point that the role of Native Americans regarding other cities is worth looking into as well. In Seattle, Native American men and women provided the large majority of the manual labor in such work as sawmills and fishing; and many started small businesses. By intermarriage, some Native Americans, particularly women, assumed prominent and influential positions in the community. The other side of the Native Americans' experience with Seattle is their being supplanted as more and more whites came to Seattle in the latter years of the 19th century. Subject to discrimination, racism, oppression, and demonization, the Native Americans lost their position in the city's economy and social structure. They were, for instance, labeled as "hostile," and said to be unable to adjust to urban life; the women were considered prostitutes. In recent years, the fundamental role of local Native Americans in Seattle's origins and the impression this had on the character of the city are being given their due. Numbers of Native Americans, showing an entrepreneurial spirit and media savvy equal to any big-city dweller, are finding places in today's Seattle. Thrush writes the full story of the changing social relationship of Native Americans to Seattle. Central to his perspective--noted in the "Foreword"--is the false, unsubstantiated dichotomy between "civilized" and "uncivilized" peoples. Following the text is an "Atlas of Indigenous Seattle" containing maps and Native American terms evidencing the prevalence of the Native Americans through the Puget Sound area, how much they had developed this area already through use of its resources, and the place of the Native American culture in the origins and development of Seattle.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting topic viewed from too far away, April 25, 2009

By 

B. Robert Helm - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Paperback)

This book covers the history of Indians in Seattle from just before historic times to the present -- sort of.
It's well-written and organized. I learned several interesting things, like what happened to the villages of Herring House and Basketry Hat. There's a very good "atlas" compilation of native places in Seattle at the end, although I wish the author had given the names with the Lushootseed spellings used by other works (like Dawn Bates' dictionary).
The main disappointment is that this is more a history of rhetoric about Indians in Seattle than it is an actual history of Indians in Seattle. An example to explain what I mean: The book notes that when the Duwamish Tribe was campaigning for federal recognition, the tribe had to compile a continuous history of the tribe's political organization from the time of the treaties to the time of the petition (early 1990s). But the book doesn't even give a hint as to what that history was! The actual events of the tribe's history are apparently not of interest, only the political use to which they were put. Oddly, Thrush ends the book with the question "What happened here?" -- I wish he had devoted more time to that question in the book.
I guess I have to get used to this kind of thing. Some academic historians now view actual events and trends as less interesting than the spin put on them by contemporaries. I'd personally rather read something that tries to cut through all the noise and speechifying and brings the reader as close to actual events as possible.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written and a pleasure to read, October 23, 2008

By 

Kathy D (up the hill from Little Crossing Over Place) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Paperback)

With great respect for indigenous peoples and sometimes contemptuous humor aimed squarely at Whites who took the land (in order to refashion it according to "God's plan"), Thrush weaves an intricate blend of stories into a history often invoked but seldom understood. The book does not follow a traditional Euro "beginning-to-end" narrative which may pose problems for more linear-minded folks. Instead, the stories follow a basic timeline of the region's ecological and industrial development, complementing each other. Thrush does a good job of revealing how the perspectives of those in power shape the history we learn in school -- and that's almost never the whole story. I would love to see a book like this covering the colonial disruption of each displaced group of indigenous people on the planet.