Free Native Seattle by Coll-Peter Thrush Page B

neighborhood. The paper predicted that after three or four weeks earning “considerable money” from labor in the fields, the Indians “will then return, on their way stopping at Seattle to spend the larger part of their earnings.” The movement of working Indian people—and, not insignificantly, their money—in and out of Seattle was becoming part of the city's urban calendar and a central facet of life in Native communities far beyond Puget Sound. Canoes from Washington's Pacific coast, the islands and inlets of British Columbia, and as far north as Alaska were more than just modes of conveyance toward economic opportunity: they were vehicles in which Indian people traveled toward a new identity crafted through their encounters with the urban. 4
    Long before hops and cities reoriented Native lives on the Northwest Coast, indigenous people had come from great distances to visit Puget Sound. In the 1990s, archaeologists working on the site of a new sewage treatment plant at West Point in Seattle found two remarkable pieces of carved stone, one worked from dark green nephrite and the other hollowed out of light gray stone. These were labrets, ornaments that had once pierced the lower lips of elite Native people; the green one even bore scratches where it had rubbed against the teeth of its wearer. They were at least three thousand years old, and their origins lay far to the north; no societies south of the central British Columbian coast had ever worn them. While the labrets are a mystery (were they worn by men or women, slaves or invaders, spouses or traders?), they attest to ancient voyages along the vast edge of a continent. 5
     
    Stories of such journeys come from shallower time as well. During the same decades that Vancouver and Wilkes explored the Northwest Coast for their empires, indigenous people with their own ambitions were making thousand-mile journeys in forty-foot canoes to the places that would become Seattle. Shilshole elders, for example, told one local historian of raids by Stikine Tlingit from southeast Alaska; those unable to escape into the backcountry around Tucked Away Inside were either taken as slaves or killed, their heads thrown into Salmon Bay. The Lekwiltok Kwakwaka'wakw of the northern Strait of Georgia had earned a similar a reputation in Puget Sound by the 1820s, their raidsappearing in the oral traditions of both peoples. Even after non-Indian settlement in Puget Sound, these northern Indians (described by settlers as “northern British Indians” or even “British-Russia red-skins” to distinguish them from local indigenous people) continued to make forays into the inland waterways near Seattle, sometimes turning their attentions to white schooners and farms. 6
     
    But in the late nineteenth century, the nature and frequency of Native visits to Puget Sound and Seattle changed. Drawn by seasonal work in the region's burgeoning economy, Indian men, women, and children began traveling huge distances, often every year, to Seattle and its outlying areas. As Puget Sound's first large-scale agricultural commodity, hops played the largest role in these migrations, but over time other kinds of crops—berries, vegetables, herbs, flowers—demanded Native labor. For tribal communities all along the coast, occasional forays into Puget Sound became regular peregrinations. By the early twentieth century, the city was a well-established stopover for Indian laborers whose home communities ranged up and down the Northwest Coast. 7
     
    Canoes going to and from Seattle changed both their home communities and the city. The most obvious effects were monetary: Indians fresh from the hop fields and other jobs injected large sums of money into Seattle's economy. One Seattle newspaper noted in 1879, for example, that Native visitors brought “great trade” to the city's merchants, and that “between their calls going and returning they will leave several thousand dollars in Seattle.” Native shoppers