Importantly, Thrush provides an alternative reading of a place-based history that includes a perceptive link between the early and the contemporary native community in Seattle. Thrush’s analysis builds on excellent work by Paige Raibmon and Alexandra Harmon by discussing the ways the histories and agency of native people have been obscured by the images of colonialism. The many totem poles that dot Seattle’s landscape and mark it as “exotic” are often more visible to non-natives than the communities from which they have come, and certainly more visible than the local Indigenous population that existed in the pre-urban area. Seattle, Thrush argues, is haunted by Native Americans even though the stories non-natives tell are more of imaginary Indians than a reflection of the experiences of the local and broader native community. A significant part of the place-story of Seattle relies on an assumption that the urban promise of Seattle depended on the dispossession of its Indigenous population. Throughout Native Seattle,Thrush also effectively highlights the ways in which native people have resisted the dominant story of their demise in the city, in effect continuing to make Seattle their own place as well.Ī central part of Thrush’s analysis lies in the concept of “place-story,” or the stories disseminated from Seattle’s emergence as a city. By explicitly writing about the symbiotic relationship between histories of native people and the growth of Seattle, Thrush reconnects native people to the landscape of urban Seattle and highlights how natives and non-natives share in the story of the city. Instead, these stories actively promote the myth of the vanishing Indian. 3), the stories that give Seattle its rich and distinctive history with a native flair are actually divorced from the experiences of most native people. At the outset of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place Coll Thrush writes that while “Seattle, it seems, is a city in love with its Native American heritage” (p. The refusal to see urban Indians and their stories occurs even when Native Americans are seemingly central to a city’s identity, as in Seattle, Washington. Outsiders see them as existing only in the past and not in the present, and if they note their presence in the city at all, it is often as a caricature of their experiences. People tend to view them as less “Indian” when compared to those who live on reservations (never mind that more native people live off the reservation than on it). He added that tribal governments generally did not support the health care cuts to urban Indians, for “ribes, too, recognize that urban Indians are their tribal members, their family, their friends.” It is a recognition of something that too many non-natives reject - the presence of urban Indians and the fact that they are connected to their counterparts on the reservations. Forquera argued that this was part of a continuing attempt to erode support for urban natives while pitting them against reservation communities. In 2006, Ralph Forquera, executive director of the Seattle Indian Health Board, wrote an opinion piece in the local newspaper condemning an attempt by the Bush administration to cut funding for urban Indian health programs for use on the reservations. “Re-storying” Native People into Seattle’s Place-Story
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place.
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