Excerpts from new titles
Excerpt from Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle
(University of Washington Press), 2007
Between 1911 and 1914 and again in the 1930s, Seattle’s premier urban festival was the potlatch. Like the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE), the Potlatch drew on symbols of the city’s northern hinterland and trumpeted the unique virtues that assured a great future for Seattle, its residents, and its investors. More than just another example of public relations, though, Seattle’s Potlatch festival was also a way for a certain class of Seattleites—specifically, the city’s new commercial elite—to tell stories about the city and its history. Called a “triumph of symbolism” by one observer, the Potlatch appropriated Native imagery to create a regional vision of civic development. In telling stories about the places that had been linked to Seattle through its imperial networks, Seattle’s Potlatchers crafted a new narrative about what it meant to be not just in this place but in this place that dominated other places: in the premier city of the Northwest Coast.
Seattle’s Potlatches, like the AYPE before them, were indicative of the heated competition among Western cities in the early twentieth century. While Seattle’s regional dominance was largely a fait accompli by the first Potlatch in 1911, the urban West remained a volatile place, where the fortunes of cities could still be won or lost. Potlatch organizers sought to cement Seattle’s position by creating a signature event, “all that the Mardi Gras is to New Orleans; all that La Fiesta is to Los Angeles; all that the Rose Festival is to Portland.” But why call it Potlatch? To highlight the city’s modernity, why did festival promoters choose a Native tradition as their leitmotif ? The answer centers on the question of wealth and on the idea of a civic generosity that offered the promise of prosperity to all those who lived in Seattle and its hinterland. That an Indian ritual could best articulate this vision made perfect sense to Potlatch promoters:
To the Indian of the Northwestern water reaches [Potlatch] means a feast to which all of the tribe are bidden and whence they return to their tepees laden with gifts.
Seattle has adopted the Indian name and applies literally the Indian definition. It spends $200,000 or more upon its annual festival, and offers it, as free as its Northwestern air, to whomsoever may fare this way.
No feature of the whole delightful celebration is offered at a price, for The Potlatch is not established for profit. Rather it is an annual thank-offering for a prosperity that seems perennial; for such beauties of climate and nature as have nowhere on earth their parallel.
Potlatch promoters, then, cast themselves as humble “chiefs” generously bestowing the fruit of civic and ecological wealth upon the people of Seattle and their guests.
Their choice not only served the message of the festivals but also expressed a long-standing fascination with the potlatch among non-Indians. Identified by outsiders as a trademark cultural element of the Northwest Coast, “potlatch” was in fact a constellation of diverse practices used by indigenous people all along the northwestern edge of the continent as a way to manage social, economic, and spiritual relationships. In Puget Sound, for example, the practice of sgweegwee, from the Whulshootseed word for “invite,” linked elite families, their resources, and their spirit powers over great distances through the public performance of a spiritually sanctioned sharing ethic, often on occasions such as funerals. As one elder said in the 1910s, sgweegwee both made a wealthy person’s name “high” and made it “go all over the place.” This notoriety brought responsibility; Tulalip elder Gram Ruth Sehome Shelton (Seeastenoo) pointed out that the primary purpose of the practice was to “keep up the poor,” to maintain social cohesion through sharing.
Puget Sound potlatches, however, were overshadowed in the public eye by those held further north. Marked by more lavish ritual performances, the public destruction of wealth, and the pageantry of dancing societies, the potlatches of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other northern Northwest Coast peoples fascinated academics and the public alike and inspired a vast scholarly and popular literature. Fascination, however, was tempered by colonial revulsion at the seeming profligacy of Indian society, expressed in the de jure repression north of the U.S.-Canada border and in de facto repression south of it. In Seattle, though, potlatch became the inspiration for appropriation. To borrow Gram Shelton’s words, Seattle’s urban Potlatchers would use Native symbolism to make the city’s name high and to make it go all over the place. Here, then, was an event that represented yet another weft of the woven coast, showing how completely Seattle’s urban identity had been transformed by encounters with its indigenous hinterland.
It did not start out this way. The first Potlatch, in 1911, used Klondike imagery: the presiding figure was King D’Oro, the avatar of golden wealth, who arrived on the Portland—always the Portland—with a retinue of hoary prospectors and rambunctious dancing girls. The following year, though, D’Oro was succeeded by Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway. The brochure for the 1912 festivities described this new incarnation:
Seattle’s Potlatch is unique, for it is based upon and is true to the rich tradition and history of Puget Sound and the Alaskan coast. Every pageant, every spectacle, is colored with the original pigments. Its principal pageant is a line of a thousand totem poles; its emblem is an Alaskan grotesque; its “patron saints” the Whale, the Crow, the Seal, the Bear and other quaint and startling crests of the native of the Northland.
This was, in effect, the AYPE’s appropriation of “Indian” images metastasized citywide. The “Alaskan grotesque,” inspired by the totem poles of both Seattle and Alaska, was the Potlatch’s mascot, known as the Big Bug. Simultaneously an emblem of the festival and an object of racist derision, the Big Bug was a regional cousin to Sambo, drawn not from the imagined plantations of the South but from the Northwest Coast of popular imagination. The Big Bug’s nearer kin were everywhere in Seattle during Potlatch: the Chanty Tyees quartet (“the singing chiefs of the Seattle Press Club”) sang “Chinook choruses” for Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway Allen during his official tour of the city, which including making “good medicine” over the new liner Potlatch at the Seattle Construction and Dry Dock. Across town, three dozen young men performing the “Totem Pole Dance” as part of the play The Alaskan, written by Joe Blethen, son of the owner of the Seattle Times, proved a far greater success than the sourdoughs and sad old King D’Oro. Upon Hyas Tyee Allen’s ritual departure, the Times observed that “ever after Seattle will look to the Potlatch for an Indian chief and not for a king or queen as high ruler.”
The Times’s rejection of royalty suggests that the Potlatches were democratic, or even populist, in their conception. Indeed, they were—designed as participatory spectacles, the events brought Brahmin and lowbrow together in a unified civic identity. But for all the nods to generosity and philanthropy, it was Potlatch organizers who gained the most from civic potlatching, and they did so through an organization that stood at the core of urban power: the Tilikums of Elttaes. Making their official debut at the unveiling of a newly painted Chief-of-All-Women pole in the fall of 1911, the Tilikums (“friends” in Chinook Jargon; Elttaes is Seattle spelled backward) included the most powerful men in Seattle. During the 1912 Potlatch parade, for example, one of the highlights was “Chief Skowl’s War Canoe,” crewed by some thirty Tilikums. Among them were Hyas Tyee Allen’s insurance industry colleagues, as well as bankers, attorneys, a Presbyterian pastor, the Seattle postmaster, and staff from both the Times and the Post-Intelligencer. The canoe also carried J. C. Marmaduke, general manager of the New Washington Hotel and the Alaska Building; Colonel William T. Perkins, an executive with the Northern Exploration and Development Company, the Alaska Midland Railroad, and the Northern Securities Company; Clyde Morris, president of Nome-based General Contractors and the Arctic Club; and Joshua Green, president of the International Steamship Company. Called “the livest of the live wires” in Seattle, these Tilikums had made fortunes from the city’s hinterland, whose images their friends at the papers now used to sell the city. So perhaps civic potlatching was not about generosity after all.
Soon after their appearance, the Tilikums became one of the largest civic organizations in Seattle. A competition among their three component “tribes” in 1913, for example, brought in 1,547 new members, bringing the total to 2,588 Tilikums, a significant portion of the city’s white, middle- and upper-class men. Their induction ceremony involved the climbing of a totem pole, and tongue-in-cheek gossip of human sacrifice circulated through town, a reminder of the fascination with rumored cannibalistic rites among Northwest Coast peoples. “Playing Indian” was a well-established American pastime and had always expressed a wide range of political and cultural notions, but if the Tilikums tried to look like Indians, they behaved more like their white counterparts in fraternal organizations throughout the country. Concerned—at least on the surface—with more than simply making money, the Tilikums also sought to create a new moral climate in the city. During their inaugural year, for example, they erected a totem pole downtown that literally spelled out the values of the Tilikums. A far cry from the Chief-of-All-Women pole at the other end of the downtown, this one stood atop seven steps, each engraved with a virtue: Energy, Loyalty, Tradition, Truth, Ability, Equality, and Success—all spelling Elttaes. For all its gaiety, the work of the Tilikums was also a moral project, its apparent confidence belying deep-rooted concerns about modern urban life and the reforming impulses of the Progressive Era.
The work of the Tilikums was also a historical project. The 1912 Potlatch parade, for instance, was a wheeled chronology of Seattle’s imperial past, its place-story cast in crepe and cardboard. First came a float belonging to a “shaman,” who used rattles to clear “evil spirits” from the parade route, followed by the Hyas Tyee’s own float of walruses, ravens, and golden cornucopias representing the North’s abundance. Then came the Tilikums themselves, some wearing papier-mâché bear, eagle, and whale masks and others dressed as totem poles, with horns braying and drums pounding in “the way in which the Indians of the North called together the chieftains.” Next came a Native potlatch scene complete with slaves and giant feast dishes, followed by Russian Alaska: a miniature replica of the Orthodox church at Sitka and “Russian priests, Cossacks and Indian slaves.” Last, but certainly not least, came the American period, represented by a huge eagle perched on a map of Seward’s purchase, a re-creation of Chilkoot Pass with a regiment of sourdoughs, and lastly the Home Government float, “a patriotic conception of what the future holds for Alaska.” Looking north to articulate Seattle’s urban future, Potlatch organizers expended little energy on the local past: Chief Seattle, the pioneers at Alki, and other figures and events from Seattle’s pre-imperial history rarely appeared at Potlatch. This was a story about place, and the place in question was the salmon-scented silences, gold-strewn Arctic creek beds, and totempoled villages of Seattle’s hinterland—not the lands and waters upon which Seattle had been built.
The kind of place-story the Tilikums told had everything to do with the kind of men they were, and with the kinds of experiences they had had with both cities and Indians. Most members of the Tilikums of Elttaes were cheechakos, people who had arrived during Seattle’s period of rapid population growth that began in the 1890s. Few of them had experienced Seattle Illahee. For them, the city had always been a place of banks and steamships and railroads and tall stone buildings, all connected to Alaska and the North Pacific. To be fair, Potlatch—which, after all, began as Alaska Day—was never really about Seattle’s history in the first place. A glorified street party and public-relations campaign, Potlatch was an escape from the past, created by men with little interest in reliving a history few of them had known firsthand. At the same time, convincing residents, visitors, and investors of Seattle’s current and future greatness required the creation of a historical trajectory—a story for the city. And, in a sense, the Tilikums’ version of Seattle’s history was a local story; in the crowded world of twentieth-century urban competition, Potlatches and totem poles and tribes could provide the city with a unique urban identity among its rivals. But their definition of place was a new one: as the Northwest Coast’s greatest metropolis, the hinterland had for the Tilikums become part of Seattle’s local terrain.
The Tilikums might have escaped the local past, but they could not escape the global present. The 1913 and 1914 Potlatches resembled that of 1912 in all the important ways—totem poles lining the streets, Tilikums in their war canoes, and the Big Bug leering at the throngs—but Seattle’s biggest festival became increasingly entangled in events in the broader world. The 1913 Potlatch was marred by running battles between enlisted men and the Industrial Workers of the World, and as the world embarked upon the Great War in 1914, Potlatch was scaled back to only four days and received only subdued press coverage. In fact, the 1914 Potlatch would be the last for two decades. The festival was revived again in 1934 to bolster the spirits of a suffering city, thanks to a new generation of Tilikums with their own Hyas Tyee Kopa Konoway, tribal chieftains, and shamans. By the Aviation Potlatch of 1941—the last Seattle Potlatch, as celebration gave way once again to war—images borrowed from Seattle’s experience with empire, and versions of history that emphasized the regional over the local, had come to seem like natural expressions of Seattle’s past. Although the Tilikums had been responsible for creating this new sense of the local, based in their own lived experiences in a regional metropolis, they did occasionally venerate local history. Even in the years when Potlatch was not held, the Tilikums participated in other urban ceremonies, throwing their weight behind both Chief Seattle Day and commemorations of the landing of the Denny Party at Alki Point. And when the men who dressed as totem poles, who shook Tlingit rattles and spread cannibal rumors about themselves, came together to remember these turning points in the local past, they came into contact with another group of Seattleites who told a very different place-story but who also used Indians to do it.
