THE PEOPLE OF CASCADIA- HEIDI BOHAN/CHIEF SEATTLE - DAVID M. BUERGE/THE INDIANS OF THE PUGET SOUND - HERMANN HAEBERLIN & ERNA GUNTHER

NOT AVAILABLE, NOT AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE (respectively) A rare 3 book review. As you can tell, I normally review these books in the order I read them, one at a time. Sometimes a few books in a row follow a theme or play into a current interest of mine, sometimes I read unrelated books simultaneously and they sort of run together in my head, but I’ve always reviewed them separately. This time I’m combining them because the Bohan and Haeberlin & Gunther books were really just supplementary stuff to help me understand the Seattle biography. I’ve been trying to read this thing for almost a year. I’ve started it countless  times; I must have taken it out from the library and/or renewed it half a dozen times. It’s always seemed like something I’m obliged to read if I’m going to live here (Seattle, I learned, is the largest city in the Americas named after an indigenous person). I’ve finally taken it down and I can now say definitively what I’ve suspected this whole time, the book is amazing. It’s one of the more interesting biographies I’ve ever read, full stop, despite taking on a particularly difficult subject. Despite being on the City Seal (and thus plastered all over the place) as well as a statue near a bar I like there isn’t much about Seattle the man here in Seattle. I took the ferry to visit his grave shortly after moving here and while impressive and sober even the close by museum doesn’t do a great job explaining why he is important. This, apparently, isn’t a new problem. The book mentions that no paper, local or otherwise, even reported his death (to be clear, the town was already named Seattle at this point). One of the reasons this biography must have been so difficult to write is that Seattle is from the generation that was born before White contact and died in a city that was majority non-native. Seattle claimed he saw Vancouver’s ships sail into the Salish sea in 1792 as a young boy so the entire arc of his life begins in the period before contact then follows the terrible decline on destruction that carries on to this day. The complimentary books I read to follow this helped round out this world. The Bohan book helps explain the way Native Life conformed to the unique meteorology of this part of the world, how the abundant summer is a time for travel and hunting and fishing while the rainy winters are for ceremony and feasting. That book is also full of really beautiful black and white drawings of different canoes, baskets, fishing techniques, etc. My favorite images were wheels that represent the different food sources available during different seasons. The Haeberlin & Gunther is a UW ethnographical study from the 30’s that I found cheap in a used book store. It has prettying clear and interesting accounts of the different spirits and powers and overall religious beliefs of Puget Sound natives which helped in understanding some of the events in Seattle’s life. It also helps illuminate how slavery functioned in this region, since Seattle, in addition to being a slave-owner, was also the child of a Duwamish slave mother and a high-class Suquamish father, and this stigma affected his standing constantly. This sort of insight (about how it was both possible to raise from the child of a slave to a chief, but how this birth would still tarnish your reputation) is what makes this books (the biography) so valuable, it is not just about Seattle when he was dealing with Whites, it includes huge sections about his life when Whites were rare in the region. During this time, Seattle comes off as a total maniac. He almost completely wipes out a rival group, he acquires a bunch of slaves and wives, he gets into a fight on a canoe and jumps off, onto a rock, right before the canoe, as well as the man he was fighting, fall off a waterfall. He’s a serious war-chief and legend before the Americans really start moving in. The books good about this section of his life as well. It’s a sad tale, and a familiar one. The Natives get fucked again and again by Whites that basically have no intention of being fair. Seattle understands early that White trade and settlement is going to happen one way or another and thinks he’ll position his people to reap the benefits by getting a settlement on his land so that by the time the settlement grows into a city his people and the Americans will be intermingled and be able to share the prosperity. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t quite go down that way. While I knew the Duwamish remain without a reservation or Federal recognition, this book really underscored the injustice of that. I didn’t know that when Seattle decide to become baptized (as a Catholic despite most of the Whites in the city being Protestants) he took on the Christian name Noah. The obvious joke here is about how much it rains in Seattle but that choice seems eerie now that we know how few of his people and descendants survived the flood. 1866 canoes.