By Betsy Anderson
Every summer during a tribal canoe gathering at Suquamish on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula, hundreds of pullers retrace canoe trading routes in western Washington and southwestern British Columbia. Photo by Colleen Jollie.
There’s only one place on Seattle’s Lake Union to land a canoe these days. The quiet sweep of gravel lies on the western edge of the lake’s southern inlet and is ringed by lanes of traffic. Cyclists weave past on a busy bicycle trail, sea planes come and go next door, and the Space Needle looms behind, but the beach remains deeply still and deeply alive. Water birds congregate here, as if to remind us that the entire lake was once lined with sand and pebble verges.
The beach is less than one year old, restored from a former brownfield site and gently graded to accommodate the landing of traditional dugout canoes. Its construction is the first phase of development of Seattle’s new Northwest Native Canoe Center, a living museum that will celebrate the rich and active canoe culture of the Coast Salish tribes of the region. The center is a joint venture between the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation and the Seattle Parks Department and is nestled within Lake Union Park, a 12-acre network of paths and green space that is currently under construction around the south shore of the lake.
A site plan of the Northwest Native Canoe Center. Courtesy Jones & Jones.
Stitched together with land acquired from the Navy, the department of transportation, the city of Seattle, and private landowners, the park will restore the city’s long-lost connection to its lake while highlighting its maritime heritage. “If you start at the west end of the park and begin walking, you can follow a timeline of maritime history,” notes Janeen Comenote, development officer for United Indians and project manager for the canoe center. “And the canoe center is at the very beginning, which is perfect because the canoe was the original maritime heritage in this region.”
The distinctive profiles of Native cedar canoes were once such a common sight in Seattle that the city was called the Venice of the Pacific. Native tribes throughout Washington’s Puget Sound—the inland sea now called the Salish Sea, in recognition of its first inhabitants—relied on dugout cedar canoes for transportation in a landscape whose steep hills, deep fjords, and thick forests made travel by land impractical. Early white settlers followed suit and even relied on Native canoes to transport the express mail between Seattle and nearby villages until the arrival of the first steamboat in 1853.
Artist’s rendering of the canoe center, looking southwest from Lake Union. The center will be the first urban museum devoted to Native culture that is run by Native Americans. Drawing by Seth Seablom.
But for the first peoples the canoe was more than simply a means of transport. It was and still remains an element deeply woven into the spiritual, artistic, and cultural traditions of canoe tribes. “It’s a way of life,” explains Johnpaul Jones, architect and principal-in-charge of the project for the Seattle firm Jones & Jones. “It’s about how to conduct your life and how to interact with your family, your community, and the world around you—that’s all part of the canoe culture teaching.”
And it’s a culture that loves to teach: “The canoe shares knowledge, it keeps knowledge alive,” stresses Saaduuts, a Haida carver who is artist-in-residence at the Center for Wooden Boats, just east of the future canoe center and an anchor organization in the new park. “It brings our family together, and the family is not just one tribe, not just Indians, not just the city; it’s humanity, and it’s also the animals and the earth. The canoe brings life together.”
For the past 15 years, Saaduuts has led a program known as Carving Cultural Connections, a traditional canoe-building project that teaches young people of all ages and backgrounds the art of hollowing enormous, centuries-old logs, one cedar shaving at a time. The students rely on their eyes and their hands—and even sometimes their feet—to achieve the delicate balance required to keep a hollowed log upright in the water. “We don’t use a tape measure. This canoe is built by the hands of hundreds of children,” Saaduuts recounts, standing by the latest canoe-in-progress and assessing the thickness of its hull.
Hands-on carving workshops like these will be the heart of the new canoe center, which will feature a Carving Canoe House dedicated to the practice, as well as a Welcome Canoe House with additional space for interpretation and cultural events. The buildings are grounded in the architectural tradition of the Northwest Coast longhouse and will feature the large, exposed wood columns and sloping roof so characteristic of Coast Salish structures. Where a longhouse would typically be a single structure, made longer as needed, the canoe center buildings are broken into two parts to allow enough space for a canoe-landing beach on the small site.
Native plants with cultural significance will be incorporated into living roofs and rain gardens and planted throughout the site to unveil the wildness that once framed Seattle’s necklace of waterways. “It’s going to be a respite in the middle of a very busy park,” says Janeen Comenote. “It will be a quiet spot, a break from the rush and the industrial character of Lake Union and the surrounding area.”
Both canoe houses turn their backs to the street and the high-rise buildings and open expansively to the beach and the lake beyond. “This was a gesture to embrace the canoes as they arrive and connect the two houses to the lake,” explains Osama Quotah, project manager and project architect. Quotah joins Johnpaul Jones in leading the Jones & Jones design team for the center. Within the small wedge of land allocated them, Quotah and Jones needed to connect the softly sloping beach to the canoe shed to allow newly carved canoes to slip easily from the carving area to the water. And they needed to do so within the constraints of a highly designed urban park, with an already determined pattern of paved pedestrian and bicycle paths.
“We manipulated the grades,” Quotah indicates, tracing the curve of the center’s overlook plaza on the plan. “It was a challenge, but massaging the grades allowed us to create a raised plaza and other areas with built-in seating to sit and watch the canoes.” The carving shed itself will be tucked into the land on its south side, he notes. “We carved the site in some of the ways you might carve a log.”
The idea for a Native canoe center in Seattle developed more than three decades ago in the mind of United Indians founder, the late Bernie Whitebear, who pressed for a Native presence on the water in the middle of the city.
Jones & Jones principal Johnpaul Jones, who is of Cherokee-Choctaw descent, was involved in some of the earliest brainstorming phases for the canoe center. He has designed other Native American cultural centers, including the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Both clients and designers wished to create a living space rather than a static replica of a longhouse. “This is not just a museum,” emphasizes Quotah. “This isn’t just a place to learn about something that is in a book or on a shelf—it’s bringing living culture to the park. The canoe culture is alive here, it’s still being practiced.”
“Our intent is to make sure that people know that we are still here,” stresses Comenote, who comes from three Coast canoe tribes. “Indians are relegated to that noble savage sort of past where we’re all still in teepees, and on horseback…. When you’re a Native in this country you feel a strange invisibility, especially urban Indians, who make up 65 to 70 percent of the Native population. The canoe center is about exposing the larger public to the contemporary American Indian experience.”
The center will be home to regular outdoor art markets, song and dance celebrations, and the practice of traditional Native American culinary arts in addition to canoe and paddle carving. “There’s so much richness in the canoe culture,” observes Jones. “And we’re creating a place so that all that richness can be shared with people. That’s more important than the architecture, in my opinion. But the architecture allows it to happen.”
Artwork donated by canoe tribes in Washington State (of which there are 25) will be on display or integrated into the architecture in the form of carvings on poles or paintings on walls. A large cedar Welcome Figure (pictured on the cover of this magazine) is currently being carved by a Skokomish carver and will be erected on site in September 2010, the completion of the first phase of the $2.3 million campaign. The tall Salish figure—who is a woman—will welcome arriving canoes as she gazes up the lake.
The Welcome Figure was a typical feature of Native villages in coastal Washington, where the large human figures would face the beach to greet guests. Similar carvings likely stood near the canoe center site on Lake Union, in front of the many Duwamish dwellings that once clustered around its shore. The canoe center will honor the presence of the Duwamish tribe in the heart of Seattle, while sharing the canoe culture of Coast Salish as well as Alaskan tribes. “This is an embassy for canoe culture everywhere,” says Comenote.
If the canoe center is an embassy, then a traditional dugout canoe is the best possible ambassador. In his daily paddles around the lake, Saaduuts shares canoe culture teaching with the many Seattleites and visitors who pause to greet him. Nothing conveys his message of unity better than sitting in the heart of a 700-year-old cedar log, cradled simultaneously in the embrace of water, wood, and sky. The steady rhythm of the paddle and the slow, sonorous pace of a canoe song make it easy to imagine Lake Union when its forested hills bent unbroken to the water, and the long silhouettes of Duwamish canoes nudged its soft gravel beaches.
Betsy Anderson is a landscape designer and garden historian who lives in Seattle.
There’s a Panther in Poughkeepsie
By Gerald P. Wykes
It started several years ago. The first time might have been a dark and stormy night, but my recollection is dim on that fact. Pictures of a giant sturgeon started showing up in my email box. “You gotta see this” was the usual tag. I opened them because they were from legitimate friends and I could think of no way that the word “sturgeon” could be code for something bad. Each time, the picture was exactly the same. It showed a gang of ten guys standing in the water supporting a monstrous sturgeon. The ancient beast was obviously well over 10 feet long—11 feet, one inch according to the text—and “over 1,000 pounds.”
The image didn’t appear to be Photoshopped or altered in any way. If it were, the work was uninspired. I mean, why make the creature only 11 feet long when you can make it 25 feet long for crying out loud. Remember the San Francisco Bay shot of the great white shark leaping out of the water at a helicopter? That altered picture made the rounds a few years back before it was revealed as a hoax. How about those 1950s postcards showing a guy riding the back of a giant walleye?
No, the photo was real, but the problem with this sturgeon picture was that it was variously reported as a fish taken in Lake Michigan; near Biloxi, Mississippi; and in Willamette, Oregon, depending on the source. Either this fish was especially widely travelled and stupid, or something was fishy. It was the latter.
Long story short, the fish was a Pacific white sturgeon captured off the coast of British Columbia. It was still alive when photographed and was released right after the shot was taken. The problem here concerned the location attributions of the photo. If taken in the Gulf of Mexico, it would have been a really big Atlantic sturgeon. Attributing it to the Great Lakes would have made it the biggest lake sturgeon ever known. Lake sturgeons top out at a very respectable eight feet and some 300 pounds, but nowhere near the half-ton, dozen-foot mark of the Pacific variety. A detailed look at the pictured sturgeon would have revealed its true identity from the get-go, but that takes time and effort on the part of the viewer.
I can say with some certainty that this picture made it to the public as a real lake sturgeon picture because of its impact value. I know this because I almost used it as a lake sturgeon example myself (due to the Lake Michigan reference) before giving it the second look it deserved. Unfortunately, a real picture of even a humongous lake sturgeon pales in comparison to one depicting one of its gargantuan oceanic cousins! As educators we have the potential to either stop or perpetuate this type of misinformation by placing reality over imagery.
The old adage about not believing everything you hear or read has a direct counterpart in the cyber world. Don’t get me wrong—I am not pulling the old fogey tact here. The Internet is a pretty doggone okay thing. As an interpreter who is, like most of you out there, constantly researching program topics and seeking obscure photo sources, I am truly grateful—pretty much. I can’t come out and give it a full blown “wonderful,” however, because I have seen the shady edge to this otherwise finely tuned tool. Yes, it’s a tool and not a means to an end. But even the finest of tools can wreak havoc when employed in a thoughtless manner. This has a direct relationship on the field of interpretation and the veracity of our product.
I’m not sure why such photo hoaxes are perpetuated. Perhaps they are momentary jokes played on a friend that end up going viral. In fact, the word hoax is probably inappropriate, since in a majority of these cases the labeling is just plain mistaken. In the Internet world, one might come upon a page posted by a fifth grader who mistakenly labeled a June bug as a cicada. Such mislabeled pictures have the potential, when pinned up on Internet boards, to end up on millions of computer screens worldwide. Many end up in our own exhibits and flyers!
There are many actual online cases of nutria pictures being labeled as muskrats, for instance. I’ll be the first to admit that muskrats are notoriously hard to portray because they are essentially blunt, hairy footballs that slouch. Nutrias, on the other hand, are much bigger and more photogenic. Some of the best muskrat pictures on the Internet are actually nutrias!
We easterners are constantly presented with a barrage of ghost panther stories. The bulk of the eastern cougar population faded into legend as settlers cleared the forest land for agriculture and out-competed the creature for big game. Unfortunately the true stories about lingering populations are being diluted by the overwhelming background noise created by Internet fakeries. We can easily ignore those farm cat pictures, but it’s harder to turn away from the real big cat photos.
As director of a Michigan interpretive center at the western end of Lake Erie, the subject of panthers is a topical one, believe it or not. The flatlands of the western Erie basin once hosted cougars up to the mid-1700s and the lake itself was indirectly named after the cougar. The Erie people, who once lived along the southern shore, were known as the “People of the Long-tailed Cat” or the “Nation du Chat”—possibly due to their habit of wearing panther robes with intact tails. The “Cat Nation” was extinguished by the Iroquois in the early 1600s, but their name remained affixed to this great body of water. Secondly, although there are now confirmed sightings of wild cougars in the upper peninsula of the state, there are continual unverified reports of these critters roaming throughout the lower peninsula.
Earlier in the year, a visitor brought in a blurry Xerox copy of an incredible trail cam picture showing a cougar dragging a white-tailed buck by the throat. According to his source, the image was captured by somebody in Escanaba—a location in Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was forwarded to him by a friend, of course. Since the cat was reportedly a Michigan critter, I was anxious to make use of the shot for future predator programs and went online to see if a clearer shot was available. Sho ’nuff, quite a few examples came up when “Mountain Lion Dragging Buck” was typed into the search engine. Remarkably, each copy of that dramatic photo was tagged with a different location!
Yes, this enterprising cat had apparently dragged his prey past trail cams near Alex City, Artemas, Ava, Batavia, Coshocton, Dinwidde, Warren, and “Chet’s Backyard.” According to this impressive list and my personal contact, the beast covered the states of Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, New Jersey, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I believe that Chet lives in North Carolina, so you can add that one to the list as well. The complete list covered nearly every state in the eastern U.S. If you are to believe this online record, the skeletal remains of this exhausted panther will soon be found somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie lying next to those of a whitetail deer. His cause of death will be starvation and exhaustion.
As it turns out, the photograph was very real. It was taken on a ranch in southern Texas—a fact confirmed by the sagebrush in the background and by the original trail cam owner. Unfortunately, the location fakery that followed it has muddied the distribution record of the species and tarnished the credibility of every viable trail cam image on record.
In another incidence of misplaced cougary, three mountain lions are shown wandering about a snowy driveway. The digital images that landed in my email box were attributed to a location only an hour away from my home in southeast Michigan. Fortunately, it only took a short time to track these digital cats back to their original location in a Colorado yard. One of the keys in making that determination involved a car visible in one of the images. This vehicle had a blue and white front license plate of a design combination seen in both Colorado and Michigan, but the clarity wasn’t sufficient to read it. The fact that the state of Michigan does not require a front license plate while Colorado does provided an initial opportunity to plant a red flag on this one.
The message here is one of renewed vigilance to match a new era. There is a whole new generation of interpreters out there who are under the figurative gun to produce programs, exhibits, and flyers. The image gallery provided by the World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the main source for such material. We all—seasonal and seasoned interpreters—are potentially guilty of giving short shrift to the likes of muskrats, sturgeon, cougars, and eventually to our public. So much of the natural world is full of the kind of incredible stuff you can’t make up—even if you wanted to. Beware, then, the Internet stuff that is “made up” because it dilutes reality. If an Internet photo reference seems doubtful, there is a very good chance that it is. Check all sources and verify when possible.
By the way, thanks to that Internet, I found out that there really were panthers in Poughkeepsie, New York, as recently as 2003–’04. These particular Poughkeepsie Panthers wore skates and performed as a short-lived semi-pro hockey team. But, admittedly, I could be mistaken about that.
Gerald Wykes is the curator/supervising interpreter at the Lake Erie Marshlands Museum and Nature Center in Brownstown, Michigan. He can be contacted at 734-242-8149 or wykes@juno.com.
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