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.
