Legacy Magazine

By BT Jones

The Petit Jean Mountain Plateau, as seen from Carden Bottom, may have once been the village of Tanico. Photo by Don Higgins.

Early in May 2010, I spent time during a sunny afternoon strolling with Dr. Skip Stewart-Abernathy of the Arkansas Archeological Survey Station based at the “Archeology Barn” of the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, Petit Jean Mountain (Arkansas). Dr. Skip, as I call him, postulates, theorizes, and makes statements based upon broad experience. “Native Americans who created arrowheads,” he said, “didn’t make bad strikes when knapping stone. They only had the misfortune of occasionally striking imperfect stone for making arrowheads.”

As we walked along, Dr. Skip went on from one topic to another: from rock art meanings to the cosmos of Mississippian Native Americans and their belief in the entity of evil or lack thereof. I construct some of my best interpretive background information regarding ancient cultures from listening to Dr. Skip in these very informal interactions, though I’m not sure that he is aware of it. Hanging out with an archeologist helps me bring life into programs that might otherwise lean toward simple information telling.

Maybe it is obvious that time spent with an authority discussing an area of interpretation is time well spent. But I have found, by chance really, that developing a casual friendship and spending time together “off the professional clock” brings the richest rewards in meaningful interactions with park visitors later on.

The 2009 archeological excavation site at Carden Bottom. Photo by Don Higgins.

For example, several years back, preceding our Petit Jean State Park’s annual Archeology Day, it was Dr. Skip who made all the difference when we planned to offer some authentic Mississippian-era food for park visitors to sample. Eastern woodland bison, extinct by the early 1800s, was impossible to put on the menu, and even boiled turtle seemed a little out of the average park visitor’s comfort zone. So we targeted the crops known as the “three sisters” of squash, beans, and corn: a vegetarian menu for the day. “The idea is to make it as boring and bland as possible,” Dr. Skip said laughing. “The Mississippian culture was salt-poor. They craved salt constantly and were seldom able to add it to their cooking—so no salt in the food.”

By midmorning on Archeology Day, our park interpreters were serving up a fresh squash and corn mush accompanied by cooked bean balls—all appropriately bland and visually unappealing. Oddly enough, most of the visitors really liked it—even more so once they were allowed to remove authenticity by adding the modern luxuries of salt and spice. Perhaps most importantly, the menu offered a venue for discussing the extent to which time may change the values that humans place on a simple mineral such as salt. It was once hard-won, a vital substance then-and-now critical to human health, and used as a food preservative—a commodity that humans fought over. By the 20th century, the technology of refrigeration had relegated salt to the commonplace. Indians from 1,000 years ago would be amazed that people from our present culture have problems removing it from our diets.

Another rich resource person, also luckily there for us in our local community, is retired United States Air Force Colonel Donald P. Higgins, whose avid pastimes are learning about the natural world, local history, and archeology. Don, as we call him, brings professional expertise to his local research and is able to offer us a wealth of insight when we ask him. He has located Mississippian rock art in numerous locations in our park, as well as other locations on our plateau in the Arkansas River Valley. If I spend an afternoon on a ramble through our park’s Seven Hollows area with Don, I will head home much richer in interpretive readiness than if I had spent the same time getting information via the Web.

Dr. Skip Stewart-Abernathy photographs artifacts at the Carden Bottom site in 2009. Photo by Don Higgins.

Both Dr. Skip and Don have been of great help in reconstructing “behind the scenes” glimpses into the lives of indigenous cultures who inhabited our region. Both are active in local archeological digs, bringing new knowledge to light every few years. Both offer their own programs as special guest speakers to our park. Both have helped me to re-create a “day in the life” of any member of an ancient culture, usually while engaged in an informal conversation in a quiet study surrounded by shelves of books or on a walk among park canyons. Both are thoroughly familiar with Petit Jean State Park, a great place for archeologists. The park is both a natural area—contained within a rare plateau in the Arkansas River Valley, cloven by a rugged canyon containing a 70-foot-high waterfall—and a place rich in archeological heritage, with artifacts dating back to Paleo-Indian times (9,500 BC–8,000 BC). And there is a much richer heritage in artifacts and in rock art dating from Mississippian Native American times (900 AD–1541 AD).

Historians and scribes from Conquistador Hernando De Soto’s expedition through what is now Arkansas in 1541 recorded a province in the area of Arkansas along the Arkansas River in the vicinity of Petit Jean Mountain. Archeological digs in Carden Bottom, just west of the mountain, suggest that the area may well have been what DeSoto’s scribes called the village of Tanico, a loosely fortified settlement within the province of Cayas along the banks of the Arkansas River. Further speculation from our state’s archeologists suggests that Petit Jean State Park’s archeological site, a large bluff shelter known as the Rock House Cave, was a sacred place for rites of the Tanico villagers. Today, rock art, Native culture, and Arkansas history are often interpreted at the Rock House Cave site.

Because of insights provided by such people as Dr. Skip and Don Higgins, a visit to Rock House Cave today may lead to a variety of interpretive opportunities. We might use our imaginations and follow the life of a young boy, a villager of Tanico:

He lived in a world large and beautiful beyond modern reckoning. By the time he was five or six years of age, he knew every plant and its value to his people. He tended to his younger sibling and stayed out of his mother’s way when she worked. He also steered clear of important people wearing headdresses and shell gorgets. Later, he was valuable for scaring crows away from the village’s crop land. He learned the fine art of net making from his mother’s father—his primary male teacher. There were seven different plant fibers that went into cordage used in net making. His people were masters at making and using nets, both for fishing and catching waterfowl. With cold weather coming on, he wore a coat made of deerskin lined with rabbit fur. He traveled with his mother on salt-making excursions—boiling brackish water from fissure-fed ponds and creating the valuable white crust to be scraped away from the large pot. When he could, he practiced with hunting weapons—bow and spear. In the village, a cooking pot was going all the time, and he contributed all that he was able. There were meals and there were naps in the open breeze. He served a function for his people and was valued. He listened to stories told under the stars at night, and when he was old enough he was allowed to attend rites at the sacred, high place.

Visitors today may see the visual remnants of the storytelling that accompanied those rites: a net and paddlefish pictograph; a horned animal, either bison or mythical beast; and a symbol whose meaning has been lost in time.

Arkansas is fortunate to have archeological survey stations located throughout. The concept is to put “an archeologist in every person’s back yard,” and it has worked. Other states have similar resources. Archeologists may be found in nearby universities, the national parks, the Corps of Engineers, the United States Forest Service, or State Historic Preservation Offices, for example.

Some question the relevance of archeology at all. Why look back at the past? Isn’t the future what is important? How interesting can dead people be? Those of us who work for parks and museums know that observing the tragedies and triumphs of the past are keys for having a future that is not dismal but bright. There is a load of wisdom hidden in the earth.

If you can, become casual friends with your local archeologists or historians. If you are able, find some off-time for sitting in a study, taking rambles through natural areas, or volunteering for an archeological dig. What you learn along the way will be well worth your while when park visitors arrive and you go to work. What has been particularly interesting for me is that, after I gain new insights from either Dr. Skip or Don Higgins, the interpretive experience is often as new for me as it is for my group of visitors. Chatting with an archeologist one spring afternoon has helped lead to a changed way of seeing our park’s archeological treasures for everyone.

BT Jones, CIG, is a park interpreter at Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas.

By Jonathan L. Gitlin

This is where the world began for my people.
Seattle has a river. It’s named for my people.
This is our place where there is a river.
This is the place given to us by the Great Spirit.
This is our place.
—James Rasmussen, Director, Duwamish Longhouse Cultural Center

The Duwamish people have struggled to maintain their identity ever since their longhouses in early Seattle were torched over a century ago. Their new longhouse, opened January 3, 2009, is a step toward rebuilding their identity as a people with a history. It serves as a tribal headquarters, an educational center, and as meeting, ceremonial, gallery and exhibit space. Built near a debris-choked riverbank alongside the site of a burnt longhouse, the new longhouse provides the Duwamish Tribe, denied federal recognition, a place to emphasize their history and to show their Puget Sound neighbors and visitors that they are a part of the community.

Tribal leader Cecile Hansen speaks at the longhouse ribbon cutting in 2009, welcoming tribal members and the community to the celebration. Photo by Jonathan L. Gitlin.

Celebrating the new longhouse, Duwamish leader Cecile Hansen said, “This is such a glorious moment in our history.” She is a descendant of Chief Si’ahl, after whom Seattle is named. Since Ms. Hansen was elected to the lifetime position of head of the Duwamish Tribal Council in 1975, she has led the dual efforts to build a longhouse and win tribal recognition. She told a radio news reporter that without federal recognition the Duwamish have “nowhere to go, so this is our place.” Remembering her famous ancestor, Hansen said, “I think he would be very proud that he finally has a home next to the river.”

Before leaving office in late December 2001, President Clinton issued a formal recognition of the 600-member Duwamish Tribe. Their tribal status had been denied since the early days of federal Indian governance due to procedural questions about tribal organization in the 1920s. Only a few days after the Clinton administration’s recognition the Duwamish got the bad news that recognition had been overturned by newly inaugurated President Bush, as he tossed out all of Clinton’s final actions in office.

Since then the Duwamish have intensified their fundraising to build a new longhouse as a rallying point for their unrecognized tribe. James Rasmussen, longhouse director and third-generation Duwamish Tribal Council member, told The Seattle Times, “Our longhouses were burned to move Indians out of here. This is an important step to be able to bring our culture and our people together again.”

Support for the $3 million project came from the city of Seattle and King County as well as state and private funds. Perhaps the most memorable funding source was the donor group Coming Full Circle, organized by Amy Johnson, a great-great-granddaughter of one of Seattle’s founders, David Denny. The group gathered donations from descendants of Seattle’s settlers to support the Duwamish Tribe’s longhouse project in an effort to try to right the wrongs done to them since Seattle’s European settlers arrived in 1852.

The Duwamish longhouse sits on the shores of the Duwamish River. Photo by Jonathan L. Gitlin.

Once the Duwamish were recalled as a story out of Seattle’s early history, as the people who welcomed the first settlers arriving in the winter of 1851 on the beach near the Duwamish longhouses. Later the Duwamish were considered a vanished people with a few survivors here and there, blending into the world around them. With their new longhouse the Duwamish now have a tribal identity gained through efforts to build not just a building, but a possibility. They reinterpreted themselves, first to each other as a cohesive people with an ancient tribal identity, and then to their neighbors in the city that they helped establish.

According to University of British Columbia history professor Coll Thrush, “Native people made the town possible.” Amy Johnson said, “Our forefather wouldn’t have survived without their help.” Thrush recounts how the Duwamish “helped the first settlers through a rough winter and then worked alongside them for several years in fisheries as builders, in land clearance, and as mill workers.”

Despite this cooperation Seattle’s pioneers petitioned the federal government in the 1860s in opposition to a Duwamish reservation south of Seattle. Some say they feared the loss of a ready cheap labor force. Others say a coal discovery near the proposed reservation provided impetus for the opposition.

Land promised to the Duwamish in an 1855 treaty was never provided. Thrush tells how the Duwamish, Seattle’s local tribe, faded from their central place in early Seattle as laborers and neighbors. But, he writes, “Though their landscapes disappear, native presence remains.”

In the words of James Rasmussen:

I represent the oldest government in King County.
This is my home.
Generations and generations of people have been here.
I can feel their presence. They are among us.

Our vision of indigenous peoples guides our interpretation, but interpreting indigenous cultures requires listening to their own interpretation. The Duwamish longhouse’s story is more than a historic recount. It is a living statement of presence on the land. The longhouse itself, in its structure, people, and activities, is a living act of interpretation.

The longhouse translates the Duwamish people’s struggle for tribal recognition from a dream to a place where the dream can be realized. The longhouse is a place where the Duwamish can interpret their experience and struggle to the surrounding community.

The Duwamish Longhouse Cultural Center is next to the sites of two burnt longhouses; they were known to their inhabitants as “Where there are Clams” and “Herring House.” Herring House was the last longhouse to burn, in 1893. Some say the arsonist desired the land, across the Duwamish River from downtown Seattle by the riverfront, for real estate development.

The Duwamish River running by the new longhouse is a sacred place for the tribe. A small Seattle city park on the riverfront at the Herring House longhouse site is named “Herring House Park” in memory of the burnt longhouse.

With the new longhouse, the tribe says, they “reclaim space to revitalize [their] culture and preserve our living heritage.” As they approach the longhouse, visitors can see the river and the ancient longhouse sites. As they enter the longhouse, tribal members are in a ceremonial space. Upon entering they say their Indian names and then their ancestors’ names.

The Duwamish want “to be able to tell [their] story to the people who live here to let them know what this place used to look like,” said James Rasmussen. He said to the people of Seattle, “You are the ones that write the history of this area…. It’s up to you to remember the history of the land goes beyond the founding of the city.”

Interpreting indigenous cultures means letting this human resource speak for itself. The Duwamish interpret their tribal experiences to visitors. Their longhouse is a living interpretation of the tribe’s history and status.

To educate the community about their heritage, the longhouse contains the Duwamish archives, displays archaeological materials gathered from the site of the burnt longhouses, and operates a resource center for researchers, students, and teachers. Duwamish language and dance group meetings are held in the 6,000-square-foot building and movies about Duwamish history are shown. Native storytelling and Native hip-hop workshops are held for Indian youth.

The yellow Alaskan cedar post-and-beam structure includes a 2,200-square-foot meeting room with tiered benches to accommodate hundreds of visitors for meetings and cultural events. Yellow cedar that once grew in the Seattle area was a common building material for the Duwamish, but was logged out by the settlers.

A full kitchen in the longhouse provides the Duwamish a resource for fundraising and community building. They hold “Salmon Bake and Fry Bread for Justice” events to raise funds toward their effort for federal recognition. The Duwamish need $128,000 to hire anthropologists to establish before the Bureau of Indian Affairs their continuous tribal status through the years questioned in the 1920s.

The Duwamish were not included in a 1974 federal district court decision awarding 50 percent of the annual Puget Sound salmon harvest to the landed tribes. The 50 percent share was guaranteed by the 1855 treaty but because they had no land of their own, Judge George Boldt ruled that the Duwamish were not a political entity and could not share in the award.

The Boldt decision rallied the national movement toward defining modern Indian identity. However, the Duwamish, who had provided salmon to the newly landed Denny party in the winter of 1851, and whose ancient culture revolved around the gathering and preparing of Puget Sound salmon, received no benefit—they were denied access to their lifeblood.

Fire burnt the Duwamish longhouses over a century ago, but the tribe still longs for official recognition. Today’s new longhouse does not replace the old ones; rather the Duwamish Longhouse Cultural Center embraces the spirit of the generations that came before and those to come. In the words of James Rasmussen:

We are still here.
We did not leave.
We are very proud of that fact.
Our sovereignty is very important to us.
It is not something I can give to you.
It is something you have yourself.

Interpreting indigenous cultures means accepting indigenous peoples as contemporary inhabitants of this land, worthy of respect and consideration.  The tribes are more than willing to tell their story, their history, and their experience as a people and on the land. It is up to those who would interpret their message to listen and seek out opportunities to learn more about their Indian neighbors and predecessors.

To interpret Indian culture requires looking at the world through the eyes and experiences of an Indian. Concerned for their cultural survival, the Native Americans see a new people living on the land of their ancestors. Their culture, where it survives and strives for progress, represents an ancient tradition, while their world was made “new” by the European immigrant.

How do you interpret the Indian effort for cultural survival? It is as natural as that of any people in a challenging environment. Resources are sought, defense mechanisms developed and strengthened. And in many cases the drive is weakened or is failing.

An understanding of Native history before Europeans arrived opens the possibility of a richer knowledge of our land’s history, as told by the people who were here. We can be enriched by the cross-cultural exchange that could result from a wider effort to understand and interpret this rich history.

Listen to this ancient human resource. Let the Indians tell the story of their long history of life before and after their world was changed by the new population. To interpret their culture is to know and to tell that story.

Jonathan L. Gitlin has a masters degree in regional planning from Cornell University. He lives in Seattle, where he is building Greenbespoke, a green household goods online store. He can be reached at jonathg@seanet.com. The Duwamish tribe can be found online at www.Duwamish.org.

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.