Wendy Red Star’s great-grandfathers played themselves in the 19th-century vaudeville show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World. They also played themselves, or not, in a human-zoo-style exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Now Wendy Red Star has curated the first-ever all-Native contemporary art exhibition at Bumbershoot, on the grounds built for Seattle’s World’s Fair in 1962—which was not immune from such exoticizing expos, creepily featuring Japanese “feminine pearl divers” in an “authentic Japanese village.” Her title for the Bumbershoot show is itself an appropriation: Wendy Red Star’s Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World.
“This is our chance now, to show what we want to show, how we want to be represented,” she says in a phone conversation from Portland, where she lives. She grew up on the Crow reservation in Montana, the daughter of a proud Crow man and a proud Irish American nurse. The two met on the reservation, where Wendy grew up called a “half-breed” without any malice at all. Her sister, Chelsea, is Korean, born in Korea and dropped on the proverbial stoop of an orphanage, the story goes. While serving as a nurse in the US military in Korea, Wendy’s mother adopted Chelsea as an infant—years before the independent Irishwoman moved to the Crow reservation for another nursing job, and met Wendy’s father.
Chelsea became the last of the Crow speakers. She came home from preschool singing Crow songs and responding to her father in Crow; by the time Wendy was born, there was only English at preschool. Chelsea still dreams in Crow.
From that history, Red Star spins art that provokes, remembers, jokes, and reinterprets. The other 10 artists she’s chosen for Bumbershoot are her “dream team,” their work ranging from photography to video games to painting and beyond. There is no “Native style” here, none of the fixed aesthetic that often attends even contemporary group exhibitions by Native artists in museums and galleries. Da-ka-xeen Mehner, for instance, is showing 11 Years of Beards, which is literally his hair. It just happens to grow in half-blond and half-brown, due to a scar on his chin, and he happens to be Tlingit/N’ishga and white. Another artist, Skawennati, made a video game where futuristic characters can revisit historical moments, just not change them. A Mohawk warrior from the future can witness a massacring of Mohawks in the past.
Don’t trip over Custer. The foolish US Army commander who died along with all his men in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn will be lying dead on the gallery floor, in a life-size sculpture by Demian Diné Yazhi’. Playing on a wall will be Peter Morin’s video compilation, on endless repeat, of all the sequences of Pocahontas’s animated hair waving in the Disney wind in the Hollywood cartoon. John Feodorov made a giant warbonnet for the middle of the gallery. Another artist, Tanis S’eiltin, uses found photographs of her mother visiting the Seattle World’s Fair to stage a re-creation.
Red Star’s own career is on fire, but this is the very first time she’s shown in Seattle. In the last year, she’s had four solo museum exhibitions. Her work is part of a traveling group show now in Paris that next spring goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s a show that combines artifacts and new art. “When else do you get to collaborate with your ancestors?” Red Star says. The group show includes her celebrated Four Seasons series, a quartet of photographs in which she poses in majestic Crow regalia in the midst of fake nature: cheesy landscape paintings for backdrops, thrift-store objects for props, including a blow-up deer. The portraits are deadpan, contemplative.
She made those in 2006; now she’s tackling history directly. For a coming show at the Portland Art Museum, she’s commissioned custom stuffed animals based on drawings a Crow chief made in 1880. Medicine Crow was one of seven Crow chiefs essentially kidnapped in Washington, DC, until they signed over railroad rights on their land. While there, the US agents took them to the zoo, where they came across caged animals native to Crow country—and those are what Medicine Crow drew. The drawings, photographs, and stuffed animals will join a traditional Crow jacket from the museum’s collection that resembles one worn by the delegation.
For Saint Louis Art Museum, Red Star made Crow dresses bedecked with prestigious elk teeth. She finished them at the last minute and shipped them to the museum without getting to try them on. When she met the dresses in St. Louis, she told the curator she had to put one on. “The two museum installer guys were so mortified that they had to leave,” she says, cracking up. “When I did that, it felt like all the objects in there were having a good laugh, because they don’t get that treatment, they don’t get to see their community.”
For Bumbershoot, Red Star is restaging a famous photograph taken of John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their media-frenzied 1969 Bed-ins for Peace. Red Star and a friend replace the couple, but wearing warbonnet headdresses, while touting the message of peace. “I know we’re the only all-Native exhibition there,” Red Star said. “I guarantee we’re going to see some hipsters in headdresses.”
Seattle officials are reaching out to local Indian tribes as they develop ideas for a planned remake of the Seattle waterfront.
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Negative No. NA897 In this photo from 1891, dugout canoes are moored at a boat launch at the foot of South Washington Street in Seattle. The scene shows the continuing influence of Native American culture on the fast-growing young city, despite the presence of discrimination aimed at local tribes.
Translated from the native Lushootseed language, the downtown Seattle waterfront was known as “Little Crossing Over Place.”
Canoes tied up at the foot of South Washington Street. Longhouses hosted seasonal encampments. The Duwamish clammed on the tide flats, caught salmon in Elliott Bay and netted ducks north of what’s now Belltown.
Seattle is named for the Native American chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes who recruited settlers to boost the town’s population and economic viability. His signature on the Point Elliott Treaty ceded the lands that would become the city in exchange for benefits tribal members mostly did not receive.
Now, with the Alaskan Way Viaduct slated for demolition and the city planning for a new waterfront park from Pioneer Square to the Olympic Sculpture Park, city officials have begun reaching out to local Indian tribes to involve them in the design and to incorporate their history and culture into the finished park.
“We want tribes to be partners. We want tribes to have a stake and a place in this project,” said Marshall Foster, the city’s waterfront design manager.
Involving the tribes and finding ways to tell their histories also could go a long way to answering critics who say the early design drawings seem too polished, more like San Diego than Seattle.
“What will make the waterfront authentic? This is one element that’s adding a layer of richness,” Foster said.
Coll Thrush, author of “Native Seattle,” said tribal people were essential to the creation of the city as laborers, housekeepers and traders.
But, he added, one of the first laws adopted when the city incorporated in 1865 made it illegal for natives to live here unless they were employed and housed by a white person.
Despite the presence and contributions of tribal members throughout the city’s development, he said, the history of natives also has included dispossession and discrimination, and the sense by many contemporary Indians that they really aren’t welcomed here.
“It’s a deeply conflicted place,” Thrush said.
Seattle-area tribes had extensive involvement in permitting for the new waterfront seawall, currently under construction along Alaskan Way, because their treaty rights give them legal standing to review potential impacts to salmon migration.
But the city hadn’t reached out to the tribes about the new waterfront park plans until Mayor Ed Murray took office in January and created an Office of the Waterfront to coordinate the $1 billion in proposed investments that include the seawall, the currently stalled excavation of the Highway 99 tunnel, the viaduct removal and design of the new park where Alaskan Way now runs.
“We had to encourage them to reach out to us,” said Leonard Forsman, chairman of the Suquamish tribe at the Port Madison Reservation on the Kitsap Peninsula.
And there still isn’t a tribal representative on the 45-member Central Waterfront Committee, the group of civic leaders who have advised the city on its planning and design development over the past two years, though city officials say they plan to rectify that.
Since April, city leaders and lead designers from James Corner Field Operations have met with the Suquamish, Muckleshoot and Stillaguamish tribes and toured Daybreak Star Cultural Center at Discovery Park.
In September, they plan to host a session for interested urban Indians. The Duwamish, who still are seeking federal recognition, have been included.
Forsman said it’s critical that the waterfront design reflect not just the tribes’ past, but their continued presence and strong ongoing connections to the city and Elliott Bay.
“It’s important that we recognize the spiritual connection the tribes have with the places in this landscape even though it’s been heavily urbanized,” Forsman said. “We need to remember that through our casino, our fishing, our geoduck harvesting, our continued work to protect habitat, these places — Puget Sound, Elliott Bay and the Duwamish River — remain important to us.”
Forsman said Suquamish tribal leaders and elders, in their meeting with the city planning and design team at Port Madison, expressed their desire for a culturally appropriate outdoor gathering space, something not exclusively for tribal use, but that could host traditional ceremonies and events such as the annual Salmon Homecoming celebration now held in conjunction with the Seattle Aquarium.
He said the tribes also are interested in ways they can tell their own stories and their history both before and after contact with Europeans.
How those goals might be reflected in the design, he said, is up to the planners.
“We told them our needs. Their job is to come up with the expression.”
Members of the design team said they’re still listening, gathering ideas from the tribes and trying to understand how native people might use the new public spaces that could be developed along the waterfront.
Tatiana Choulika, a lead designer with James Corner, said she was struck, in their visit to the Suquamish, by a large carving of a canoe being carried on the shoulders of six life-size tribal figures, both contemporary and mythic. She said the carving suggested the strong value of teamwork and the flow of tradition from an ancient past to young tribal members today.
In their meeting with the Muckleshoot Tribe, she said, she was impressed by their elder center, health-care clinic and offices for managing hunting, fishing and wildlife resources. She said the Muckleshoot expressed an interest in building a Salish cultural center on the waterfront. The closest thing Seattle has now is the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus.
Choulika said she also realized that the history of the Seattle waterfront is more than the 160 years since the landing of the Denny party, that it’s always been a port and a gathering place, a multilingual, multicultural mixing spot.
“Once it was all the tribes of the Salish Sea; now it’s people from all over the world. How do we communicate this in the design of the new waterfront?” Choulika asked.
Nicole Willis, the city tribal relations director, organized and attended the outreach sessions with the tribes. She said she was impressed with the design team’s seriousness in learning about native culture.
“It’s really pretty amazing. They’re only out here from New York for a few days every month and they’ve devoted entire days to visiting reservations, hearing stories, hearing from tribal elders, hearing interpretations of tribal structures and how the tribes choose to represent themselves.”
Willis said Seattle is one of the few American cities where native art, images and people are visible. The Seahawks’ logo is based on a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask carved on Vancouver Island. Seattle manhole covers feature a Tlingit orca whale. Totem poles stand in Pioneer Square and Steinbrueck Park, though she notes that totems were the art of northern coastal Indians and not traditionally carved around Puget Sound.
But Willis also mentioned the shooting of First Nations carver John T. Williams in 2010 by a Seattle police officer. She said that’s also part of the history of Indians in Seattle, some of whom feel that they aren’t welcomed or wanted.
What she heard in the listening sessions with the tribal members, she said, was how important the Seattle waterfront had been to them. It was a center for trade, a gathering place, a home.
Willis said, “The overarching theme is they want to feel welcomed and comfortable and that they want to have a presence there again. The waterfront can be a project that renews that sense of belonging.”
Lynn Thompson: lthompson@seattletimes.com or 206-464-8305. On Twitter @lthompsontimes
Information in this article, originally published Aug. 21, 2014, was corrected Aug. 22, 2014. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Seahawks mascot was based on a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask. The story should have said the Seahawks logo was based on the mask. http://tinyurl.com/jwdnt4z
The matchup between the Atlanta Dream and the Seattle Storm drew Schimmel fans from across the Northwest. Many chanted her name in the stands, which motivated her rivals even more.
“We were mad,” Storm forward Camille Little told The Seattle Times. “This is our home court. We wanted to play well, and we’re playing for our lives right now.”
The Dream ended up falling to the Storm by a score of 88-68. But Schimmel was still grateful for the support she received.
“This is home for me, and for everybody to come out tonight and show support, thank you guys,” Schimmel said after the game, The Oregonian reported.
Alan Berner / The Seattle Times Matika Wilbur took this portrait of her niece, Anna Cook, for Project 562, a three-year, cross-country road trip aimed at documenting all of the nation’s 562-plus Indian tribes. Cook is Swinomish and Hualapai. The portrait is part of an exhibit at Tacoma Art Museum.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER Matika Wilbur has a little exercise she encourages new acquaintances to perform.
Do a Google image search for the term “Native American” and see what comes up.
The first result on a recent attempt is a grainy, sepia-toned picture of an unidentified Indian chief staring into the distance like a lost soul and decked out exactly (and unfortunately) as one might expect — in a headdress of tall fathers and a vest made of carved horn. It looks to be from early in the previous century. The next six pictures, variations on this theme. It’s as if the society depicted in these images ceased to exist decades ago.
Wilbur, a 30-year-old from Seattle who’s a member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes of Puget Sound, knows perhaps as much as anyone in America how laughably out-of-whack that Google-search result really is. She is halfway through an epic journey funded by everyday people via Kickstarter to visit and document every single federally recognized tribe in the United States — more than 500 in all.
For the past year and a half, she’s been taking new images to replace the tired ones that pop up in Internet searches, in the mainstream media — and in our minds.
She calls her three-year campaign Project 562, the “562” representing the number of recognized tribes when she started out; there were 566 as of this spring. The first 50 or so gallery-ready images from the project are on exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum until Oct. 5.
It is the most ambitious effort to visually document Native Americans since Edward Curtis undertook a similar challenge at the beginning of the last century. Back then, it was widely believed that Indians on this continent were going extinct and needed to be photographed for posterity.
Wilbur is also concerned about photographing Native Americans for posterity, but her project is more a story of survival and advancement than extinction.
Matika wilbur Some of Wilbur’s Project 562 portrait subjects live closer to home, such as sisters Darkfeather, left, Eckos, center, and Bibiana Ancheta, from the Tulalip Tribes north of Seattle. Wilbur is also a Tulalip member.
Wilbur’s first name means “messenger” in her tribal language, and she more than lives up to that title. She pursues the issue of Native American identity with the zeal of an evangelist. And she doesn’t mince words.
“How can we be seen as modern, successful people if we are continually represented as the leathered and feathered vanishing race?” Wilbur says in a clip on Kickstarter.
In person, she makes an equally powerful impression, telling stories, laughing out loud and giving hugs, but also speaking earnestly about her work.
Taking a break from the field to attend the opening of the Tacoma exhibit this spring, she pointed out that images such as hers have an impact well beyond museums and classrooms.
“We have to take back our narratives,” she says. “It’s time we stop assuming an identity that was never really ours.”
Native Americans make up only 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, or about 5.2 million people, according to the 2010 Census.
As Native American tribes negotiate for things like federal recognition and access to natural resources, Wilbur says it helps to show that Indian society remains intact and functional, albeit diminished.
“Imagery matters,” she says. “Representation matters.”
PROJECT 562 officially launched in the fall of 2012, when Wilbur, a schoolteacher, decided to give up her apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood along with “a salary, a really cozy bed and a juicer!” and hit the road.
Matika Wilbur Wilbur captured twin brothers Jared (left) and Caleb Dunlap, both of Seattle, in a lighthearted moment during a cultural gathering in Quinault, on Washington’s Pacific Coast. The brothers, from the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Minnesota, jokingly refer to themselves as the “nerdy natives.”
She laid the groundwork by networking through Facebook, tribal newspapers, cultural leaders, professors and even distant relatives to get out the word and drum up contacts. She launched the first round of her Kickstarter campaign to fund her travels, raising $35,000.
Then Wilbur packed up her Honda with her belongings, as well as personally canned fish and berries from the Northwest to present as gifts to her hosts around the country, and headed out.
To date, she has visited more than 220 tribal lands from Long Island to Louisiana, Hawaii to Alaska, armed with little more than a camera and audio equipment, and a willingness to live out of her car and sleep in the homes of strangers.
Wilbur jokes that there are only two degrees of separation between people even in the most far-flung sections of Indian country. Still, it can take time to follow the necessary protocols with tribal leaders and identify portrait subjects, and days more to build rapport before the camera comes out.
In the field, Wilbur, a people person if ever there was one, sings and dances and cooks and feasts, gaining access to tribal events and behind-the-scenes moments that are off-limits to most outsiders.
“I can hang — I’ll do your dishes!” Wilbur says in typically animated fashion one day while “hanging” in her old stomping grounds on Capitol Hill.
Wherever she visits, locals make a way for her. “It’s like they take pity on me,” she jokes.
Wilbur, who maintains a small staff of volunteers based in different cities, seems to have struck a chord. A second Kickstarter campaign to raise $54,000 more to continue the project netted pledges totaling nearly four times that — $213,461.
The Tacoma Art Museum helped raise $20,000 to print silver gelatin images on display there.
Project 562 is only partly a photographic journey. It is also a social documentary, a contemporary oral account by people young and old, rancher, blue-collar and professional, of what it’s like to be an Indian in the United States.
At the Tacoma exhibit, recorded audio and video interviews accompany the portraits, adding nuance and resonance to the framed and in some cases hand-painted pictures. Subjects speak frankly about experiencing racism, their connection to the land, spirituality and personal identity. It is not always easy listening.
Wilbur’s teenage niece, Anna Cook, is the subject of one portrait. She talks about going to a Catholic school and struggling to find a place in the overwhelmingly non-Native student body. On the recording that accompanies her portrait, she sobs while talking about how the white, Hispanic and the few Native students self-segregate in her school’s lunch room — “but nobody really says anything about it. I just have one really solid friend that I sit with by myself, so we kinda like separate ourselves.”
That interview saddens Wilbur even now. But she believes that by having Cook expose her deepest anxieties about being Native American, she will inspire other young Native Americans to do likewise — and open a window for the rest of us.
“It’s scary to be honest,” Wilbur says. “But if we don’t do it, then we won’t change the experience for the next generation.”
Subjects in the exhibit express differing views about what it means to be an Indian. Star Flower Montoya, Barona and Taos Pueblo, shares advice from her grandmother: “You learn to wear your moccasin on one foot and your tennis shoe on the other.”
But Turtle Mountain Chippewa Jessica Metcalf, a Ph.D in Native American studies, expresses an alternate take in the clip that accompanies her portrait:
“We are not split in half. We do not have to choose . . . We do not leave our Indianness at the door when we walk into a grocery store or into an academic situation. We are who we are wherever we walk.”
WILBUR HAS tackled the issue of Indianness before.
In her earlier exhibit, “Save the Indian, Kill the Man,” Wilbur plays off the 19th-century U.S. government practice of sending Native American kids to boarding schools to assimilate them. The pictures explore how genocide and the loss of language and traditions contribute to problems such as substance abuse among Indians, which she believes is caused, in part, by a desire to numb the pain of historical and present-day ills.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives have among the highest rates of alcohol-related deaths and suicides of all ethnic groups in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Wilbur says it’s crucial to deal openly with the “sickness and toxicity” that plague Native American communities.
At the same time, it’s important to combat stereotypes perpetuated in, say, old “cowboy and Indian” movies, as well as depictions of drunken, downtrodden urban Indians, she says.
What’s striking about Wilbur’s pictures is the flattering way Wilbur has chosen to portray her subjects. The exoticism of the “noble savage” is replaced by an everyman sort of dignity. Majestic, natural backgrounds suggest a deep pride of place. The viewer can sense Wilbur’s determination to reset our attitudes about Native people.
“Unfortunately, a lot of times when young people discuss ‘What’s Indianness,’ it’s associated with poverty and struggle,” Wilbur says. “That struggle somehow defines who we are, and I think I made the same mistake as a young person. I associated it with alcoholism and drug addiction, and the negative things in our communities that we’re still trying to recover from.”
First, Wilbur had to wrestle her own ideas about what it means to be an Indian.
Wilbur’s mother, Nancy Wilbur, whom she describes admiringly as “an old-school hustler, a total entrepreneur,” was an Indian activist who ran a Native American art gallery, called Legends, in La Conner when she was a kid. There, across the Swinomish Channel from the reservation where she grew up, the young Wilbur had privileged encounters with influential artists such as Marvin Oliver and Douglas David, who’d stop in to show off their latest work.
Wilbur’s Swinomish family has a deep connection to the land around La Conner; a road near town even bears the Wilbur family name.
There was much that Wilbur could’ve been proud of in those years — but she was angry.
At college in Montana and then Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree from the Brooks Institute of Photography, she became tired of fielding ill-considered questions about her identity. Explaining to people unfamiliar with Northwest Coastal culture that “No, I didn’t grow up in a teepee” can wear you down.
Even though she knew the stereotypes about contemporary Indian life were wrong, Wilbur was “too young and naive” to figure out what actually did represent her culture, or why certain ills within her community persisted.
“I didn’t understand why my people were sick; I didn’t understand why I had been to 70 funerals,” she says.
It took some time to connect the dots.
After college, Wilbur traveled abroad in search of herself, spending time in Europe, Africa and South America, where she photographed indigenous communities in Peru.
Wilbur came home inspired. Instead of thinking of her heritage as a burden, she’d work to showcase it. She would be “my grandmother’s granddaughter,” passing on the positive traditions and beliefs handed down to her while documenting efforts to improve life for present-day Native Americans, from programs to revive fading tribal languages to ones aimed at improving health-care outcomes on reservations.
Her portraits don’t avoid colorful Indian attire and ceremonies — far from it. From White Mountain Apache crown dancers in full body paint and headdresses to traditional hoop dancers, the collection celebrates custom and ritual. But presented among pictures of academics, activists, students, family men, career women and cowboys who are Indians, these images have a more appropriate context.
When the exhibit opened in Tacoma this spring, Wilbur invited local relatives, project volunteers and subjects from around the country to the opening party to present blessings of song, dance and storytelling. What could’ve been a stodgy reception turned into a moving and at times rousing affair, with a stunning cross-section of Native American society on hand — Puyallup, Tulalip, Swinomish, Paiute, Pima, Crow, Yuma, Apache and beyond.
Thosh Collins, a portrait subject from the Pima of Arizona, remarked on the uplifting spiritual energy in the room.
“What she’s doing is healing work, wellness work,” he said of Wilbur’s pictures.
At times like this, it’s hard to ignore the sad fact that this country’s Native people have few opportunities to celebrate across tribal affiliation in a mainstream space like an urban art museum. And it is even rarer for non-Natives to bear witness to such a gathering.
Rock Huska, the museum’s curator for Northwest Contemporary Art, admits that TAM has limited experience with Native American art from the present day. And it is taking a huge gamble in helping an artist in the field to bring her project to fruition. The exhibit on display now is, in a sense, a test case for this type of collaboration. The museum will use feedback from paying visitors to make needed refinements and decide later how to work with Wilbur as she gathers additional material.
Wilbur is engaged in two kinds of image-making — and only one involves a camera.
She talks a lot about making Native Americans “attractive.”
But when Wilbur uses that term, she isn’t just talking about physical beauty. She’s also talking about doing things that inspire others to make positive change in their own way — leading by example.
As Collins sang a song with his dad and brother at the opening reception, Wilbur, wearing a traditional woven hat, led a large, smiling group of women and men locked arm-in-arm in a joyful circle dance around the museum’s atrium.
Wilbur says her goal is to build a traveling longhouse that represents her Northwest Coastal Indian roots and can be set up in cities all over the world to showcase her portrait collection, reminding visitors that the communities represented in her images aren’t just a part of history — they’re still making it.
Tyrone Beason is a Pacific NW magazine writer. Reach him at tbeason@seattletimes. Alan Berner is a Seattle Times staff photographer.
Courtesy Dana Robinson Slote Seattle City Council via radio station KPLU No one was hurt—this time. The first oil train derailment in Washington State happened under the Magnolia Bridge.
Indian Country Today, 7/25/14
Spills. Explosions. Deaths. Injuries.
The oil train that jumped the tracks outside Seattle the other day did not do any of those things, but it still highlighted concerns about rail transport of crude, especially highly flammable oil sands bitumen.
The 100-car train operated by Burlington Northern Railroad, filled with crude from the Bakken oil fields, was pulling out of the Interbay rail yard going five miles per hour when one locomotive, a buffer car carrying sand, and three tanker cars derailed at about 2 a.m. on July 24, the Associated Press reported. Two of the tankers tilted, one to a 45-degree angle, a railway spokesman told AP. That one had to be pumped out and hauled off for repairs.
As with the other half-dozen or so industrial-train derailments over the past year—starting with the runaway train that vaporized the center of 6,000-population Lac Mégantic in Quebec, Canada, along with 47 people last summer—the Quinault Indian Nation was on hand to warn about the perils of this type of transport.
“It was sheer luck that the cars, carrying 100 loads of Bakken crude oil, didn’t spill or even catch fire,” Quinault Indian Nation President Fawn Sharp said in a statement. “If that had occurred the chances are there would have been tragic loss. If fire had occurred, the odds are it would have burned out of control for days, and oil would have made its way into Puget Sound. People need to know that every time an oil train travels by, this is the risk that is being taken.”
Tribes are not alone in their unease. Local officials also expressed consternation.
“I’m very concerned that large volatile oil trains pose significant risk for derailment, fire, explosion, loss of property and life,” King County Executive Dow Constantine told MyNorthwest.com. “We need to have a conversation about what is appropriate to ship through these heavily populated areas and what kind of notice people deserve that these shipments are taking place.”
The Quinault and other groups fiercely oppose proposals for oil train export terminals at Vancouver and Grays Harbor.
“These accidents have occurred before,” said Sharp, who is also president of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and area vice president of the National Congress of American Indians, after the Seattle derailment. “They will occur again. Even with the new safety measures proposed by President [Barack] Obama and Governor [Jay] Inslee, the accidents will occur. The rail and bridge infrastructure in this country is far too inadequate to service the vast expansion of oil traffic we are witnessing.”
The railroad company’s assertion that there had been no public threat because no oil had escaped also came under scrutiny.
“I have to disagree with the statement that there was no public threat,” said Sharp in the Quinault statement. “There was. In fact, there is a public threat every time an oil train passes by. There have been too many accidents, too many derailments, too many fires and too many spills.”
BAR ASSOCIATION SCHOLARSHIPS: Five Native students attended law school in 2013-14 with support from the Northwest Indian Bar Association.
This year’s scholarship recipients:
Charisse Arce, Native Village of Iliamna, Seattle University School of Law.
Tiffany Justice, Couer d’Alene, University of Idaho.
Rhylee Marchand, Colville, University of Idaho.
Ashley Ray, Muscogee Creek Nation, University of Idaho.
Cara Wallace, Ketchikan Indian Community, University of Arizona.
The NWIBA offers scholarships every year to Native law students in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington—the deadline is in November—and offers bar-exam stipends in June. For more information, visit the website or contact Lisa Atkinson, Northern Cherokee/Osage, nwibatreasurer@gmail.com.
One of the lowest tides of the year this weekend revealed a “crime scene” at the beach at Golden Gardens Park in Seattle.
The victims: thousands of clams that died in the prime of their lives. Each bivalve victim has a tiny hole drilled near its hinge.
Also strewn on the beach were gray rubbery things that looked like toilet plunger heads. The Beach Naturalists from the Seattle Aquarium say concerned citizens have collected them in buckets, upset that someone would have dumped so much litter on the beaches.
But it turns out that the holes and the toilet plunger heads are all the products of a little-known predator: the moon snail.
The culprit: Not a toilet plunger head, but the predatory moon snail. Credit KUOW Photo/Joshua McNichols
A Gruesome Murder
When it comes to the moon snail, Seattle Aquarium Beach Naturalist Will Downs is unwavering when he describes how the moon snail treats its victims: The snail “doesn’t see his prey. He feels them. He tastes them. And if you’re a clam, he sneaks up on you and engulfs you.”
Low tide at Seattle’sGolden Gardens Park.
Credit: Joshua McNichols/KUOW
It gets worse. If the snail can’t smother the clam then and there, it drills through the clam shell with its bony, barbed tongue. That specialized tongue slowly files away at the clam, “day after day sometimes, until it can reach the interior, where the clam thought it was safe. Then it extrudes in there acids, enzymes, anything that’ll digest the clam.”
Downs grins as he delivers his punch line: “…and then it slurps up its own clam chowder.”
And those rubbery things that look like toilet plunger heads? Downs says they’re moon snail egg collars. The snail squeezes out the leathery substance by fusing together eggs, sand and its own mucus. As the egg collar emerges, it wraps around the moon snail’s shell, taking on the shell’s shape.
Case Closed
Before we condemn the moon snail, Seattle Aquarium naturalist Darcie Larson said the moon snail may be vicious predators of clams, but they’re an important part of the beach ecosystem of Puget Sound.
“If we had no predators, we might have too many shellfish. And then the shellfish population would get out of balance,” she said. “And they would eat up all the food, all the plankton in the ecosystem. We refer to predators like that as keystone species, and they hold the whole system together.”
So are moon snails threatened? Larson said anecdotally, the moon snails are doing well. Which is good, as other predators, such as sunflower sea stars, are currently suffering from a mysterious wasting disease.
Richard Walker Saaduuts Peele, a Haida master carver, instructs Gabriel Port, a Samish Nation descendant, on a finer point of canoe carving on October 23, 2010, at the Center for Wooden Boats in Lake Union, Seattle. Saaduuts is resident carver at the center, and has carved two canoes with the assistance of local students.
Haida master carver Saaduuts Peele was a guest at Pinehurst K-8 School in Seattle, Washington on June 18 for the school’s final graduation ceremony—the school will soon be torn down to make way for a new school.
Peele and Pinehurst students carved a 40-foot ocean-going canoe, Ocean Spirit, in 2003-04 and gifted the canoe to the Native community of Hydaburg, Alaska in a potlatch in April 2004. The canoe was returned to Seattle on June 18.
Saaduuts, resident carver at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, is doing some repairs to the canoe at the center. Once repairs are completed, the canoe will return to Hydaburg.
Deanna Sebring was the main witness to the murder. She crossed Howell Street at 4:12 p.m. on August 30, 2010, just as Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk opened fire on Ditidaht carver John T. Williams, who had been carving a board while walking. She stood behind Birk as he shot five bullets in about a second. The dash cam of his patrol car shows her recoiling from the sound. Deanna kept walking, then turned and saw John lying on the sidewalk, looking up at her. She continued walking. The horror took a moment to sink in. His eyes are what bothered her the most. Birk had just gunned down an unarmed man. Finally, after a block and a half, Deanna stopped and returned to report the crime.
I never expected to find a story like this in the documentary, titled “Honor Totem,” produced for the government access Seattle Channel and recently released on YouTube. As an Alaska Native who has also been homeless and incarcerated, I found it easy to seethe at the cops after the murder. But my outrage masked something else, something I had been hiding—something Deanna’s story brought out into the open.
Video of Community Stories: Honor Totem
Through her eyes I experienced John’s last moments of consciousness. I could see him in my imagination, pleading, then fading. The finality of his death gave me vertigo and I felt as if I might fly apart in a million pieces. Her story destroyed my shield of political outrage and made me see the raw horror of John’s death. And for some reason it haunted me.
Through interviews with family members, in particular John’s brother Rick, “Honor Totem” relates the story of John’s life and the causes of his downward spiral. After losing his father, who taught him to carve in the family style, and three brothers in just a few short years, John began drinking more. He sank into depression. By the time of his murder he was deaf in one ear and virtually blind. He was a broken man, displaced from his tribal homeland.
But to Seattle Police he was just another drunken Indian to be swept off the streets like confetti after a parade. If it hadn’t been for witnesses like Deanna Sebring, Officer Birk would have probably received a medal. Due in part to her testimony, the Firearms Review Board determined the shooting was unjustified and Officer Birk resigned.
Ian Devier, who wrote the documentary, at the foot of the John T. Williams Memorial Honor Totem that stands near the Space Needle at the Seattle Center.
Deanna relates in an interview during “Honor Totem” that she suffered nightmares after the shooting. She says she heard about John’s brother Rick and his plan to carve a memorial totem pole for John to promote healing. She and her son visited the carving site on Pier 57 several times. Rick even taught her son how to carve. As she spent time with the carvers, she absorbed the welcoming atmosphere and slowly began to heal.
Rick says in the documentary that the totem pole has healing energy. So the day after viewing “Honor Totem,” I take the light rail downtown and transfer to the monorail. I am nauseous and my head is spinning. I see the totem as we pull into the Seattle Center, standing at the end of a cool, moist lawn just east of the Space Needle. I stumble toward it. Vertigo makes every step a struggle. I reach the pole and close my eyes. I see John, his eyes pleading, then fading.
Then I realize they are not John’s eyes at all. They belong to my Aunt Judy, my mother’s twin sister, a full-blooded Tlingit. She looks at me from a bed in a nursing home, pleading, then fading. She took me in after I got out of prison years ago and I abandoned her at the end of her life. I let her die alone in a nursing home. I had so much anger inside. I don’t even know what it was about. I just hated.
Detail of the John T. Williams Memorial Totem Pole. An eagle stands on top, beneath that is a master carver, and beneath that is a Raven. (Ian Devier)
I sit near the totem pole and my stomach starts to settle. My Aunt Judy passed away just two years before John’s murder. My political outrage about his assassination masked the guilt I felt about my aunt’s death. I feel just as guilty as Officer Birk, but until now I buried those feelings deep inside. John’s Honor Totem and the healing it represents help me face my guilt. I look at the master carver depicted in the middle of the pole. I shot you, John. It might as well have been me. I killed my Aunt Judy by abandoning her.
The wind makes the trees behind John’s Honor Totem rustle. The master carver listens. Kids play on the lawn and a breeze kisses my cheek. Part of healing is forgiveness. Part of healing is remembrance. My stomach settles and I suddenly feel hungry. Thank you, John. May we always remember what you taught us about acceptance, forgiveness and the healing power of our traditions.
