There exists no record of Smith’s notes from or presence at the speech. Seattle’s words were translated from Lushootseed, eroded and warped by the passage of time, and flattened onto the page to build an imaginary world where the last living Indian gave white men permission to keep cutting.
RED ONION TAVERN
Every day for years, I sat at that dark bar, drinking pints and hoping for conversation. I wasted coins on pinball and pull tabs. Outside, I flicked spent cigarettes into coffee cans. My friends favored a couple of dives with ceilings dotted white with playing cards put there by the old, tuxedoed magician who went from bar to bar and table to table, but never to my den at the slope’s bottom.
Yelp review: “It’s the type of bar that lowers the property value of the neighborhood in a much needed kind of way.”
Yelp review: “If you’re a loner, go somewhere else. I have never eaten here so I can’t comment on that.”
Yelp review: “When we first walked in we were a little disappointed with there being almost no one in the bar and the decor clearly has not been updated for at least 20 years.”
The space had previously housed a drugstore with a soda fountain, which is basically what the Red Onion was for me once it could offer the whiskey I took with ginger ale. I lost hours, dollars, layers of lung, and neighborhoods of brain. Some nights, I closed the place down and brought Kevin—first my drinking buddy and then, after Henry, my boyfriend—back to my place to work at collapsing the blood bag inside the wine box. Some nights, we’d go from the tavern to the playground across the street. Swings, slides, and a zip line were installed where Madison Street Park Pavilion, White City’s entertainment hub, once stood. Before that, the land was covered in timber. Before that, the forest wasn’t timber—it was trees.
In deep night, we swung so high I thought I’d launch into flight over the neighborhood.
LAKE WASHINGTON
Henry told me I, a lazy person who would not exercise, wasn’t useful, so I asked to learn to drive the boat. I wanted to do something other than pound Rainiers while he wakeboarded. I learned well, got a license, and always drove sober, having seen his friends’ boats impounded during the Seafair bacchanalia of the Microsoft set.
We were happy together only on the boat, skipping across wakes, creeping along the shoreline to study the houses and grounds of the rich, pulling bodies and boards, not talking. I never got the hang of wakeboarding. My legs were too weak to let me stand on water. Henry had magic: he made flips look easy, soaring above the wake. I liked him best upside down and impossible.
He did wipe out; everyone did. He once went down hard on his skull. He didn’t come up right away, but maybe time was just stretching right then, my back rigid in the driver’s seat, his friend silent and stoned. I don’t remember feeling anything as the friend and I pulled him into the boat when he finally did surface, speaking nonsense. After we returned to his apartment and docked the boat, he said he was sure it was another concussion—he’d blacked out, I think—but it wasn’t a big deal. I hadn’t heard about how a concussed brain can change—the way the trauma can turn thoughts into sinister nonsense that moves violence from unthinkable response to natural answer. We were together for three more months.
WATERFRONT, DOWNTOWN SEATTLE
Poet William Arrowsmith published a rewrite of Chief Seattle’s speech in 1969. Arrowsmith said Seattle said, “When the last red man has vanished from this earth, and his memory is only a story among the whites, these shores will still swarm with the invisible dead of my people.”
Arrowsmith reprinted his version in the American Poetry Review, prefacing it, “Beneath the dense patina of white literary rhetoric there lies a text which, in my judgment, no white man of the period could conceivably have written.”
Then this white man does what he said was impossible: he writes the text. He shapes the words before him into a figurine.
LAKE WASHINGTON
Underwater sediment holds records that can be read through the extraction of core samples. Fossilized pollen can be read as markers in the layers, showing disturbances to flora growing on nearby land. A core taken in Madison Park shows dramatic changes in plant life around the start of settler encroachment and in waves after as settlers logged, replaced evergreens with houses, planted leafy decorations, and changed the lake. Deep down in the old layers, there is pollen from fir, hemlock, and cedar, nearly no grass. Everything after the mid-1800s presents as post-disturbance. The layers lie undisturbed in the lake, deep in water, holding.
MADISON PARK BEACH / MADISON VALLEY / CENTRAL DISTRICT
It was a series of visits, not visions. I thought seeing my future self would be a onetime thing, but she returned, at another stop on the 11. Still on Madison Street, but farther from the lake. This woman—by the way, I’m in the same seat as the other time—stops at the top of the stairs and waves her hands at me and says, “Hiiiii! Hiiiiiiiiii!” And I notice she’s me. Except maybe fifteen years in the future. And I don’t look great. I look aged, beyond what time does.
So this lady gets off the bus waving, and I don’t speak. I’m looking through the window at her as she’s standing on the curb, waving and waving and still waving when the bus pulls away.
It was a while before I saw her again.
I saw her in the Safeway on Madison, farther toward downtown in the Central District. I was in the longest ATM line of my life, looking around at people. I know it’s rude, but I just like to look at people’s faces and try to listen to what they’re thinking, or maybe I’m looking out for men who’ve done unspeakable things to me, but anyway, that’s when I see her: this woman, me from, let’s say, twenty years in the future, standing at the customer service desk and waiting for someone to help her. And no one does. She’s me. She doesn’t look bad, but she looks lost. She doesn’t look like the woman I want to grow up to be. She’s uncomfortable in her body, which I always figured I’d grow out of. I stand in line forever. She walks away.
So I wondered, What does it mean? I was thinking these were warnings—that if I keep going, this is how I’ll end up. Ragged. Or unsure. Or wearing some medical mask.
A friend said, “What if you met this woman at turning points—points at which you sloughed off a version of yourself? And she came to show you what you departed from.”
PAHTO OR MOUNT ADAMS
Cowlitz people have access to tamanawas: spirit guides, supernatural things. Children, in the old days, worked to find them, fasting and following instructions in set-away places. Children were forbidden from telling others about the tamanawas they found, who would guide them for life. I never received instructions, but I did go to a set-away place, picking huckleberries on the mountain with my aunties nine months after I first saw the woman. They showed me how to pick fast, the way their mother taught them. At night, in darkness that felt both obliterating and world-making, I saw the Milky Way. The kinnikinnick, ferns, evergreens, and mosses had always been there; we had always gone there when it was time to pick berries; I was young and sick and knew nothing, not even how to ask tamanawas to approach.
RED ONION TAVERN
Sitting at the bar or smoking out front, I met my neighbors: the Salish sisters who lived above me; a VP of a company everybody knows; a lady with family money and no job who once biked drunk to her house to retrieve a carved Coast Salish mask I did not want to see. I knew it would upset me further; she’d just said I couldn’t possibly be Native and had run her hands through my hair to investigate.
Mostly, though, I talked to the bartenders, middle-aged men I pretended didn’t want to fuck me because they never came out and said so. Once, drunk, I lent my childhood copy of The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, to one of them, telling him it would be good to read with his daughter. I should’ve read it myself, but I didn’t want to think about riddles, secrets, and codes. I lived a simple narrative and lacked the capacity to search beyond the apparent. The bartender never returned the book. I don’t think he and his daughter ever read i
t. I understand: decoding is demanding work. It takes something out of a person before the answers come.
MADISON STREET
Cable cars ran along Madison Street before the 11 did. In 1927, Almira Bailey wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the street now called East Madison “was just a little, moist, woodsy road through miles of forest for years. And then there was the cable car that went all the way to the lake. And now broad boulevards lead to stately homes.”
A street like a knife, a crease, a rip in space and time through which my future selves step into view.
MADISON PARK BAKERY
Next door to the Onion, the baker worked at night, dipping a metal basket of dough into a hot oil vat. My bar friends told me that if I knocked, he’d let me in and give me a donut. At 2:00 AM, the bars were closed and I had nowhere to go but home, the dangerous place with no cigarettes, only thoughts. The baker gave me my first taste of marzipan. In exchange, he wanted a cigarette. “Are you a virgin?” he asked. The marzipan didn’t taste like I’d imagined. I wished I’d never eaten it. But I did, and one more thing stopped being magic. Before long, I vomited it up.
LESCHI, LAKE WASHINGTON
In the deep place, my body is in his bed in the apartment hanging over the lake, guts churning to untangle the feelings: first, my brain fought itself as one part recognized violence in his hands stopping my breathing while another part denied there was malice; later, my heart panicked when he broke up with me, not because I loved him, but because he lived in my skin and I was afraid I was too porous and my spirit might leak out without his wishes filling me.
He’s been in the deep place, holding me by the ankles. I was drowning myself so I wouldn’t have to come ashore and look back into the water.
WATERFRONT, DOWNTOWN SEATTLE
Home, a 1972 made-for-TV movie written by Ted Perry, features another version of Chief Seattle’s speech.
Perry said Seattle said, “I am a savage and I do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffalos on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.”
Perry said Seattle said, “What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit.”
Chief Seattle may have killed a buffalo, for all I know, but it was the water beings—the cockles and salmon and clams—that kept his people alive.
LAKE WASHINGTON SHIP CANAL
The Duwamish people had been carrying boats between the lakes, or shoving them down a creek that appeared when the lake was high, forever. The white men wanted a canal. Logs, lumber, and coal would no longer be portaged; ships could pass through the wound gouged into the isthmus.
The Lake Washington Ship Canal was built to connect Lake Washington, Lake Union, and Puget Sound. When it opened in 1916, Lake Washington’s water level dropped 8.8 feet. The Black River, a Duwamish River tributary into which Lake Washington emptied, disappeared. Joseph Moses (Duwamish) said, “That was quite a day for the white people at least. The waters just went down, down, until our landing and canoes stood dry and there was no Black River at all. There were pools, of course, and the struggling fish trapped in them. People came from miles around, laughing and hollering and stuffing fish into gunny sacks.”
THE SPOT
Some bar friends showed me a secluded waterfront public park separated from the Broadmoor Golf Club by a chain-link fence. It was mostly secret; occasionally, it would be listed as one of Seattle’s best secret waterfront access points, and teenagers knew it as a place for smoking joints. The entrance driveway, at the dead end of a road, looks like private property. The driveway leads to a path to murky water. I liked to stand alone on the dock, watching cars race across the bridge floating on the lake, listening to invisible beavers move through water.
In 2010, the golf club dredged the lake near The Spot to improve water flow for maintaining their greens. The beavers departed during dredging but returned to find their lodge intact. Quoted in the Madison Park blog, a resident said, “Some of the beavers slapped their tails right next to the dredge to say goodbye. It was quite touching.”
A commenter said, “My son and I went out on the lake today May 31 2011 and saw several dead Beavers near the Broadmoor golf ranges in take pipe. Also some dead fish and a bad smell around the Lodge. We took photos of the Beavers.”
WHITE CITY
In 1909, a circus elephant named Queenie wreaked havoc in the amusement park. Two little white dogs approached while she was being moved. Queenie chased them, crashed into the carousel, broke wooden horses, and stuffed her mouth with apples and oranges from the fruit stand. Then she allowed herself to be chained again.
Two ladies fainted.
Later that day, a tiger reached through the bars of its cage, grabbed a fox terrier, and tore its body to pieces.
CACTUS
I had my first and last Madison Park meals at Cactus, where I used to spend afternoons getting wasted on neon-pink cocktails. I wanted to be rich like my neighbors so I could afford double orders of brisket tacos. After I moved to the suburbs, I learned Kurt Cobain had loved Cactus. His last residence was a few minutes’ drive south along the lake, but despite my teenage obsession with Nirvana, I didn’t visit the park next to his house when I lived there. I kept him in myth. I avoided thinking about death in the neighborhood.
Two days before his suicide, Kurt ate dinner with friends at Cactus. They started with bananas dulce. Kurt’s credit card was declined because Courtney had canceled it when he left rehab. Cactus’s owner asked him to pay by check and remembers, “It was kind of gibberish but it was still decipherable, so I accepted the check. That was the last time I ever saw him—that Sunday night. Sometimes, I wish I had held onto that check. I did try afterwards to get it back from the bank, but the check had already gone through the system and it was too late.”
Stars hang from the ceiling, cow skulls from the walls. At the end of Kurt’s last Cactus meal, someone saw him licking his plate.
MADISON COURT APARTMENTS / THE SPOT
I moved from Madison Park on a whim a month after ending my four-year relationship with Kevin, who liked having me around, but not enough to try to imagine our future. When escaping (from whatever) to the suburbs, I didn’t clean the fireplace. I failed to repair the cabinet door that had been half ripped off when Kevin, drunk, lost his balance. I left mold on the windowsills and wine spots on the carpet. I ruined that home. The blemishes could be fixed—I mean I broke its energy. My sadness will haunt that place like a restless spirit.
Before moving, I had to complete a ceremony requiring I be in a set-away place. In waterproof boots, I went to The Spot and veered off the path into the swamp. I toe-tested bog stones, stepped on those that didn’t sink, jumped over muck, and grasped tree trunks. On solid land, I completed my ceremony. I retraced my steps thinking I remembered every stone I’d tested, but I trusted one with the weight of my body and sank.
I smelled rot—dead things turned living. I felt my body sinking without resistance and without hitting bottom. I would die drowning in decomposition, my lungs filling with swamp muck.
I grabbed a sapling and muscled my way out, clawing the solid earth I realized I was desperate to stand on again. Sludge coated me to my waist and filled my boots.
If I had sunk, if I had found spirits of that place deep in the muck, they might not have recognized a living thing inside me.
Or maybe the spirits rejected me because it wasn’t my time to leave.
EDMONDS, WASHINGTON
Three months later, I quit killing myself with whiskey. My great-great-aunt Virginia spoke with the photographer Edward Curtis in 1910, and from their conversation he wrote, “The Indians, after the disturbance of 1855–56, were dying off in great numbers through the use of whiskey—so called—whole canoe-loads drowning.”
Removed from the
city, I could hear my instructions for living. I’d never thought I’d find them on those nights I stumbled from bar back doors, smoked in alleyways at dawn, and slept with a swamp mouth dirty with traces of my insides.
I stopped seeing Future Elissa, but other people began to tell me, “I saw your doppelgänger!” Someone kept seeing her along Madison. They would ask whether it was me. I’m waiting to have the answer.
I made the long drive from my suburb to Madison Park two equinoxes and a solstice after I left. The neighborhood looked as if it had been painted over with fresh, bright coats, but only because of my new clarity, the hangover haze long departed. Nobody was going to make the neighborhood change.
I did not see the woman.
WIND RIVER
Edward Curtis reported this paraphrase of my great-great-aunt Virginia’s words:
An old man dreamed and announced that new people were coming, with new ways, and the Indians would die. He made them put coyote-skins over their shoulders and two by two, men in front and women behind, march in a circle, while he sang his song of prophecy. The old woman who told [Virginia] about this said it happened when she was a little girl. She took part in the dance, and laughed at the flapping tail of the skin on the girl in front of her, and the old man seized her by the wrist, flung her aside and said, “You will be the first to die.” As it happened, she outlived all the others.
LAKE WASHINGTON
In the deep place, my body is in the apartment hanging over the lake. If I let you in, will you pull me out?
EVERY NEIGHBORHOOD
This Cowlitz story was told to ethnographer Thelma Adamson by James Cheholts in 1927:
God sent wἁni the chief, here to teach people how to live. He was to teach them how to work stone and to do all the necessary work. But wἁni did not do as he was told; he just fooled around with the girls and never showed the people the right things to do. God once came to him and discovered him neglecting his work. God looked around and saw that the new people had trains, steamboats, steam-donkies,—all of which wἁni was supposed to have shown the people how to make. Then he threw wἁni on an island where he turned into a rock. In the next world,—when the world turns over, wἁni will be a [real] man.7 I guess he is still there on the island. I hear people say that he looks like a rock in the shape of a person. He gets up at night and walks when everyone is asleep. A man once caught him in the act: wἁni was walking around all over the house and seemed to be half-asleep.
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