White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  Under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, federal agencies must “take into account the effects of their undertakings on historic properties,” and “consultation with an Indian tribe must respect tribal sovereignty and the government-to-government relationship between the Federal Government and Indian tribes.” While planning the light-rail expansion through Seattle, the Federal Transit Administration, Sound Transit, and the Washington State Department of Transportation consulted with “interested Indian tribes”—Tulalip, Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Yakama, Snoqualmie, and Suquamish—and the Washington State historic preservation officer. This is not a courtesy; this is the law. At my desk in the tower, I pored over the ethnographic study because it was a real-life example of a legal process that had been theoretical to me when I worked for the USDA in DC more than a decade before, using Microsoft Word to create best practices flowcharts for people interested in developing their lands but unclear on tribal consultation. Winds, Waterways, and Weirs showed me that the process could not only reduce harm and preserve sacred sites but also honor the continuance of Indigenous knowledge.

  Seattle is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, and many sacred sites have been disturbed and harmed. Foster Island, a small island in Union Bay on the east end of the ship canal, is now part of the Washington Park Arboretum, but settler damage has already been done. The lake’s big water-level drop enlarged the island, and settlers later firmed up shorelines with dredged lake soil. The floating bridge split the island in two. sčәgwučid was once a graveyard. Nearby on the shore, clothes and food were burned, sent by the living to relatives on the other side. People placed boxed dead bodies in the trees. When the boxes fell or disintegrated, bones fell to the ground; settlers took them when they made sčәgwučid into part of the arboretum. The land is said to be protected from development now. I say the land was turned curio, changed to suit settler tastes and rendered static. Even with their bones gone from that place, the people on the other side are still at sčәgwučid. Among the invasive purple loosestrife and yellow flag iris, there is no place for burning.

  In 2011, a decomposed human leg bone and foot were found in a plastic bag under the Ship Canal Bridge, the two-layer span carrying I-5 and its express lanes over Portage Bay. This is listed on the Wikipedia page for “Salish Sea human foot discoveries,” although it seems unrelated to the rest, this one being bagged, with no mention of the sneaker that encased most of the others (at least twenty) that have washed up on shores around the Salish Sea in Washington and British Columbia since 2007. The cause is unclear, and the internet loves the mystery. People seem to want it to be the work of a serial killer, the long setup of a true crime drama unfolding in news bulletins.

  The cause has mostly been settled: marine animals and churning water disarticulate the feet. The sneakers are buoyant, their solid synthetic architecture protective of the feet inside. Sea currents, unpredictable in the straits, carry the feet long distances. Two of the feet are known to belong to a woman who committed suicide by jumping from a bridge over the Fraser River, which empties into the sea. It seems likely that suicide was the cause of death for some others whose feet washed ashore. And yet the internet still wants to have fun with it: a website called Cool Interesting Stuff.com files its write-up under “Modern Mysteries”; the National Paranormal Society says “eerie mists” and ghostly cold spots have appeared where feet were found; Ripley’s Believe It or Not! features a write-up with a photo of one of the feet, tibia and femur still attached, no warning. I’m reminded of shrunken heads in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in downtown Seattle, whose “curiosities,” at its opening in 1899, largely consisted of Alaska Native artifacts and art. Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s daughter, who refused to leave her land after treaty signing and remained there for life, sold baskets there. The shop remains as a tourist destination where souvenir trinkets share space with mummified corpses propped up in glass.

  From my tower, I could see the Aurora Bridge, carrying Route 99, high above the canal. People began jumping from it to die before construction was even finished. Hundreds have jumped since. A fence was added in 2011, a result of advocacy by Seattle FRIENDS (Fremont Individuals & Employees Nonprofit to Decrease Suicides), self-described as “a group of individuals who live, work and play in the Fremont neighborhood.”

  Play—I become tense at the mention, despite myself. This group’s accomplishment undoubtedly saves lives. But “live, work and play,” well-worn language in Seattle’s newest self-styling, calls to mind the ways in which Seattle tries to wield quirk against sinister gloom. The concentration of oddball whimsy is highest in Fremont, home to statues of a famous clown, Vladimir Lenin (intended, apparently, as kitsch), and, under the Aurora Bridge, a colossal troll holding a Volkswagen Beetle. De Libertas Quirkas, “freedom to be peculiar,” is the neighborhood motto; “Entering the Republic of Fremont, the center of the Universe, throw away your watch,” instructs a sign. Every summer solstice, as an unsanctioned part of the annual parade, a group of cyclists remove all their clothes, paint their skin, and assemble to ride bikes through the parade route.

  I avoided the neighborhood and its curiosities for a long time. I was cheerless, trying to die slowly. I did not go to the high bridge, but neither did I go on the tour of the nearby chocolate factory. While Seattle was playing, I was drowning myself, carried far down some river, lost at sea.

  It was finally time for me to interface with the public, so I allowed a few reporters and their accompanying camera people to ascend the stairs. All asked me to describe the office, and I was never able to estimate the room’s size, even when they told me to “just give a rough number.”

  Some wanted to know why my project was valuable. A white TV man sat a foot away from the window through which the bright colors of the Google logo nearly glowed behind his smile-sharpened chin. He asked whether my project was worth ten thousand dollars. I told him it was valuable to have a Native woman in this office, on this bridge, writing this story.

  I didn’t tell him that in the early 1800s, many of the earliest white explorers regarded Native women as bodies to use by force and coercion. In the ensuing years, many settler men married Native women in earnest, intending to be good husbands, but in the mid-1800s, Washington Territory law disenfranchised my “half-breed” ancestors by legally voiding legal marriages between Native and white people and limiting the rights of their descendants. In Seattle at that time, as part of the ongoing colonial project of portraying Native people as lesser beings with no claim to the land, writers of newspaper editorials made wildly untrue proclamations that Native women would destroy the town with drunken fires, smallpox, and depravity; in 1873, the passage of Ordinance 42 banned Native women “or other disreputable persons” from being in the city after dark, unless they were leaving. In truth, it was settlers who brought the pestilence and poison, the Duwamish women and their families who were shuttled away to suffer. That is what happened here. The land and the people know it.

  The month I got my bridge keys, the Department of Justice released a report on intimate partner and sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women and men: of the women, four out of five had experienced violence in their lifetimes, one in three in the past year; 56.1 percent had experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes, 14.4 percent in the past year.

  Later that year, newly hired as director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, Abigail Echo-Hawk opened a file cabinet and found a folder labeled “Sexual Violence,” containing questions from a 2010 survey conducted by the UIHI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who sought to learn about sexual violence against Native women in Seattle. Previous leadership decided against making the data public, possible fuel for further stigma and stereotyping; Echo-Hawk pushed for the development of a report. The findings were released in 2018: of the women surveyed, 94 percent had been raped or coerced into sex.

  While I was in my surplus chair in the tower, pinned down
to permanence by the camera, I wasn’t thinking about violence, only about representation and responsibility: my Coast Salish face on the news, the blessing of an opportunity to speak, the burden of getting it right. I felt I needed to hold myself accountable: a non-Duwamish visitor driving settler streets, walking settler-flattened hills, crossing the settlers’ fake river by bridge. I was reliant upon the products of this violence, moving across the land by way of “improvements” that bludgeoned it into something nearly unrecognizable to the glaciers that carved it. I wanted to express that I knew I was complicit, living in someone else’s homeland, protected by what strangers took to be whiteness. I saw this as my responsibility.

  But where else would I live? Not my ancestral territory, where I couldn’t imagine a way to make a living. Now, I wonder whether I wasn’t taking on a share of settler guilt, willing to suffer for them—for meaning in their place, but also as in for their entertainment, because they want the suffering. Settler colonialism wants me flagellating myself, because it’s a good distraction: nobody might notice the DOJ findings that, of the Native women they surveyed who were victims of sexual violence, 96 percent were harmed by non-Native perpetrators.

  A settler man I once matched with on Tinder said he liked that I was Native, it was sexy. I asked him to explain. He said, “I think a psychoanalyst should answer that question but if I attempt to analyze myself, I would say that there are multiple reasons for that, such as: Native American women are gorgeous, they are protective, strong and kind mothers. Native American people are (at least seem to me) very honest and honorable, they seem very exotic which they are, and people find exotic sexy and etc …”

  How many settler boys learned through stories that a Native woman should be expected to be a chief’s daughter waiting to be promised to a warrior or saved by a white hero? How many times have I showed up doomed to fail them just by being myself because they said they liked me for who I was when they meant they liked the fantasy maiden they were prepared for me to be?

  Settler colonialism wants me to call myself “white-passing,” and I do, I am. The mortgage lender and the cops don’t treat me as a menace; they think I’m white and so they let me live. But on dates or at work, being known to be Native makes some things change. Settlers speak as though difference is only what’s visible, lying to us all while fine-tuning the structures wrapped around our lineages, constricting, trying to get us to disappear. In “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Audra Simpson writes about the 2014 murder of twenty-six-year-old Inuk student Loretta Saunders, who “looked like a white girl”:

  Her violent passing is teaching us that one cannot “pass”—this structure, this assemblage, those people that articulate themselves through and for it, will find you, and subject you, it can kill you … One’s life, one’s land, sovereignty, one’s body, emptied out, in order for other things to pass through … If you are an indigenous woman your flesh is received differently, you have been subjected differently than others, your life choices have been circumscribed in certain ways, and the violence … will find you, and choke you, and beat you, and possibly kill you.

  This, Simpson says, is what the settler state demands. They could not kill me, so they told me I wasn’t Native at all. When I defied them and would not be made a white woman, they asked me, Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? and over and over I said, I’m sure I’m sure I’m sure. I became so busy insisting on the fact of my existence that it was only through strain that I could summon up the words for anything else.

  But in the tower, I did. I described my project to the white newsman. Say it one more time, he kept telling me, this time without the word confluence, too big for broadcast. Yes, I wanted to say, it is too big. It is all too big.

  Later, he called to ask what neighborhood I lived in, and whether I had an apartment there. He asked whether I was ever homeless and said, “I promise this isn’t a leading question.” Leading to what, other than my reluctant disclosure of that personal detail and his admission that he thought I was living in the bridge to get off the streets? I asked him what gave him that idea. In Seattle, Natives have, by far, the highest rates of homelessness of any racial or ethnic group. But he didn’t say that. He said someone told him this was the city’s program for homeless artists. Was that it, or was it the narrative he liked so much he convinced himself it was true?

  The interview was broadcast on the evening news and on the station’s website, accompanied by text with three mentions of the sum. On the station’s Facebook page, in comments posted under the headline “City pays writer $10,000 for summer-long project to chronicle Fremont Bridge” and a photo of me, a Native woman who wouldn’t have been allowed to live in the city its founders dreamed of, or would’ve been sold for sex, or wouldn’t have even made it to age thirty-one, people wrote:

  RIDICULOUS !!!! They just squander the peoples money away and families can’t even afford food for their table.

  can think of better ways to spend that money

  Nice waste of 10k.

  And you’ll vote to raise your taxes again anyway.

  Theres your tax dollars for ya

  Who’s bright idea was this?

  I can write some poems …

  really? arent there more worthy things to do with 10000?

  Wow and then Seattle wants to raise taxes! Glad I don’t live there!

  A year earlier, after a colleague was quoted in a news piece about her scholarship on her community’s whaling tradition, a man called my office and yelled at me: “Why do you wanna kill the whales? Why do you wanna kill the whales? It’s part of your culture? Well, killing Indians is part of my culture.” He called four more times. I trembled for ten minutes and put my head between my knees, hair brushing the floor. At my request, a university cop came by, called the guy back, and told him not to contact me again. He told me, “Typically, they don’t call back. This happens fairly often. An ex-boyfriend is calling a girl, we call him and tell him to stop, he stops.”

  One month after the phone call, in an email to an entirely different man, one I knew, I wrote, I just need for you to stop contacting me. Don’t reply to this message. Don’t initiate contact if we are both in the same public place. Don’t assume I have changed my mind about this unless I explicitly tell you so. One month after that, he emailed me again, begging me for friendship, then followed me out of a campus building, saying, “I just want to know what I did to hurt you.” A university cop called him and told him not to contact me again. He stopped, but he later called the cops, asking if he could mail me a gift, come to my reading, because he couldn’t believe the law would deny him access to me. A court, satisfied with my articulation of fear, called it stalking. They granted my request for a protection order and forbade him from contacting me for two years.

  And now—I’ve gone and opened a door, introduced a wrinkle of a plot point, and I will have to deal with the stalking on the page or delete it. Can I ask you to deal with it for me? In my opinion, I’ve given enough. I’ve served as a sturdy container for men’s anger and need, so often overlapping. I’ve disclosed for the curious. Learned to wear my suffering like a mimesis of suffering, a tolerable performance, heart turned human interest story. Is it enough to know that when the protection order expired, he contacted me again? That my body and mind have to keep holding him? Simpson writes:

  Force qualified as violence moves through us, trying to empty us out, transiting through moving to the flesh that is the subsurface of “identity” as peoples possessing bodies with living histories of relatedness to territory that is constantly being violated, harmed, ignored—allowing some of us to be devalued to the point where we are denied bodily integrity, denied philosophical integrity, flattened, sometimes killed.

  I am trying to write about a tower. Let me write about a tower. When I write about the windows, know I’m not saying (because I barely recognize it myself) that when I was up there, under all thought ran a curre
nt of worry about who might look through.

  For a few days in mid-June, I went to a wooded island in the Salish Sea to write. The evergreens hung dark and heavy over the cabin. I walked paths cut through nettle and blackberry brambles. In the evenings, I called Carl, who had returned from tour after I drove to the woods. I told him I’d found my dream: to have land in the woods among the salal, Oregon grape, ferns, and cedars my ancestors would have known as relatives.

  As a child, I drew maps of the island I dreamed I’d own, laying out plans for all the buildings I would need to make my life. In the woods, I took up the practice again in my mind. Hemlock, fir, cedar, alder, maple, cottonwood, camas, lilies, nettles, ferns, salmon, smelt, shellfish, deer, elk. Before the world turned over, it was forest and prairie, burned to let the bulbs grow unfettered. I imagined land that didn’t know the suffering settlers had inflicted. I’d build a cabin for me and one for Carl. The woods felt safe, a hiding place. We’d leave everybody.

  Back in the city, Carl brought me lunch at the bridge. While we sat and ate, I asked him if he ever wanted to live with me. “Maybe,” he said, and I regretted asking, so I tried to sound like I was joking and talked about the mansion I wanted. I told him I’d build in the city if I could, but I’d never be rich enough.

  “What about squatters’ rights,” he said. If a person openly occupies and pays property taxes for an otherwise neglected property for seven years, they’re eligible to claim title. Washington State came into being, after all, through settler squatting, an American tradition; white people tried to take my great-great-grandmother’s land through squatting.