Not Playing Indian

November is both Native American Heritage Month and National Homeless Youth Awareness Month. This week (November 15-22, 2020) is Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. Especially this year, in the midst of the pandemic disproportionately affecting Native Americans and other BIPOC people, rising joblessness, increasing evictions (despite CDC and other anti-eviction mandates), increasing domestic violence, increasing social isolation and depression among our teens/young adults, increased attention and action related to these social and health issues are important. There are many things we can all do to help. Here is my list of actions for you and your family members to consider doing—not only during November:

1. Become better informed about these national and local issues by reading through the resources included in the links above.

2. Read more books by Native Americans. My current favorites include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer; There There by Tommy Orange, and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

3. Support Native American/Indigenous owned and run social service programs, such as Chief Seattle here in Seattle. They have health and social services (including supportive housing) for urban Native Americans/Native Alaskans/Indigenous people experiencing homelessness.

4. Support Native American/Indigenous owned and run arts and crafts stores, such as the “Inspired Natives, Not Native Inspired” Eighth Generation located in Pike Place Market, Seattle.

5. Support the expansion of school nurses and mental health counselors in all of our schools.

6. Support upstream policy efforts to prevent homelessness and hunger in our country. National Low Income Housing Coalition is one source of information on these issues. Likewise, for health and homelessness national policy issues, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council is an excellent resource.

Here is a digital storytelling video I made this summer in a StoryCenter workshop. “Honor Their Stories” is about my experience researching and writing a book chapter (in Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City, JHU Press, 2021) on Kikisoblu, also known as Princess Angeline, who was the daughter of Chief Seattle for whom Seattle is named. In this video, I explore the ethical issues I encountered as a white woman trying to understand more of the life, and death, of a Native American woman.

Honor the Stories

Once upon a time, as a child living on land in Virginia where the Powhatan had lived, I dressed as an Indian princess—Pocahontas most likely—and tried to learn to paddle a canoe, silently, “like an Indian.”

Once upon a time, as a young teenager, I was dressed in white flowing robes and a feathered Indian headband, paddled out into the middle of the James River at Jamestown at night (amidst a raging thunderstorm), and brought back to the bonfired beach as the Spirit of Chanco to the amazement of the group of Episcopal Church campers gathered there. Even more bizarrely, I was then blindfolded, placed in the back of a white-painted hearse, and roughly driven around Surrey County as some sort of initiation into the inner circle of place. Writing that now, I see the echoes of the KKK—although, of course, I was the ‘wrong’ gender for that. Ironically, the ‘real’ Chanco was male.

Once upon a time, quite recently in fact, as I was writing a book chapter about Chief Seattle’s daughter, Kikisoblu, also known as Princess Angeline, she began to appear to me in dreams. Her voice whispered—okay, sometimes yelled—over my shoulder as I tried to honor her story. Her story, at least as I have heard it, is layered with the stories of so many other Native American girls and women who have lived with—and in too many cases, died by—gender-based violence. Honor their stories.

My own heritage is white European- American and not Native American. I recognize the danger inherent in cultural appropriation and the long tradition of “stealing stories.” I also recognize the responsibility of using my privilege as a white academic writer to amplify stories and voices.

Abigail Echo-Hawk, Chief Research Officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board, states: “I always think about the data as story, and each person who contributed to that data as storytellers. What is our responsibility to the story and our responsibility to the storyteller? Those are all indigenous concepts, that we always care for our storytellers, and we always have a responsibility to our stories.”

Echo-Hawk goes on to talk about what she decided to do with the results of a CDC-funded 2010 study on the experience of sexual violence by Seattle-area Native American and Native Alaskan women. She states, “The Seattle Indian Health Board had decided to not publish this information because of how drastic the data was showing the rates of sexual violence against Native women. There were fears that it could stigmatize Native women, and that would cause more harm than good. But those women had shared their story, and we had a responsibility to them, and to the story, and I take that very seriously.”

(Sources: “Abigail Echo-Hawk on the art and science of ‘decolonizing data” by Manola Secaira, Crosscut, May 31, 2019 and “Nearly every Native American woman in Seattle survey said she was raped or coerced into sex” by Vianna Davila, The Seattle Times, August 23, 2018).

Homelessness: Native Seattle

E23611D1-BEFE-4A2D-AC70-C0BD4D09CA1E I offer these images of Seattle Pioneer Square from my Skid Road street hauntings, alongside powerful quotes from Coll Thrush’s important book Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing Over Place, second edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). Even though it is not specifically about homelessness, it is essential reading for a deeper understanding of homelessness in Seattle.

“In 1991, The Seattle Arts Commission launched an ambitious program called In Public, a citywide set of installations designed to inspire dialogue about the role of art in everyday life. (…) In Public was edgy and controversial. One of the most confrontational pieces, by Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, was installed in Pioneer Place Park alongside the Chief-of-All-Women pole and a bronze bust of Chief Seattle. Called Day/Night, it consisted of two ceramic panels inscribed with dollar signs, crosses, and text in Whulshootseed and English that read ‘Chief Seattle now the streets are your (sic) home. Far away brothers and sisters still remember you.’ Dedicated to the city’s homeless Indians, Day/Night challenged Seattle’s other place-stories.” pp. 173-4.

Note that the images included above are two photographs, a juxtaposition of a “modern” street art image of Chief Seattle from a Pioneer Square alleyway, as well as one panel of Day/Night in English and reads “Chief Seattle now the streets are our home.” The day I took this photograph the second ceramic panel of the Day/Night art installation was not there. Vandalized? Being repaired?

The second image and quote from Thrush’s Native Seattle have to do with the earliest days of the white American settlers/Pioneers who staked land claims on what is now Seattle’s Pioneer Square—an area that was known as the Little Crossing-Over Place by Chief Seeathl (Seattle). The Little Crossing-Over Place had a source of fresh water and had been an old Indian fishing village. The photograph above is of a Pioneer Square saloon alleyway doorstep (and nighttime sleeping place) located near the Chief Seattle Club, a terrific multi-service agency “providing a sacred space to nurture, affirm and renew the spirit of urban Native people.”

“Indeed, well before the day when Bell, Boren, and Denny decided that Little Crossing-Over Place would be their new home, the indigenous world of the Duwamish, Lakes, and Shilsholes had been irrevocably transformed. The ruined longhouse at Little Crossing-Over Place, overgrown with wild roses (and, according to oral tradition, only one of several that had once stood there), spoke to the abandonment of towns in the wake of epidemics and slave raids. In Whulshootseed, similar words described both houses and human bodies: house posts were limbs, roof beams were spines, walls were skin. Just as sweeping a house and healing a body could be expressed with the same verb, related words spoke of illness and the falling down of a home, and so the ruins were testaments of loss.” p. 38

Below, is a photograph of the native plant, the Nootka Rose, mentioned in the quote above. I took this photograph recently while walking through the University of Washington Botanic Garden’s Union Bay Natural Area— which is built on top of a large Seattle landfill that long ago had been an important Native American fishing village. Thrush concludes his book with these words:

“… in every college diploma earned by an Indian, in the restoration of urban nature and in the willingness to challenge narratives of progress, there is hope that Seattle’s Native past—or, more accurately, its many Native pasts—can be unearthed. These place-stories, linked to urban and Indian presents and futures, will not simply be cautionary tale, smug jokes, or nostalgic fantasies but will be dialogues about the transformations of landscape and power in the city and about strategies for living together humanely in this place.” p. 207