This week, we are talking about Seattle. Not the place specifically, but the formidable indigenous leader of the early 19th century. A warrior, a diplomat, a peacemaker, and an eloquent orator. His defense of Native American rights culminated in a speech that would go down in history and ultimately lead to his legacy as the namesake for what is now one of the most famous cities in the world. So in this episode, I want to know, who is Chief Seattle? Welcome to America, a history podcast. I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by a professor of history at the University of British Columbia with a teaching focus on indigenous and settler colonial histories. His books include the acclaimed Native Seattle, which we'll link to in the show notes as well. It's a real privilege to welcome Cole Thrush.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining me. I think I said to you before we started recording, this is one of those subjects on the podcast that kind of jumped out to me when I was doing some kind of initial research. And I have to admit, no, absolutely nothing about. So I can't wait to get into this.

Great.

So I wonder if you could tell me what we know about Chief Seattle's origins, early life, and his kind of path to leadership.

So, yeah, Chief Seattle, his proper name is Seattle. That's where we get that from. From the indigenous language that's known as the Shootseed, which is spoken in the Seattle area and the sort of Puget Sound area. He was born in the late 18th century and died in 1866. And so his life really saw the beginning of European presence in his homelands and home waters and all the way through to the rise of urban settlements, including the one that would be named after him. So his early history is a little murky. He is thought to have been a child when George Vancouver first arrived in 1792. So Vancouver and his crew were the first Europeans in this area, and Siat was believed to have been a young person when that happened and that he was there. And so we don't know a whole lot about that encounter. Vancouver didn't mention him by name, of course, so he seems to have been there across this really wide transition from the first exploration all the way to full blown settler colonialism.

I guess that's just one of the broader problems in Native American history generally is that historical records on the history of particular Native Americans is probably really lacking, right?

Sometimes, yes, particularly in earlier periods and colonial periods. But by the 19th century, indigenous people in the United States, for example, are some of the most surveilled people around. And so we often have good census records and other kinds of records where people can go back and reclaim their genealogies and so on. But for these earlier periods, it can be really tricky.

What are the kind of agreeable sources of truth on Chief Seattle?

There are sort of two bodies of knowledge about him. One is the indigenous oral tradition, which is actually quite a conservative phenomenon. And doesn't. It doesn't change as quickly as I think a lot of people assume it does. It's actually quite robust. And then the other is the early pioneer sources, sort of the founders of Seattle and other settlements around that area. So those are sort of the two bodies of material that we can draw on. Both of them have some imprecision to them, but they also are quite rich at the same time.

And so, please educate me. What tribes did Chief Seattle come from?

Yeah, he's described typically as being both Suquamish, which means people of the clear water, and Duwamish, which means the inside people, because they live sort of in off the salt water. And his father was from the Suquamish and his mother was from the Duwamish. And these are related communities. They're across Puget Sound from each other. Lots of kin connections, trade connections, political connections, and so on. And so one of the challenges is that tribe is not an Indigenous concept in this part of the world. That's really something that was layered onto Indigenous people by colonial law. And so in central Puget Sound, people would be organized primarily by village or town, which then would be organized into larger kind of alliances along, say, a river or what. And so Siasht came from two of those communities.

So were there any significant cultural differences between those communities?

I wouldn't say that there were very significant differences. They would have had slightly different landscapes that they inhabited. So the Duwamish lived along the river that's named after them. And so they were a little bit more of a riverine people, whereas the Suquamish lived primarily on saltwater shores. So they had slightly different ecological settings, but a lot of cultural similarities. They would have spoken the same languages, maybe with a slightly different dialect, but very similar.

And as he grew up, did he spend more of his time in one particular community? And why?

Well, it's really hard to know in his young life where he was. There's even questions about where he was born. There are several different theories about that, depending on who you talk to. And so he really only comes into focus in the 1840s with the fur trade, and then especially in the 1850s with the founding of the city that would be named after him. So that earlier period of his life is a little bit vague.

It's interesting because maybe I'm being naive here, but I've always assumed that Indigenous people are quite. They don't travel much beyond their tribe, so it would have been fairly easy to pinpoint roughly where he was born.

Yeah, it's just that there are different claims that are being made.

Right.

About the specific place. But the. You know, the. The region is really tied together by these wide networks of trade. Everyone would have been multilingual. There are political differences, military conflicts, all this kind of stuff. So it's an incredibly dynamic and rich region.

What was the political landscape like in that region? Because Seattle itself incredibly close to the Canadian border. So I'm wondering kind of how that worked at the time.

Yeah, I mean, Seatth led an expedition against a people known as the Cowichan, who are on Vancouver island in, I believe, the 1830s. That was a pretty robust military victory on the part of the. The people that Siyash was with. It's called the Battle of Maple Bay, I believe. And, yeah, the region is really densely inhabited, and there's a larger grouping of peoples called the Coast Salish that reaches across the B.C. washington border. And so that 49th parallel is really a modern imposition into kind of a shared cultural space of many, many different communities speaking different languages, but all sort of related in a larger network.

And of course, probably important to note that Indigenous communities were thriving hundreds of years before borders, national borders were put in place. So probably didn't make an awful lot of difference to them. Did.

Didn't at first. But eventually, as Canada and the U.S. become more established as federal states, that border becomes harder and harder to cross.

We've discussed in several previous episodes about the treatment of Native Americans, particularly during that time as the US And Canada became very separate nations. How did the treatment of Native Americans differ on either side of the border?

Yeah, that's a good question. There's a bit of a misperception that Canada has this kind of kinder, gentler colonialism than the United States. And while it's true that outright military violence was less common in what's now Canada, the end result has been largely the same. Both countries engaged in genocide just in somewhat different ways. Between Washington State and British Columbia, though, one of the Biggest differences is that in British Columbia, there are virtually no treaties, whereas Washington is all covered by treaties. And that's made a real difference legally. There's a lot of things going on in the two spaces that are quite different because of those different legal structures. But I sort of go back and forth, like in my teaching as well as in my writing, between saying these two countries are both profoundly different from each other, but also, they sure look alike.

Yeah. Okay. So do we know much about when Chief Seattle? Obviously not chief at the time, but when he first encountered colonialists.

Yeah, so he did. His first encounter would have been with George Vancouver and his crew in 1792.

Yeah.

Then the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1840s, which was further south in Puget Sound, near what's now Olympia, Washington, the state capital, and then really engaged with the folks who founded Seattle in 1851, the. What are called often the Denny party. And he played a very significant role in the early years of Seattle's founding, And that's indicative or indicated by the renaming the place after him.

So tell us what that kind of journey looked like for him. Kind of rising up the ranks in his. In his community and eventually kind of leading it.

Yeah, I mean, he clearly was a really powerful person, both physically. He was described as being over six feet tall, which was quite tall for settlers, certainly at the time. And politically, very astute, a great orator. He was known to carry thunder as a spirit power, which is a power of oratory. And so he was really a highly charismatic figure by all accounts, and really demanded attention from both indigenous people and settlers alike, which at times made him a bit of a lightning rod, I'm sure.

Yeah. And so at what point did he rise to prominence and, you know, come to lead his people?

Yeah, it's a little. Again, it's a little murky prior to the 1850s, but certainly it seems that by the 1830s, he was ensconced as a pretty powerful leader. And again, we don't have the. There are no sort of colonial written records for that period. So a lot of it comes down through oral tradition or what settlers heard about him from other indigenous people. So it's, again, a little murky.

And, you know, we'll get into the. I guess, the rather unique relationship that he had with settlers. But considering the time that this was all happening, you know, early 19th century, were there any attempts to enslave them by the settlers?

No. There was slavery on the Northwest coast in the indigenous tradition, very profoundly different from American slavery, but no settlers at least in the Seattle area, never officially enslaved indigenous people. But there were coercive labor practices. Part of that. That's part of what led to what we now call the first treaty war in the 1855, 1856 winter season. And some of that had to do with violent coercive labor practices forcing people to work and so on. So it wasn't slavery, but it was part of the mix.

And so thinking about then, the interactions between the settlers and the native communities, do we know much about exactly what happened and how it developed into, I guess we could say a somewhat kind of diplomatic relationship?

Yeah. When the so called Denny party arrives at a place called, that they called Alki Point, Alki means eventually in the local trade language, the Chinook Wawa, when they arrived there in 1851, there were 24 of them and several hundred of indigenous people on that point gathered. And so they, the Denny party understood from the beginning that this was indigenous territory. And in fact, the small settlement that would be named Seattle wouldn't have survived without indigenous labor. And so Siaf and other indigenous leaders really played a significant role in facilitating the creation of that small settlement, or at least facilitating its survival.

How did it transpire that they were able to figure out a way to kind of work together? It was a rare thing, right?

Well, it's really common in indigenous and colonial histories for indigenous people to see opportunity in the newcomers. Obviously, there's a lot of violence that happens there, the epidemics that happen and so on. But for some indigenous political leaders, these newcomers with their new resources, their new political connections, economic connections and so on, are seen as a potential resource in and of themselves. And so it's quite common to see indigenous leaders kind of casting their lot with these newcomers as a way to extend their own political and economic power. And we can see Seoch doing that.

How did the Europeans respond initially to that? Because that must have been someone of his stature and his prominence must have seemed quite threatening or intimidating, at least at first.

Yeah, it's interesting. That's not something that comes across in kind of a dominant way in the sources. There is a real sense of, I would sometimes even say friendship between some of the settler families. And Siash in particular, there's also, you know, there is violence that happens between settlers and indigenous people, but sort of at the upper echelons of society on both sides, there's a lot of interaction going on. You know, Siyash is facilitating, providing labor to early settlers in Seattle and so on. So it's a sort of mutual Relationship which gets Siash in trouble during the treaty war because he's seen by some as kind of a traitor.

I guess I was thinking just that. How much did Siyash honour the traditions of his community by doing that? Or was he very much forging a new path in these diplomatic relations with settlers?

Yeah, I don't think that we have to have a choice between the two. There's a long history of diplomacy on the Northwest Coast. That's a time honored tradition. And as I said, it was really common up and down the coast for Indigenous leaders to try to make use of these new people in their territory. So I don't think it's a question of denying his people's tradition. It's actually an extension of it. It's just that other Indigenous leaders made other choices.

Yeah. And so how did his tribe's relationship with others perhaps change as their relationship with the settlers kind of grew?

Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, the first Treaty War in 1855 and 56 really highlighted some of the different strategies that Indigenous leaders in the region were using. So people like Siaf were. I wouldn't say they were on the side of the settlers, but they were not taking up arms against them. Whereas you have other leaders from other communities, like the Snoqualmie tribe or the Nisqually tribe, actually taking up arms against settlers. And that has a lot to do with land encroachment. That has a lot to do with coercive labor practices. And that has a lot to do with the treaty proceedings themselves that are happening the year before.

But at some point, there has to be a decision to trust the other side. And that was probably one of the biggest barriers to peace between both sides when you look at the history of kind of Native and settler relations. So do we know if there were any particular kind of events or turning points at which they kind of realized that they could trust each other?

Well, I think the treaties were part of that. The Point Elliot Treaty, which is the treaty that covers the Seattle area and the SIAT was a signatory to that, was an opportunity for a conversation between the territorial government and Indigenous leaders. And some signed, some refused to sign. Some saw it as a protection of rights, others saw it as a giving up of rights. So those conversations that happened within Indigenous communities are largely invisible in the archive, but we know that there were really robust codes, conversations and quite heated ones happening within communities about how to deal with this new population that was clearly on the move and growing quickly.

Yeah. And presumably Chief Seattle's exceptional ability to as an orator would have put him in good stead when it came to having those difficult negotiations with the other side.

Absolutely.

You mentioned the treaty of Point Elliot and the treaty war, but specifically, when we look at Chief Seattle, how critical was he individually in that progress being made?

Yeah, I mean, he only lived for 11 years after the treaty, and he was quite elderly at that point. So I think his political power was waning by that point. It was mostly in the past by then, but certainly he was a significant figure in the treaty process. And again, that power of thunder that he carried would have been part of that story, and the understanding that other people would have had of him as an orator would have been really important as well. And so he clearly plays a really, really significant role, and it has a legacy that carries down into the present, as we'll talk about, I'm sure.

Yeah. And it perhaps was more significant that he was later in life when. When all of this happened, because actually, that. That influence that he had and that. That. That stature that he had would have. Would have gone a long way. I mean, particularly this is a time when settlers and, you know, Americans now were seeing Native Americans as. As, you know, savages, in their words. So what, I guess. Why was it that they were able to acknowledge and even accept Chief Seattle as an equal?

Yeah, well, you know, I wonder if equal is exactly the right word. And it sort of depends, I think, probably, on who you would have talked to in the moment. But, you know, CF was often perceived not as a savage, but as a noble savage. Certainly after his death, he was portrayed that way as this kind of tragic figure, doomed figure, but someone who was honorable and noble and so on. That's a stereotype as well. But it. But it also really speaks to the real relationships that he had built with many settlers, particularly the elite settlers in and around Seattle.

Do you think that he recognized the inevitability of the situation and knew that a compromise was better than no compromise? When, you know, you see what was happening around the country and hearing about kind of the atrocities, you know. Yeah.

There's a question about the extent to which he would have known about what was happening across the country, but certainly he could see what was happening in his region and his territory. And so it is a question of reserving rights, maybe more than compromising, and making sure that his people would be taken care of as he approached the end of his life.

I read in my research for this, and it seems almost too remarkable to be true, that in the years following all of this. That he was actually banished from what is now Seattle. Is that true?

Yeah. When Seattle incorporated in the 1860s as a town, one of its first ordinances decreed that indigenous people could not live within the town limits unless they were employed and housed by white people. So there's two things going on there. One, the ordinance is saying, we don't want these people here, but the ordinance is also saying, but we need them, because indigenous women were keeping house for settler women. People were clearing land. They were bringing the mail. They were fishing and hunting and providing food to settlers. So settlers really needed indigenous people. And so you can see that in the ordinance, this really deep ambivalence. But, yeah, the ordinance was essentially an expulsion act with this kind of caveat.

I don't know if it's hypocrisy or if it's just, you know, appropriation, but naming Seattle after a Native American and then not even allowing that person, let alone his whole tribe, to stay, surely at the time, they knew that that was ridiculous, right?

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of debate about what Seatth thought of the town being named after him. And it's not clear. I don't think he ever made a public statement about it. And, in fact, he kind of drops off the radar in the 1860s as he moves back across Puget Sound to the Suquamish community and spends the rest of his life there. And when he dies in 1866, it's not commented on in the press at all. And no settlers attend his grave when he's buried and so on. So it's kind of a sad ending in a way, but really speaks to this idea that settlers are thinking that they can move on without indigenous people. And one of the things that I always talk about, about treaties is that for settlers, treaties are perceived as the end of something, solving the, quote, Indian problem, or whatever, the land question. Whereas for indigenous peoples, treaties tend to be the beginning of something, the beginning of a new relationship. And so you can see that in all of this, that the settlers are like, okay, we're done. He's deceased. We don't need them anymore. We can move on into the future. When that's actually not true.

And actually, that difference in mindset between both sides is incredibly important and has probably fueled a lot of that conflict, which is born out of just coming at completely different ends of the spectrum. Right?

That's right. That's right. Because the Treaty of Point Elliot wasn't really recognized in practice until the 1970s. And so. And that's so that's 120 years later. Because for a lot of settlers it was a thing of the past and indigenous people were just going to just disappear and so on, or at least be irrelevant. And that's proven not to be true at all.

Yeah, I mean, you could say that. You know, when you look back at history about the treatment of not just indigenous peoples, but any kind of non white community is really in America, that this, this sense that equality has never really meant equality.

Yeah. The late 19th century is the height of Asian exclusion, all these other kinds of policies, the rise of the Klan after Reconstruction and so on. So by, you know, he didn't live to see a lot of that. But it's not long after his death, a generation or so after his death, that we really reach a nadir of race relations in the US So tell.

Me about his speech because this has really stood out to me when I've been doing some research about Chief Seattle was kind of the moment, I think that he was probably immortalized in history. So what is the speech?

Yeah, so as we've talked about, he had thunder as one of his powers and he was, as we've said, a really powerful orator. And so during treaty negotiations he is said to have given a speech that basically establishes his people's relationship with the earth, that the earth is sacred, that his people have relationships with all parts of the earth, and that that needs to be respected in these treaty proceedings. The problem with the speech though is that it wasn't written down until the 1880s by a settler. And it really traffics in tropes of indigenous disappearance. In one version of the speech, for example, he basically says, you know, my people are going to disappear, but will haunt you, which is a long standing trope in American literature and American imagination, that indigenous people will disappear and remain only as ghosts. So there's a lot of debate about that. He was known to have given other speeches that were much different from, from that, that we're much more focused on, you know, these new people that are here. We need to keep an eye on them, we need to stand up for our rights and hold them account for what they've promised in these treaties. So there's. I think it's interesting that the sort of doomed, tragic speech is the one that has become so immortal.

Could there be an element of the very fact that it has been probably fabricated and tweaked with every version that gets distributed, that actually in doing that it leans into the sensitivities of the people reading it, which Somehow, you know, makes it more palatable.

That's right.

And that's why it sort of lasted.

That's right. I mean, for example, in the 1970s, there was a new version of the speech that added in commentary on the buffalo and on the railroad, neither of which Siast would have ever seen. The railroad was completed after his death, and he probably never saw a buffalo. And so it has everything. The speech often tells us more about settlers than it does about him. That's what's interesting about it and their sort of wishes and fantasies about indigenous people. At the same time, the speech has been a really powerful tool for indigenous people, especially in this region, to really draw attention to their relationships with territory and so on. So it's a very complicated thing where it's. It is actually it has proven to be really useful for indigenous people and tribes and nations to get the attention of settlers. And so the speech has functioned in a lot of different ways. It's an exceptionally complex thing.

Yeah. Are there any kind of measurable consequences that we can take from that speech to sort of understand its impact?

Yeah, I mean, we can think about the second treaty war, for example, that happens in the late 60s and early 70s, also known as the Fish wars, when indigenous people in the Seattle area were being routinely arrested for exercising their treaty rights to fish and so on. And they finally brought a court case called U.S. v. Washington in 1975. It was decided that they, in fact, had a treaty right to half of the harvestable salmon, which was a seismic event legally. And finally, the treaties were being recognized, and the speech kind of was floating around in that period. And really, environmentalists were very fond of it. People saw it as a way to think about indigenous people as actually perhaps more moral when it came to the environment than settler society. So it was a really powerful tool during that second treaty war.

Who made that decision?

The legal decision?

Yeah, yeah.

It was a judge called George Bolt. He was a federal judge, and it's often called the Bolt decision. And it just really catalyzed so much in this region. So the now federally recognized tribes, which do not include the Duwamish people, now have sort of regulatory control over salmon and along with state and federal authorities and are very much co managers of the salmon populations now.

That's incredible. But has that become the rule or was it just a legal exception?

Well, it's certainly become the rule here in this part of the world, in the Seattle area, Western Washington, for example. And it was part of a broader pattern in the 1970s of a movement towards self determination and the recognition of Indigenous rights. And so it's very much of its time. And now 50 years on, as I said, it's been really linked to the resurgence of Indigenous culture all throughout the region.

And so when we look back at the legacy of Chief Seattle, you know, it's a name that I'm sure many people haven't heard of, but one that's had a huge amount of impact on the future of, you know, Native Americans in the country. How was he commemorated or remembered?

Well, certainly there are people who claim descent from him, who are descended from him, who have a certain degree of public stature in the Seattle area. He does have descendants here still, and he's still a controversial figure, though, for some. Some tribes and some people in tribal communities around the region, because he was seen as something of a collaborator. But by others, he's seen as a really powerful, important ancestor. So his story continues to be very complicated.

What is the rationale behind those who may still see him in a bad light?

Well, I think it has to do with taking a more radical position against the negative aspects of settler colonialism. Whereas he tried to work with settlers, and so that's kind of a perennial debate within any political movement. Do you collaborate? Do you resist? What do those words even mean? Particularly in a period. We have to remember that the period he lived in was the height of the epidemics that were killing large numbers of indigenous people. The communities were really in disarray in some ways as the settlers were pouring in. And so people had to make really difficult decisions, I guess.

Yeah, that is a tough decision. It kind of goes back to what we were saying before. You can either work with these people and try and save your tribe to as much of an extent as you can, or you can resist and potentially all be killed. That was a choice faced by many.

Yeah, but some of the tribes or the communities that resisted actually had their rights protected more. So, for example, one of the communities that fought during the Treaty War, they're called Muckleshoot. They're a tribe in my hometown near Seattle, actually used to work for them, and they were able to get a reservation out of the Treaty War, even though they had taken up arms. Whereas the Duwamish Chief Seattle's own people still are not federally recognized by the government. So they don't have a reservation. And as far as the government is concerned, they are not indigenous people. They just have some indigenous ancestry. So there's a real ironic outcome there.

Yeah, definitely. And it does have to bring into question maybe the significance of Chief Seattle's contributions when the Duwamish are still fighting for federal recognition. Right.

That's right. And the speech that he's associated with and his stature generally are always used in Duwamish arguments for federal recognition. And so what happens is that you've got, again, two strategies. Some Indigenous people, as Seattle grew around them, stayed and married in and so on, and others left for area reservations. And so there are Duwamish people in many places, including up here in British Columbia, people of Duwamish ancestry. And so it's, again, a very complicated story. There are no easy answers in this history. There are no easy conclusions to be drawn.

Yeah. And probably worth acknowledging that it's easy to look back on history through a white gaze. And history is written by the victors. Right. So could it be that actually Chief Seattle is celebrated more by settlers and simply because he complied? And there's no. There's no. Not harsh way of saying that.

Yeah, I. I think complied might be an overstatement, but he certainly is remembered very fondly in settler society in Seattle. Lots of, you know, memorials and monuments and various things to him, you know, books written about him and so on. So, you know, he continues, you know, as he's thought to have said, that he would haunt the city. He kind of is. He's like Seattle's premier ghost story in many ways. You know, his words are still kind of hovering over the city.

He's a fascinating figure, not least because of, you know, how, I guess, contentious his legacy is. And I just wonder, what do you think his story tells us about that larger context of not just 19th century Native American history, but the experiences of Indigenous peoples at that time as well.

Yeah, I think, for me, his continued relevance really highlights how unfinished colonialism is. It never fully worked. Indigenous peoples are still here. And I think the ongoing importance of his story really highlights that. The Duwamish, recognition or not, are still here. The Suquamish are still here. The Muckleshoot are here. All these nations that are really powerful. And a really good example of this is the redevelopment of the Seattle waterfront just in the last few years. They've taken the main road along the waterfront there called Alaskan Way, and they've given it a formal second name, which is Zidselalic, which is the name of the Duwamish community that Seattle was built on top of. Means the little crossing over place. And for me, that's a perfect metaphor for how this history is unfinished.

It's a great note to end on. And I think there's a lot more to unpack from this conversation that I think we're going to have to do in several other episodes. But I can't thank you enough for joining me to start that. And for anyone listening, if you want to find out more, we'll put links to everything that's been mentioned in the show notes as well, so you can check that out. But Cole, if anyone wants to connect with you, where can they do that?

They can go to my website, colthrush.com c o l l t h r u s h.com and find out about the other books I've written. Native Seattle was just my first book, so I've written three others since then. And yeah, I'm happy to hear from people and can get back to them if they've got questions and so on.

Wonderful. Thank you. And to those of you listening, if you do enjoy the podcast, make sure wherever you're listening to this, that you give us a rating and a review. And make sure you click Follow as well, because then all future episodes will just appear in your feed. And if you really love what we do, there are links in the show notes as well to support the show and everyone involved in making it will be super, super grateful about that. But thank you all so much for listening. Thanks again to Cole and goodbye.