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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."
Note that the images included here 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."
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."
