Conscious Choice Seattle: Backwoods: The Conservation of Memory

April 2005 | Back Woods

Backwoods: The Conservation of Memory

Why Chief Seattle still matters, especially when Wal-Mart comes calling

by Joe Follansbee

In early 1854, Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Indian tribe gave a speech that inspired environmental and social justice activists more than a century later. The 68-year-old leader met with Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens, who was negotiating the takeover of most Indian lands by the government. Seattle described his people’s relationship to the land, and how their spirits lived even in the rocks and dust:

Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe.

Many people regard Seattle’s speech as an anthem for environmental and social justice. But few recognize he spoke to our need to remember who we are, and our responsibility to hand those memories to our children and grandchildren. By linking memory with the land, Seattle showed us a connection between people who preserve memory and people who preserve the land and preserve human rights. Heritage workers, environmentalists and social-justice activists have much in common, though they rarely recognize it.

Chief Seattle understood the power of this area’s singular landscape to shape its society. Over thousands of years, the mountains, the salt water, the salmon, the November storms, even contact with Europeans, had formed a set of human experiences unique to the Suquamish leader’s environment that expressed itself in his personality.

Though the white settlers, merchants and industrialists who came after him did not view the land in the same light as he did, they appreciated it in their own manner. The land changed them as well. Three-hundred-foot trees with trunks nine feet in diameter forced immigrant loggers from New England to rethink their way of work. The myriad of small harbors on the Pacific Coast, combined with wind patterns that disfavored some types of ships, pushed shipwrights from Scandinavia to design new kinds of sailing vessels constructed of local materials. A distinctive local culture evolved.

Sadly, Chief Seattle knew his way of life was dying. In his speech, later recollected by a settler, Chief Seattle asked for something in exchange. He did not ask for money, or goods, or property. He wanted only the opportunity for his people to visit the graves of family and friends, unmolested.

It was his way of honoring the people who gave his community an identity and made him what he was. By implication, he charged Stevens and his people, our ancestors, to preserve and care for his legacy.

As the Anglo-European community grew, men and women built institutions allowing them to visit, in a symbolic sense, the graves of their own ancestors. Forty years after its founding in 1911, the Seattle Historical Society built the famed Museum of History & Industry. In the 1970s, the historic preservation movement blossomed in Seattle when activists protected Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from “urban renewal.”

Last year, 2,600 heritage volunteers worked more than 250,000 hours in historical societies, museums and special projects, according to the Association of King County Historical Organizations. This year, 16 citizens, including local elected officials, maritime workers, historic preservationists and educators are working on a plan to preserve the region’s maritime history.

The value of conserving history paralleled an emerging value of environmental stewardship. Congress designated the alpine meadows and dense forests around Mount Rainier as the nation’s fifth national park in 1899. Olympic National Park followed in 1938. The ecology movement of the 1960s expressed itself in a modern Northwest philosophy putting conservation on a par with development.

Others sought to create a social-justice landscape that reflected the beauty of the physical landscape. Native canoe carvers are perhaps the clearest example of these links. They pass along boat-building skills to young people. Many carvers, as they explain technique, talk about the earth and the water, and the continuing struggle of many Native people for justice in a white world.

Heritage workers, environmental activists and social-justice activists are three phalanxes in the same army. All three have a common adversary, the inexorable push by a market economy toward efficiency and standardization.

For many conservators of memory, as I like to call heritage workers, the appearance of a new Wal-Mart, Starbucks or McDonalds is a potential assault on the uniqueness of character that defines a community and its individuals. While some national corporations respect local values, others prefer to wipe the slate clean without regard to the effect they might have on human and natural landscapes. Heritage organizations are natural allies of social-justice organizations fighting for fair wages and environmental activists determined that the land be protected.

In 1854, Chief Seattle told Governor Stevens that the settlers’ children and grandchildren would never be alone, even if they worked in solitude in a field or walked by themselves in the woods. The spirits of his people would always be with them. The same is true for the people of today: The metaphorical spirits of our own ancestors live next to us and inside us.

Just as environmentalists speak for an Earth that cannot defend itself, and social justice workers fight on behalf of the weak and helpless, heritage workers believe in the truth of Chief Seattle’s words, that the dead are not powerless.

Joe Follansbee is a member of the board of the Association of King County Heritage Organizations. He has just completed a book tracing the history of the Wawona, an 1897 lumber and fishing schooner.

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