Native Seattle

Every American city is built on Indigenous land, but few advertise it like Seattle. In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history; usually, Indigenous people appear at the point of contact, participate in violent conflict and/or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. Native Seattle explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indigenous people and cities—and thus Indigenous and urban histories—are mutually exclusive and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other.

 

Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native and settler. In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of Indigenous Seattle, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region. This updated tenth-anniversary version of Native Seattle brings the Indigenous story to the present day and puts the movement to recognize Seattle’s Native American past and present into a broader context.