White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  But you don’t know any of this yet. You only know that you have a man right now and are meant to have a man forever. You leave the fort. You continue rafting. You don’t capsize.

  The music changes. The orchestra sounds happy. It’s January 28, 1856. Rainy. 1,864 miles traveled. You’ve reached Oregon City! You stake a land claim. A man behind a desk gives you acres. Save diary. End game. Are you sure you want to end your game? OK.

  The game is over, but it’s not over-over. You didn’t get what you came for, which was not land: you were the Oregon City you were looking for all along. Seriously, what did you think you were going to get out of this nostalgia exercise? This game was not made for you. Not for the person you want to become, anyway, the descendant of your ancestors. The game was part of the project of whiteness: you were expected to colonize, to strive for an arrival into land theft, to see it as a great adventure, to see the Natives as helpers or hindrances or frightening shadows. When your mother was born, Native people still weren’t welcome in some stores in the white towns near her river. By the time you were born, the hostility had lessened, but whiteness was still working hard to erase you, positioning its desires as the only ones that would lead to a win. This game has only two outcomes: death or settlement.

  You go back to the trail again and again, hoping to meet your relatives. You try an alternate route. You try hunting to excess, filling your wagon with a thousand pounds of meat as a provocation, hoping the Indians might retaliate. You leave as late in the year as possible and stretch out your time on the trail so your arrival at the Columbia Plateau, in a time before treaty making, coincides with the arrival of the salmon runs.

  And this works. In June 1851, you stop in to Fort Walla Walla and see a Native man with a Pendleton blanket in his hands and a drum and basket at his feet. Finally, after miles and miles of no Indians but those on the prairie, here is one of your people.

  He says, “We are Tsinuk traders. Maybe we have something you need. We can do business.”

  “Tell me more,” you say.

  He says, “The Tsinuk live near the western ocean, but we travel far to trade, as far as the plains to the east. To trade well, one must know many tongues. I speak English, French, some Spanish, and six Indian languages—including Tsinuk, of course.”

  “Do you have any advice?” you say.

  “Trade with us. We offer much better deals than the fort trading post here. We can do well for each other.”

  You realize that Tsinuk is Chinook but you’ve never seen it written that way, and you realize that when he says the western ocean he means the mouth of the river because that great water is the center of the universe, so you, an upstreamer from another Chinookan people, trade with this relative. He offers you 5 pounds of bacon for 1 ox, and you accept. The moment is anticlimactic: this is the middle of the apocalypse, after all, and here this man is, trying to make a deal.

  But this is right. The end of the world was long: more than half a century of skin turning to sores, necks snapped by rope, blood pouring from bullet holes, vaginas trespassed by unwashed bodies. Through all that, the people had to find ways to keep living. So they say to your white man mask, “My people will gladly trade with you here and on the road ahead.” A child with a basket says, “Hey, wagon-people! Look here! I have some very good salmon. Maybe you want to trade?” At the Grande Ronde River, “Let us help you cross. The river can be difficult at times, especially after heavy rains. What do you have to offer in exchange for this help?”

  Friendly and cooperative, ones the whites would have liked, not like your actual relatives, whom they hanged, whom they called “siwash,” who did not agree to leave the river.

  You can play this game over and over for the rest of your life if you want to, and maybe you will, until your old computer finally gives up the ghost and you have no way back in. But you won’t find the women you’re looking for. You’ll see them in photos, dressed like the ladies you imagine going to Victorian-era séances, and you’ll look for your face in theirs. You’ll recognize them in movies like The Revenant, which you’ll see in the theater with Philip. You’ll hold your breath during the scene in which white fur traders sidle up to drunk Native women on a cold night at the fort while men speak about pelts. You’ll close your eyes when a French trapper rapes an Arikara woman against a tree. When a Pawnee man is hanged, you’ll gasp. Minutes earlier, he caught snowflakes with his tongue. After the movie, when you are quiet, Philip will tell you it’s just a movie, nothing to get upset about, and you should be glad they were historically accurate and used Native actors.

  Let me tell you: that’s not even right. In reality, there’s no recorded evidence of a Pawnee wife for Hugh Glass, the settler Leonardo DiCaprio played. You know why they gave him one, right? If not, your real quest will be to first figure that out, and then to beat that game. You don’t know what’s history and what’s fiction in the film, but when the unnamed trapper rapes Powaqa, the made-up daughter of a chief, you’ll think of Toussaint Charbonneau, a real trapper who enslaved Sacagawea as his teenage wife. Lewis and Clark arrived later that year and asked Charbonneau to join them and bring his Indian wives. Sacagawea was there at your river when Lewis and Clark pushed their expedition into it. There in your homeland when the party met a principal chief covered in sores and his wife racked with pain. Clark would later write in his journal that the chief’s wife was “a Sulky Bitch.” In The Revenant, the trapper says in French translated into English subtitles, “I need a woman with big tits” and “Bring me the girl, those five horses weren’t free.”

  You were promised to the white men, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep playing. You know you’re going to restart this game until you find what you’re looking for. You know why you’re not done: because—unlike the theater where you’ll see an anguished face that feels like your own, or the bed where you pray for protection before you sleep—here at this window, you don’t even have the option to be a Native woman. Because your man is off the continent, which you haven’t yet been. You’re not ready to stop trying to suck the poison out of yourself. There are snakes everywhere. What do you want to do? Continue as usual? Rest here awhile? Slow down? Increase rations? Use tourniquet/suction method? Use antiseptic on the bite? Give patient lots of exercise? Get advice? None of this will cure you. Listen to your grandma: don’t go where the snakes are. Listen to grandpa: wear Western boots whenever you walk outside. If you must stay on this trail, hope not to be bitten and hope not to drown. Look for the Salish child who will guide you across the river. In exchange, he wants something. Close the window and figure out what you need to give up to reach the other side of this thing that could kill you if you don’t learn to choose well.

  We will guide you across the river in exchange for 1 Winter coat

  Is it a deal?

  8. If I tell you what I want, will you believe I know? What I want is to say it over and over and over: If a man was never to lie to me. Like the speaker, “I dream of the one who could really wound me.” Do you have recurring dreams? I dream I’m in a fortress under siege. I can’t explain dreams. I write books instead. How do you feel about repetition? Do you think a person’s relationship with repetition is culturally shaped? Is that a leading question?

  CENTERLESS UNIVERSE

  All my life,

  since I was ten,

  I’ve been waiting

  to be in

  this hell here

  with you;

  all I’ve ever

  wanted, and

  still do.

  —Alice Notley

  If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.

  I swear I would never leave him.

  —Louise Erdrich, “The Strange People”9

  FROM THE DEPOSITION OF JENNIE Davis (Duwamish), March 28, 1927, US Court of Claims:

  QUESTION. In the old days, when you were a girl, did the Duwamish people use to use all parts of their country?

  ANSWER. Yes.

  QUESTION.
Was it all covered with big timber then?

  ANSWER. Yes.

  QUESTION. Was it well stocked with fish and game and roots that they used to eat, and with berries and everything that you required?

  ANSWER. Yes; plenty of it.

  QUESTION. Did you use to go out and pick berries and dry them for your use?

  ANSWER. Yes.

  QUESTION. Do they let your people go out and get any game now or fish?

  ANSWER. No; they can’t go out and get fish and game or they will be arrested.

  QUESTION. Are your people poor because they got no reservation and no lands?

  ANSWER. Yes.

  QUESTION. Have they suffered hardships because they have been forced away from their own country, with no place to go?

  ANSWER. Yes.

  The spring and summer of 2016, when I was one year sober and knew everything, Facebook and Twitter kept showing me an image of John Trudell’s face with an overlay of his words: “Protect your spirit, because you’re in the place where the spirits get eaten.” I liked it. I loved it. I shared it. I didn’t really think about it.

  Before settler imposition, late May would have been a time for gathering and storing blackberries, clams, and cockles; that year, for me, it was for getting the key to the bridge tower. Two afternoons a week, I would ascend the Fremont Bridge’s northwest tower stairs with dried mango, LaCroix, and a thermos of hot canned soup. The bridge spans the Lake Washington Ship Canal, opening for boats, closing for cars. My perch was a room with windows on all sides, one holding an air conditioner, one holding a neon sign of Rapunzel. Vehicles rumbled over the bridge: cars, trucks, buses, the Ride the Ducks land-into-water vehicles.

  Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture and the Seattle Department of Transportation selected me as the bridge’s writer-in-residence, a role that would not actually involve residing. My task that summer, according to the call for applications, was to occupy the bridge tower a few afternoons a week and “undertake an in-depth exploration of the historic bridge’s role and meaning for the city of Seattle and create written materials in response to this residency … The writing shall represent or illuminate some aspect of the bridge and the bridge’s history, be it real or metaphorical.”

  I wasn’t going to apply. I had nothing to say about a bridge. I felt that bridges were fine. I liked walking over the one between the university and Madison Park, but there’s no narrative tension in liking. A bridge never did anything to me.

  I needed the money, though—ten thousand dollars for a few months’ work. My salary at my half-time job was twenty-five thousand, I was living in an expensive city, and money was running out. I realized I had something to say about a bridge.

  My application letter said:

  I propose to write an essay about the role of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in the transformation of the Little Crossing-Over Place into the city that is central to my work, life, and relationships. The non-Native settlement of the shores of Lake Washington drove away a'yahos, a shape-shifting serpent spirit that lived in the lake and in the sky above it. A'yahos caused landslides and was feared and avoided by the Duwamish people, and though it was known to be malevolent, it was a respected source of personal spirit power. I am interested in the role of the creation of the ship canal and the changes it brought to the lake in driving a'yahos away.

  After my interview, selection, and informal orientation, I received a key tagged FREMONT BRIDGE and instructions to call the bridge operator before arriving and leaving because of an alarm on the door. On the first day, the operator asked, “Will you call me when you go anywhere and when you come back?” like my first long-term boyfriend always asked in high school.

  I looked upon shimmering water, rustling trees, and pale sky. The ship canal was a straight, wide, concrete-edged street for sailboats (the Land Rovers of the sea), superyachts (the tricked-out RVs of the sea), police boats, barges, and Argosy cruises packed with tourists pointing phones at the bridge. Most boats were white; most people on most boats were white; most barges carried porta-potties and garbage; some white boats carried smaller white boats; other boats were pushed or pulled by tugboats; one tugboat was labeled BEARCAT. I knew the carving of this canal was a mark announcing white dominance over the breathing, squirming land, but my eyes deceived me: I only saw beauty I wanted to take in forever.

  I began to worry about the vastness of this project that had seemed so manageable when I was spewing words into an application window: I’d promised a (limited) history of Seattle, but I was not a historian; a personal essay, but I was writing it for the government. I wasn’t sure how much of my pain I wanted to make into a deliverable for them, even though they had claimed me generations ago.

  The water below me seemed like the kind of place where the dangerous beings of old Cowlitz stories lurked, waiting for a person to approach so they could attack. I was most drawn to those stories. The dangerous beings were never explained; they were simply dangerous. Maybe there were messages about humanity and evil in their movements, or maybe there was no sense at all, no narrative motivation, just desire for rupture. I didn’t see anything in the water, but I felt something; then again, I always had.

  Before Seattle, there were steep hills, bent rivers, tideflats, lakes, bogs, spirit powers, forests, people, longhouses, and prairies forming a system of fluctuation and movement of time and land. Then the bostons—the word people up and down this coast used for white men—turned places into property: terminals, shipyards, mills, railroad beds, dumps, cesspools, homesteads, parks, streets, wharves, trestles, bridges, canals. The boston men dredged, regraded, dumped, removed, sanitized, engineered, straightened, renamed, mined, seized, settled, procreated. Where they saw useless, unsightly, progress-impeding land and water, they imagined real estate: navigable waters, land to build upon.

  In 1978, city engineer Roy W. Morse wrote, “It is apparent that the first settlers could not have envisioned the great city that would grow on and spill beyond their claims on the shores of Elliott Bay. Nor could they have foreseen the significant landscape surgery needed to mold the townsite for the future safety and economic well-being of its people.” Those early city engineers, he said, “translated the problems into effective solutions.” The implied problem: land the Duwamish people had been in relationship with for ten thousand years. Solution turned out to mean:

  Removal: In 1855, Chief Si'ahl and subchiefs Ts'huahntl, Now-a-chais, Ha-seh-doo-an, on behalf of the Duwamish people, signed the Treaty of Point Elliott, establishing a government-to-government relationship between the United States and the signatory tribes and legally recognizing the tribes as sovereign nations. This treaty’s terms include tribal cession of the land from the summit of the Cascade Range to the east, the western shore of Puget Sound to the west, Point Pully (approximately the latitude of the current location of the airport) to the south, and the Canadian border to the north. That land has become some of the most valuable in the United States. Small tracts were reserved from this ceded territory to establish four reservations, but no land was retained by the Duwamish in their territory. The treaty specified that tribes would retain their rights to fish, hunt, and gather roots and berries. I refuse to say that the tribes received these rights and reservations in exchange for anything. What they were promised had already been theirs.

  In 1865, three weeks after the town of Seattle’s original incorporation, Ordinance 5 was passed, decreeing that “no Indian or Indians shall be permitted to reside, or locate their residences on any street, highway, lane, or alley or any vacant lot in the town of Seattle,” with exceptions for the Native people present for employment. White progress demanded the labor of these people they saw as troublesome, unsavory, and indispensable: settler construction would’ve been impossible without Duwamish labor at Yesler’s mill, which spit out boards to build the new town. When Seattle’s government was dissolved in 1867 and reincorporated in 1869, the ban on Native residents was not renewed. But settlers would keep them out by burning
villages.

  Assimilation: The Indian Homestead Act of 1875 gave Native people the settler-legal ability to own land if they agreed to live like white people, no longer tribal members. This willingness had to be proven by white endorsements like “We, David Denny and Luke McRedmond, do solemnly swear that we are well acquainted with Bill Sbedzuse and know that he is an Indian formerly of the Duwamish tribe—that he was born in the United States—that he has abandoned his relations with that tribe and adopted the habits and pursuits of civilized life—that he is over the age of twenty one years.”

  Surveying: In 1863 and 1881, the Northern Pacific Railway identified steep hills, lapping tides, and flood-prone rivers that would pose construction problems. To reduce flooding, surveyors proposed a sea-level canal between Lake Washington and Elliott Bay. A city surveyor was appointed to plan the flattening of the land’s natural contours into a uniform grade system for the streets. “Surveying” was not neutral learning; it was cataloging for demolition.

  Regrading: I picture a topographic map’s contour lines sliding apart as Seattle’s steep grades were pushed down and its low points tugged up. In reality, millions of cubic yards of hard blue clay, sand, gravel, glacial till, and soil were removed, and in the seventeen years between regrades, a steep cliff was left to be cut down later. It’s estimated that between 1910 and 1929, over one-eighth as much earth was moved in Seattle’s regrades as was moved to build the Panama Canal. Some of it became fill for swamplands and tideflats; some was shaped into what was then the world’s largest manufactured island; some was dumped into deep bay waters.