"We pay you for your land and stay amongst you folks": settler colonialism and indigenous power in Southwest Washington Territory

Abstract

iv Acknowledgments v Introduction: The Contradictory Lives of Stories 1 1. “The Treaty Council that Failed”? The Chehalis River Treaty at the Interface of Colonial Encounter 18 2. Blockhouses as Sites of Imperial Domesticity: Racial Proximities and Biopolitics in Nineteenth Century Washington Territory 61 3. Landscapes of Memory, Evocative Objects, and the Production of Knowledge in Southwest Washington Territory 110 Conclusion: Ecology, Place, and the Ethical Possibilities of Stories 147 Bibliography 153 Introduction: The Contradictory Lives of Stories Near the end of the winter ceremonial season—a time marked by visiting and sacred rituals among local villages of coast Salish peoples—a handful of canoes carrying Lower Chehalis and Chinook Indians skillfully negotiated the braided tidal channels of Grays Harbor and entered the Chehalis River at its mouth. When the evening fell, in the great houses, the people sang to spirit helpers. During the days they raced their canoes under the low-hanging sun with the aid of other spirt helpers who enhanced those vessels and their crews. At a bend in the river less than a mile from their destination, men and women bathed and donned their finest clothes—the men decorating themselves with ostrich feathers imported from Africa, the women in calico, originating, perhaps, from Alabama cotton fields and the humming textile mills of England. All applied red ochre pigment to their faces before disembarking towards the ceremonial grounds. 1 Elsewhere along the coast and throughout the Cowlitz and Chehalis river drainages, hundreds more from dozens of villages poled their canoes towards the same destination. These travelers spoke many different languages and dialects, often finding a common tongue in what came to be known as Chinuk wawa, which the King George and Boston men 2 referred to as Chinook jargon—a language developed through trade circuits in aboriginal times but expanded globally with the opening of the maritime fur trade in the late eighteenth century. In that lingua franca, their gathering was known as a potlatch, a term meaning “to give,” but employed to describe 1 James G. Swan, The Northwest Coast: Or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory (New York: Harper, 1857), 334, 154. 2 Nineteenth-century indigenous peoples on the Northwest Coast referred to Englishmen and Americans, respectively as King George men and Bostons, Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities Around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 80.