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A Parade Of Pretenders

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COURTESY OF DAN KERLEE THEN: Coll Thrush's new book "Native Seattle" includes this scene of "The Tilikums of Elttaes" from the Golden Potlatch of 1912. His caption notes that parade organizers "enthusiastically adopted 'savage' symbolism for their displays of civic boosterism." The word tilikum is Chinook Indian trade talk for humans. Applied generally, it means those who are not chiefs -- common or insignificant persons. COURTESY OF JEAN SHERRARD NOW: Lined with bleachers in 1912, Fourth Avenue has long since been developed as a typical Denny Regrade street lined with apartments, condos, small businesses and a few theaters. This view looks north across Lenora Street.

THE SEATTLE TIMES called the 1912 Golden Potlatch — Seattle's summer festival — a "triumph of symbolism." The multi-day spectacle was also sensational with fireworks, aero-plane exhibitions — "1,500 feet above the waterfront and at nearly 60 miles per hour" — illuminated water pageants, band concerts and long parades filled end-to-end with fanciful floats and "barbaric grotesqueries" like these marching ersatz totems.

The 1912 Golden Potlatch was considered a great improvement over the festival's first installment in 1911. It was "Ben Hur to 1911's Uncle Tom's Cabin." The Golden part of the festival name was a nostalgic reference to Seattle's many turn-of-the-century years as the "jumping-off place" for the gold rushes to Alaska and the Yukon. So the festival's semantic "triumph" was, to quote The Times again, "a collaboration of two great independent themes which, though not at all similar, easily were fused in the joint definition of the Potlatch's significance."

What are we to make of that part of our abiding Native American history that is urban, and also what of the recurring Euro-American urge to "go native"? With Coll Thrush's new book, "Native Seattle, Histories from the Crossing-Over Place" (University of Washington Press), we get often wise and witty interpretations of urban Indians of all kinds. It is a surprising subject, which has been more often neglected than not in the many retellings of Seattle history — mine included.

Thrush got his Ph.D at the University of Washington, and is now an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. In his preface he credits local historian David Buerge for inspiring his interest in Seattle's indigenous history.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.