Issue 33: July 2025
Indigenous Walking Tour of Seattle Waterfront: Stop 1
Happy July! It feels wild to think we are already seven months into 2025. I feel like I could’ve written that sentence for every month so far. I just looked back at July 2024’s blog post where I had written about Secretary Haaland’s release of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report Vol. II and summed up what it entailed. Now, looking back at it with everything that has happened, it feels, not hopeless, but obviously set aside. I do want to bring attention to a specific funding elimination for the Institute of American Indian Arts as laid out in the Trump Administration’s big beautiful bill. I know there is a lot going on and that is want the administration wants: to create confusion and overwhelm the system and the collective will of the people, but I would be remiss to not share the following:
For a bit now, I’ve been teasing at writing portions of the Indigenous Walking Tour of the Seattle Waterfront. While I don’t intend on writing to the same completion of the Indigenous Walking Tour of UW, I do think it would be fun to share some stops as you check out the new waterfront this summer. So, for this issue, I want to share Stop 1 of the Indigenous Walking Tour of the Seattle Waterfront as written in its infancy.
Stop 1: A Crossroad of Place Names
The beginning of this tour starts at Colman Dock, operated by Washington State Ferries, near where Alaskan Way bisects Yesler Way. Stand between the two green signposts that display “slu?wil” and “?ulułali.” In the distance, across the car lanes of Alaskan Way, look for the brown sign that says “dzidzilalich.” Triangulate yourself between these three place names.
To travel through a channel.
To travel through a channel by water.
To travel through a channel by water to land at dzidzilalich.
To travel through a channel by water to land at dzidzilalich, now known as Seattle.
Here at Colman Dock, these place names converge the present and ancestral. Millions of people enter and exit the Seattle ferry system each year. They land here from Bainbridge or Bremerton aboard vessels with names like Issaquah, Tacoma, Suquamish, and Kaleetan, which all came from Native words from this region. Odds are that you’ve only been on Washington State ferries named after Native people/tribes/words. These names are just as important as the ones you are between. They may be anglicized and removed from daily discourse, but they exist and continue to be spoken, maybe not by you, but by tribal people in Washington. Every time people arrive through Colman Dock they are moving over the traditional Duwamish village of dzidzilalich or “Little Crossing-Over Place.”
It makes sense that the City of Seattle would construct a dock here. If Native people already had a place that essentially did the same thing, why would settlers work harder to achieve the same outcome? It’s because the land doesn’t have a poker face; it wants to give tells.
The crossroads of place names here give you foundational information of the place known as Seattle. To travel by water was efficient, fast, and accessible. The Salish Sea has hundreds of inlets, rivers, and channels. From dzidzilalich, you could travel just as far as the ferries can. Today, people still do. Canoes are an active part of tribal life. They aren’t relics of the past. They don’t just provide a flexible way of traveling but provide an immense spiritual well. It’s our duty to pass that well to our future generations just as people are reconciling with the return of landscapes to the built environment.
Nearby is Pioneer Square Habitat Beach. Finished in 2024, it is an attempt to return to the original shoreline that staged dzidzilalich. The beach itself is wide enough that it would fill a camera’s focal range for a quick snap but lower your camera and it is still wedged between the industrial creep of towering cranes and a long jetty. But it marks a change. It is the only place where you’d be able to land a canoe through natural means on the Seattle Waterfront.
So, if you are starting your journey here at the Seattle Waterfront, take a moment. How did you get here? How are you in relation to the water? When was the last time you traveled through a channel by water?
The August Issue of Southwest Wawa will include; Stop 2: The Ghost of a Longhouse and Stop 3: Let the cormorant stretch her wings.
Additional note I want to add here for an in-person event you all are invited to
Please join us 5:30-7pm on Tuesday, July 8, to rededicate the Salish Welcome sculpture and recognize its creator, Marvin Oliver. We are honored to welcome once again Duwamish Tribal Chair Cecile Hansen, who gave the keynote address at the 2010 dedication, along with Marvin's son Owen Oliver, Seattle Public Utilities Landscape Restoration Manager Josh Meidav and Jason Huff of the Seattle Office for Arts and Culture as speakers. A master carver, sculptor, and printmaker, Marvin Oliver worked within the traditions of Native American Northwest Coast designs and themes and was an important influence on contemporary Native American art and artists. He described his art as "formulated by merging the spirit of past traditions with those of the present... to create new horizons for the future." Many of his artworks express his ideas and Native American stories about life, time, traditions, ancestors, the universe, and his hope for future generations. He was Professor Emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Native American Art at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture until his death in 2019. Funding for the sculpture came from Neighborhood Matching Fund grant and the City of Seattle One Percent for Arts Program. The design draws inspiration from Coast Salish welcome figures, with one side of the base depicting juvenile salmon heading to sea, and the other side adults returning to spawn. We'll also take this occasion to welcome the last of this year's smolt run as they adjust to salt water and gain weight, and wish them well on their journey to the ocean. If you are able to help us prepare in the few days before the event, please let me know. We hope to see you there!
July 8th
5:30
3419 NW 54th St, Seattle, WA 98107