Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

The largest city in the Pacific Northwest is known to most by the name given by the original white settlers of the city – Seattle – but known to the local speakers of Lushootseed as dᶻidᶻəlalič. Since Anglo-American settlement in the 1850s, the city has prided itself on its ideals of progress and its capitalist industries. The Anthropocene ideals of capitalism and industry reshaped the area’s landscapes and waterways, especially in the creation of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Ballard Locks. This effort, led by Hiram M. Chittenden, and undertaken by the U.S. Corps Army of Engineers, was viewed by Chittenden as a utilitarian necessity for the economic future of the Seattle-area, regardless of “sentimental interests” of any of the native Salish speakers (Chittenden 1910). These “sentimental interests” included the history and stories of a 10,000-year relationship (Rasmussen et al. 2015) between the landscapes and ecologies of the Seattle-area. and the Salish speaking inhabitants. Muckleshoot elder Florence “Dosie” Star Wynn describes trips with her own elders where they “named all the rocks. The hills… they had names for every one of them”. (Wynn 1994) This expressed and embodied relationship was disrupted by the Capitolocene mandate of industrial progress, creating a haunted Anthropocene landscape (Haraway 2015), where non-human life remains a shadow of its former self in the run-down remains of hubris that destroyed millennia of memory.