Western Washington University Western CEDAR WWU Graduate School Collection WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship 2014 "We pay you for your land and stay amongst you folks": settler colonialism and indigenous power in Southwest Washington Territory Kaden M. (Kaden Mark) Jelsing Western Washington University Follow this and additional works at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Jelsing, Kaden M. (Kaden Mark), ""We pay you for your land and stay amongst you folks": settler colonialism and indigenous power in Southwest Washington Territory" (2014). WWU Graduate School Collection. 390. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/390 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship at Western CEDAR. It has been accepted for inclusion in WWU Graduate School Collection by an authorized administrator of Western CEDAR. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “We pay you for your land and stay amongst you folks”: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Power in Southwest Washington Territory By Kaden Mark Jelsing Accepted in Partial Completion Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Kathleen L. Kitto, Dean of the Graduate School ADVISORY COMMITTEE Chair, Dr. Christopher C. Friday Dr. Kevin A. Leonard Dr. Jennifer Seltz Master’s Thesis In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master’s degree at Western Washington University, I grant to Western Washington University the non-exclusive royalty-free right to archive, reproduce, distribute, and display the thesis in any and all forms, including electronic format, via any digital library mechanisms maintained by WWU. I represent and warrant this is my original work, and does not infringe or violate any rights of others. 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Kaden Mark Jelsing December 1, 2014 “We pay you for your land and stay amongst you folks”: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Power in Southwest Washington Territory A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Western Washington University In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Kaden Mark Jelsing December 2014 Abstract Against a teleological narrative of inevitable U.S. hegemony in what is now the southwest corner of Washington State, this work argues that settler colonialism has been a co-creation of local indigenous peoples and settlers that has emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onward through continuous negotiations of power and influence. The uneasy co-existence between metanarratives of U.S. westward expansion and local narratives produced through the colonial encounter give rise to productive contradictions that provide materials to reframe the dominant narratives that continue to naturalize settler colonial power today. iv Acknowledgments I wish to thank Professor Chris Friday for sticking with me all these years from when I was green and intellectually paralyzed, to pulling through at the end just in time to help tie everything together. Professor Cecelia Danysk showed me how academic inquiry is always a work-in-progress—through seminars, bibliographies, and paths through lines of scholarship she demonstrated that, “History’s a little ad hoc, eh?” Professors Kevin Leonard and Jennifer Seltz were generous to sign onto my thesis committee at the last minute and provided many useful comments from their own respective areas of expertise. Liina Koivula did a fine proofreading job, along with providing years of patience and support when things seemed overwhelming. And finally, I dedicate this work to my brother Eric: both of us metallurgists, following our materials. v Contents 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 vi 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 men2 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. ceremonial practices of gift giving in which a host bestows wealth to visitors from neighboring villages to affirm individual or family status within networks of extending kinship groups, to confirm rights to resource sites as well as to affirm marriages or access certain spirit powers.3 Potlatches were for the established elite and for those newly seeking a higher rank or status, a feature increasingly common following nearly a half century of contact with Europeans and Americans in which periodic disease episodes necessitated frequent recalibrations of power. This particular "potlatch" would be held by a newcomer who, following local conventions, offered valuable gifts and a feast of meats, breads, and potatoes as he attempted to consolidate his own power over rights to camas fields, fisheries, pastures, and game trails.4 This newcomer was Isaac Stevens, the recently appointed governor of Washington Territory and ex officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory. As American settlement—most often in the form of squatting—began to intensify in Indian country, the federal government of the United States scrambled to engage Native inhabitants by treaty to, in the discourse of U.S. land policy, "legally” cede their lands. So far, Stevens had successfully induced many aboriginal bands along Puget Sound, the Cascade foothills, and the Olympic Peninsula into ceding most of what would become western Washington State. However, at the council on the banks of the Chehalis, events unraveled as the days wore on and Stevens lost the 3 For an ethnographic overview of the potlatch see Wayne Suttles, ed., Handbook of North American Indians: Volume 7, Northwest Coast (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), esp. 84-85, 513. For a discussion on the slippery nature of the Chinook Wawa term for "potlatch," and a detailed account of the development of this language see, George Lang, Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009). The view