WHITE PICKET FENCES AGAINST THE WIND: RACISM, ANABASIS, AND CHIEF SEATTLE

And yet life is transformation…— Rilke

The first Indian I remember seeing came on the first day of first grade. This would have been in early September 1957.

She was part of the Suquamish tribe, whose reservation lay just across Agate Pass northwest of Bainbridge Island where I grew up. A few Indian families still lived on the island in those days — mostly poor and invisible.

Bainbridge Island— “The Gem of Puget Sound” as our local paper used to tag it — lies eight miles west of Seattle.

I don’t know why our teacher told us that she was part of the tribe. I still remember her name. And the all-too-human suffering inscribed on her face.

A hot iron had fallen on her bare foot the day before, our teacher, a strikingly frail old lady, informed us. She was in pain, this dark-skinned child in a soiled dress and some kind of pain beyond a hurt foot. After a few days she stopped showing up for school and dropped out of our lives. She lingered in mine.

Suquamish, “place of clear salt water,” would become the dark side of the moon that haunted my middle-class existence, some Ultima Thule I overheard grown-ups mention in tones that suggested a hard-luck place just over the short bridge connecting Bainbridge to the mainland.

Suquamish would become my life’s “not-me,” my polar opposite, a dark stranger on the margins of my known world. And yet my injured classmate was warm, breathing, human life my understanding could not explain or make room for. My confused heart would have gone out to her, but it didn’t know how.

Wisdom, an ancient Greek poet told us, comes slowly, drop by drop. It would be too many years before I discovered how most of the Suquamish tribe had been pushed onto the reservation, created in 1864, by men who counted their wealth in columns, transubstantiated land into real estate, and employed right-angled words like census, cede, allotment, and judicial to consolidate their gains.

And put-up white picket fences to hold back the wind.

It must be one of the most ironic waterfront views in America.

Suquamish, the small town at the heart of the Port Madison Indian Reservation, commands a surreal view of hi-tech Seattle southeast across the water, where the decapitated tops of downtown’s steel and glass towers, fourteen miles away, float above the green shoulder of the city’s largest park like figments from Dali.

In back of town and up a modest hill lies the churchyard of St. Peter Mission and the grave of Chief Seattle. For the region’s first white settlers, the name Seattle, sometimes Sealth, tripped off the tongue more readily than Si’ahl in Southern Lushootseed, once the indigenous dialect in this part of Puget Sound. Southeast of Seattle, the towering presence of snow-cold Mount Rainier, a 14,410-feet-high, volcanic ice cream cone, presided over us all.

Bainbridge Island, Seattle, and Suquamish are the cardinal points of my seventy-five years. Seattle, where my father worked, my grandparents lived, and where I went to college and would work most of my life, is a thirty-five-minute ferry ride away. Seattle was our big city, but Bainbridge Island was our universe. And Suquamish was the unfortunate place close by where we didn’t go.

These days Bainbridge is a very high-end island. In my youth, anyone could live there. My godfather drove a milk truck in Seattle and lived with his family on a large plot of land in the middle of the island. A postal worker in Seattle and his family lived in a waterfront cottage facing Seattle — “a million-dollar view” two decades in the future. By the 1970s, the strawberry fields had dwindled, and the old middle and working-class families were beginning to fade.

In the 1980s, Money Magazine held up Bainbridge as its latest shiny bauble, but the new “Changers” — the hip lawyers and architects and money-handlers with their slightly naughty hot tub parties — had arrived. I still see older vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, on the Suquamish side of the bridge wearing a worn bumper sticker: CLEAR CUT BAINBRIDGE ISLAND!

Mileage and clocks and algebraic calculations belong to the world of chronological time — chronos to the ancient Greeks. For the world I was born into, drawing a straight line through nature is as natural as breathing.

Suquamish, like all indigenous places, existed in the world of kairos, the other Greek word for time — meaning organic time. For everything there is a season, so the Bible says: berries are harvested as the salmon return to their home streams and the first alder leaves begin to fall, those same alders that budded late the previous spring because they didn’t trust the lingering cold. Einstein informed us that time is not an iron law of the universe: a clock will tick infinitesimally faster on a mountain top than it will at its base.

Which is a case for civilized humility. As the British physicist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in 1927: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

At a ceremony at Chief Seattle’s grave in August 1999, while the world of chronos hurtled the ominous year 2000, I joined the crowd as a tribal elder spoke: “My people live in the past, present and future,” he said. “I do not worry about Y2K. A simple tick of the clock will not wipe out time past or time to come.”

Kairos.

Of all people, it was my Cub Scout den mother who first took me to Suquamish. I was ten.

A half-dozen boys crammed into her station wagon and off we went, turning east off the narrow highway just past the bridge. And so we descended to a collection of weathered, wooden buildings beside the water: a couple of taverns, a gas station, a small grocery store and post office. A narrow driveway took us up past tiny, white-painted St. Peter’s Mission church, where we parked and entered the cemetery. The day was chill and gray, as gray as November, which it probably was. We walked up a knoll toward a marble cross, eloquent in its stolid silence. Gull feathers, clamshells, beads, snuffed candles were strewn around its base.

We stood in the afternoon cold, around by this forty-something woman who was not a member of my parents’ golf club. After a few words of orientation, she read parts of Chief Seattle’s famous 1855 speech directed to the white world. She read slowly, in elevated tones, sometimes looking up to see if the great chief’s words were penetrating our young lives. I stood with the rest in a pantomime of respect, but mostly I wanted to be back in the car and warm again. And yet, despite the cold, despite the famous speech’s Victorian bunting, transcribed and embellished decades later by a white man, something sharp and real as a six-inch nail came through, the way something comes through with the Sermon on the Mount.

There was this: “In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”

And this, long before I had any concept of my father’s death: “The ashes of our ancestors are sacred, and their final resting place is sacred ground, while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers without regret.”

As we drove back to the island, I brooded over what I’d just heard. I could not know, of course, that I would never move away from my father’s grave, or my mother’s.

The following Fourth of July friends of my parents held a party. It was a family affair. The usual people showed up, golf club people, with the usual tinkle of ice in their high balls and the usual patter about club gossip, real estate prices, more gossip, and their seemingly unanimous belief that Richard Nixon would succeed Big Daddy Ike as president. It was 1960.

The Civil Rights movement came up, too. “You can’t legislate morality,” a woman’s voice sang out. A couple of drinks later, I heard her rail against a proposed Seattle ordinance to allow striptease clubs.

Kids register things like this; it’s like glimpsing a strange animal that disappears into the bush. They must wait to circle back years later to attach a name to what they overheard, or saw. I looked around the room, taking in the grown-up faces. Some of the men, like my father, had been through the worst of World War II, only fifteen years gone. One bearish man I disliked for his bluster came ashore in the second, and worst, wave as a Marine on Iwo Jima. A mousy man who grew quieter with each drink had piloted a B-17 bomber over Germany. Men who’d helped save the world so there would be no more Hitlers or Anne Franks.

Because it was the Fourth of July, or “firecracker day,” according to us kids, the conversation turned to Suquamish, and firecrackers and fireworks and firewater. And then a woman in pink pedal-pushers with a brunette, beehive hairdo put a hand to her mouth and yodeled a war hoop.

Raucous laughter. Tinkle of ice.

I felt my cheeks burn. From my corner seat I surveyed a room of familiar strangers. My Cub Scout den mother would never, in a gazillion years, have been invited to this gathering.

When I was sixteen or so I visited a friend who lived on Agate Pass, an expensive part of Bainbridge. We walked the sandy beach, past the big houses with picture windows framing the tidal currents. As my friend talked, I gazed over to Suquamish, to the gray huddle of wooden buildings. It was spring. A fine, soft rain began to sift down. I turned to look behind me at island land, and saw a patch of bluebells shining from a well-manicured yard. And I looked back again to Suquamish, and wondered about the coltish mazes of Providence that placed my life on the Bainbridge side of the pass. Or moat.

Reckoning, and the ever-so-vogue consciousness raising, came in the 1970s for many of our garden-variety assumptions about the American Dream. The war in Vietnam, domestic upheaval, and the political assassinations of the 1960s had done their work. The publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970 confronted Americans with a more complete history of how the west was “won.”

That same year “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman hit the movie theaters. An intensely visceral scene came right after the comic sequence where Hoffman, doing his matrimonial duty, makes love to his wife’s sisters. The Indian encampment is then attacked by the blue coats, drawing on the echoes of the Sand Creek and Washita massacres, in a savage display of the murder of women and children by whooping troops. I sat in Seattle, in a darkened theater, where a woman’s ragged voice screamed: “This is your history!” My cheeks burned.

Epiphanies come at us sideways.

In June 1975, as a young American backpacker, I sat on a bench one evening on the holy Scottish island of Iona, beside an English woman in her sixties I had befriended in our small hotel. As we looked out at the darkening sea and the Isle of Mull across the channel, a tall, blond, solidly built fellow, strode from the waterfront toward us like a conquering hero. He inquired in a posh accent about a place to anchor his sailboat. I started to speak when he looked at me as if I were a strange, zoological species, and then looked through me before he redirected his question to my companion.

He had caught my American accent. And I was given a flash of insight into British colonial history; or any colonial history. After he strode away, she apologized for her fellow countryman’s snobbery.

The trifling episode was a shot across my bow: from a brief, white-on-white, superficial diss arose vivid revenge fantasies I didn’t share with my English companion. Do we need to feel superior to someone, anyone, to enjoy our daily bread? Is to “otherize” (rhymes with “monetize”) the fuel that drives our world?

The thought came: imagine living inside a differently colored skin, in another circumstance, being reminded day-by-day by a public-school snoot of your non-existence. Having it rubbed in your face. To do so helps explain much of human history.

In the early 1980s my wife and I rented a cheap, waterfront cabin on the Suquamish side of the pass, because we couldn’t afford island rental prices, let alone a waterfront cabin. Sitting out one summer night I looked across the water to Bainbridge where a high hedge screened a floodlit tennis court. This was the residence of one of my richy-rich acquaintances from high school. I could hear the back-and-forth whack of a tennis ball three hundred yards away. And I thought: yonder is the soundtrack from my old life.

We finally found a cottage we could buy in nearby Indianola, a small town down the bay to the north, with a long pier, country store, and a post office. Like many of the houses there, our old cottage did not have a straight line in it.

In the early 2000’s, the contested fate of Old Man House State Park on Agate Pass, a short drive from downtown Suquamish, daylighted old racist tropes that had more or less dozed in their larval sacs over the decades. A portion of the site of Old Man House, the biggest winter longhouse in the region, built around 1790 and burned down by the US government in 1870, had been a state park since 1950.

In 2002, a year after Chief Seattle’s grave had been desecrated, the Suquamish tribe asked for the state park land to be returned to its original owners.

Petitions circulated among the many non-Indians living within reservation boundaries claiming non-tribal members would lose access to the sandy beach; loud events (tom-toms, no doubt) would disturb the neighbors’ sleep; unregulated mayhem would hold sway on the one-acre site. None of this was true. Public meetings grew ugly, and bad-faith rumors found fresh legs via the newborn tentacles of social media.

The State Parks and Recreation Commission found for the tribe in 2004. A leader of those who opposed the tribe, a lawyer who lived near the park, thinking he would ride a populist wave, made a run for county commissioner and hit a brick wall.

It turned out that more people in the non-tribal community had rallied to the tribe’s side than not. What followed was even more heartening: more outreach, better communication between the tribe and the community, and everyday people volunteering to help with the salmon feast when regional canoe journeys called on Suquamish shores. There were heroes, quiet heroes, among us. If a door cracked open to the bigoted rot in my own backyard, another, wider door opened to the better angels of the white world.

Nowadays, the Suquamish Tribe is Kitsap County’s second largest employer, after the U.S. Navy. Among its holdings: a casino, golf course, fish hatchery, museum, and retail and business interests throughout the community. The elegant House of Awakened Culture, spiritual successor to Old Man House, opened on the Suquamish waterfront in 2008. Chief Seattle Days , a long tradition, happens here the third weekend in August. The public is invited. Festivities include a salmon roast, dancers, canoe races, ceremonial speeches that often unfold slowly, and are heard with a patience.

The world of Chief Seattle Days is not on chronos time.

One year a visiting elder from the Lakota tribe, with black-gray streaked braids and crisp white shirt, assumed the microphone. The dancing stopped. Heads bowed. At least a minute of silence flowed by. I looked over at Mount Rainier towering to the southeast, named after Peter Rainier by British explorer George Vancouver. Rainier was an admiral in the Royal Navy who fought against American Revolutionary forces and never sailed anywhere near these waters.

There might be twenty names for the mountain in Southern Lushootseed: sky wiper, breast, fountain, among them.

I looked to the decapitated tops of Seattle’s towers. The city that takes the great chief’s name, at that moment on a sunny, late summer Sunday, would be going about its business without a clue to what was happening in this far spot across the water.

A little more time passed before the elder spoke: “Grandfather, bless all, each and every one who came. Also, the visitors who are here to work together. We are here in kindness and in the nature of love.”

The elder spoke on, echoing the gravitas for which Chief Seattle was known. At the end of the speech the drum renewed its beat, striking deep-down in sync with the beat of the heart. I looked out over the water, ignoring the city, and watched three canoes race a couple of hundred yards offshore — disciplined young men paddling by in unison, competing against the other two canoes, pulling for their canoe-mates, and themselves. The Suquamish Museum has an installation listing ten rules for the canoe. One of them: The journey is what we enjoy.

My eyes swept over the gathering on the waterfront village: to the children and families in traditional garb — and their pride; to the white smoke rising from the roasting salmon; the sun-flash off Agate Pass; the green moss at my feet. The rhythmic pounding of the drum.

And time turned to water.

Kairos.

Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His poetry and essays appear online and in print in this country and abroad. His most recent book is Nocturne: New and Selected Poems, from Unsolicited Press (2024).