The City Named for a Chief Who Didn't Want It

The city was named for him without his consent. According to some Duwamish and Suquamish oral traditions, Chief Si'ahl objected to the honor on spiritual grounds: using a person's name after death disturbs their spirit. The settlers named it anyway. That is the beginning of Seattle's story, not a footnote to it.

Si'ahl was born around seventeen eighty-six on Blake Island in Puget Sound. He was both Duwamish and Suquamish, the son of a Suquamish father and a Duwamish mother, which gave him standing among both peoples. When American settlers arrived at Alki Point in eighteen fifty-one, he chose a path of accommodation that protected his people in the short term and cost them dearly in the long run. He signed the Point Elliott Treaty in January of eighteen fifty-five, ceding millions of acres of Duwamish and Suquamish land to the United States in exchange for reserved fishing rights and small reservations.

A speech attributed to Chief Seattle has been circulating for a century and a half, a moving address about the web of life, about the interconnection of all living things, about what it means to sell the land. It has been printed on posters, read at Earth Day celebrations, quoted by environmental organizations worldwide. Scholars at the Suquamish Tribe and the University of Washington have established that the version most people know was substantially written by a Texas screenwriter named Ted Perry in nineteen seventy-one, for a television documentary. Perry was adapting an earlier, shorter, and less lyrical account from eighteen eighty-seven, which was itself a reconstruction from memory by a settler physician who had heard the original speech through a Chinook Jargon interpreter decades before. The famous lines about the earth not belonging to man, about all things being connected, are Ted Perry's words. Si'ahl may have said something. What exactly, the record does not preserve.

What the record does preserve is this: the city named for Si'ahl was built on Duwamish land. The Suquamish Tribe, his community on his father's side, achieved federal recognition and maintains the Port Madison Reservation across the Sound to this day. The Duwamish Tribe, his community on his mother's side, the people whose river bisects the city, received no reservation under the treaty and has been fighting for federal recognition for more than a century. The gap between the myth of Chief Seattle and the legal reality of his descendants is the fault line on which this city sits.