Statement
Duwamish Remains investigates Seattle's river, and its transformed watershed, as a historical geography. As a 21st Century witness, I seek moments along the river’s current and long-lost meandering course that connect its present, developed conditions to its complex, transfigured history.
Altered solely by forces of nature for millennia, the 20th Century unveiled to the Duwamish River a sustained period of human-wrought mutation. The fertile provider to native populations succumbed to the inevitable meddling hand of westward expansion. Seattle’s agrarian and industrial revolutions required predictability from its waterways, initiating flood control infrastructures still being developed today. Dammed, diverted, redirected, dredged, back-filled and run dry, between 1906 and 1916 the Duwamish River’s watershed was reduced to one quarter of its 1,600 square mile reach. In 2002, decades of industrial contamination led to the designation of the lower five miles of the Duwamish estuary as a federal Superfund cleanup site.
And yet, through all of this, the Duwamish remains.
Native populations embed directly within their grammar an awareness of a river that is alive. They also distinguish within the term ‘pre-contact’ a time immemorial prior to European arrival. This expression references a distinct historical moment in a way that evokes the tactile and physical, and one after which nothing would ever be the same. 100 years after human contact, Euro-Americans began to reconfigure the Duwamish watershed. This indigenous river, the implications of contact, and what remains, guide my concern.
River cartography of a ‘pre-contact’ condition, drawn by the hands of engineering and colonization, recorded this period of the Duwamish. Layered with present-day maps I am able to pinpoint locations within the current landscape where the waters once flowed. While these endeavors allow us to wander backwards, my images inevitably remain in the human/river ‘post-contact’ world.
I acknowledge that my photographs have been made on and of the traditional land of the first peoples of Seattle, including the Duwamish People past and present. Through my tracing of the histories of this terrain, I intend that the work honor the land itself and, in turn, all who have lived on it.
As you view the images and maps, please consider how this landscape must have looked and felt, for millennia, and how it has been transformed in merely a century and a half.
Timeline
10000 BC earliest evidence of human occupation within the original Duwamish watershed
1792 George Vancouver sails south into the Whulge and re-names it Puget Sound
1846 Oregon Treaty divides the Pacific Northwest at the 49th parallel claiming land to the south for the United States government
1855 Treaty of Point Elliott creates agreement with United States guaranteeing hunting and fishing rights and reservations to all Native signers.
1865 City of Seattle incorporated
1906 White River diverted toward Tacoma
1912 Cedar River routed north into Lake Washington
1913 commencement of the dredging of the Duwamish Waterway canal
1916 completion of the Lake Washington Ship canal and extinction of the Black River
1920 cessation of the dredging of the Duwamish Waterway canal
1961 completion of the Howard A. Hanson Dam on the Upper Green River
2002 declaration of the lower 5 miles of the Duwamish estuary as a United States government Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site
Watersheds
Prior to 1906, the Duwamish River brought 1,600 square miles of watershed to the Puget Sound. Lake Washington, the Cedar River, and the White River funneled through the Duwamish from locations as diverse as Mt Rainier and Lake Sammamish. Today’s Duwamish pulls water from the Cascade Mountains solely via the Green River and an approximate 400 square miles (blue).
A
White River Watershed, severed, 1906
Following decades in which colonizing farmers utilized dynamite to alter the natural course of the White River away from its Duwamish confluence, the 1906 flood forces a decisive diversion south to Tacoma. Duwamish watershed reduced by 490 square miles.
B
Cedar River Watershed, severed, 1912
As a means to rid Renton of its seasonal flooding, settlers terminate the Cedar River’s confluence at the Black River and route it northward into Lake Washington. Duwamish watershed reduced by 180 square miles.
C
Lake Washington Watershed, severed, 1916
To ensure a more viable path to the Puget Sound, settlers cut the Lake Washington Ship canal and lower Lake Washington by nine feet. This action terminates the Lake’s natural southward drainage into the Black River (B). As a result, the Black River runs dry. Duwamish watershed reduced by 590 square miles.
D
Duwamish Waterway, cut, 1913 to 1920
The cutting, dredging and backfill of the tidal zone of the Lower Duwamish River creates a 4.5 mile canal, assuring access for ships and commerce.
Glossary of Dates, Locations, Terms
Black River
For millennia, this 3-mile long river delivered the watersheds of both the Cedar River and Lake Washington to the Duwamish. Indigenous peoples called it ‘the river of two mouths’ due to its tidal and seasonal intermittent reversal. It was forced to extinction in 1916 when construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal lowered Lake Washington by 9 feet.
Black River Pump Station
The dam bearing the Extinct Black River’s name that controls water draining from the Black River Watershed. 1000 feet downstream, this water meets the Duwamish/Green Rivers at the Black River’s former confluence (Meeting of Rivers).
Black River Watershed
Name applied to a 25-square-mile human-defined, flood-control-driven basin south of the Black River Pump Station that stretches to south Kent. It represents nearly none of the Black River Watershed prior to 1916. Springbrook Creek is its primary collector.
Boeing
The Boeing Company, an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. Boeing owns 131 properties in King County alone, many of them along the Duwamish/Green River. The company’s growth and historic path, from the dawn of the 20th Century, is inextricably tied to the Duwamish Valley.
Cedar River
Arising in the Cascade Range, the north-flowing Cedar once joined the Black River just south of Lake Washington, on its way to the Duwamish. In 1912 its flow was diverted into the south end of Lake Washington.
The Dredging
Term for the human-conceived and human-executed straightening and deepening of the lower Duwamish River, and the simultaneous infill of its meanders. This action created the Duwamish Waterway.
Duwamish River
The 11-mile long river and tidal estuary that originates at the confluence of the Extinct Black River and Green River, and empties into Elliott Bay/Puget Sound. The lower 4.5 miles is also known as the Duwamish Waterway.
Duwamish Waterway
The name given to the lower 4.5 miles of the Duwamish River, dredged between 1913 and 1917.
Elliott Bay
Part of the central basin of the Puget Sound, the Duwamish empties into its south end, and the city of Seattle occupies its banks.
Green River
Name given to the upper 65-miles of the Duwamish River, south of the confluence with the Extinct Black River.
Georgetown
Once occupying the banks of a Duwamish meander, this neighborhood, whose growth after the Dredging was facilitated by the filling of those very meanders, now sits nearly a mile inland from the Waterway.
Hamm Creek Watershed
A group of tributary creeks west of the Duwamish Waterway and south of South Park that have been systematically diverted and buried by three miles of culverts, pipes and channels leaving only 25% of the flowing water open to the sky. The polluted system was resurrected by the sheer will of John Beal in the late 20th Century.
Kellogg Island
This portion of resultant land, severed by the Dredging, was once part of a much larger tidal island. Today it sits between the Waterway and the sole remaining river meander.
Lake Washington
The large, glacial-cut lake east of Seattle that once accounted for 1,100 square miles of the original Duwamish watershed. Originally draining at its south end to the Puget Sound via the Black and Duwamish Rivers, since 1916 it has drained at its western midpoint, via the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
meander
‘A winding curve or bend of a river or road’ here used to reference the original forms of the lower Duwamish that were cut and filled during The Dredging.
North Wind’s Weir
An important location in the oral history of Coast Salish Indigenous Peoples, this Duwamish tidal zone provides protection and a fresh/salt water transition for young Chinook salmon on their way to Puget Sound. It stands as a model of successful habitat restoration.
River Street
Built on the back-filled path of an easterly-flowing meander, this street is perhaps the urban grid’s most literal echo of the original path of the Duwamish.
slip
These amputated meanders were left behind by the incomplete cut-and-fill of the original Duwamish path. Utilized as flood control and ship access, they sit as vestiges of what was.
Springbrook Creek
Channelized in the first half of the 20th Century to assist with agricultural drainage, today this ‘creek’ collects run-off and mitigated wetland water from the Black River Watershed and delivers it northward to the Black River Pump Station. Portions serve as successful examples of (sub)urban wetland habitat preservation/restoration.
White River
Originating from Mount Rainier’s Emmons Glacier and running as close as 4,000 feet from the Green-Duwamish near Auburn, this glacial river was once part of the Duwamish River Watershed. In the final two decades of the 19th Century, feuding settlers diverted its flow back and forth, north to south, from the Duwamish to the Puyallup, to rid their respective valleys of flood waters. In 1906 massive overflow forced a natural and permanent diversion southward. Today a 1,500 foot-long concrete diversion wall at Auburn’s Game Farm Park ensures that the River’s waters flow to the Sound via Puyallup and Tacoma in perpetuity.